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Profile of Charles Oakley
December 3, 1998
Oakley Can't Shake the Hard Knocks, or Ewing
By HARVEY ARATON
he man who has watched Patrick Ewing's back for the
better part of a basketball decade anxiously awaits
a bit of news, a ray of hope, on the prospect of
salvaging a season and what was supposed to be the
biggest pay day of a long and dedicated career. Charles
Oakley will not be calling his former Knicks teammate
for an update from Wednesday's renewed National
Basketball Association labor talks in Manhattan,
though.
Ewing is a superstar, and Oakley is not. And the union
president would not want to hear what Oakley might say.
"I talk to Herb Williams," Oakley said by telephone
from his mother's home in Cleveland. "Herb keeps me
informed."
The information to this point has all been bad going on
worse, a season teetering on the edge, with the
potential washout of a $10 million thank you from the
Knicks to the sturdy power forward they unceremoniously
traded to Toronto last spring.
As if that weren't enough of a kick, Oakley now waits
from afar -- helplessly, as far as he is concerned --
as Ewing, of all people, leads the superstar-driven
hard-line faction in the players' risky game of
high-stakes poker with the N.B.A. commissioner, David
Stern.
"I can't make nothing happen," Oakley said, with
resignation. "And when you're out in the middle of the
ocean, you don't jump in the water. But I always see
where they put the microphones when they come out of
these meetings, only with the franchise players. They
don't let the little man speak. They out to put the
microphones next to the guy who's making $350,000."
This was the classic, none-too-cryptic Oakley, drawing
straight lines and letting everyone read between them.
The fate of the season and his once-in-a-lifetime
reward, he was clearly saying, is in the hands of the
autocratic few, who just happen to be the clients of
the leveraged agent, David Falk. Oakley was saying,
then, that this union is not unlike your basic,
locked-out N.B.A. team. Superstars rule.
For much of his 10 seasons in New York, intramural
issues similar to these -- mostly, the preferential
treatment for Ewing -- gnawed at Oakley, invariably
made him mumble and moan. He was sensitive, almost to a
fault, but he would ultimately rejoin the cause. He
played fiercely for his team, did all the interior
dirty work, and then some.
More than Ewing, the centerpiece, Oakley was called the
heart of the Knicks.
"I always did whatever they asked," he said. "Play
hurt, play center. I never told them no."
Four years ago, the Knicks tacked the $10 million
balloon payment on the end of a contract that last
season paid him $2.85 million.
Had Toronto played at Charlotte Wednesday night, as
originally scheduled, Oakley would have earned roughly
$122,000. He will be a free agent after this season,
but he will turn 35 in two weeks. He plays now on
battered legs, on gnarled toes. He knows that even as a
free agent, he will not see this kind of contract
again.
Everyone is losing money, he realizes, but his
situation is especially painful. Ewing made big money
last year, and will make big money next year. For
Oakley, each passing day, each game lost, is like
running himself through one of the car washes he owns.
He is being hosed.
"What can you do?" he said. "I try to get up in the
morning every day, and make the best of it. You try to
not miss what you never had. I've never blown a lot of
money. And what can I complain about when there's guys
struggling to make 10 to 12 thousand a year? The people
you feel sorry for in this are the ones who are losing
money parking cars and waiting tables in restaurants
where people eat when we play the games."
Obviously, in that context, Oakley as a millionaire,
needs no one's pity. That doesn't mean, in an N.B.A.
context, his story isn't one of the sad ironies of the
lockout.
"Who can I hold a grudge against?" he said.
Oakley knows he can't blame Ewing, who has done nothing
personal to him. He could blame fate, which has never
treated him too well.
"I was traded from Chicago, right before they started
winning championships," he said, recalling the 1988
deal which sent him to the Knicks for Bill Cartwright.
Had the Bulls given the Knicks Horace Grant, no doubt
Oakley would have won a few rings as the enforcer for
Michael Jordan, as opposed to Ewing.
The Knicks' trading of Oakley for Marcus Camby just
before the lockout began last summer was, to Oakley,
the final cold slap in the face. After all he had meant
to the Ewing era, after all the million spent to
upgrade the roster with veteran talent, they just
decided to slog on without him, in their unlikely
pursuit of a title.
The trade, which he said he learned of after its
completion, underscored the feelings he has about what
kind of league the N.B.A. has become.
"That's why we're in this situation, 'cause you have
all these so-called franchise players who aren't
leaders, who don't make anyone better and don't even
make the playoffs," Oakley said. "This league has
become all about fake superstars, about hype."
Not about heart, not about soul. So the man who
provided s much of that for the Knicks for a decade
waits for the break of his professional life. He waits
for good news from Williams in New York. Then maybe the
season will start. Then maybe Toronto, which doesn't an
aging enforcer, will trade him to the Los Angeles
Lakers, who do, and he will win his championship ring
before Ewing.
It is a delightful thought, a fantasy to hang on to, as
Charles Oakley loses $122,000 a game.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company