Martin Amis, Michael Jordan, Mother's Day, and The Knicks.
The Martin Amis memorial at the 92nd St. Y, The Knicks, the odd state of home and away in the NBA playoffs, Michael Jordan and his hometown of Wilmington, NC, and David Brown's Flower Shop.
1.
I was in the weight room of the 92nd Street Y playing around with the fat jiggling machine when I looked up and saw a tall, elegant black man with a goatee working out with a barbell on his shoulders, doing toe raises. It was 1975, or 1976, or 1977. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. The man’s elegance was communicated by his afro and goatee, the clean white socks pulled up over his calves, his Puma sneakers, and also by the tilt of his chin, and the impassive, regal, imperturbable quality of his face. I saw him in profile, going up on his toes with the barbell behind his neck, then coming back down.
After I stared at him for a few moments, I recognized him as Walt Frazier of the New York Knicks. It was just him and me in the middle of the afternoon. As he silently went up and down on his toes, I stood there within the cloth band of the fat jiggling machine, debating whether to flip the switch. I won’t go into the mechanics of this machine except to say that such a machine once existed. It was supposed to in some way shake the fat off your body, and it is a testimony to the magical thinking people are prone to when it comes to their own bodies that even then, in the era of Jet travel and Tang and the IBM Selectric typewriter, enough people believed that such a thing would work that the weight room of the YMHA was compelled to have one.
I remembered this long ago encounter as I worked through my conflicted feelings about the Martin Amis event at the 92nd Street Y. I had tickets to hear a tribute to Martin Amis featuring Jennifer Egan, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, A.M. Holmes, and other luminaries. I made this plan before realizing that it would conflict with game four of the Knicks-Celtics series.
We all live in several cultural dimensions at once and have parts of our lives that are, if not secret exactly, discrete from one another. I couldn’t find any overlap between Martin Amis and game four of the Knicks-Celtics series, they seemed like events in total opposition to one another. I know Amis played tennis, but that wasn’t enough.
Then I remembered that odd ten or so minutes alone with Frazier, a star on the Knicks teams that won their only two NBA championships, heights to which they have painfully failed to return in the decades since.1
But the real conflict about Monday night went beyond the Knicks themselves, even if it was the most important game the Knicks have played in 25 years. I was not sure I wanted to forgo watching the game with my son, to whom I have passed on the problematic heritage of Knicks fandom. It’s not like it’s a huge ritual, watching games together. We don’t congregate around a TV to watch an entire game, for one thing, as I imagine normal families do, or did; we drift in and out of the orbit of the games and each other, sometimes watching on different devices in different rooms, and join together for periods of time. Then, like planets with irregular orbits who sync up at the key moment, we usually watch most of the fourth quarter together.
2.
The day before Amis/Knicks was Mother’s Day. I bought flowers from a snazzy shop on Amsterdam avenue that had set up an extensive sidewalk operation in front of the store. The sky was blue, business was brisk, and there was a line. The guy in front of me had a fat bouquet of peonies and said to the cashier (an antiquated word) “I understand there is a sale and these are ten dollars.” A joke, they were 75 dollars.
“Are those for your mother or your wife,” I said. He seemed like a guy who was up for random conversation.
He turned to me in expensive shades and before he could respond I added. “Sounds like, “your money or your life.”
“It’s sort of both,” he said.
“Both your mother and your wife?
“Both your money or your life. My mother I took care of this morning, made her eggs benedict, her favorite. These are for my wife.”
“Wise,” I said.
We bid each other farewell, a couple of husbands and dads and sons attending to business. My bouquet was a bunch of very pretty tea roses, interspersed by this other thing that the florist put in there because they didn’t have baby’s breath. In the course of this brief exchange about the baby’s breath and what could be there instead I had conveyed the need for niceness that is the soul of all these floral encounters, and she had registered the need, hit me with, “I’ll take care of you,” to which I responded, “That you so much!” and enough of a bond was created between us that she gave it a little extra. I felt proud of this bump in value.
