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October 26, 2008
Sports of The Times
The Flameout of a Fiery Competitor
By HARVEY ARATON (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/columns/harveyaraton/?inline=nyt-per)
Isiah Thomas (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/isiah_thomas/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s long and still-legendary career in professional basketball has been pockmarked by contradictions and conundrums. With the disturbing news out of Westchester County in New York on Friday of his overdose on sleeping pills, the pattern continued, even in what sure looks like an enforced retirement with the bonus of a paycheck.
There were his best friends in the business uniformly commenting in Saturday’s newspapers that absolutely, in no way, not even thinkable could they imagine Thomas trying to harm himself with prescription medication. And yet these are the people, mostly those who lived in his shadow when Thomas was the little big man of the Bad Boy Pistons (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/detroitpistons/index.html?inline=nyt-org), who have spent a fair amount of time trying to explain Thomas to the world, and figure him out for themselves.
Who is the man behind one of the most dazzling smiles in sports, capable of charming the venom from a snake? Brendan Suhr, a longtime aide to Chuck Daly and later to Thomas, once told me, “Isiah Thomas is the smartest guy I’ve ever met in basketball.” But how many times over the years has he slithered this way and that way until he outsmarted himself?
Somehow, the most credentialed 6-footer in the history of the sport found himself left off the one-and-only Dream Team for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Somehow, the player whose electric talent and colorful leadership helped build a two-time champion and typically sold-out arena in Auburn Hills, Mich., was divorced from that franchise roughly 20 minutes after he could no longer play.
Daly, Thomas’s coach during those halcyon days in the suburbs of Detroit, always said, “This guy could jump out of an airplane and land on his feet.” But even Daly would have to admit that more times than not, and especially in New York, Thomas did not jump. He was pushed hard.
No one, including his friends, can know what Thomas’s true frame of mind has been after so much rancor and ridicule as president and coach of the Knicks (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/newyorkknicks/index.html?inline=nyt-org). Much of it he contributed to or brought on himself; some of it was over the top, because of the combustibility of James Dolan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/james_l_dolan/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s Madison Square Garden and the New York stage on which the basketball Big Apple circus plays.
The practical strategy for the newest Knicks savior, Donnie Walsh (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/donnie_walsh/index.html?inline=nyt-per), was to gently move Thomas aside last spring, if only because he had three years remaining on his contract, then hope Daly was right, that Thomas could again land on his feet, find another job, and negotiate a buyout.
Not so likely, according to an N.B.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_basketball_association/index.html?inline=nyt-org) official I spoke to not long ago. How, he asked, does anyone in the pro or college game sell him to the public after all that happened in New York?
Thomas’s Knicks disaster and, most significant, the civil suit for sexual harassment brought against him and won by the former Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders has rendered him radioactive. Maybe Walsh sends him on a scouting mission now and then. He probably has much time to ride his bike and hit the golf course, the leisurely life his friends have said he seemed so content with in the wake of this latest episode.
David Hall, the police chief in Harrison, N.Y., in an interview with The New York Times, called the case “an accidental overdose of a prescription sleeping pill” — but quickly added “we aren’t mind readers, so we don’t know why” Thomas took what Hall had earlier said were as many as 10 pills.
Thomas told The New York Post that it was his teenage daughter, Lauren, who had the medical issue. To which Hall responded, “We know the difference between a 47-year-old black male and a young black female.”
If Thomas really used his daughter as a public shield, what can we say about that except, Holy cow? If the chatty police chief’s version of events is accurate, it is understandable why he was annoyed with Thomas for, in effect, calling him a liar. But the point could have been made by saying he knew the difference between a 47-year-old male and a young female. What’s black got to do with it?
Once again, as always with Thomas, we are left with contradiction and conundrum. And the people who care about him — and that includes the fans who fondly remember what he was with a ball in his hands — must worry and wonder what comes next.
Years ago, I co-wrote a book that delved into reports of Thomas’s gambling habits during the Pistons’ championship years. In retrospect, it occurs to me that Thomas is becoming more and more comparable to Pete Rose (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/pete_rose/index.html?inline=nyt-per), who was beloved for so long as the irascible Charlie Hustle, but eventually barred from baseball for continuing the hustle into his postplaying career.
To be a franchise player at Isiah Thomas’s size, he had to be cunning, calculating and occasionally downright nasty. Outside the lines, that was the formula for failure and now perhaps excommunication. For a man of 47, with Thomas’s fierce, competitive nature, who knows what it’s like to live with that?
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