An Open Letter to Isiah Thomas

Isiah Thomas
President, Basketball Operations, New York Knickerbockers
Four Penn Plaza, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10021

Mr. Thomas,

Salutations Mr. Thomas, I hope this letter meets you in good health and spirits. If you don’t mind, I’m going to refer to you as Isiah for the balance of this letter.

Isiah, I’ve been meaning to write you for some time now and your recent acquisitions at the trade deadline last week finally spurred me into action. By way of introduction, I am a 24-year-old lifelong devotee of your organization. Some of my favorite moments as a sports fan came courtesy of your team, from Starks’ dunk over MJ in the ’93 playoffs to Ewing’s putback slam to clinch the ’94 conference championship to Houston’s leaner against the Heat five years after that. I cherish these memories and I must thank your franchise for that.

So please understand Isiah why I must call you to task on your recent moves as the Knicks chief of basketball operations. I cannot grasp what your plan is for my team, and judging by public outcry, I am not alone in this. To be honest Isiah, I have no clue what you are thinking. If you don’t mind, I’m going to refer to you as Thomas for the balance of this letter.

You see Thomas, when you were announced as the new leader of my team, we were apprehensive. We had heard the stories: How you were a talented but dirty and inherently unlikable player, how you ran the long-running CBA into the ground, how your teams with the Raptors and Pacers always seemed to underachieve with above-average talent.

And while we had our reservations, we gave you a chance. Maybe it was those two rings, maybe it was because Patrick was gone and we needed something fresh, maybe we saw you watch those games from the tunnel with that sly smile, and we believed no man could look so supremely confident without the goods to back it up. How misguided we were.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to refer to you as The Problem for the balance of this letter.

Sadly, it comes down to this: In just 14 months on the job, you have effectively destroyed any chance for my team to contend for a NBA title for the next 10 years. Almost out of defiance to the previous regime, you overhauled an entire roster, intent on making it out of your own image.

You chose to build around a point guard who is paid like franchise player but has never played like one. You took on career underachievers and traded away serviceable talent. Last week you jettisoned your only true center essentially to get back two first round draft picks that are higher than ODB. You took back a couple of has-beens, never-will-bes and another $23 million on your already shipwrecked cap number to boot. No general manager in the NBA gets more thank you cards and fruit cakes during the holidays than you.

I am writing you this letter so that you will go away. We don’t want you here anymore. When the stories circulated that you were going to skip town on yet another franchise/organization that you had doomed, we just hoped the door wouldn’t hit your Armani suit on the way out. Of course, we weren’t that lucky.

I don’t know if you know this, but there was a time when the Garden was the most exciting place in sports. Maybe you remember the electricity of MSG as a player -- it was a jolting current that could lift players and teams to another level. That current is gone now. Do you know where it is?

Of course you don't. And that’s why you’re The Problem. You don’t have any answers. No substance, only style. We know better now, but it's too late. You’re a fraud, and we’re just along for the ride…one poor decision at a time.

Sincerely,

A troubled fan

Thank you, Barry

February is a pretty difficult month for me.

With both Woman’s History Month and Black History Month in full swing, I’m already feeling a bit overlooked. Even more pressing, February is the unquestionable graveyard of the sports calendar, which puts things on a whole different level. The NFL and college football are history. Baseball is just shaking out the cobwebs. NCAA hoops won’t truly heat up until March. The Knicks and Nets are floundering, rendering the NBA useless. The AFL, featuring Bon Jovi’s Philadelphia Soul, the Georgia Force, and the New Orleans VooDoo, may or may not exist. The NHL is dunzo, though that’s not such a biggie for me seeing as I haven’t watched a complete hockey game since Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup finals.

Needless to say, these are the 28 worst days of the sports year. And that’s why my ride home from work was so special yesterday. If the battery on my iPod hadn’t had kicked an hour earlier, I may have never have heard it. But the stars were aligned. A feast of entertainment was about to poured out upon me.

The date was February 22, 2005. Or, as it will be known from this day forward, The Day Barry Bonds Was Proven Insane.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, Barry Bonds – sitting on both 703 home runs and the biggest drug scandal in the history of American sports – reported to the San Francisco Giants spring training complex in Scottsdale, Ariz. yesterday.

Bonds was expected to be hit with a barrage of questions regarding BALCO and the steroid scandal that he is the face of. In a defiant tone and with the biggest head I've ever seen, Bonds went on the offensive.

Some particularly insane excerpts from Barry’s press conference with reporters: (transcripts courtesy of ESPN.com)

Q. Jose maintains that he did take steroids -- [inaudible] -- Mike Greenwell feels he should get the MVP because Canseco admitted that he used steroids. What's your opinion on that? And people who achieve awards, should there be an asterisk or maybe it taken back?