I am always stimulated by expensive flowers. So beautiful, and they die young2. I was amazed to learn that the giant arrangements in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum are paid for by an endowment set up for the explicit purpose of having these giant floral arrangements in perpetuity. If this isn’t sufficiently perverse, if lovely, I never paid attention to the giant arrangement in the Metropolitan Museum of Art lobby until I was told about this detail of floral financing.
3 .
I suppose it is a bit odd that Michael Jordan was flickering in my thoughts all throughout Mother’s Day, but there were reasons: I had just published a piece about Jordan and his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina; the relationship of the city to Jordan is tinged with a strange ambivalence.
A more literal connection is that my mother-in-law, Evelyn, moved to Wilmington from Raleigh a few years ago, and we have now visited her several times.
On the first visit, I took Alexander, then 11 years old, on an improvised tour of Michael Jordan related landmarks. We went to his childhood home, and the playground where he played, and a few other relevant spots gleaned from Roland Lazenby’s biography of Jordan.
What struck me in every instance was how little there was about Jordan. You can’t walk more than a few blocks in some European cities without seeing a plaque saying who once lived in this or that building. This is not the case with Jordan in Wilmington, and after a while I began to wonder why. I wrote a piece exploring this curious dynamic. And in the course of reporting it became more familiar with the city of Wilmington and its history, though I didn’t have enough space to talk about the race riot of 1898 whose shadow is still cast on the city.3
More than anything, though, it was the strange anomaly of road team victories in the current NBA playoffs that brought my thoughts to Jordan. So far in the playoffs the road team is winning much more frequently than the home team. This is unusual.
There have been about 78 playoff series since the NBA’s first one, in 1947. And until the very recent past, the home team has won their games about 60 percent of the time in 58 of those seasons. “The last time the home team’s win percentage dipped below .500 was 1981.” Playing at home just doesn’t mean what it used to,” wrote Mike Vorkunov in the New York Times. “This spring, NBA teams are just 26-24 at home in the playoffs. That’s the lowest playoff winning percentage among home teams since 1981.”
I had been wondering why this is the case. The question became especially acute when the Knicks, to the great shock of basketball pundits everywhere, won both of their away games in their second round matchup against the Boston Celtics. As fantastic as this was, it led to the possibility that the Celtics would come back and win both of their away games against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. On Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day, the Celtics won. Therefore stakes for game four, the Amis game, were exceedingly high. All this led me back to Michael Jordan.
Jordan’s relevance to the ‘why are the NBA teams winning so often on the road?’ question involves his celebrated relationship to insult, which he used as a kind of athletic aphrodisiac that brought him to the heights of his powers.4
By the time Jordan hit the game winner of his final championship season, in an away game in Salt Lake City, his reputation as a ferocious competitor was long established. It was a major subplot of The Last Dance, which illuminated not just his singular focus on winning and the personal sacrifice this required of him in terms of isolation, but the way that insult, real or perceived, brought out his best. Put more bluntly, Jordan was all about revenge.
It is this theme of revenge that has had the longest aftershock in the years since The Last Dance, in 2020. Years when the curious ecosystem of podcasts by former NBA players have become ubiquitous. These players are collaborating, de facto, on a tapestry of the oral history of Michael Jordan. It feels as though one day every single player on whom Jordan scored will have testified to the details of the moment5. These accounts are little novelas in which the context of the game, the personal subplot of the personalities, and the intrigue and perspective that comes with hindsight all merge to create what I guess you could call a critical cannon of close reads, as though Jordan were Shakespeare and his every line was the subject of someone’s PhD dissertation. The tapestry amounts to a Giant Book of Jordan.
It was the avenging, spiteful, fired up by the insult Jordan that I was thinking about in terms of the curious case of teams winning on the road so often in this year’s playoffs6—most importantly, the Knicks in Boston.
4.
The day of Amis vs. Knicks moved from morning to afternoon. I made the calculated decision that I could be home for the second half if I left the 92nd Street Y early. My wife and I took Alexander to a favorite local spot, Two Wheels, for an early dinner. Then I set off for Amis.
