One Homecoming The instant I steered into her narrow driveway, Michelle emerged from the front door of her row-house condo and pulled it shut behind her. She was more than ready to go. She was raring. The Garden-and another game-beckoned. It was a few minutes after four on a gray, misty Friday afternoon in Stamford, Connecticut, a few weeks after my Hall of Fame induction, a new NBA season underway. We were headed into Midtown Manhattan, to a Knicks game, not unlike any of the thousands we had attended-Michelle, the fan, in her choicest of locations in the first row right behind the Knicks bench, and I, the journalist, nearby in a courtside press seat. Madison Square Garden was the center of our sporting universe, the footing on which our friendship was founded. Over the years, we shared our love for the game-however abysmally played by the Knicks-but on that October night, days before Halloween, it had a measurably different feel, an unmistakable sense of denouement. Any game we attended together at this point in time was conceivably our last. A fixture for decades behind the Knicks bench, Michelle was no longer a season-ticket holder. She had them for this game against the Brooklyn Nets thanks to the largesse of a wealthy financial mogul who, for several years, had been her semisecret benefactor. The tickets had once actually been affordable-a bargain, even. For years, Michelle had owned four, selling off the two that were nearby in her section, on the railing a few feet to her right, and using the markup to help defray the cost of her own seat. But courtside prices surged with the NBA's popularity, growing steeper by the season. Michelle held on to her remaining life luxury for as long as she could, while admitting, "I'm embarrassed to tell people what I pay for basketball tickets." Finally, the realities of retirement and living on a fixed income set in. In 2011, when the Garden underwent an expensive redevelopment, the price of a single-game seat for Michelle soared from $330 to $900 per game. There was an option to move to a cheaper location, away from the court, far from the action, back to where she had started many years earlier. She wasn't interested, admittedly spoiled. She figured she was done-until Wynn Plaut, the financier, stepped in to keep her in her seat, in the game. Plaut's wife, Robin Kelly, was a friend of Michelle's from their yoga class in Greenwich, just south of Stamford. Even there, basketball was a uniting force. The studio was run by the wife of Gail Goodrich, a Hall of Fame player from the sixties and seventies, who occasionally showed up to fake his way through the routines, happier to talk hoops with Michelle. Plaut's parents were dying. His son had cancer. His marriage was in jeopardy. His wife had gone to a few games with Michelle and had enjoyed the scene. He thought, OK, these are really expensive but I'm in the financial world; I've done fine. Maybe going to some games with Robin might reconnect us. The marriage didn't survive, but Michelle somehow managed to become a confidant to both as they hurtled toward divorce-and she continued attending games with one or the other. Michelle, the Knicks loyalist, was the true survivor. Her arrangement with Plaut allowed her to attend her fair share of the season's forty-one home games. But she was pushing eighty and winter night driving had become an adventure best avoided by the 2016-17 season. She went from rarely missing a game to needing someone-usually Plaut-to give her a ride. For several years, she had promised him a time when she would step aside and he could have the tickets, for which he was paying roughly a hundred thousand dollars, transferred to him. That time arrived with the renewal for 2017-18, along with a sad realization. "It gets to a point where you have to just accept that you're old," she said. "But to be honest, when I began thinking I couldn't go anymore, it made me so depressed because being in those seats has been my identity for so long." I knew what she meant. I, too, was in a quasi state of withdrawal, having taken a buyout in the fall of 2016 from the Times, having convinced myself, only months from my sixty-fifth birthday, that it was my time to slow down, engage the world differently: resume piano lessons I had abandoned twenty years earlier; volunteer in my community; spend more time with family and friends; liberate myself from the never-ending demand for content and the inherent loneliness of being with a laptop. All easier said, or imagined, than done. Three weeks after leaving the Times staff, I was back to contributing as a freelancer on a fairly regular basis, weighing in on the Knicks, the NBA, and assorted other subjects. As it turned out, I hated the sound of the R-word. I winced whenever Beth would