BONDS: … I mean, you can't -- you guys are like rerun stories. This is just -- this is old stuff. I mean, it's like watching "Sanford and Son," you know, you just, rerun after rerun after rerun.

You guys, it's like, what, I mean, you can't -- it's almost comical, basically. I mean, we've got alcohol that's the No. 1 killer in America and we legalize that to buy in the store. You've got, you know, you've got tobacco number two, three killer in America, we legalize that. There's other issues. You guys are going to be the same people next week as some tragedy happened, how we need to save our children and everything else and next week, you're the same people sitting there coming, how we should be doing this and how we're evil people, or, you know, you guys, it's one thing after another. You know, pick one side or the other. Are y'all going to be good people or are you all going to be who you are and make the game or sports what it is? It's become "Hard Copy" all day long. Are you guys jealous? Upset? Disappointed? What?

Ummmm…okay. And no Mike Greenwell, you can't have the 1988 MVP award. You idiot.

Q. Everybody in this room agrees with what you said, this is a circus --
BONDS: I like you. What's your name, man?
Q. What would be your solution to end the circus?
BONDS: I think that allow Major League Baseball, Bud Selig and the Union and its players, allow the drug testing program to work. Allow it to work. Let's go forward. I truly believe that we need to go forward. Okay, you cannot rehash the past. If that's the case, we're going to go way back into 19th, 18th centuries in rehashing the past and we'll crush a lot of things in a lot of sports if that's what you guys want. If you just want a lot of things out of the sports world, then we can go back into the 1800s and basically asterisk a lot of sports if that's what you choose and that's what you want to do.
If that's going to make you happy and everything, then go right ahead, figure it out, who you want, it's going to go all the way down the line.
But, things that happen in sports, in all sorts of sports, it's time to move on. Every time there has been incident, it has been corrected and now that it's being corrected, I think we need to go forward, move forward, let it go. Y'all stop watching Red Foxx in rerun shows and let's go ahead and let the program work and allow us to do our job.

Did Barry just reference 1700s America and Red Foxx in the same answer? Yes. Yes he did.

Q. What's going to be your approach to repair it from here on out? [Do] you expect other people to come clean and move forward?
BONDS: We just need to go out there and do our jobs, just as you professionals do your job. All you guys lied. All of y'all and the story or whatever have lied. Should you have asterisk behind your name? All of you lied. All of you have said something wrong. All of you have dirt. All of you. When your closet's clean, then come clean somebody else's. But clean yours first, okay.
But I think right now baseball just needs to go forward and you guys need to turn the page and let's move forward. Let us play the game, and we will fix it. I think we all want to, I think we all have a desire to. I think we all are hurting, including myself.

Barry has now labeled over 100 bitter sports reporters in a cramped room as “liars.” This will not go over well.

Q. What are we moving forward from?
BONDS: OK. Strike one, ball one, one out, cheer, boo, yeah, game over, let's go home. I mean, what else do you want to talk about? You know, there's a sports world -- the sports world is as bad as it is because this is the only business that allows you guys in our office to begin with. You can't just go to Bank of America, walk in the office, start interviewing employees. Just the sports world. Well, what for? Well, we don't want to get into the money aspect of it; we'll leave that to the side.

“OK. Strike one, ball one, one out, cheer, boo, yeah, game over, let’s go home.” Must…find time machine…to change…senior quote.

February had just went from an Iron Sheik-level heel to Marty Jannety-level baby face in 25 glorious minutes. I listened to this gold mine on WFAN and following the interview, Mike and The Mad Dog chimed in with their own insights. Mike Francesa labeled the diatribe as “one of the strangest press conferences he’d ever seen” while repeatedly saying “bizzahhh.” Chris Russo – a diehard Giants fan – referred to Bonds as a “weird guy” at least 18 times. I think I agree.

I took the remaining time in my car to reflect on all the insane goodness that Barry had suddenly brought into my life. One day, when my grandson sits on my lap and asks me about the great Barry Bonds and his 800 career home runs, I’ll no longer be at a loss to explain this controversial figure and his place in history.

“OK. Strike one, ball one, one out, cheer, boo, yeah, game over, let’s go home.”

For this Barry, you maniacal bastard, I thank you. We all do.

A Super Sunday

Is there anything more universal in this country than Superbowl Sunday? It’s a day where everybody is doing the same thing, where degenerate gamblers and girls who love seven-layer bean dip can unite for a common cause. It’s also the only day of the year where an entire city can sell out of Tostitos, as happened in Hoboken on Sunday. That itself is kind of cool, if not wildly inconvenient.