The gathering at Kaufman auditorium was very well attended. I have had memorable experiences at events here (in the Kaufman Auditorium, not just the weight room upstairs). I saw Joyce Johnson and Phillip Lopate read as the opening acts for Saul Bellow. I saw Ken Kesey and Robert Stone. (I wrote a piece about it, A Memory of Robert Stone.) I had my own appearance, not in the grand Kaufman Auditorium but an adjacent annex, where I was in conversation about my Salinger book with Edmund White and Patricia Bosworth.
I scanned the faces, waited in line for my ticket, filed in and took my seat amidst the old brown wood paneling. The seats made of an appealing emerald green felt. Combined with dark brown wood on the walls, the place felt cozy and special. Up ahead I spotted the bob of Anna Wintour, who was seated directly in front of the unruly head of black curls belonging to the writer Julian Tepper, who had authored a searching piece, “Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, and the Soul,” a few years earlier.
Eventually the lights dimmed and the crowd hushed.
Amis’s wife – for all kinds of reasons I don’t like the word “widow” - Isabel Fonseca came out to explain that this was the American version of an event that took place in London the year before. She was languorous, glamorous, faintly grieving. I met her in London in 1994. I was somehow recommended to her, I forget by who. One evening, I found myself in a well-appointed living room with a woman of about my age (29 at that time) in a pale gray sweater, her brown hair up in a bun. Whatever we talked about I do not recall, but at some point the phone rang and she picked it up and spoke into it with a conspiratorial elation that I now think might just be her personal style, the style of intimacies and secrets, but which at the time made me feel something dramatic had happened. Isabel has been gracious and friendly when I have met her since, and she has no recollection of this meeting. I wouldn’t, either, were it not for the image of her as she stood and picked up the phone and my sense that something momentous was being said on the other end of the line.
(Tepper and Wintour, left to right)
As she spoke I gazed at the photo of Amis projected behind her. This was the man later in life, when the Mick Jagger echo was no longer so pronounced.
For me, the pleasure of Amis involved the combination of wit, glamour, the acuity of his intelligence and the mischief of his syntax. And there was also a kind of vengefulness in the writing. Not cruelty or the need to dominate, but in the Jordan sense of finding a kind of ember to light a fire, an ember that can be felt across the novels. I also associate Amis with the fluidity with which he moved between fiction and nonfiction, specifically book criticism and journalism, without any self-consciousness.
As I sat listening to his work and the various testimonies I realized that I had not read him in a long time other than to glance at the opening pages of Money when he died. The big books that made an impression on me - Money, London Fields, The Information - were books read by a much younger man than I am today. Also on the shelf but yet seriously engaged with, Experience, which I suppose is his Speak, Memory (not that the books are similar, but in the sense of being a gleaming memoir on a shelf full of novels) and which several people I trust have spoken of as an essential book.
All the speakers at the Amis event were good or very good. Some read from the work, and some talked about it. Jeff Eugenides went first and was funny and looked plump and middle aged in the old-fashioned way, and I recalled the catastrophic collapse I had while playing tennis with him long ago, when I got very tight and choked away the set7.
Jeff's account of meeting Martin at a Brazilian writers conference was funny; his timing is redolent of Lipsyte. Maybe it’s a Brown thing. And he closed it out very neatly. But I can't recall what he actually said partly because I kept thinking I was going to stand up at any moment and race home to watch game four of the Knicks Celtics series. Also, this wasn’t a lecture hall, it was a hushed theater, like a movie or a play, and I didn’t want to be taking notes on my phone.
Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Eagan read from his work, Salman Rushdie told amusing anecdotes about the poker games and the regular dinners in London with Ian McEwan. James Wood, a critic, cited criticism as it appeared in the novels, notably The Information, quoting the line about its hapless protagonist Richard Tull, who was a good reviewer of books. “When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed,” he said, circling back to this line at the end and getting a laugh. Lorrie Moore seemed to convey the most emotional vulnerability, perhaps because she has written so movingly about health catastrophes in her fiction; she is also the writer who I associate most with laughter.
Then Nathan Heller, who I have read in the New Yorker and Vogue, arrived at the podium looking stylish in a blazer, no tie, and began to stammer very badly. His speech impediment was a shock for some reason; in print he is so fluent. For a moment, it was tense as he struggled to get his words out, to get through the sentences, but things smoothed out a bit with only minor hiccups, and he was droll and eloquent. He said that on the way to this event he thought about how he was approaching a peculiarly American form of nightmare: that of being an American surrounded by sophisticated, well-spoken British people.
