When you’re curious, you ask questions. I was curious, so after Tuesday night’s Bucks game, when it was just the two of us in front of his locker, I asked Stephen Jackson a simple question.
“Do you still want to be here in Milwaukee?”
It was not necessarily a question out of the blue. There had been rumblings for at least a couple weeks that Jackson wasn’t the happiest of campers in Milwaukee. And since this was the first time I’d seen him since those rumblings picked up steam, I was genuinely interested in getting his thoughts.
He didn’t hesitate in answering. Or, depending on your point of view, in not answering.
“I can’t answer that,” Jackson said. “You’re trying to get me fined.”
“No, I’m not,” I assured him. “I’m just curious.”
Still calm and professional, he reiterated his stance.
“If I answer that,” Jackson said, “I’ll get fined though.”
“OK. Fair enough,” I told him.
Jackson: “I mean, I can’t answer that.”
Me: “OK. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Jackson: “No problem.”
And that was the conversation. It was entirely cordial in nature. It lasted for all of 13 seconds.
It was, in a word, unexpected.
Did Jackson answer the question without answering the question? You tell me. Would it have been simple to answer the initial question with a quick affirmative, even if he didn’t mean it? Absolutely.
But you get the sense that, if Jackson is going to say something, he’s going to mean it.
And maybe that’s still the case, even when he says he’s not saying a single thing.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter, where I tweet as howiemag. And listen to me chat sports with Mitch Teich once a month on WUWM’s “Lake Effect.”
