[Let’s start the new year off with some Pat Riley back in the days when he coached the New York Knicks. What follows is an essay from the great novelist and essayist Roger Rosenblatt. His piece ran in the January 1994 issue of the magazine Rip City.]
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Every basketball fan remembers the move: It is the fourth quarter of the second game of the 1993 NBA playoffs. John Starks, the Knicks shooting guard, of the baby I-didn’t-do-it face and the I-did-it-and-I’ll-do-it-again disposition, decided to take Michael Jordan and the entire Chicago Bulls defense to the basket. And so he does, soaring and crashing into the air simultaneously, jamming the ball through, stopping in flight like a helicopter, landing with a surprised and innocent expression that nonetheless shouts, “So there!” A noiseless gasp is not heard round the world. The Knicks are up two games to zip.
“And with that dunk,” says Pat Riley today, “our season ended. John called, Michael raised, and we never got back.”
Much that Riley believes in as man and coach was compacted in Starks’ astonishing moment. The moment also displayed a truth about Starks, who is in many ways, the most interesting player on the team. The reason is that watching him double and redouble his ability each of the past two years, one contemplates the season, wondering if Starks will rise to become the Knicks’ second franchise player (after Patrick Ewing). A championship team needs two. The question with Starks applies not to his hands or legs, but to his head and heart. Is he able to call and raise again?
“I can’t do it for him,” says Riley. “It’s got to come from John. I’ll help. But it’s got to come from inside.”
The inside, for Pat Riley, means everything a person is, will or will not be. I spoke with him to try to determine how anyone can know what lies inside someone else and how that inside—for the purposes of a coach or a teacher, since they are the same thing to Riley—is nurtured to triumph. The question has two edges. If a man has it within him to call and raise and raise and keep on raising, fine. But what if he doesn’t? What if all his ability to shoot and “sky” is merely a tantalizing indication of heights he will never achieve, because the inside is not there?
On the matter of encouraging the best out of those in one’s charge, Riley is an expert. What he has done with the Knicks in his first two years as head coach—taking a visibly purposeless, disheveled street gang and shaping it into a coordinated, if at times, thuggish instrument—is remarkable. The fact of his four championship seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers, before he came to the Knicks, speaks for itself. Yet Riley’s expertise centers less on product than process.
When, for example, I asked him if the picturesque benching of Anthony Mason, Greg Anthony, and, of course, John Starks early last season, for showboating and boastful play, represented a pivotal moment in establishing team discipline, he answered that the incident was really a blip in a “sequence of events.” The ultimate event of the sequence was the molding of the team. The self-interested antics of three players served as distractions. Distraction had to be eliminated.
The key, says Riley, is that “you’ve got to believe in the blue sky. And you’ve got to make them believe in it too. When I first came to the Knicks, I immediately wanted to assure Patrick Ewing that things were going to change for the better. He reacted courteously, but skeptically. ‘Why should I believe you?’ he asked. ‘Everybody has said that every year I’ve been here.’ I told him, ‘I am committed to surrounding you with warriors.’”
By warriors he means disciplined warriors, men who judge success only as collective team success. Riley does not simply see the value of discipline; he has a reverence for it, derived in part from his Catholic faith and upbringing and from his late father, a minor-league baseball coach who was always “very dignified, very direct.” Pat Riley’s reverence for discipline is sustained by his family and by an inborn sense of order. Speaking of modern times, he says he likes it better in the 1990s than in the 1980s, because the 1980s were chaotic with “greed and shortcuts. Now the country wants to go back to the reliable.”
At first, I found it curious that a man who has helped make the Armani-gleaming-hair look the look for young American men would turn out to be so traditional in his thinking. But in Riley’s case, the look draws one’s attention to that inner orderliness. Instead of crowing, “Aren’t I slick?” his appearance, when revealed alongside his temperament, says simply, “Everything is in place. And you should notice that.”
Also, people like Riley are traditional without being conservative. You can’t really be wholly conservative in basketball and win, because the composition of the team is like that of a jazz band; someone may, indeed has to, fly off on an individual riff, but if he doesn’t come back to the others in proper order, there’s no song, no band. Riley puts it, “There’s a fine line between pattern and spontaneity.” The trick is to encourage a solo flight without leading to a flight off the handle—something Starks still has to learn, though he is not better than he was.
“Can the ship be run too tight?” I ask Riley.
“Sometimes, yes,” he says. “You can be a little too regimented. And the trouble with that is it creates monotony, which can lead to resentment. One time when I was with the Lakers, I thought things might be getting too strict, so in practice, I started pandering to the players enthusiasms. I’d let everyone go loose. After a while of this, Kareem calls me aside and says, ‘Lookit, Coach. If we’re going to practice, let’s practice.’ So, I listened. When the best player in the game tells you to stop walking on eggshells, you stop.”
