From time to time, I would insist to Michelle that Anthony—though more concerned with personal branding than with winning a title—was actually a pretty good guy, who had, like Stoudemire, welcomed the challenge of New York. There was no convincing her of that, though. Operating from inside his superstar cocoon, Anthony was not one to commune with her or any fan. He was probably her least favorite player in all her time at courtside, but I argued with her that he was who he was, and he hadn’t acquired himself. In the final analysis, there should have been only one man to blame. Ultimately, Michelle knew this, too. “The day Dolan made Donnie get Carmelo,” she said, “was for me the death of all hope.”
• • • • •
In February 2017, Michelle was in her final season as the holder of her Knicks tickets, and Porzingis’s development was one of the only reasons to be excited about where the team was headed. Early in a game against the Los Angeles Clippers, Porzingis was at the free-throw line. As he prepared to shoot, it became clear that some kind of commotion was breaking out in the stands just behind the basket he faced, a couple of rows behind James Dolan.
I was sitting high atop the court in the press area on the Garden’s eighth level. From the media’s vantage point, it was not easy to determine what the fuss was about—security guards rushing over, converging on a tall man in a dark suit with salt-and-pepper hair, who seemed to be in the middle of the fracas. Fans in the area were standing, craning their necks to see what was happening.
Someone down the row from me, apparently with much clearer vision, yelled out, “Holy shit, is that Oakley?” And soon came a confirming chant from below of the old warrior’s name—“Oakley, Oakley”—as the unfathomable unfolded below. The Knicks’ beloved enforcer of the nineties, Patrick Ewing’s unofficial bodyguard, was wrestled to the ground, cuffed, and dragged out, the crowd continuing its chant as if Oakley’s adversaries were Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant.
A statement was soon released by the Knicks, alleging that “Charles Oakley came to the game tonight and behaved in a highly inappropriate and completely abusive manner. He has been ejected and is currently being arrested by the New York City Police Department. He was a great Knick and we hope he gets some help soon.”
It was no secret that Oakley had for years had a prickly relationship with Dolan, whose arrival on the scene in 1999 had coincided with his being traded to Toronto. Oakley, cranky by nature, was thus a rare former Knick who had no problem publicly calling Dolan and the franchise out for their chronic dysfunction. He had been just as outspoken as a player, once criticizing Ewing, his teammate, for allowing the 1998 lockout to drag on as the players’ union president. Oakley’s complaints were never mean-spirited, or even calculated; they were just stream-of-consciousness kvetching. But in retirement, his style violated Dolan’s loyalty code.
Michelle loved Oakley for all he had physically sacrificed to the Garden’s cause. She always would tell me that while Ewing was the team’s unquestioned star, Oakley, in all his orneriness, was its backbone. And unlike Ewing, Oakley shared his thoughts with the fans—including her—much as he did with the writers. Their rapport carried over to his post-playing years. Before the feud with Dolan turned nasty, he often sat in Michelle’s section when attending a game. He would stop by to chat about the team, Michelle understanding half of what Oakley, who typically spoke in bursts of accelerated garbles, was saying. When he occasionally suggested they have lunch, she knew it would never happen. She was still flattered by the thought.
I knew Michelle had to have been horrified by the humiliation Oakley had endured in the arena he loved most. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to take the Knicks’ word for why it had occurred. At halftime, I raced down to courtside and asked her how much, if any, of the scuffle she had seen. One more time, my courtside source clued me in.
Nothing unusual had happened until the security people appeared and tried to make Oakley leave, she said. The Knicks contended that Oakley was belligerent and profane from the moment he entered the arena, yelling at Dolan from a seat he had apparently purchased from a season-ticket owner. But when footage of the episode surfaced, it appeared to corroborate Michelle’s contention that Oakley, while laughing and joking with fans, hadn’t created a scene at all until Dolan, caught on video, summoned security to have him removed.
There was, of course, no defending Oakley’s shoving a much smaller security guard, touching off the melee. It was also possible that, literally behind Dolan’s back, he had said something offensive that was loud enough to hear. But the issue, once again, was how little it obviously took to set off Dolan. The video evidence was clear that the episode might have been avoided had Dolan been more circumspect. He just couldn’t resist the temptation to make an uncomfortable situation much, much worse. His crassness came through loud and clear when he went on the radio and offered a familiar depiction of an adversary, alleging that Oakley was a drunk.
When I called Michelle a couple of days later, she was again incredulous at Dolan’s complete tone deafness to the chaos that he—more than anyone—was responsible for. She dismissed the Knicks’ side of the story. “I know what I saw,” she said. The dysfunction had been unfolding in front of her for far too long. Even in her subsidized seat, the price of watching it was becoming too steep.
Ten The Long View
After the trepidation of accepting the position as a columnist in the Sports of the Times rotation gave way to excitement, actually writing the column
