Some sports executives don’t get it
Albert Einstein never owned an NBA team, but James Dolan does.
Stephen Hawking has never been the president of an NBA team, but Phil Jackson is.
Thomas Edison was never the president of a major league baseball team as is Randy Levine.
It goes to prove one doesn’t have to be a genius to be involved in the management of a pro sports franchise.
In fact, Dolan, Jackson and Levine are shining examples of the exact opposite. They show that brains aren’t required for their work.
Or, at least, it doesn’t seem to matter if one lacks common
sense, proper decorum, public relations sensibility or people skills.
Let’s start with Levine, the president of the New York Yankees.
The Yanks recently won an arbitration hearing with relief pitcher Delin Betances.
The pitcher was asking for a $5 million salary, the Yanks countered with a $3 million offer that was awarded through the arbitration procedure.
Standard procedure is to acknowledge the result and, then, go about the business of baseball.
Instead, Levine sought to rub some salt in the wound of the losing side. Rather than react with class he opted to gloat.
He ripped Betances’ agent, Jim Murray, for demanding money usually reserved for a closer, saying the amount being sought by the pitcher in the process had “no bearing in reality.”
Levine added that Betances was being “used” by his agent in an attempt to change the marketplace.
Betances was justifiably miffed by the criticism. He said he had been ready to move on after the arbitration decision until hearing of Levine’s demeaning posthearing comments.
“...They take me into a room and they trash me for an hour and a half,” Betances has said.
That’s to be expected. What wasn’t expected was that Levine would continue to trash Betances in a follow-up conference call with media members.
It all has Betances, already a three-time all-star as a set-up reliever, wondering if he’ll be as willing to pitch multiple innings or enter innings with runners on base, as he had been in past seasons.
Nothing like a foolish comment from management to upset a key player.
Just ask Phil Jackson about that.
Jackson isn’t as prone to public remarks directly to the media as Levine, but he rivals President Donald Trump when it comes to offending through his Twitter account.
We saw the “Zen Master’s” act right here in Albany when he was the head coach of the Continental Basketball Association’s Albany
Patroons before he went on to NBA coaching glory.
Jackson’s cryptic discourses were often difficult to decipher back then. Now, his words are at a minimum. He has almost no face-to-face contact with the media, instead doing his “talking” via Twitter.
As in this gem from earlier this month: “Bleacher’s Ding almost rings the bell, but I learned you don’t change the spot on a leopard with Michael Graham in my CBA daze.”
Translation: It was a reference to Bleacher Report’s Kevin Ding, who wrote a column criticizing Knicks’ star Carmelo Anthony for not fulfilling the role of a superstar who cares primarily about winning.
In other words, Jackson agreed and appeared to have called out Anthony as a selfish, one-dimensional player.
That might be true. But is it in the best interest of anyone for Jackson to admit that, particularly at a time it appeared that he was trying to trade Anthony?
Don’t those words serve the dual negative purpose of devaluing Anthony as a trade chip and alienating the player who possesses a no-trade contract clause and just might opt to refuse to be traded just to spite Jackson?
Jackson doesn’t exactly show himself to be as enlightened a team executive as he was as a coach. But, at least he didn’t alienate almost an entire fan base.
He left that to Knicks owner James Dolan, who provoked plenty of fan fury when he recently had former team tough-man forward Charles Oakley escorted out of Madison Square Garden.
It took a phalanx of security guards to evict Oakley, who pushed, shoved and punched as he seemingly objected to having hands placed upon him
The feud between Oakley and Dolan had been ongoing for some time, precipitated by Oak’s honest public comments about the sorry state of the franchise in recent years.
But, the visual of a player beloved by working-class fans for his blue-collar style being angry evicted was an embarrassing sight.
As was Dolan’s post-incident public comments when he claimed Oakley needed treatment for anger management and hinted the former player might be dealing with alcohol-addiction issues.
Is that any way to keep support of fans who pay exorbitant ticket prices to attend Knicks games to see what has been an inferior product that has won exactly one playoff series in
the past 16 years?
Public approval clearly leans towards Oakley.
Even New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, in a column published last Sunday, came out with strong support for Oakley.
So strong, in fact, that he advocated having Oakley’s uniform number be retired and hung from Madison Square Garden’s rafters.
Pretty strong sentiment for a player who had a career scoring average of 9.5 points per game, made just one all-star team in his 19year career and is compared, statistically, to the likes of Clifford Robinson, P.J. Brown, Dale Davis and Shane Battier.
It’s one thing to support Oakley and something else entirely to advocate the sporting immortality of a retired uniform number.
That honor should be restricted to “great” players. Oakley was very good, but usually no better than the third-best player on any team on which he played.
Just goes to show that lacking common sense isn’t restricted to those who run sports franchises, but that it afflicts some who write about it, too.