A story written for ESPN: The Magazine in 2016 was killed because it made former Warriors coach and current ABC analyst Mark Jackson look bad. That is an accusation Ethan Sherwood Strauss, who covered the NBA for ESPN at the time, is making in his latest Substack newsletter.
Strauss notes he was not the writer of the piece. He declined to name who was.
The purpose of the story was to examine how the Golden State Warriors had turned into a championship team under Steve Kerr. Part of the background of the story involved laying out what the team had become under Mark Jackson, who was fired in 2014. Strauss describes that information as “incendiary” and the reason the story did not see the light of day.
In his latest newsletter, Strauss writes that some of the information in that piece is what has caused Jackson to be passed over for coaching opportunities in the past. Most recently, he lost out on the Sacramento Kings’ coaching job to Mike Brown.
“The reasons for Mark Jackson’s drought are hidden, in part, because he’s an announcer,” Strauss writes. “If he ever gets what he wants and leaves that position, we’ll see more on why the object of his pursuit was kept from him. Teams know. They’ve done the work to find out what Jackson’s current employer has tried to keep quiet.”
Among the allegations in the 2016 article were that he called asisstant coach Jason Collins and team president Rick Welts, both openly gay, “penis touchers” and would remark that they were “going to hell.” Jackson also reportedly accused team employees of “being influenced by the devil” and regularly tried to pit the locker room against the front office.
While these specific allegations have never been made public, they are in line with past allegations against Jackson, particularly the homophobia. Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob said after Jackson was fired from the team that the coach “couldn’t get along with anybody else in the organization”.
It is reasonable to assume as an employee covering the NBA for ESPN at the time that Ethan Sherwood Strauss would have been aware of the story and it never seeing the light of day. Still, he does not have any first-hand accounts of ESPN’s decision or what was in the story on the record.
