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Appearance is crucial for Knicks' Isiah Thomas

BY JOHN JEANSONNE | john.jeansonne@newsday.com

October 4, 2007

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Isiah Thomas' personal and team dress code may have been ahead of the NBA's 2005 call for a more corporate look - suits instead of T-shirts, headgear, chains and pendants - but this week's sexual harassment judgment against him casts the league emphasis on image in a different light.

Always attentive to his raiment, forever with matching tie and handkerchief, the Knicks president/coach nevertheless was unable to convince a seven-person jury that he hadn't engaged in some base street behavior with fellow Madison Square Garden executive Anucha Browne Sanders. In fact, said image consultant Sandy Dumont, Thomas might have hurt his chances of winning the case by his look.

"We make an instant judgment about whether or not you are slick or classy, slick or trustworthy," said Dumont, the self-proclaimed "Image Architect" who directs the Impression Strategies Institute. "If you're doing crisis management, your appearance certainly can un-do a lot of things and leave so many doubts."

Perhaps the jury subliminally picked up on what Dumont spotted in the gray suit Thomas wore to court - gray is "wishy-washy," she said, "the politician's color; it says, 'maybe yes, maybe no.'"

Or maybe the jurors didn't find Thomas' famously ready smile to be sincere. "If you're good looking and you look classy," she said, "you're forgiven. And people will say, 'Those women throw themselves at you.' But you don't want to look schoolboy-like innocent; people won't trust you."

Mason Ashe, founder and president of the Ashe Sports & Entertainment Consulting, Inc., wasn't convinced that the Thomas suit (the legal one) revealed "much more than it was a very messy case.

"He does appear to have Teflon skin, that setbacks with his team and so on don't seem to affect him."

But while Ashe called the obvious public embarrassment of Thomas' trial "an unfortunate follow-up to the referee incident for the NBA, I don't see the league doing anything about this."

The NBA officially has declared its "policies don't encompass civil litigation," and Ashe said, "If nothing else, this sends out a strong notice to executives around the league that they better be careful."

Still, Ashe dismissed any impression that the professional sports culture is especially hostile toward women.

"They [Thomas and Browne Sanders] were both from an athletic background," said Ashe, referring to Browne's college basketball career. "Type A, aggressive. We found with Clarence Thomas that the complainant [Anita Hill] didn't make noise until years later but, here, the woman didn't wait.

"I think her being a confident, strong woman, she stood up for her rights, she went for it, she duked it out. Maybe with a ballclub or league office, they're not going to take it."

Then again, duking it out might not be the image the NBA wants, either.

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