The more Michelle ventured to the Garden and elsewhere in her expanding basketball circle, the more she wanted to be there, all the while resigned to her family obligations that prevented an actual move into the city. But over the span of her six years at Xerox, her life changed dramatically. Though she was far from rich, the money faucet turned back on, which gave her some measure of security. She was forever grateful to Derwin Fox, who had unlocked this new world for her. Years later, she attended his funeral, a stranger to the assembled mourners. “He gave me a chance when women didn’t get many,” she stood up to tell them. “He saved my life.”
In 1978, Michelle moved on from Xerox to PepsiCo in nearby Westchester County, developing management programs for human resources. In another job that required extensive travel, she arranged a deal for her one major perk: She could schedule her trips to ensure her attendance at Knicks home games.
She stayed at PepsiCo for three years, and leaped at the opportunity to work in Manhattan for Warner Amex. When she arrived, her former boss at PepsiCo wrote her a letter, an acerbic but complimentary bullet-point list of personal observations. “I don’t miss you as much as I miss your AURA,” he wrote. “Anyone who drives a secretary to tears just with one look has got to be a powerful person.” Michelle tucked the letter into a home file, saving it as evidence of her corporate ascension, if not of her workplace compassion. She claimed she was never that hard on her support staff, just proud of the respect she commanded and received from her colleagues.
At Warner, where she eventually became a vice president of human resources operations, she impressed visitors to her office with a wall filled with photos of NBA stars and enlightened them in management classes she led by citing various coaches and players as examples of successful or failed leadership. She oversaw headquarters staff and field locations for Warner, a company of six thousand employees. She counseled and strategized with senior staff, designed performance-appraisal systems, and evaluated the performance of individual executives and the organization at large.
She stayed at Warner for five years, surviving a series of downsizing periods in which she became a real-life version of George Clooney’s character from Up in the Air, an executive tasked with breaking the bad news to those laid off. Before the ax could fall on her, Michelle left for Chase Manhattan Bank, only to learn weeks later that her new company was also about to shed hundreds of employees. She eventually decided she had enough experience and relationships to strike out on her own, launching her global executive-training business, the Training Advantage Ltd., in 1986. Chase Manhattan helped her take the plunge by becoming her first client. Others soon signed on.
Unsurprisingly, running her own company proved more demanding than any of her previous jobs. Many workdays began at six a.m. and ended at midnight. Her travel schedule made a sportswriter’s seem tame—one year, 1991, she had so much business that she logged eighteen trips to Cincinnati, five to Nashville, four to Seattle, three to Chicago, two to Hong Kong, and two to Thailand and Australia, among others that consumed fewer miles.
She still somehow managed to schedule her work life—and social life—around the Knicks. By the eighties, she kept like-minded company at the Garden, working women whose lives resembled hers more than any she had known in the suburbs. During her years at Warner Amex, working for the first time in Manhattan, Michelle had connected with Ernestine Miller, a single mother and a former high school and college athlete who had joined a different division of Warner not long after Michelle was hired. When men at the company learned of Miller’s interest in sports, they would say, Have you met Michelle? Miller would become part of a rotation of three women sharing Michelle’s second courtside seat—all single or divorced, all career professionals.
By this time, her children having reached young adulthood or in college, Michelle’s business was thriving to the point where she could afford to rent an apartment in the city for the workweek—beginning with bland Midtown towers and, later, in Greenwich Village. There, with a view of Washington Square Park and sharing the neighborhood with NYU students, professors, street musicians, drug dealers, prostitutes, and undercover cops, she felt “alive, stimulated.” Pushing fifty, she was an older version of Mary Tyler Moore, transitioned from the suburban stereotype of Laura Petrie to the professionally ambitious Mary Richards.
Being in the city meant a short subway ride to the Garden and a faster commute across the Hudson to the Nets’ arena in New Jersey. (For a few years in the early to mid-eighties, Michelle also held season tickets for the Nets at the comparatively dowdy New Jersey Meadowlands arena. On game days, she would hitch a ride through the Lincoln Tunnel with Dave Sims of the Daily News or Nets executive Lewis Schaffel.) It reached the point to where she was attending four or five NBA games a week. But the Nets games merely represented another chance to catch that period’s transcendent NBA megastars—Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird—who never seemed to land on one of the local teams. The Garden was her special place, her chosen crowd, her stake in the Midtown heart of New York. She knew it from the moment she settled into her first courtside seat.
She told herself: I’m home; this is it, where I want to be.
• • • • •
In her 1980 Christmas letter, Michelle made a grand announcement, though sheepishly. She was
