Our Last Season Read online

  Also by Harvey Araton

  Driving Mr. Yogi

  When the Garden Was Eden

  Cold Type

  Crashing the Borders

  Alive and Kicking

  Money Players (coauthor)

  The Selling of the Green (coauthor)

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Harvey Araton

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  All images not indicated below courtesy of the Musler family.

  1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: courtesy of the author; 6: courtesy of the New York Daily News; 7, 8, 9, and 10: © Eileen Miller.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Araton, Harvey, author.

  Title: Our last season : a writer, a fan, a friendship / Harvey Araton.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020. | Includes index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019053128 (print) | LCCN 2019053129 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984877987 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984877994 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Araton, Harvey. | Araton, Harvey—Friends and associates. | Musler, Michelle, 1936–2018. | New York Knickerbockers (Basketball team) | Sportswriters—United States—Biography. | Basketball fans—United States—Biography. | Basketball—New York (State)—New York—History. | Friendship.

  Classification: LCC GV742.42.A77 A3 2020 (print) | LCC GV742.42.A77 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/49796—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053128

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053129

  Cover design: Darren Haggar

  Cover photograph: Eileen Miller

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  For Beth, of course

  Contents

  Introduction: Ad-libbing

  One: HOMECOMING

  Two: THE MAKING OF A FAN

  Three: THE MAKING OF A REPORTER

  Four: COURTSHIP

  Five: CHRISTMAS CHEER

  Six: OLD FRIENDS AND BOOKENDS

  Seven: THE NEW GOOD OLD DAYS

  Eight: WINNING AND MISERY

  Nine: DOLAN AND THE DEATH OF HOPE

  Ten: THE LONG VIEW

  Eleven: THE END GAME

  Twelve: THE POSTSEASON

  Postscript

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Ad-libbing

  September 2017

  All too well, my wife knew the pattern, and it meant trouble. After more than three decades of living with a man also married to his work as a reporter and newspaper columnist, she recognized distraction that was quickly devolving into full-blown obsession.

  The closer we got to the critical day, the more unsettled I was getting. Dread was a state I hadn’t yet reached, but with each fitful night’s sleep, I suppose I was getting there, too. Finally, Beth had had enough of what one might call conversations in which I apparently hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. You’re being honored at the Hall of freaking Fame, she told me. You need to figure out a way to relax and enjoy this, not drive yourself and everyone around you crazy about making a damn speech.

  “So do yourself a favor,” she said. “Call Michelle.”

  Call your friend, your career adviser, your unpaid therapist. Dial her long-memorized 203 area code number—Stamford, Connecticut—and talk it out, as you’ve done so many times before.

  Call Michelle.

  For almost four decades, I had been doing that, reaching out to the steady voice of reason in my life, the proverbial wise elder, the trusted friend I always could count on. We all need one like Michelle Musler, whose instincts and insights and tough but dedicated love had guided me through so many professional and personal storms. In the parlance of basketball, the game we loved and shared, she was the coach who knew how to help me be the best version of myself.

  As a player, I maxed out my abilities as a five-foot-eight, shot-happy and turnover-prone point guard at a Jewish Community Center. Only in my most grandiose adolescent fantasies as the second coming of “Pistol Pete” Maravich or Walt “Clyde” Frazier could I imagine myself as a Hall of Famer. Nonetheless, I was headed to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Named for the legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy, the award I was about to receive was actually for watching from the sideline, an honor bestowed annually on one member of the print media and one from the broadcast side for distinguished coverage of the sport. That connection to the game I could make without mocking realism or risking conceit. I dearly loved basketball and had dedicated a great deal of my four-decade-plus career to chronicling it for four newspapers, the past quarter century as a columnist and reporter for the New York Times.

  The award came with a trophy and a fine-print inscription on a wall of past winners inside the shrine for the actual greats, from George Mikan to Michael Jordan. But it required doing what I enjoyed least: talking in public about myself, in this case addressing a dinner crowd of several hundred that would include:

  The woman I had been married to for thirty-two years. The boys we had reared to young adulthood. An assortment of talented colleagues. Men and women—from David Stern to Bernard King to Dwyane Wade to Geno Auriemma to Rebecca Lobo—whose celebrated careers I had regularly chronicled and critiqued. Rare in a life of sixty-five years is a gathering so inclusive—except, I suppose, one’s funeral. But from the time I was notified of the Gowdy Award in February 2017, I found myself trying to minimize it, half joking that I must not have insulted or alienated enough people within the basketball establishment that would grant such an honor.

  My young-adult sons, in whom I had instilled a love of the game, wouldn’t hear it, disabusing me of that self-shielding sentiment with their enthusiasm and pride. For no better reason than it was so important to them, it had to be for me, as well. And the closer it got, the more significant the award seemed to become, and the more anxious I was. In the days before the event, I compulsively fine-tuned my speech as if the Pulitzer Prize were hanging in the balance. I wanted it to be smooth, entertaining, a story in itself. Of course, manic rewrites were nothing new for me; they were now a familiar, if still unpleasant, part of my established writing process.

