Knicks owner James Dolan is not a fan of former Knicks star Charles Oakley. In fact, it’s so bad that Oakley has to buy tickets to Knicks games on StubHub whenever he wants to see his old team play at Madison Square Garden. Oakley claims that Dolan flat out ignored him last year when they were introduced, and now Oakley has even gone as far as to ask commissioner Adam Silver if he could set up a meeting with him and Dolan.
“I asked the commissioner to set up a meeting with (Dolan), take a step forward,” Oakley said via Christian Red of the New York Daily News. “I want to know what I did to be hated so bad by an owner. The dad (Charles Dolan), I never heard him say nothing bad about me. I asked players I played with to go talk with (James Dolan). He said he don’t want to deal with me.”
Why might Dolan be upset with Oakley?
“He said (that) I said something in the paper 15 years ago,” Oakley told WFAN’s Boomer & Carton. “I even asked the commissioner to set up a meeting. I said we’ll get all the articles. I said, ‘What have I said?’ … I’ll come on the air and clear it up.”
Oakley is definitely fed up and had some choice words for Dolan.
“As hard as I played for that motherf—-r, and he don’t want to talk with me?” Oakley barked.
“Everybody in New York liked me except this one guy. Why is this?” said Oakley. “Everywhere I talk to people – ‘Why aren’t you working with the Knicks?’ I said I try to. They said, ‘What, is it Dolan?’ I talked to maybe a million people. He’s a bad guy.”
No one is exactly sure of Dolan’s side of this story, but if it’s really a beef from 15 years ago, it’s making him look very petty. Coupled with the fact that Oakley was loved by Knicks fans for so long and Dolan allegedly thrashed a fan in an email this season, and it’s just not looking too good for Knicks fans to side with their owner.
[h/t Larry Brown Sports, Yahoo Sports]