use it in reference to me in conversation with friends. I settled on telling people I had only downsized my career, not retired entirely. Nor did Michelle have to completely detach herself from courtside at the Garden, thanks to Plaut's continued generosity. About the time he took full possession of her seats, he had bought a place in Florida, and was planning to spend more of his winter there. He had taken on a partner to share in the cost of the tickets, but told Michelle there still would be games available to her. She mentioned to me on the phone in early October that Plaut was more than offering; he was pressuring her to take him up on the offer. "Probably because he knows how painful it is for you to have given them up the first place," I said. She sighed, admitted that she would of course love to go if only she could figure out a way to get there. I told her I'd be happy to take her. "You'll come all the way up here, go into the city and then back up?" "Why not?" Michelle protested my having to do all that driving-just not vociferously enough to convince me that she wanted me to rethink the offer. We set our date for a game against the Brooklyn Nets. An email from Michelle arrived the next day. ARE YOU SURE? I was more than sure. I was thrilled. And nobody had ever had to twist my arm to go to a game and sit in a courtside seat. We pulled out of her driveway, cruised through the streets of downtown Stamford and onto Interstate 95-as usual, slowed to a truck-infested crawl. "I have to tell you, this is so exciting for me . . . because my life has become so fucking narrow," Michelle said as a sixty-minute ride into the city stretched in traffic to ninety. I stole a glance at her-dress stylishly casual, hair meticulously done, makeup carefully applied. Still elegant. But noticeably struggling with her new terms of engagement. A proud woman well known to her friends for refusing to stay in her lane, becoming more and more dependent on the kindness of others. Finally reaching Midtown, we turned onto Thirty-fourth Street and pulled into her regular indoor garage. Michelle exited the car as the elderly often do, in slow-motion stages. The parking attendant greeted her with a hug before steering my car into an easy-access spot obviously reserved for a VIP-who clearly wasn't me. At the cashier's window, the face of the woman who took my payment lit up when she noticed who was beside me. "Michelle!" she said. "So good to see you." I could see that Michelle was pleased by the attention, especially with me as a witness. But it was nothing I hadn't seen before. Everyone in or around the Garden seemed to know her. We proceeded into the arena and up to the glass-enclosed Delta Sky360 Club, a posh mZlange of food and drink stations for owners of the priciest season tickets. When the club originally opened following a renovation of the self-proclaimed World's Most Famous Arena, I wrote a column about the dilemmas for longtime Knicks courtside ticket holders created by the exorbitant price markups. Michelle already had struck her arrangement with Plaut, but some of her oldest Garden friends had left and others, in seats farther from the court, no longer had access to the same club. Michelle was more than annoyed. She was offended. "They've segregated the damn sections," she complained, not relishing being in a first-class cabin that was off-limits to those in coach. Once-unimaginable price escalation was destroying what had been a sense of family and community. She could at a moment's notice drop a half dozen names of the dearly departed. More and more in recent years, there were nights when Michelle had felt practically anachronistic, a distant alumnus returning for a homecoming game. Inside the club, she looked around and saw only unfamiliar faces. She'd been hoping that Walt Frazier and a few of the other former players who often made the social rounds would come by. But no one so much as acknowledged her until a young woman named Dani Brand, the Garden's consumer service representative for elite ticket holders (official title: premium experience specialist), came over to give her a hug. "I feel a bit like a stranger in here now," Michelle told her. "No way-this is your second home," Dani said. Not really, Michelle knew. Not so much anymore. She had tried to be pragmatic and unemotional about the deal with Plaut. But surrendering her tickets had been an agonizing capitulation to age, a disengagement from the place that made her feel different, unique. She had dreaded the nights ahead at home, the television close-ups of the Knicks bench, wondering whose faces-if not Plaut's-might peek through the gaps between the players and coaches, in her seats. She knew the partner he had taken on-a young entrepreneur named Noah Goodhart-and