  I doubt that many would have characterized me as shy, even noticeably modest. I was just always most comfortable and happiest in front of a keyboard, alone with my words and my whims. And while I’d had some experience speaking to audiences for one professional reason or another, I just never fancied the spoken word as my strength, the spotlight as my friend.

  The speech was formatted to be no longer than five minutes, though I’d been told by prior winners and a few basketball officials not to worry if I exceeded the requested limit. (Just avoid Peter Vecsey territory, they said. A onetime colleague of mine at the New York Post, in 2009 Vecsey had droned on for roughly half an hour before no less a luminary than Jordan walked out, music was queued, and the mic was cut.)

  Given that precedent, I actually wasn’t too concerned about the length of my speech. But I had been forewarned that there was to be no teleprompter, as there would be the following night at the nationally televised show for
the induction of players and coaches. Naturally, I didn’t want to read the speech at the expense of eye contact with the crowd. Nor did I want to lose my place and stutter myself into a state of babbling incomprehension. Hence, my nerves. Falling asleep, I had visions of fumbling the papers while the crowd murmured uneasily and my embarrassed sons slouched in their seats. Practicing in front of Beth—each attempt short-circuited by a glitch that elicited convulsive laughter or a string of profanities—was driving us both nuts.

  So I took her sound advice. I called Michelle, who began by telling me to relax; I would be fine no matter what. She also knew me well enough to guess that such a promise was a waste of her breath. An hour later, an email landed—in all uppercase letters, as were all of Michelle’s messages, legibly shouted to get my attention.

  HARVEY . . . WHY NOT TRY REDUCING YOUR SPEECH TO BULLET POINTS . . . AND PRACTICE WITH JUST THAT OUTLINE INSTEAD OF TRYING TO READ & LOOK AT THE AUDIENCE . . . IT MAY JUST SOUND . . . MORE SINCERE.

  Great idea, I wrote back. And got right to work, grateful as always that Michelle, who had made her living managing and coaching corporate executives, was always happy to hear from me and to help. During my years at the Times and for most of my days in the newspaper business, I had covered all sports, traveled around the world, shared great adventures with too many bright, talented people to count. But there was no one quite like Michelle. No smarter friend. No better mentor. At the crossroads and crises of adulthood, there was no wiser and more trusted elder. Her little speech tip was but a tiny example of the times she had been a lifesaver for me in a multitude of more challenging life crises. I owed her so much.

  “Come to the Hall of Fame dinner,” I had told her weeks before, knowing that without her it would not be complete.

  “That’s a time for you and your family,” she said.

  “You are family.”

  “I know, but you know what I mean,” she said.

  I did. I also knew that wasn’t the real reason why, at eighty-one, sixteen years my senior, she declined the invitation.

  * * *

  • • • • •

  My brief time in the Hall of Fame spotlight began awkwardly, those seemingly endless few seconds of unfolding sheets of paper on which the speech was printed, complete with bullet points. I looked uneasily into the crowd, glanced to my left, to the table where my family was watching. Please don’t botch this, I begged myself.

  I talked about coming of age in New York when the iconic basketball figures were Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Earl Monroe—the championship Knicks of the early seventies. I transitioned to covering the Dream Team in 1992, starring Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird. I don’t remember the exact moment I began to relax and even enjoy my five-plus minutes of so-called fame. Michelle’s suggestion of bold-faced bullet points no doubt helped the flow of the speech, allowing me to improvise and feel at ease in the moment and especially to enjoy the part I had looked forward to most: a few lighthearted but loving words in tribute to Beth and my sons, Alex and Charly. Momentarily, my mind wandered: Was I missing anyone else? It hit me in a flash, more nearly egregious oversight than epiphany.

  Over the years, at four newspapers, I’ve had so many great colleagues: reporters in the trenches, editors who mentored and put up with me . . .

  And one remarkable, irreplaceable woman I managed to ad-lib into my speech, in the nick of time:

  Michelle Musler—a special lady who’s been sitting right behind the Knicks bench for the past forty years. My de facto career coach.

  Only those in the crowd who were regulars at Knicks home games would have recognized the name, or grasped why I had singled her out. I was just relieved to have avoided an omission that would have gnawed at me for the rest of my life. The following day, I eagerly sent Michelle a link to a video of my speech. She wrote back not long after, still digitally shouting:

  YOU DID A GREAT JOB. AND I THOUGHT YOU LOOKED TERRIFIC TOO. I LOVED MY MENTION—YOU WERE RECOUNTING YOUR ENTIRE CAREER AND YOU TOOK THE TIME. THANK YOU! I SAID, WHOA, I FEEL LIKE I ALSO MADE THE HALL OF FAME!!!!

  Those who knew Michelle, who had in one way or another shared their love of the game with her, would have unanimously agreed: In the pro basketball annals of Madison Square Garden, in the history of the Knicks and their most devoted fans, she was one of a kind. In my life, she held the same hallowed place.

  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 t
ime 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.