The reaction from the beleaguered community of Knicks faithful to the forced removal and indefinite ban from Madison Square Garden of Charles Oakley, their combatant hero still, has surprised no one with the sharpness and continuity of its outrage. When Oakley was dragged into the Garden tunnel in the early stages of what would be a third straight loss in a season that is marching dismally into the gloom, Knicks fans immediately translated the symbolism – it was another plank burned by James Dolan on the bridge back to the team’s glorified past.
When you whitewash history, you’re left to think only of the present, and for a franchise mired in nearly two decades of uninterrupted failure, fans aren’t exactly eager to dwell on current events. Understand what these fans mean: when they chanted “We want Oakley” at MSG Friday night, they were begging their organization, beginning with their owner, to allow their memories to have relevance in the present. Nostalgia is the most positive emotion these fans have felt this millennium – in its absence, there is only harsh reality.
When you take away Oakley, you leave Marbury, Isiah, Curry, Francis, Brown, Stoudemire.
Surprising to no one, the guy holding the gasoline up to this most recent fire is James Dolan. Even considering the backlash that’s followed, it’s not crazy to believe that Oakley owns some culpability in his forced removal Wednesday night – that Oakley would have been thrown out and banned from the Garden if he’d simply been shaking hands on his way to his seat seems unreasonable, even for the Knicks.
But it’s also reasonable to believe that considering the franchise’s adversarial relationship with Oakley, Dolan, expecting his appearance Wednesday night, may well have been looking for a reason to embarrass the former star, and he’s certainly gone out of his way to do just that. Even if Dolan believed that facts on the ground Wednesday night merited Oakley’s eviction, there were ways for Dolan to execute this directive with a subtle flash rather than a mushroom cloud. Oakley could have quietly been escorted from the arena during a timeout, during halftime – instead, Dolan had him carried out during live game action, with cameras rolling, early in the first quarter.
He could have let the controversy die 24 hours later, but instead he chose to distract Knicks fans from the sewer their season is sinking into with an effusion of bile strictly his own, alleging that Oakley is a violent alcoholic in an interview that will be written into law school curricula as the textbook definition of public slander.
I’ll politely ask James Dolan to spare us his moral outrage on this subject. He contends that he hopes Oakley will “seek help” for his troubles – should he be reminded that Anucha Browne Sanders turned to him for help in 2006, when she alleged that Isiah Thomas sexually harassed her and was, subsequent to her report, fired by Dolan from her position as a Knicks vice president for marketing? Dolan settled a lawsuit with Browne Sanders for $11.5 million.
James Dolan will no longer welcome Oakley to the Garden for undisclosed, legally unproven poor behavior, but every day he warmly welcomes Derrick Rose, whose testimony in a sexual assault case against him revealed his thoughts on the nature of reasonable consent:
Q: So they just said, ‘Hey, it’s the middle of the night, let’s go to Plaintiff’s house,’ and they never gave you a reason why they wanted to go over there?
Rose: No, but we men. You can assume.
Q: I’m sorry?
Rose: I said we men. You can assume. Like we having to go over to someone’s house at 1:00, there’s nothing to talk about.
The ‘we men’ defense for sexual assault is more than welcome in Dolan’s Garden. No official intervention is needed for Derrick Rose. But for Oakley? Dolan wishes someone would step in.
Asking James Dolan to carry himself with even a modicum of self awareness would be like asking a tree to do a backflip. The wall between Dolan and reality will never fracture, so Knicks fans are forced to bear it alone. Their franchise is without hope, at least until it’s their owner who is dragged from the Garden, never to return.
Parquet 