Saturday, October 25, 2008

Isiah Thomas: honest, stable, classy guy

Reports yesterday suggested that Isiah Thomas had been taken unconscious from his by an ambulance to a hospital to be treated for a drug overdose. Thomas is now most famous not for winning championships with the Pistons but for stealing money for half a decade as GM and sometime-coach of the New York Knicks during a tenure in which the Knicks, despite the league's highest payroll, won very few games and racked up tons of bad p.r., including well-substantiated charges of sexual harassment by Thomas himself, eventually resulting in a jury verdict of $11.6M in punitive damages.

Thomas denied the incident had taken place. Instead, he said, his daughter had been hospitalized: "Thomas, in a brief cellphone interview with The New York Post, said it was his teenage daughter, Lauren, who was in distress. Thomas denied that anything had happened to him."

Thomas then trotted his son out in front of the press, who then dutifully repeated Isiah's line that he was not involved in the incident, that all the reportage was false, and that it was Isiah's daughter that had been hospitalized.

Enter Harrison [NY] Police Chief David Hall, who "confirmed that a 47-year-old male had been taken from Thomas’s home. He refuted claims that the incident involved Thomas’s daughter.“I understand that this person claims it was his daughter; he is lying,” Hall said. “It was definitely not his daughter, it was a male. We know the difference between a 47-year-old black male and a young black female.”"