Heller spoke of the quality of charm in Amis's writing and how both Kingsley and Martin produced in the reader a similar kind of laughter, though achieved through different means. He described it as laughing with or through the teeth. Or was it a high, heady laughter? He had a great taxonomy of the laughter different novelists elicit, and got a huge laugh out of me when he quoted Chesterton’s nicknaming of body parts, like coconut for head. (“I was scratching the old coconut.”)
I kept intending to get up and leave but everyone was so good and it moved quickly. Rushdie went last, was briefest, and then it was over.
5.
I raced home listening to the Knicks game on the radio. I had somehow only missed the first half. Radio is in some ways the best medium for sports, I don’t know why—the transistor radio feeling of being right there beside you and also far away, the energy of the announcers, who have to paint a picture of what is happening in words, in real time. It reminded me of being in long ago taxis.
I got home in time for the Knicks to start a comeback. They were in striking distance, nothing like the massive 20 point deficits of the first three games, two of which they overcame.
For a while Alexander resisted joining me and we even had a very modern sort of problem when I started shouting in response to a play and he started shouting from another room that I should shut up—my broadcast was a few seconds ahead of his. Perhaps for this reason, or the natural flow of our Knicks planetary life, he joined me when things got intense. We rode the comeback together. Shouting and clutching each other. This Knicks team, this season, these playoffs, this series, it has been wild.
And then, late in the Fourth Quarter, just when the Knicks seemed to be opening up real space between them and the Celtics, OG stole the ball. He headed downcourt. Our lead was about to grow, and a feeling of yes this can really happen began to assert itself, because even though there were almost three minutes left this was real momentum—just at this crescendo of joy, Tatum went down. I should probably watch the footage to gauge the exact moment our elation became colored by something else. But I don’t want to because hated that footage, (literally, about a foot), hated the sight of this player writhing on the court. Alexander was the one to call it first. “Achilles,” he said.
“What makes you think that?”
“Look at the way he planted the foot.”
I assume he is conversant In these matters at least partly because he is a Durant fan and the way Tatum planted his foot was reminiscent of the scissor step on which Durant got injured. And also of the Damian Lillard injury earlier in these playoffs.
At any rate, it was grim, everything changed. A genuinely awkward moment in the building and on TV—a man was writhing in pain, something was very wrong, and soon it was apparent that this was not a bad bruise or a bad sprain, this was something worse. Although I didn’t think this at the time, I imagine it was a complicated moment for the many former Knicks in attendance, athletes who had been through these sorts of injuries or seen them up close. Patrick Ewing went down with a torn achilles and didn’t play on the Knicks last legendary run to the finals, in 1999.
But those were thoughts that came later, and which I will delve into later8. in the moment there was the awkward spectacle of the Celtics star player going down. I was so glad that the Knicks already had the game, and the series, in hand. There could be no claims that the Celtics lost because of the injury more than the Knicks won. Brunson, Bridges, Hart, KAT, and OG had excelled. It was joyous. And yet the Tatum injury was kind of tragic. The glee of revenge, or triumph, was mitigated by the injury. They showed him being wheeled down the back hallway to the locker room, sitting in a wheelchair in a state of pain and grief. I hated seeing that. But the night had its own momentum, it was one of joy and relief. As the clock ticked down and the Knicks went up 3-1, the camera panned across the crowd and found those former Knicks. One of them stood out for wearing a remarkably loud if stylish jacket, the one player in the house who made it onto camera and who had won a championship—my pal from the YMHA weight room Walt Frazier.
Me and Alexander were thrilled, but I confess I was a bit shaken by the Tatum injury. I wasn’t the only one—the Knicks have been in the habit of posting video of the radio calls of these fourth quarter thrillers, but they didn’t do it that night out of respect for the Tatum injury. It was so visceral, all that pain, and it put me back in the real world sooner than I would have liked.