The best people I have seen running any sort of team are disciplined to the point of obsessiveness. At Time magazine, where I worked eight years, the managing editor was a brusque, bearded man named Ray Cave. Cave, too, was dapper in appearance, and, like Riley, he was driven to see that things were done right. Journalism does not require the kind of teamwork basketball does, because the players (writers and subeditors) don’t know what the collective product will look like until the game is published. But the managing editor knows. Like Riley, Cave was never buddy-buddy with anyone on the staff, but he understood everything that the players were capable of and everything about the construction of a magazine. I think he knew how much the staples weighed. Cave also appreciated the distinction between spontaneity and pattern, which is another way of saying the exception and the rule. Writers would be encouraged to take flight once in a while, but Time was a newsmagazine. Cave guarded the rule.
Such people make you want to win for them by winning for your colleagues and yourself. Yet this takes us back to the other questions inspired by John Starks’ dunk: What if everything is in place and you are hellbent on winning and still you don’t have it? Even Riley, who has just written a book called The Winner Within, will only go as far as to say that discipline and hard work will lead not to victory, but to a final testing ground.
The recent history of the NBA offers a parable. In the 1960s, the players were of first-rate intelligence and ability (see the Celtics), but there were fewer extraordinary athletes. In the 1970s, the emergence of playground styles emphasized athleticism, but at the expense of traditional coaching methods. By the 1980s, coaches had adapted, and with the arrival of brilliant team players such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, the game, says Riley, “got better than it ever was.” The NBA is now at a point where, for a team to win a championship, much less successive titles, it requires a superhuman effort. That’s all right for Michael Jordan, who happens to be superhuman. For everybody else, it is undoubtedly disturbing.
While talking with Riley, I kept wondering what it would be like to play for him, and I came up with the dual answers: wonderful, and terrible. The wonderful part is easy to explain. The terrible had to do with what Riley inevitably makes you examine in yourself. Essentially, it relates to the supernatural. Like most people who believe in the blue sky, Riley trusts in the unseen. He has long believed that the voice of his father returns to him in crises, telling him to stand firm. He describes a trancelike state in which he once gave a pep talk to the Lakers before a do-or-die game. Riley told me that the sound of his own voice is like his father’s.
The assumption, behind the idea of unearthing the winner within is that the winner exists to be unearthed. Discussing the Knicks’ disintegration after that 2-0 lead in the playoffs—especially game five, in which the team shot 20-for-35 at the free-throw line, and Charles Smith could not find the basket in the final seconds, though he was standing under it—Riley says, “We did everything right until that ultimate game. But it isn’t only that you must earn the right to win, you have to feel that you’ve earned that right. You have to believe you deserve it. Those free throws—winners make them. A little voice says, ‘I deserve it.’ After that, we had to deal with the consequences of losing when we were supposed to win.
“You have to learn to take a hit and to recover. My wife, Chris, and I took a great canoe trip in the Grand Canyon last year. Before we set off, our guide told us that there were two rules to follow: ‘First, you have to wear a life vest. Second, you are definitely at some point going to fall into the water and end up underneath the boat. When you do, you have to become a participant in your own rescue.’”
One builds a team, he says, but it will come down to the individual who “has to decide if his values coincide with ours.” Even then, nothing guarantees that the player inside exists. In the parlance of the game, Riley takes his man inside, but neither of them knows what’s there. “John [Starks] has to continue to have integrity in his effort,” he says. “But he hasn’t made it yet.” And the implication is that Starks may never make it because he may not have it. And, intentionally or not, no one will make him as aware of that fact as Pat Riley, whose mission is to find the winner within, though there may be no winner within.
Riley believes that the only way to make a team out of isolated players is “to get them to do what they don’t want to do.” Yet he knows, too, that there are things certain players can never do. Had Pat Riley, a 1967 first-round draft pick from Kentucky, been asked to find the winner within himself as a pro player, he would be searching to this day. That he was able to find his interior winner as a coach says a good deal about his adjustability and his fortitude. Still, there was this mysterious place from which one draws the power to win—or he does not.
And the man who insists that he find that power must know that by asking what may be impossible, he’s creating both test and torment. Of course, when one is playing at the top of the game, what other choice is there?
Two days after speaking with Riley, I took my youngest son to the opening of a Herman’s sports store in Manhattan, where John Starks was appearing at noon to sign autographs. But, arriving at 11:30, we were way too late; fans, we were told, had been lining up since 7 a.m. Many hundreds wound round the block. So, my son and I stood inside the store to get a glimpse of Starks, who, wearing what looked like a child’s sunsuit of matching mustard-colored shirt and shorts, emerged at noon from the room with a retinue of protectors and walked right by us. I looked at that baby face up close and called out, “John! Is this gonna be the year?” He smiled and assured the throng, “This is gonna be the year.”
[During the 1993-94 season, John Starks averaged what would be a career-high 19 points and 5.9 assists per game, though he appeared in just 59 games. In 1995, Riley left the Knicks for Miami, where he’s remained within the organization ever since.]
From Way Downtown 