Our Last Season by Harvey Araton

Author:Harvey Araton [Araton, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

Winning and Misery

Michelle didn’t watch live games the way other fans did. While friends like Ernestine Miller and Drucie De Vries whooped it up in triumphant Knicks moments—such as they were—with all their courtside neighbors, Michelle sat calmly, stoically, barely shifting in her seat. She never yelled at the refs or the opposing players. She didn’t erupt with joy when the Knicks pulled out a close one. The occasional section resident would sidle up to Miller and ask why Michelle was so muted. “She’s an observer of the game—she shows interest in her own way,” Miller would tell them, herself guessing.

But while she never would change her game demeanor, the 1992–93 season, and specifically the playoffs, provided plenty of opportunity for high drama. Until the night of Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, or actually through that night, all had been proceeding on championship schedule for Pat Riley and his marauding Knicks. They rose to the top of the conference, winning sixty regular-season games, second-best in the league and three more than the Michael Jordan–led Bulls. To further whet their fans’ appetite for the playoffs, they took three of four of their head-to-head meetings. They marched through the first two rounds, setting up another showdown with the two-time defending champions in the Eastern Conference Finals. Only this time, the Knicks had home-court advantage, which meant that a seventh game, if necessary, would be played in New York.

“I keep pinching myself,” Michelle told me again and again—it was her standard line when the promise of Knicks greatness peeked through the perpetual cloud cover—as that season progressed. It was no dream, though it felt like the continuation of Riley’s fantasy life with all of New York along for the ride. These brawny, emboldened Knicks looked formidable holding serve against the Bulls in Game 1 at the Garden. In Game 2, John Starks, a onetime minimum-wage supermarket stock boy, went airborne and dunked like Mike, famously posterizing Jordan and his teammate, Horace Grant, and icing the game for a 2–0 series lead. The Garden joyously erupted. The Bulls looked vulnerable. Better yet, Jordan looked mortal. We soon had answers—or at least educated guesses—as to why.

At halftime of that game, Dave Anderson, my fellow Times columnist, strolled my way with a tip: Throughout the first half, he had been listening to a fan behind his seat along the baseline hector Jordan about being in Atlantic City early that morning. This was not exactly shocking information—Jordan’s gambling excesses, occasionally with characters of questionable repute, were already a media preoccupation, a cloud hanging over him and the league. But Anderson and I agreed: If he had actually been out in the wee hours on the morning of a playoff game, that was a story we needed to pursue because it spoke to his level of commitment to his team.

Jordan’s heckler laughed when I made my way over and introduced myself—as if to say, What took you so long?—and proceeded to tell me that he had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.