Despite His Problems, Ewing Says That Life in the NBA Is Still Fun

In the second season of Patrick Ewing and the New York Knicks, the knees are bad, the schedule horrible and the position new.

Two years removed from the cocoon of Georgetown University, Ewing has been involved in a public feud with his coach, Hubie Brown. He has been criticized by the New York press. And he has spent many games not slam-dancing with Moses Malone or Bill Laimbeer, but chasing down such forwards as Bill Hanzlik and Xavier McDaniel.

“How do I guard someone like that?” he asked, smiling. “I run around a lot, step back and hope they shoot it. Then I try to throw a hand in their face.”

Perhaps the biggest change is in Ewing himself. Once the most private of public people, he’s now an engaging interview, someone who is not only patient with reporters’ questions but who seems to enjoy the postgame give-and-take.

One evening this week, after the Knicks beat the Phoenix Suns at Madison Square Garden, he sat at his locker, and as teammates dressed and left, he talked about the incredible changes his life has undergone in the last 18 months.

“I’m a year older and a year wiser,” he said. “Last year, it was hard because it was such a zoo here. Now everyone has calmed down and relaxed.”

He said he still spends most of his time at his New Jersey home and, all in all, misses Washington no less now than a year ago. He said one reason is that he has learned the perils of being a celebrity in New York, and all the screaming tabloid headlines that go with it.

“I’m still basically a private person,” he said, “and I don’t go out a lot. I can go home and kick back and relax. And when I’m home, there’s not going to be a headline the next morning, ‘Patrick Ewing seen making an ass out of himself.’ ”

His laugh might seem a little more sincere if he didn’t have a large ice pack strapped to each knee. He says he plays in some pain each night, but, since the Knicks had just played 5 games in 5 cities in 7 days, it’s worse than usual.

“Tonight, they were bad,” he said. “I missed some foul shots because I couldn’t even bend ‘em.”

Meanwhile, his performances have suffered. His scoring is down from 20.0 points per game his rookie season to 11.4 this year, his rebounds from 9.0 per game to 7.4.

Worse, he has played with the bad knees while trying to adjust to Brown’s Twin Towers lineup, which has both 7-1 Bill Cartwright and 7-0 Ewing playing at the same time. The problem for Ewing is that Cartwright is the man Brown has chosen to play the inside spot, meaning that Ewing not only winds up guarding forwards, which puts more strain on his knees, but also plays many minutes away from the basket.

Publicly, after watching how much trouble he has getting up and down the court, the Knicks say they’re considering forcing him to take a few games off to see if the pain goes away. Privately, they’re apparently going to wait until he comes to them and, as one friend said, “That won’t happen. If he can walk, he’ll try to play.”

If the Knicks aren’t thinking about his knees, Ewing is.

“I’m playing it by ear right now,” he said. “If they don’t start to get better, I’m going to have to get a second opinion. We’ve played a lot of games lately, and they’re not getting any better right now.”

He doesn’t believe his knee problems are career-threatening, but he has played on at least one bad one for almost a year and is clearly frustrated about it. His right knee first became sore about midseason last year, and he discovered the problem himself one morning on an airplane, when he found a piece of floating tissue while massaging the knee.

He had surgery March 14 to have the tissue removed, and, even after a brutal summer of weightlifting and rehabilitation at Georgetown, he showed up at training camp with the knee “feeling pretty good, but not 100%.”

Since then, the right knee hasn’t gotten much better, and now the left one is sore. The result is that he hurts all the time, and appears to be gingerly running on egg shells a good part of every game.

“The left knee, which had been fine, got sore because I was trying to compensate for the right one,” he said. “I imagine it’ll take a full year to get it all well.

“I do think Bill and I complement each other,” Ewing said. “We’ve had times when his man has beaten him to the basket, and I’ve come over to help out. He has done the same thing for me. We played together a few times last year, and even then, I knew it could work.”

Ewing’s understanding of the move, though, was that he and Cartwright would switch between forward and center. “So far,” he said, “I seem to be the one at forward every night.”

Whatever the reason, the Knicks have looked as bad as their 2-6 record.

For Ewing, the switch came at a time when he already had to make other adjustments in his professional life. One was that two of his closest friends from last season, forward Ken Bannister and traveling secretary Frank Blauschild, are no longer with the Knicks.

Another is that former Georgetown teammate Michael Jackson, another close friend and the Knicks’ second-round pick last summer, was a late training-camp cut.

Yet Ewing apparently was willing to play the new position on the old knees and keep his mouth shut until Brown, out of frustration one night, publicly criticized Ewing.

“You can’t be averaging six rebounds as the guy who’s going to bring us back (to respectability),” Brown said. “The two things which were supposed to be automatic, guaranteed, were the shot-blocking and rebounding, and it hasn’t been there.”

Incredibly, Brown also said the Knicks were “prepared to play without him.”

Lately, Brown, under intense win-or-else job pressure, has toned down those words.

“Look, a major factor for our team is when he can play pain-free,” Brown said. “He’s got to rebound and block shots and play the way he’s capable of. I understand that.”

Brown said he wants Cartwright and Ewing playing together for a couple of reasons, one being “that they both make $1 million. Right now, it’s not going like we’d hoped. Cartwright sprained an ankle, and the other guy has bad knees. When you play a lineup like this, you have to have rebounding, shot-blocking and scoring from the 7-footers, because you’re also going to be giving up some things, namely speed.”

All of that might have made for a fine basketball debate until some stories cropped up that also questioned whether Ewing was loafing. Brown wasn’t quoted directly, but the tone indicated that someone on the coaching staff might have been the catalyst for them.

Ewing, and the people who know him, reacted furiously. In a one-on-one meeting this week, he said he told Brown: “You should say it to my face.”

“I play hard every night,” Ewing said, “and, when that’s not true any longer, I’ll retire. That has been the case from the first game I played. I haven’t been playing as well as I would like for a number of reasons, but I’m trying. I told him I needed to get more involved in the offense.”

What did Brown say?

“He listened mostly. He made a few comments.”

Did the meeting do any good?

“I felt better.”

Georgetown Coach John Thompson also reacted strongly to any implication that his former star player would loaf.

“I have a lot of opinions about this, that are best for me not to get into publicly,” he said. “I will say this: Nobody can ever say that in high school, in college, with the Knicks or in practice or anywhere else that Patrick Ewing ever loafed. The kid doesn’t understand what the word ‘loafed’ means. You can say he loses his temper or that he plays rough. But loaf? Never.”

What permanent scars all of this has left on Ewing and the Knicks is anyone’s guess. There’s no question Brown’s Twin Towers experiment has put his job squarely on the line, and General Manager Scotty Stirling said this week he’ll give the team another month to get straightened out.

“You’ve got to have some sort of relationship with your coach,” Ewing said. “You’ve got to have respect for each other when you get on the court. When you start playing, it may not matter, because your personal feelings don’t enter into how you play, but you need a relationship.”

Of his relationship with Brown, he said, “We don’t have one. I just go out and play.”