MAILBOX

This week: A Knicks fan knocks us for our coverage; Armond White doesn’t know his Platagenets from his Tudors; and adding insult to injury for Deborah Solomon.

Dolan (Coverage) Sucks
Your “Dolan Sucks: A Special Report” (Oct. 10-16) was far from special and riddled with factual errors offensive to any Knicks fan worth a damn. In Bobby Julian’s Knicks history lesson (“Will the Knicks Ever Win Again?”, he tells us that the franchise “won it’s first NBA title in 1970…But the team only enjoyed a few more winning seasons before returning to its losing ways.” Wrong. The Knicks made it back to the Finals in 1972, losing to the Lakers, then won the title against the Lakers the following year.
That’s three finals appearances with two crowns in the ’70s. This is not to mention the healthy Bernard King years (1982-84) when Knicks fans were treated to some of the most heroic and thrilling post-season play in their history. Julian does recall the Knicks’ 1994 return to the Finals, losing to Houston, but fails to note the Knicks’ Finals appearance in 1999 against San Antonio. Julian also lists Don Nelson as one of the “shrewd” but wasted Knicks coaching talents. Nellie was here for less than a month. I could go on but I won’t.
Then you’ve got Brian Koppelman’s laughable reminiscence (“Pain Management”) of the game his father took him to when he was four years old. Really Brian, who remembers anything in such detail when they were four? Oh, that’s right, he remembers “Walt ‘Clyde the Glide’ Frazier.” Frazier was simply called “Clyde,” named after gangster Clyde Barrow who was being popularized at the time in cinema (see Warren Beatty in “Bonnie and Clyde”) and whose sartorial style Frazier emulated. The moniker “Clyde the Glide” is well known to be the property of one NBA player and one only, Clyde Drexler. Real fans don’t mix up that kind of thing.
Finally, Emma Span’s “The Boneheads” offered little more than a milquetoast recitation of facts we’ve already known for weeks. I thought this was supposed to be an alternative paper. Where are the guts? This pabulum reads like weak version of Reader’s Digest.
Look, there’s a reason your new EIC David Blum and his darling Emma Span were hastily run out of the Village Voice, which they turned into an increasingly bland and pointless publication. Don’t let the New York Press descend into total vapidity and irrelevance.
You should bring back Hollander vs. Sullivan. At least those guys knew sports. They were smart, had street cred and delivered poignancy while still being entertaining. I don’t know why you let them walk. Now I’m walking.
—Billy Clyde Puckett,
LES, Manhattan

Get Your Royals Straight
I don’t know Armond White and haven’t seen Elizabeth: The Golden Age (“Golden Aged,” Oct. 10-16), but could this reviewer at least get the history correct?
Would it be too much to ask that if you’re going to review a film and fling mud at an actress because she didn’t capture the character, you might be even tangentially aware that the character in question wasn’t a “Plantagenet royal”?
Elizabeth II was a Tudor, being the daughter of Henry VIII (Tudor) and Anne Boleyn. That Henry was maternally related to the Plantagenets, through his mother does not make him a Plantagenet. So how does one accept the criticism of an ill-informed and lazy opinionator?
—Rod Burk
Ocean City, N.J.

Dull Deborah
I used to think Deborah Solomon was just sanctimonious, simplistic and dull. I didn’t suspect that she was also unethical until I read your piece (“Questions for the Questioner,” Oct. 3-9).
—Charles Kaiser
Upper West Side, Manhattan