Bob Cook

What we have learned about the NBA commissioner’s office in the hubbub over Phil Jackson’s open-mic night is that joking about gay-themed movies is evil, but banning them from the movie theater multiplex you own is a-OK.

The NBA rightfully condemned the Lakers coach for his comment after Tuesday night’s loss to the Spurs that the 3-point-heavy affair was what “we call a  ‘Brokeback Mountain’ game, because there’s so much penetration and kickouts.” Not only was it an insensitive comment, a coarse gay joke of the kind that usually gets punctuated with a wet towel snap, but it also was a crime against comedy. I mean, it doesn’t even make any sense. Kickouts? Where did he get that? If you want to see penetration and kickouts, watch pro wrestling.

So if a stupid joke is so awful, where was David Stern when Utah Jazz owner Larry Miller banned “Brokeback Mountain” from his Salt Lake City theater? It wasn’t that Miller thought the 2005 movie about two sheepherders (they wear cowboy hats, but they are not cowboys!) who have a secret homosexual love affair would be box-office poison. He pulled the movie, already booked at his theater, only a few hours after a radio interviewer told him what it was about. How is that any better than what Jackson did?

It is the easy way out for any organization to suspend or otherwise come down on someone for the words they speak. Any league and team is sensitive to how it sounds when some brain-frozen coach or player says something racially, sexually or some other -ly insensitive, and then listens to it played on talk radio for the next 48 hours. At that point, your hand is forced into doing something.

But the deeds people do can say even more, and have far more insidious effects. And when those deeds are done by the owners, and barely a peep is raised, it exposes a league as more concerned about image than truly offended at its heart.

Take another example. During the NBA All-Star break last year, former player Tim Hardaway went on a Miami radio station to deliver the news that he hated homosexuals. Stern immediately and summarily fired him from his job working with the NBA’s charity arm.

About one week later, the Stranger, a Seattle newspaper, revealed that Aubrey McClendon and Tom Ward, two members of the group that had just purchased the Seattle Sonics and the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, gave $1.1 million to Americans United to Preserve Marriage, an organization dedicated to fighting any legal or legislative attempt to allow gay people to get married. The NBA didn’t get upset about that.

"The Hardaway situation was one that was filled with hateful language and bigotry,” NBA spokesman Tim Frank told the News-Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., at the time. “That is not the same as making political contributions.”

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