Sports Genie: A Lifetime Knicks Fan's Angry Email

 

As fans, we all go through ups and downs. We experience the intense joy of victory and the excruciating agony of defeat; the thrill of a new season and the disappointment of another year without a championship; the deliciousness of a hot dog at the ball game and the expensiveness of a beer at the ball game.

But the worst ups and downs come from all the stupid things that the management of your team does. You love the big free agent signing until you think about how much of your salary cap is locked up in an aging power forward. You love the big trade until you consider the fact that you will not have a first round draft pick until 2017.

And what makes those stupid decisions that the management makes all the more frustrating is the fact that you know you could do better than those idiots in the front office! If only they would listen to you for five minutes, you could set them straight and explain why they should use their number one overall draft pick on Johnny Manziel.

Irving Bierman is 73 years old, and has been rooting for the Knicks since 1952 — for my readers who cannot do math, that is since he was 10. That means he has been experiencing all of these ups and downs for the past 63 years.

And at a certain point you say to yourself, enough is enough.

Bierman hit that point sometime in January. His beloved Knicks had been torturing him for too long. It was time for him to set things straight.

So he did what anyone would do. He sent an angry email to the Knicks’ owner, James Dolan. And he gave him a piece of his mind.

“At one stage I thought that you did a wonderful thing when you acquired EVERYTHING from your dad,” Bierman wrote. “However, since then it has been ALL DOWN HILL. Your working with Isaiah Thomas & everything else regarding the Knicks. Bringing on Phil Jackson was a positive beginning, but lowballing Steve Kerr was a DISGRACE to the [K]nicks. The bottom line is that you merely continued to interfere with the franchise.”

“As a [K]nicks fan for in excess of 60 years, I am utterly embarrassed by your dealings with the Knicks,” Bierman continued. “Sell them so their fans can at least look forward to growing them in a positive direction[.] Obviously, money IS NOT THE ONLY THING. You have done a lot of utterly STUPID business things with the franchise. Please NO MORE.”

And then he signed it, “Respectfully, Irving Bierman.”

Irving displayed both tremendous insight and impressively creative capitalization in this email. As a fan, it is his God-given right to tell the owner of the team that he is an idiot.

Dolan displayed wonderful restraint in his response to Bierman.

“Mr[.] Bierman,” Dolan wrote, “You are a sad person. Why would anybody write such a hateful letter. I am just guessing but [I’]ll bet your life is a mess and you are a hateful mess. What have you done that anyone would consider positive or nice. I am betting nothing. In fact [I’]ll bet you are negative force in everyone who comes in contact with you. You most likely have made your family miserable. Alcoholic maybe. I just celebrated my 21 year anniversary of sobriety. You should try it. Maybe it will help you become a person that folks would like to have around. In the mean while start rooting for the Nets because the Knicks don[‘]t want you.”

And, appropriately, he signed it, “Respectfully, James Dolan.”

Some people just cannot take constructive criticism.

Seriously, though, Dolan went straight for the jugular in this response. I cannot help but think that he did not mean it when he signed his email, “Respectfully.”

He probably felt pretty good with himself when he finished writing the email. Just imagine — he pressed send, took a sip of 40 year old scotch and gave himself a nice little pat on the back.

“Nice email, James,” he probably said to himself. “You really made yourself clear there. Mr. Bierman must now understand exactly why he was wrong in this situation. Especially that reference to alcoholism. He probably just did not realize that he has a problem. Just give it a couple years and he will thank me for bringing this problem to his attention. You did a good thing today. You deserve another scotch.” ESPN managed to reach Bierman for comment, and when asked if he would stop rooting for the Knicks, he replied, “Never.”

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