He had a restaurant in downtown Detroit called “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I walk in, there’s Judge Mathis, Queen Latifah, Tavis Smiley…Kwame Kilpatrick, Eddie Levert from the O'Jays. After the show, Derrick Coleman was there. I said, "Man, I told you to give me three to five minutes.", I said, "Let's get out of here." So I leave the O’Jays. To be clear, this isn’t Judge Mathis, right? Before you even get to the story of that fight, you got into a separate fight on the same day? Now he wants a new generation of NBA fans to know his story, and so Oakley sat down with GQ to discuss his career highlights, his new memoir, his lifelong beef with Charles Barkley, how he once tried to beat up Judge Greg Mathis over a $1,500 bar tab, and who his favorite big men in the NBA are right now. In more recent years, Oakley has been in the news for his ongoing dispute with Knicks owner James Dolan, who once forcibly kicked him out of Madison Square Garden, leading Oakley to file a civil lawsuit. The Knicks never won a championship, but no one forgot Oakley as he played his last days above the border in Canada, still pushing and shoving players like a big kid on a playground. When he got traded to the Knicks, his star exploded in New York as the face of a famously physical roster built by Pat Riley. There was Oakley on Michael Jordan’s Bulls teams, duking it out without anyone who misstepped on a nightly basis. Oakley’s willingness to stand up for himself and his team – he says he’s nowhere near a bully, but won’t be pushed around – made him one of the biggest fan favorites of the nineties era of hoops. In his NBA career with Michael Jordan’s Bulls, Pat Riley’s Knicks and Vince Carter’s Raptors, Oakley was both a terror on the boards and the ultimate protector of his teammates, and now he’s published a memoir, The Last Enforcer, whose title speaks for itself. And this is the best compliment you could possibly give him.
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