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martin
Posts: 81037
Alba Posts: 108
Joined: 7/24/2001
Member: #2
USA
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lazy bastard, make me click on a link.
Knick bosses defense is laughable
Mike Lupica
This is Wednesday, Judge Gerard Lynch's courtroom, 23A, high up in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Building, a spectacular view out the righthand windows of the river. Steve Mills, who describes his job as president of Madison Square Garden sports, sits there to Lynch's left and to the right of the jurors, and the more Mills talks the more you imagine a sign in back of him, in lights Times Square bright:
"I Need This Job!"
In that way Mills is the same as everybody from the Garden witness list who will sit in this same chair, all of James Dolan's men: They have the best jobs they will ever have in their lives, and will obviously do anything - or say anything - to hold onto them.
And if they have to sit there and portray Anucha Browne Sanders as a liar and money-grubber and all-around hysterical woman, they will do it, on demand.
Steve Mills will never again be president of a place like the Garden. Isiah Thomas will never in his life be given the run of a basketball operation the way Dolan has given him the run of the Knicks. The only one who isn't going anywhere, unless Dad removes him, is Dolan.
It is why the great lie of the Garden's defense, the great lie and the great joke whether this turns out to be another star-struck jury or not like they get in Los Angeles all the time, is that Ms. Browne Sanders' competency is the issue here, that somehow - after years of glowing reports signed by Mills himself - she suddenly turned incompetent once I. Lord Thomas became lord of the basketball part of the Garden.
As if job performance matters at James Dolan's Garden.
If it does, then Mills is gone and Thomas is gone and Glen Sather would have been gone long ago, and whoever has turned the television network over there into such a second-rate operation is gone, too.
The Garden wants this trial to be about job performance? With Dolan the big boss of the place? Are they kidding? All of these people, starting with Dolan, have combined to make the Garden's image as cheap and lousy as it has ever been in the whole history of the place. This at a time when they are more obsessive about image, about the Knicks "brand" that Mills kept talking about the other day, and the Rangers "brand," than ever before. If that is part of the mission statement of Dolan's men, protecting these "brands," then back up a truck for them now.
But suddenly Anucha Browne Sanders' competency for one year - 2005 - is supposed to be the issue that matters above all. Why? Because Mills kept giving her gold stars before that, that's why. Because he kept giving her raises before that and never suggested she was in trouble.
Browne Sanders wasn't fired for being incompetent. Dolan, who is about as good at giving depositions as he is anything else, all but admitted that the other day. He is supposed to have blown his top once because he thought Browne Sanders didn't understand capital expenditures. That's a good one. When they get around to swearing Dolan in, somebody should ask him to explain the salary cap in the National Basketball Association and watch him wrestle himself to the ground.
Browne Sanders was suing Thomas for sexual and verbal harassment and Dolan, the rich man's son, got mad and fired her and now here they all are, high up in the Moynihan building. Here come Dolan's men on the dead run, out of the men's club that the Garden really is, swearing to tell the whole truth according to Dolan and nothing but.
When Barry Watkins, Dolan's PR man, was on the stand the other day, Lynch said, "Your job is to put out the party line, right?" Watkins, who in that moment could have been any Dolan lieutenant, said: "Yes."
A moment later Judge Gerard Lynch said, "Your job here is to tell the truth, you know the difference in the two, right?" Watkins: "I think so."
Imagine Anucha Browne Sanders not thinking she was in the presence of true genius working with somebody like Thomas, who has the largest payroll in his sport and has had it for years and has not yet produced a single playoff victory.
"Stop talking right now!" Mills quotes James Dolan as saying to Browne Sanders in the famous meeting where he supposedly decided she wasn't as smart as all the other geniuses in the room.
In that moment Dolan sounds like what he is and always will be: a spoiled rich boy. He eventually decided he didn't want Browne Sanders around anymore and that was that, he didn't need to listen to lawyers. And Thomas? You think he was ever going to listen to some pushy woman who refused to see things his way?
Here is a quote from a story Christian Red and T.J. Quinn wrote in this newspaper last year, about Thomas' days running the Continental Basketball Association into the ground. It comes from a woman named Diane Bosshard, who owned the La Crosse Bobcats with her husband before selling the team to Thomas:
"He ruled with intimidation. It was just like, 'If I swear enough or if I act like I'm tough enough you're going to back down.'"
Anucha Browne Sanders didn't back down at the Garden, doesn't back down in 23A, where they want her job performance to be on trial. That shouldn't put jurors to sleep. It should have them rolling in the aisle.
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9/21/2007 9:49 AM
