NBA All-Star Weekend 2019 in Charlotte Special Side Story

A tribute to late Arnaud Gelb by Michael Steenstra

Friends forever

My friend Arnaud Gelb died suddenly on June 28, 2016 at 31 years old. His death hit me hard. I cried often. It was the death of friend that I had recently became quite close with and it was a level of grief that I had never experienced before. We’d do weekly happy hours during the NBA offseason and I never knew why, but he would call me just to talk every day during that last year of life. We’d mostly talk about basketball but Arnaud knew enough on that subject to talk about it for years.

I became friends with Arnaud while covering the Washington Wizards games for the Japanese NBA magazine “HOOP Japan” in 2013. It was immediately clear that Arnaud was the most passionate, and knowledgeable, basketball fan I had ever had the pleasure of meeting. But he was also super nice; taking me under his wing and showing me the ins-and-outs of what it meant to be a media member in the NBA. 

Arnaud was a content machine while working for the French basketball outlet, BasketUSA. He’d have written five articles before I had even picked up my credentials most nights. He was going places. There was no doubt in my mind that he was going to end up on TV or become the French version of Darren Rovell, who was his media idol. Arnaud consumed more basketball in his 31 years than I’ll watch in a lifetime. 

He was at every Wizards game, every NBA one-off event (like the draft), a lot of NCAA events (I think he would have liked me to point out that he was the #1 NCAA reporter in France, actually) and traveled several times a year to check off a new arena on his basketball passport. He hit every NBA arena that was open at that time. But with all of the events that he attended, NBA All Star Weekend was his absolute favorite.

If there was a heaven for Arnaud Gelb here on earth, it was All Star Weekend.

Unthinkable happened

Arnaud convinced me to go to All Star Weekend in 2015 in New York. He was excited (and getting me excited) for months prior to the weekend. We ended up renting a room together in Hotel Pennsylvania (not a clean hotel) right across the street from Madison Square Garden for that weekend. It was a whirlwind. We did everything we possibly could. We hit all of the NBA events; media availabilities, industry pop-up shops like Jordan, Nike, Underarmour, and Adidas, and walked around NYC absorbing everything we could. He was right; it was an incredible weekend. 

For some reason, this random memory sticks out to me most about that weekend. Arnaud and I had just got back to our dirty little Manhattan hotel room on the Sunday night after the All Star Game ended. We had stopped at McDonalds for a late night bite and Arnaud ordered a Big Mac meal, super-sized, of course, and a 20 piece McNugget. He was sitting on the bed across from me in his underwear and eating his meal faster than I thought any mortal person could eat. It seriously looked like he didn’t breathe while eating. But I suppose it was a fitting, in a way. Arnaud lived fast and hard in 31 years. He enjoyed everything like it was the first and last time he was doing it. It was admirable.

I missed out on Arnaud’s last All Star Weekend in Toronto in 2016. I envied the pictures. It was clear that he was loving every minute of it. But he was thinking of me there and made sure to give me some Toronto “swag” when he returned and made me vow to attend in Charlotte the next year (which is where it was scheduled to be in 2017).

But then the unthinkable happened. 

Arnaud had suffered from night seizures for some time. Thinking back on the aftermath of them, I realize now that these were intense seizures. He would tell our friend group (shout-out Roscoe Whalan and Gerardo Lopez) that he would often wake up in a pool of blood from biting his tongue during a nighttime seizure but always just laughed it off while proudly displaying the bite marks on his tongue. Gerardo Lopez, a reporter from Puerto Rico who had also become friends with Arnaud pushed him to get tested at a sleep center near my house. I had known Arnaud for years at this point but it was the first time that he met my wife; who had heard about him constantly through me. We ate dinner and laughed hard. He was so funny with his French accent and his vast knowledge of the American version of The Office, of which I now suspect most of his humor was lifted from. 

It was one of the last times I saw him, though. What’s really odd is that about a three weeks before his death, I recorded a podcast with him about his life. In the conversation, Roscoe Whalan (another NBA reporter friend from Australia) and I peppered Arnaud with personal questions while doing a brewery tour around Washington, DC. It is a somewhat intimate conversation and it gives you an insight into the mind of “Gelb” and the relationship he had with our International Report friend group.

I saw him one more time at a happy hour five days before his death. It was with his friends from his day job at The American Health Lawyers Association. I remember being kind of annoyed that I didn’t know anybody but Gelb when arrived but he made me feel as though I fit right in; just like he did when I first met him at the Wizards games and at All Star Weekend in New York. I remember his smile and laughter fondly.

Celebration of life

But then I remember the phone call I had received from Gerardo on my drive into work.

“I have some bad news to tell you, Mikey.” 

You could tell he did not want to believe or say what he was about to.

“Arnaud died in his sleep last night.”

It was a seizure. A massive one. An autopsy would later reveal a microscopic tumor that seemed to be causing them. 

I was devastated. I didn’t know what to do so I continued driving to work in a daze. And then all I could do was cry. I walked to my boss’s office and broke down. I don’t remember how I asked but he let me go home. Gerardo and Roscoe and I made a plan to meet at the Black Rooster pub down in DC in the early afternoon. We cried. We laughed a lot too, though. We made a lot of memories in a short amount of time.

The funeral passed and we were shocked by the outpouring of support by the NBA community. French players were all tweeting their condolences and Adrian Dantley’s family even showed up to the celebration of life (a story for another time).

But when it was all said and done, I just missed my friend. 

When it was time for All Star Weekend in New Orleans in 2017 (it was switched from Charlotte that year), Gerardo and I were hellbent on going to honor our friend. We were going to attend All Star as if we were Arnaud, going 100% all of the time. We had a blast, of course, but also shed some tears at the thought of being there without him. 

And now, another two years have passed and I have just returned from Charlotte from the 2019 All Star Weekend. It was the city that I promised Arnaud I would go to with him. In honor of Gelb, we worked our tails off going to every event that we could. But even with the effort, I know that Gelb would have made it to twice as many events and written three times as many articles as I did. 

It was, of course, the best weekend of NBA coverage of the year. 

When I returned home from All Star weekend, I was tired. I haven’t really cried for Arnaud in probably two years. But for some reason, I was reminded of Arnaud’s early death when randomly watched Adam Sandler’s Chris Farley song that recently closed out his Netflix special. I wept. I wept with my 9 month old daughter in my arms. I wept because I miss my friend. I wept because of the future that he was never able to live. And I wept because I just wish he had got to experience All Star Weekend with Gerardo and I in Charlotte this past weekend.

But I shouldn’t weep for Arnaud anymore. I should celebrate him. He lived a happy life. In fact, just a few months before his death, in the same halls that I just walked at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, Arnaud met his idol; Michael Jordan. His photograph with MJ is a symbol of a life well lived. He reached his goals in 31 years. So what’s our excuse?