As we’re told on those Chevy commercials, these are, “Real people, not actors.”
As for those told that the circus would no longer be performed in Madison Square Garden, the Charles Oakley-James Dolan epic slogs on.
Yesterday, three days after it appeared NBA commissioner Adam Silver successfully had brokered a lasting peace, Oakley blew up the accord with a broadside implicating Dolan as a racist and supporting sudden social critic and professional crotch-kicker Draymond Green, who accused Dolan as one who rules with a “slave master’s mentality.”
As one who has studied the Family Dolan since the 1980s, I find this assessment unfair, inaccurate and comically perverse.
The very idea Dolan would treat blacks worse than whites is demonstrably wrong. By whatever choice Green or Oakley choose to measure, Dolan has treated white people at least as bad as blacks.
Next, by continuing to throw stones at Dolan following a cease-fire, Oakley risks doing the impossible: shifting sympathy toward Dolan.
Until Thursday, Oakley had it won. Heck, ESPN’s Jeff Van Gundy, Oakley’s former Knicks coach now always eager to make extra noise, on Wednesday declared Oakley’s No. 34 should be retired!
Finally, unlike “slaves” who toil for millions of dollars under a Donald Sterling or a Jim Dolan, NBA “slaves” have what no slaves anywhere in the world at any time in history ever had: the right to quit. The continued mindless easiness with which comparisons are made with genuine enslavement is revolting.
Still, in a time when our leaders aspire to “greater transparency” — a new-age term for something closer to the truth — no one is more transparent than Dolan. In the hours following the start of the Oakley crisis, he suddenly decided to demonstrate his public devotion to ex-Knicks by bringing in, of all people, All Bad-Guy Team captain Latrell Sprewell, to sit beside him.
Did it dawn on any of the slick, subtle Garden public relations geniuses that in trying to exploit Sprewell to champion Dolan they had chosen a player who was infamous for choking his coach, that they had embraced an ex-Knick known for his public demands — infamously explaining he needed millions more “to keep food on his family’s table” — only to lose his two multimillion-dollar estates to foreclosures?
Yep, playing BFF with Latrell Sprewell would show the world that Dolan is on the side of the angels!
And Dolan’s story still makes no sense. If, as he insisted, Oakley was at full fault, why did Dolan fire his security chief, Frank Benedetto. Or was this 27-year Secret Service agent, who had been assigned to guard U.S. presidents, not good enough for Jim Dolan?
Benedetto, according to an ex-colleague, was counseled not to work for Dolan based on the latter’s history of scapegoating, mistreatment and sudden firings of employees at all levels.
Commissioner Silver put an end, at least temporarily, to an episode that threatened to allow professional, selective, media-dependent race hustlers to fuel and inflame.
After all, Silver brought Dolan and Oakley together just as Al Sharpton and Brooklyn borough president/racial arsonist Eric Adams were declaring their intentions to pounce on Oakley vs. Dolan as a clear case of racism — as if Benedetto and scores of white Garden ex-employees and execs hadn’t been purged by what a recently dumped MSG Network employee described in an email as, “The intimidation from higher-ups, which is at the heart of MSG’s toxic work environment.”
Other stage hogs included Mike Francesa, who again proved there is no issue, local, national or global, that he won’t firmly seize with all of his omnipotent authority and inside knowledge … to get completely wrong.
Thus, Monday, Francesa, while belittling a caller for the mere suggestion, declared that a meeting between Dolan and Oakley brokered by Silver, “Won’t happen. It will not happen.”
Francesa soon was forced to report it just had happened — though he didn’t add that it likely happened while he was insisting that it wouldn’t.
Naturally, from the start, Francesa, who had no idea what happened, backed Dolan. Standard Francesa. He always will back those who can do something for him. Oakley? He can’t do a thing for Francesa.
So it ain’t over ’til it’s over. And if Oakley keeps it up, he may inspire fans to see the steady wisdom in Dolan’s 22-years-and-counting Knicks’ rebuilding plan. Real people, not actors.
If you’re thinking, ‘I don’t get it,’ neither do we
Ever find yourself measuring the world, at least your part of it, by what your father would say?
I do. And though he has been gone 30 years, I still remind friends that should he ever reappear, “Please, pleeze, don’t tell him we buy drinking water.”
He was a sports fan and a son of the Great Depression, thus he never would understand what we understand.
He never would have been able to reconcile the recent news that Orioles second- or third-string catcher Caleb Joseph, though an MLB record-holder, lost his salary arbitration case. He had asked for $1 million per year; instead, he will have to get by on $700,000.
Joseph last season set a record for most plate appearances, 141, without an RBI. He hit .174. And he wanted $1 million but will have to take $700,000. My dad never would understand, at least not the way we understand.
My old man liked basketball, best. But if he had seen the end to Sunday’s Cornell-Penn on SNY, well, again, he wouldn’t get it the way we get it. (And thanks to reader Yoram Silagy for the heads-up on its ending.)
The game was an early blowout, which Penn won by 19 — the last shot missed by Penn at the buzzer. Both teams were leaving when they were called back.
A courtside monitor review showed that the shot clock had expired before that last shot. It should’ve been Cornell’s ball with .06 seconds left. And so the game, several minutes later, resumed — Penn up 19 with .06 left. Cornell inbounded then walked off — again.
You see, my dad would’ve thought this insufferably stupid. Unlike us, he wasn’t around when “getting it right” became important. He just wouldn’t get it.
Murray antics getting old
Has Bill Murray become a deterrent to watching the Pebble Beach Pro-Am on CBS? As readers note every February, the only folks who seem still to find his on-course antics funny — as opposed to forced, tired and even annoying — are CBS’ announcers.
Reader Rich Ippolito writes that while CBS thinks we love watching Murray do his “Caddyshack” shtick every year, “It’s more like watching him in ‘Groundhog Day.’ ”