Harvey Araton - Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship

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)

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 hadnt yet reached, but with each fitful nights sleep, I suppose I was getting there, too. Finally, Beth had had enough of what one might call conversations in which I apparently hadnt listened to a word shed said. Youre 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 numberStamford, Connecticutand talk it out, as youve 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 womenfrom David Stern to Bernard King to Dwyane Wade to Geno Auriemma to Rebecca Lobowhose celebrated careers I had regularly chronicled and critiqued. Rare in a life of sixty-five years is a gathering so inclusiveexcept, I suppose, ones 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, wouldnt 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 Id 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 Id 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 Betheach attempt short-circuited by a glitch that elicited convulsive laughter or a string of profanitieswas driving us both nuts.