liked him very much. She still worried that her tickets would wind up being used as symbols of privilege more than passion, as business bargaining chips. "That's driving me crazy," she said. This for years was a chronic Michelle complaint: fans who weren't real fans, just those with the financial wherewithal and access, more into what the NBA branded its in-game experience than the actual game. To Michelle, these embellishments amounted to continuous noise that served as a wily NBA marketing scheme: a potent distraction from hearing oneself think about how much was being spent on those nights when the game was poorly played or hopelessly lopsided. Or-as was too often the case in recent years-when a superstar or two was conspicuously missing with a hastily contrived medical condition that amounted to a night off to rest. "The real fans," she said, "don't need to sit there and watch someone ride a unicycle balancing dishes on his head." The more expensive the tickets became, the more pretend fans there were, taking selfies, scoping out celebrities-some of whom were comped their seats for the very purpose of being eye candy. When someone at the Garden would point out a celebrity-an Ethan Hawke, a John Turturro, a Woody Allen-she had a standard reply: Big deal. Who would come to a basketball game to watch other people watch the game? Having finished our dinner in the club, we made our way out to the court, Michelle carefully navigating the narrow passageway between the team bench and the front row. I followed close behind and stopped when she paused to greet Jonathan Supranowitz, the KnicksÕ director of public relations. A Brooklyn boy, Supranowitz was the media director in an organization dominated-all but destroyed, as many Knicks fans would argue-by James Dolan, scion of the Cablevision family dynasty. The working conditions at the Garden under Dolan, who held the same regard for most newspaper reporters as does Donald Trump, had become, at best, barely tolerable. Some of the beat writers believed that Supranowitz relished enforcing Dolan's Kremlinesque rules-ordering staff to restrict access to players while eavesdropping on whatever interviews were allowed, among other degradations. Michelle was well aware of Dolan's petty media feuds-his staff went so far as to keep dossiers on reporters covering his basketball and hockey teams. Reporters for the Daily News, whose coverage of his chronically losing team Dolan deemed too negative, were never called on at news conferences or were locked out entirely. But Michelle liked Supranowitz and was of the mind that he was just doing-or protecting-his job. Tall and lanky as some of the players, he had grown up a devout Knicks fan during the mideighties, and beyond. At home games, he liked to chat up fans before getting on with his night's work. Michelle, he said, was a star attraction, the regular he most enjoyed seeing, night after night, waiting for her to appear with a small token of his appreciation. In the days when the media sat courtside, with beat reporters or star columnists usually positioned to the left of the bench, a stack of media game notes would be placed on the table by the seat reserved for the public relations director. Michelle-and only Michelle-helped herself each night to a packet, page upon page of statistical minutiae she would seldom look at, until the game notes vanished along with the reporters. "Where did the stats go?" she asked Supranowitz. "The media doesn't sit here anymore," he told her. "Well, I do," she said. Fair point, he thought. From then on, he made sure to hold on to one packet, reserved for Michelle, when she emerged from the club-not that she needed it. If she read anything before a game, or at halftime, it was a newspaper-the Times or one of the city's tabloids she lugged around in a tote bag embellished with an embroidered M. Yet Michelle gratefully accepted the game notes, brought them home, dropped them onto a shelf. She had stacks and stacks, just part of her ever-expanding collection of Knicks and NBA memorabilia saved over decades. Posters, books, photos of her with various Knicks personalities, framed newspaper clippings that detailed-humorously, in some cases-her basketball fanaticism. She had long been a hoarder, unable to part with her kids' baby clothes and furniture, until she bought her condo and sold her family home in 2004 and nearly drove herself crazy confronting the mountain of stuff in her garage. She hired someone to help her sort through it all and part with much of it. Her basketball collection, including every Knicks yearbook over twenty-seven years, went with her. Excerpted from Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship by Harvey Araton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
