“And for those that didn’t show me love - I let ’em have it.” People showed me a lot of love in my career,” Oakley said in a recent interview. Still, Oakley at times takes aim at Carter and former Raptors coach Lenny Wilkens for various sins against the good of Canada’s NBA team. Raptors fans will appreciate the homage paid to the likes of one-time teammates Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady - whom Oakley insists would have rivalled Lakers duo Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant for basketball supremacy if they’d stayed together in Raptorland. Oakley takes a comprehensive inventory of personal feuds that go back further, including blow-by-blow details of Toronto-based run-ins with Tyrone Hill (over money) and Jeff McInnis (over a woman). Ink is spilled on Oakley’s ongoing feud with New York Knicks owner James Dolan, not to mention the list of ex-Knicks who stayed quiet after Oakley was disgracefully removed from Madison Square Garden as he attempted to watch a game in 2017. As much as Oakley’s book charts his inspiring rise from the bleak streets of hometown Cleveland to a life rubbing shoulders with basketball royalty - no less than Michael Jordan venerates Oakley as “my enforcer” in the book’s foreword, while fellow Ohioan LeBron James has called Oakley a “legend” - it also checks off a highly readable hit list of enemies past and present. Now that the retired butler is the author of an excellent new NBA memoir, “The Last Enforcer,” let’s just say he’s hardly averse to scattering a career’s worth of collected grime around the league’s palatial estate. “I’m just happy to clean up and make sure everything’s all right,” he once said. In a 19-year run as a no-nonsense, all-elbows NBA forward, former Raptor Charles Oakley occasionally likened his on-court role to that of a butler in a mansion: He did the dirty work.
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