As some of you may have read or heard earlier this week, Dan Gilbert has chosen to stand by his comments in the infamous Comic Sans Manifesto of July 8th (which I’m dubbing the Scarlet Letter since it roughly fits the team’s colorways).
I have been debating with myself for the past 24 hours or so whether or not this is a good thing.
The reality is, I’m over LeBron’s departure. (Sidebar: I found myself getting irritated whenever he missed a free throw against Boston on Tuesday night, then kept happily realizing milliseconds after it happened, “Wait a minute…This no longer affects my team!” Same phenomenon whenever Shaq blew an easy lay-up. But I digress…)
As we’ve written many times already, the healthiest, most productive thing for Cleveland fans would be to move on from James as quickly as possible. Stop thinking about him, stop tracking what he’s doing, stop comparing how he’s playing, stop critiquing the condition of his image. Just put the baggage down for once.
Of course, that’s not going to happen—especially not this quickly.
Dan Gilbert knows this, as well. In fact, in his comments on Tuesday, he tried to sell the idea that he wrote the open letter not for LeBron or himself, but for the fans, so that they would know he and the rest of the organization felt the same way as they did the night James left. I’m sure there is some truth to this, but I also don’t believe for a moment that part of it wasn’t just about Gilbert being pissed off and lashing out because he felt like he’d been played—not to mention the calamitous, instant drop in the franchise’s value.
Regardless, the question is: should he have apologized or retracted the sentiment in the letter?
After contemplating, I would have to say ‘No.’
Public Relations 101 would tell you that the correct move was to backtrack. We see it happen all the time in sports journalism: some player (most frequently), coach (on occasion), or owner (rare) gets emotional in a press conference or a sideline interview and says something his reps decide they need to retract. (Unless it was a Twitter rampage, in which case the person in question will inevitably use the ‘My account was hacked last night’ excuse.)
Barring extreme circumstances, though, do any of us really end up liking the person in question better when they backtrack? I know I don’t. In fact, I usually end up rolling my eyes and liking them less.
I’d estimate that 80% of the time, the comment the person is apologizing for was authentic, honest, entertaining, or some combination of the three. Those are exactly the qualities that I want in an answer from a public figure. It’s one of the reasons I look forward to every Phil Jackson sound byte. He plays head games; he takes shots; and he absolutely does not apologize, no matter how outraged his target may be.
I disagreed with Gilbert’s decision to release the letter in the first place. I thought it further inflamed a public that already had the potential for rioting. But considering that nothing terrible happened that night, and we now have some distance from it, I’m happy that he’s chosen to stand by his comments. At least he doesn’t look like another spineless P.R. zombie.
However, he’s also smart enough to know that the anti-James sentiment in Cleveland is still very strong, and will continue to be for a long time. In that sense, his stance makes him look good to both sides of the aisle. The fans who are still angry at James believe that Gilbert is still with them; the fans who have moved on from James’s exit can respect that he neither copped out nor made the situation worse. (Most importantly, he made clear that he will not release the laundry list of LeBron’s transgressions and shortcomings that he promised he would air out back in July.)
In the final analysis, I give Gilbert a pass for his handling of this most recent interview. However, I also have a sneaking suspicion that we haven’t heard the last from him on this topic. Whether or not I’ll be in his corner on the next chapter remains to be seen.
-T
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