If someone walked up to you in a bar and treated you with the kind of disdain, the kind of naked contempt, that James Dolan showed you yesterday, there are just two ways you would possibly have reacted.
If you are a woman, you would have thrown a drink in his face.
If you are a man, you would have asked him to step outside.
And there wouldn’t be another person anywhere in the saloon who would have denied you the right to act that way. That is what James Dolan did to Knicks fans yesterday. He spit in your eye. He slapped you in the face. He whistled at your girlfriend. He took the drink money you had on the bar and he slipped it in his pocket.
He treated you like the worst kind of punk, because he knows he can get away with it. Because that has been the story of James Dolan’s tenure with the Knicks: There are no rules for him to play by, no sense of fair play. Fans are suckers, to be treated that way, to be scoffed at and sneered at. You think you matter?
Not to James Dolan, you don’t.
Dolan hired Isiah Thomas back into the fold yesterday. The title they give Thomas is “consultant,” but honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Thomas is staying, for now, as the basketball coach at Florida International, but don’t let that fool you, either. Dolan has been star-struck by Thomas from the moment he met him, and continued to pine for him like a love-struck teenager even after Thomas covered his team in mud for the better part of six years.
And now he’s back. Unbelievable. What other sports team operates this way? Do you see the Giants bringing back Ray Handley to Jersey? You think you will spot Rich Kotite at any Jets halftime ceremonies? Here’s an idea: Stump Merrill Day at Yankee Stadium.
Impossible to believe. And yet so quintessentially Dolan, the little rich boy who always has gotten his way with daddy and daddy’s money and expects you to behave the same way. He spit in your face. He threw up on your shoes. And now he’s laughing at you. What a piece of work.
“Don’t buy that [Isiah] is returning as anything more than a consultant,” one Garden official insisted yesterday. And you had better believe that’s what the level-headed factions of the operation are saying, because if you were an office worker at BP would you like seeing Tony Hayward walking back into the corporate dining room?
It is staggering how little regard Dolan has for Knicks fans, how little regard he has for the Garden, or for Knicks history . . . or even for the small matter of common decency.
Let’s not forget, Isiah wasn’t only an abysmal coach and a historically bad general manager for the Knicks (and proved he hadn’t lost his golden touch one bit by going 7-25 at FIU last year); he also was responsible for the most embarrassing corporate moment in the Garden’s history, causing a sexual-harassment suit that he and Dolan would love you to think was a bigger victory than Yorktown yet goes into the books, now and forever, as an $11.5 million loss.
His final months at the Garden were brutal, the visceral reaction from Knicks fans night after night as vicious and cruel — and justified — as anything ever heard in a stadium or arena anywhere. And even after Thomas was purged he made humiliating news for the Knicks, taking an overdose of sleeping pills and trying to cover the story by pinning it on his 17-year-old daughter.
What a beauty.
What a disgrace.
“Isiah Thomas brings unique experience as a Hall of Fame player, coach, executive and owner, and we believe having him as part of our organization will be extremely beneficial to the team’s success,” was how the Knicks, in a “joint” statement from Dolan and team president Donnie Walsh termed yesterday. That’s just fancy talk. This is what James Dolan really said to you yesterday.
“Your wife is ugly and you’re fat. What are you gonna do about it?”
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com