It’s possible I was more sensitive to this element of the Knicks game having been to the Amis event. Something about seeing the man projected onto a screen above the stage all night brought me into a visceral intimacy with the fact that he was gone. I don’t want to feign personal grief, or overstate a sense of personal loss. I cared at the start of the night, but the nature of my caring changed as the Amis event wore on, which I guess is the point. Most of my caring involved the writing, but some of it was just the man and his legend. When one of the speakers referenced Amis’s quips about mortality and the declining powers of a writer, they talked about him walking to the beach with a notepad and the alarm he felt when nothing came to mind. I will substitute the actual quote when I find it later, it was good.
For now I want to conclude this piece about Mother’s Day and Michael Jordan and Game 4 of Knicks-Celtics and Martin Amis with the fact that I am on a deadline to finish in time for the soon to begin Game five.
As Martin Amis once wrote, “By the time you read me, anything might be happening.”
Frazier has remained a vivid presence in his role as the loquacious color commentator on Knicks broadcasts where he produced poetic basketball couplets while calling games. (“Posting and toasting,” “Dishing and Swishing,” “Sharing and Caring,” “Bounding and astounding,” all of which have actual meaning as he used them, are some of the highlights, but the cannon is large and he seems to have one at the ready for every situation; they are a window into his thought process.)
I used to be friends with a high end florist on Bleeker street, David Brown. And by friends, I mean he tolerated me coming in and saying, “I have a twenty, what can you do for me?” He was a large man in a small space. His boyfriend, Jason, was from Texas and had huge black Phillip Johnson style glasses and cut hair in a space with giant window on West Fourth and Bank Street. He was always there with his handlebar mustache in the window, working. It was like hairdresser theater. One of the bitter pills of West Village life these days is that while the Magnolia Bakery, next door to David Brown’s old flower shop, thrives, David’s place was supplanted long ago by a store that sells tacky perfume. It was bad enough when the perfume place opened, but it has also thrived, perhaps in symbiosis with the Magnolia Bakery. (The Magnolia Bakery exists in a space that was once a bird shop. Maybe there is a similar birds-succeeded-by cupcakes irony as there is to flowers-succeeded-by-perfume irony, but I think the latter is more obnoxious.) There is a lot more to say about David and Jason, but for now it will have to suffice that they have passed away.
I came across an hour of uncut footage of Brown in his store in the late 1990’s on Youtube. There is a moment of him riffing on the pleasures of talking to famous female clients. “That was just Catherine Deneuve on the phone,” he says, and gestures to the phone on the wall. He tries to explain the pleasure these calls from Deneuve or Isabella Rossellini elicit, and he seems about to enact the feeling, when the phone rings—the pleasure a phone gives is equal to that which is removes, perhaps as true back then as it certainly is now. The moment is a kind of name dropping coitus interruptus. It’s great.
Wilmington appears early in Roland Lazenby’s biography of Michael Jordan, in chapter 2. It’s title: “Bloody Wilmington.” It traces the history of a thriving black middle class that existed in the city in the late 19th century. “Dixie Democrats” had reasserted white control of most of the state, but “Wilmington and the Coastal Plain stood apart, largely on the strength of more than 120,000 black male registered voters,” he writes. “The place was on its way to becoming a peer of Atlanta with an emerging black upper class, two black newspapers, a black mayor, an integrated police force, and an array of black-owned businesses.”
Then, on November 11th, 1898, a well-planned white race riot took place; it began with the burning of the offices of a black newspaper, then went on to involve executions. “As the violence spread, terrified blacks took their families and fled into the nearby swamps, where the Red Shirts were said to have followed to execute many more whose remains were allegedly never recovered. The second phase of the well-planned rebellion began the next day as whites escorted prominent blacks—clergymen, business leaders, politicians—to the local train station and packed them out of town for good.”
And that was the end of Wilmington as the next Atlanta.
If this mingling of sex and sports, not to mention the scrutinizing of athletes as though they were literary texts, seems dubious, I have Martin Amis to back me up:
Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike, who regard our addiction as affected, pseudo-proletarian, even faintly homosexual. We have adapted to this; we keep ourselves to ourselves – oh, how we have to cringe and hide! If I still have your attention, then I assume you must be one of us, pining for social acceptance and for enlightened discussion of the noble game.
