Pablo Torre

Quote, you never encountered people taking such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source as you did reporting on this story from inside of Madison Square Garden.

And I think the first time that sports fans realized that the owner of the Knicks might be allowing for a kind of surveillance state inside the actual arena was February 2017, when this happened.

I mean, Charles Oakley, one of the most curmudgeonly people that's ever played sports, who also is quite combative.

I mean, this is him getting kicked out of the Garden in 2017 on national television amid the escalation of a deeply personal battle with James Dolan himself.

This still makes me sad to see.

This is Charles Oakley.

I would say the patron saint of the security guard, as athletes are concerned, the protector of the star players.

Certainly good at defense.

A local hero who is swarmed by dudes wearing suits.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven suits that are like laying hands upon him to escort him out.

I don't know.

And so something I've always wondered is like what it felt like to be one of these security guards at the Garden, one of the security employees.

Truly, part of the impetus for a story like this is what are these people thinking?

Yeah.

Who is ordering this?

How does it work?

Where does he go?

And what I saw from afar at the time was Charles Oakley getting cuffed and arrested and then winding up on the front page of the Daily News under...

An admittedly good headline.

Charles is charged.