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Curry certainly guilty of poor judgment

Barbara Barker

2:01 PM EST, January 13, 2009

I am not a famous athlete. I don't have lots of money. But I have, on occasion, paid someone to pick up my kids from school and watch them while I'm working.

One of the first things I did before hiring anyone was to ask for a driver's license and permission to run a background check so I could make sure the person has a good driving record, etc. Why did I do this? Because I believe it makes good common sense to know the person driving my kids around is someone I can trust.

Eddy Curry is a famous athlete. He has a lot of money. Yet, it appears he doesn't have a lot of sense. How else can you explain the fact that he knowingly hired a twice-convicted criminal to drive both him and his family around? Yes, it appears that Eddy Curry is the sporting world's most recent graduate of the Plaxico Burress School of Bad Judgment.

Curry's former driver, David Kuchinsky, has filed an explosive lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and racial discrimination against the Knicks center. Among the tawdry accusations, Kuchinsky is alleging that Curry asked him to perform sexual favors.

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In the homophobic world of sports, this is about as damaging as it gets. Curry's teammates are already rushing to the press to protect his reputation. "I know for a fact that Eddy is not gay," Malik Rose told Alan Hahn in his Newsday.com blog.

Personally, I don't care whether Curry is gay. And I don't think anyone except his wife should either. Whether Curry sexually harassed and racially discriminated against his driver is another story.

Yet, it's much harder to believe these accusations than the ones Anucha Browne Sanders made in her sexual harassment lawsuit against Isiah Thomas several years ago. Browne was not a convict, and she had a solid employment history including good employment reviews.

Right now what we know about Kuchinsky is that in 1992 he was convicted of a burglary that resulted in a three-year prison sentence, and in 2004 he also had a resisting-arrest conviction. Is this the type of guy who you would want to drive you around?

According to Curry's lawyer, Kelly Saindon, Curry knew about these charges when he hired Kuchinsky in October 2005. "Eddy thought he was a nice guy," Saindon told Newsday, "and this is what he gets out of it."

If Kuchinsky was the best driver that Curry could find, I'd like to see the background of those he interviewed and rejected. Athletes are always complaining that they are targets. Yet, they don't exercise the sort of judgment people outside of the public eye do when they decide whom to hire, whom to hang out with and how to manage their private affairs. Somehow, maybe because so many things have gone right in their lives, they believe that nothing can go wrong.

Curry, who has two years and $21.7 million remaining on his contract with the Knicks, once had a staff of close to 30 people working for him and his family, according to one source. Kuchinsky was let go last October after Curry was told that he had to start being more responsible with his money.

If he had been more responsible with his hiring practices three years ago, this might have never happened.