This appears as part of a throat clearing intro to a review/essay for the London Review of Books that he wrote in 1991, ten years after the publication of the book being discussed, The Soccer Tribe by Desmond Morris.
If that paragraph isn’t helpful enough to my cause, the piece is framed a bit like this one, in close proximity to a big game. In his case, in anticipation. “I am writing this piece, by the way, several days before the England v. Hungary encounter on 18 November. By the time you read me, anything might be happening.”
That last line - anything might be happening - sounds like a good title for a book about sports, or an anthology of Sports Writing by literary authors, or maybe an anthology of Sports writing by Martin Amis. But should it include the first half? “By the time you read me…”
That’s not a bad title, either.
The most recent example I witnessed involved two players I don't normally associate with Jordan, Kevin Garnett, and Isaiah Rider. I find Rider interesting because for a couple of years he seemed like a major figure, a stud, a wild athletic talent. But he was also a head case. Wild off the court, wild in temperament. Multiple arrests during and after his career, difficult to coach, someone who, with more discipline, could have been a multiple time All-Star. Instead, he was out of the league at 30. In the podcast in question, the plot follows the standard arc, except the inciting event was something said by Kevin Garnett, then a rookie but already at no loss for words. The reason I am even dwelling on this was how shocking I found it to hear Rider speaking, now, in 2025. How soft spoken and even shy he was. How mellow. There is more to say about this juxtaposition between wild-man talent and the off court demeanor of mellowness and shyness. For now, it’s enough to note that it has a strong echo of Latrell Sprewell, a player I loved as a player, a major figure in the story of the Knicks. That I should feel so attentive and even fond of this kind of hurt, aggrieved, and also violent type of player who has a softness to them, surely says something about me.
Over the course of mother’s day I developed a Michael Jordan related theory for why this might be: today’s players are at the center of their family’s universe; the most famous and talented are essentially teenage tycoons. Some of the younger ones, it is implied, live like Caligula, especially on the road, but the older players have wives and families like everyone else, or the complications of domestic arrangements. And the teams that make deep runs in the playoffs are usually well stocked with veterans. I decided that the demands on the modern father at home were distracting.
There is a scene in the Last Dance where Jordan is shown to be counting out tickets before a Bulls game in Chicago. This is late in his career. It’s the playoffs. The crown, it would appear as he counts out the tickets, weighs heavily on the king’s head. He bears the weight stoically.
Jordan was not a touchy feely guy. Jordan is often discussed in juxtaposition to his rival for Greatest of All Time, Lebron James. I don’t want to get into the basketball side of this debate, except to say I think MJ is the GOAT, and some of that derives from the influence he had on the game and the culture. But LeBron James has also had an influence on the game and the culture. I would say one effect of his reign as the best active player in the league has been to make his personal warmth and playfulness – compared to Jordan – be the standard in the league. I realize there are larger forces at work, such as society’s growing awareness of the need for all people, even big strong athletes, to be treated as humans with feelings that they now and then need to express. Also, the gigantic amounts of money that everyone in the NBA guild now collects, leading to a guild mentality, as though it’s all one circus, or, as I put it in my book, Lost in the Game, a kaleidoscope. As a result of all this, players hug after games.
In my imagination this warmer personal style, one that acknowledges that the players are human, means that they are more sensitive to family life and its complications, and these become distractions at home. On the road, they are free of it, and have only their teammates, a squadron behind enemy lines, on whom to rely.
A much less abstract explanation comes from a friend who writes about basketball for a living. According to him, playing at home is no longer the advantage it was once because 1) the preponderance of skilled three point shooters. 2) the fact that instant replay and the challenge has made refs less vulnerable being pressured into calls favoring the home team. 3) Seats are so expensive at these games that, however loud the arena may get, the fans don’t have the same solidarity and intensity that they used to.
There was a slight redemption in his later wanting to bet a hundred dollars on Jonathan Ames in a game of one on one between Jonathan and I. Ames had to talk him out of it, and point out my height and that I actually played basketball and so forth. All this so long ago.