My Super Sunday started off just as every other since I was eight years old. I wake up just south of 9 a.m. and make a bee-line towards my couch to ESPN2, where they run a marathon of those classic 30-minute Superbowl recap shows by NFL films. This year I woke up at about 8:45 or so (after a night of heavy drinking no less) tuning in just in time to see a coked up LT dragging down John Elway in the second quarter of Superbowl XXI.

For those unfamiliar with the Superbowl recaps, you’re seriously missing out. You won’t find a better combination of timelessness and datedness on celluloid. Each show opens with a blast of programmed synthesizer against a picture montage of famous Superbowl heroes transposed next to the Vince Lombardi trophy. The images are of the Superbowl greats – beginning with Lombardi and ending with Montana (who was the Numero Uno Hombre when many of these films were produced).

The intro then gives way to a beaming Steve Sabol, who is nothing short of an icon in my book. The NFL Films president and son of company founder Ed Sabol, Sabol wears stupendous multi-colored sweaters while dolling out a brisk and effective intro and outro of each game.

The game footage itself is tremendous, featuring intimate camera work and miked up sideline insights from everyone from Bart Starr to Terry Bradshaw to Troy Aikman. The slow motion replays that define the series are classic– a practice that would later become an industry standard. The play-by-play dialogue is laughably endearing, where a gruff voiceover professional spouts ridiculous line like, “While Boomer Esiason looked as cold as a Cincinnati winter, Joe Montana and the 49ers were creating a heat wave.” And then there’s the music, which serves as the backdrop for everything. Contemporary to the time of production, Superbowls from the ‘60s feature big band flair, while many of the ‘70s Cowboys and Steelers classics possess an acute disco inflection. By the time the ‘80s roll around, creepy synth and random guitar squeals rule the day, the perfect soundtrack for The Fridge, Phil Simms and Doug Williams.

It's my own personal 12-hour pre-game show...and I don't even have to listen to Chris Collinsworth telling me how he's right and I'm wrong. It's perfect.

Some quick points from Sunday:

-- Paul McCartney is really old: Listen, I love the Beatles. And while I’ll always be more of a Lennon guy than a McCartney guy, you won’t ever catch me legitimately bashing Macca. The guy is a legend. But hiring a 65-year-old with dyed brown hair to play on the world’s biggest stage just smacked of banality, an insult to everyone involved. Sitting in my living room with some friends on Sunday, my roommate Dude Love (a tepid music fan who once ventured in a music quiz that Ringo Starr played saxophone for the Beatles) commented that this was “the worst halftime show he’d ever seen.” The sad thing is, there were probably 30 million other people across the country saying the same thing. Wrong place, wrong time for McCartney and a gutless choice by the NFL. And yes, this upsets me.

-- Boring ass commercials: Another byproduct of the Janet Jackson fiasco, commercials took a decidedly “cute” turn for Superbowl XXXIX. I can’t even think of one spot that legitimately stood out to me as funny. Certainly nothing that made me want to buy something…which is what I think commercials are supposed to do. I think.

And while we’re on the topic of commercials, did anybody see Buddy from “Just One Of The Guys” in that new Circuit City spot? Oh man, 2005 may have already hit its high point. How Buddy (real name Billy Jacoby) has been forced into doing pride-swallowing electronic store commercials to pay the rent of his seedy east L.A. apartment (okay, this is how I picture it) is beyond me. I mean…HE WAS BUDDY! “All balls itch! It’s a fact!”

--Terrell Owens shuts them up: His nine catch, 120-yard performance served as a big ole FU to the white sports media that ripped him all week for being selfish to his team for trying to play. If Andy Reid hadn't read the Herman Edwards Clock-Management handbook before the game, Owens may have been the MVP. After the game, Owens correctly asserted that Brett Favre would have been treated as a saint had he done the same thing. He wasn’t out of line…and this is coming from me, a former white sportswriter. There seems to be a double standard at play here, possibly a guilt by association situation brought on by the Randy Moss/Ray Lewis/Jamal Lewis generation of NFL stars. For a guy without any drug busts, assault charges or offensive hip hop records, he sure seems to get a bad rap. And no, I don’t defend him solely because he was on my fantasy team this year.

Okay, mostly, but not solely.

-- The Patriots are really, really good: The first post-Yankees dynasty has officially arrived. People seem to miss the reasons why this team is so good, reasons that I’ve seen up close as they’ve handed the Jets their lunch for the better part of the decade. This is a team with an assassin for a quarterback, a strong core of solid role players on both sides of the ball and, perhaps most importantly, one of the greatest combinations of coaches ever assembled on one staff. It may be a different formula than your daddy’s dynasties, but it’s just as effective. In the salary cap era, maybe even more so.