by Jeffrey Stanley
“I’m in that fifty percent of people who never get a chance to use their major professionally,” he quipped. Although he majored in management and finance at C.W. Post, the 6’9” Michael Henderson ’79 avoided a white collar career and went straight to the NBA playing for the New York Knicks in 1984. “When that came to an end, I started looking for ways to stay involved with the game,” he said. So he became an NBA referee.
Michael demystified his unusual career, describing a typical day in a professional ref’s life: “You’ve got to get to your hotel, log on with your laptop, take a weekly test.” The test is a sort of pop quiz given to NBA refs every week on the official rules of the game in order to keep them on their toes. “I also watch a play by play of the last game and send over my critiques,” he said, referring to the fact that he must revisit and reevaluate every snap decision he makes during a game. To keep the referees from showing a bias in favor of particular teams, the NBA gives him no say in his itinerary throughout the season. “I get my travel schedule a month in advance,” he explained. “The computer picks my assignment and schedules it. I don’t follow teams.”
One could say that Michael’s NBA career began at Brooklyn Friends School. He was a student from ninth through twelfth grades, entering just after he moved to New York from Jamaica. His family settled in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Michael took the B 45 bus to school and remembers his block being made up of a close-knit group of families. “We always pulled together,” he said.
He still can recall the culture shock he felt as a new ninth grader at Friends. “I think about how liberal it was. We had free time between classes, but that gave you responsibility. You were still checked – you had to behave.” Still, it was a big difference from his school days in Kingston. “That school was more regimented. You sat in one room all day with the same teacher and every 30 minutes you put away one book and opened up the next one. Coming to BFS was like freedom.”
Michael had grown up playing soccer. He had never seen a basketball in his life, much less played the game. Still, he wanted to try it, so he approached basketball coach Frank DePalo about joining the team. “Frank started me off. He could have said you can’t be on the team. But with him it was come one, come all.” If it hadn’t been for the coach’s positive attitude toward inexperienced players, Michael never would have wound up an NBA star. “He taught me the fundamentals.”
Michael found that this openness extended beyond Coach DePalo, pervading life at Brooklyn Friends. He credits English teacher Pat McIlnay Lea for easing his transition into life here. “Pat cared. She had a really soft touch. She had a warm heart.” Biology teacher Ron Harning was tough but entertaining. “He ran a tight ship but he made you excited to learn.”
He also appreciated that Brooklyn Friends was small. His graduating class was made up of 37 students but nonetheless it was a diverse population. “I think when I left Brooklyn Friends I was too young to grasp this, but looking back it was like the United Nations, it was so multicultural.” He found that to be not just a politically correct pleasantry but also a distinct advantage over students from other schools.
“When I got into the real world I knew how to relate to people. I got that from my parents as well, they taught me how to get along with everyone.”
Looking back, Michael considers his time at Brooklyn Friends to be “the second best four years of my life.” He imagines the same is probably true for the current Upper School students and offered a word of caution to them about their next four years, those spent in college, which he sees as the most difficult period. “The responsibility in college will become their own. That one-on-one interaction is gone, and the sense of someone caring is gone. It’s all on your shoulders.”
And the best four years? “The fun part comes when you get out of college,” he said of the time when one settles on a career and truly finds one’s identity. To Michael, that meant basketball.
Michael’s mother still lives in the same house the family moved into in the 1970s. He sees her every time the NBA season brings him to New York but his home base is Springfield, Missouri, where he lives with his wife Katie Abrahamson-Michael, head of women’s basketball at Missouri State, and their two young daughters.