A Big Winner From the First : Sure, Pat Riley Is the Cover Boy for L.A. Slickness Now, but When He Slid Over on the Bench 497 Victories Ago, No One Suspected That He, Too, Had That Magic Touch

Pat Riley lifted his arms to the sky in exaggerated seriousness and wondered aloud about the meaning of life.

The question was only about basketball, about what it means to the Laker coach on the verge of winning his 500th regular-season game--he has won 497--joining only 12 other NBA coaches. But for Riley, life and basketball have become nearly inseparable. Only when Riley put his arms back on his desk and laced his fingers did he explain how, for him, the subjects intermingle. How he derives pleasure and truly feels alive when engaged in the physical act of coaching. How he has learned, from his first game on Nov. 20, 1981, to game No. 682 today, to savor such moments.

“I can remember feeling tremendous exhilaration--before, during and afterward,” Riley said of his first game as Laker coach. “Joseph Campbell (who writes on mythology and philosophy) is a guy I’m reading a lot lately, and he made a statement that I have related to my situation. You might be searching for the meaning of life, but he said it’s not about trying to find the meaning, in your job or anywhere else. But what you’re searching for is an experience of being alive. Really alive.

“That’s how I felt that first night. I still feel it. Competition, to this date for me, makes me feel totally alert and alive and involved and significant. It does. That’s the only thing that matters. Believe me, all this other stuff on the perimeter--the recognition, the money and the security--is fine. But that isn’t it, the real thing, for me.

“When I go down to the locker room, or to practice or to the floor for a game, it’s like a switch that goes off in my head. As soon as the game starts, it’s that competition that makes me feel alive. People may ask, ‘Why is he so intense and serious all the time?’ It’s the way I am in these situations. It gives me this feeling.

“That first night, I got that jolt; being down there, calling plays and organizing and talking to the players and being involved was an unbelievable experience. That becomes addictive. As much as (coaching) can be harrowing and drudgery and totally grueling, that always brings you back to what it’s really about.”

Appreciating life through coaching is easy, cynics might suggest, when you have the highest winning percentage of any NBA coach, when you have inherited a team with plenty of talent, when the owner is willing to spend money and the general manager has been consistently shrewd in getting more talent.

But merely winning, it seems, has never been enough for Riley. In Riley’s mind, he has long since proven his worth as a coach. But he still needs what Campbell refers to as “peak experiences.”

For Riley, they come through coaching. They are why he has been labeled an obsessive-compulsive personality by some, a control freak by others. He immerses himself in the game with cold practicality, but he says the experience itself is the payoff.

Such abstract thinking, however, was hardly Riley’s top priority when he moved over one seat on the bench, from assistant to head coach, when the Lakers played the San Antonio Spurs on Nov. 20, 1981 at the Forum.

At the time, chaos reigned in the Laker organization. The team had never been so unsettled. Paul Westhead, who had coached the Lakers to the NBA title in 1980, had been fired on Nov. 19, after Magic Johnson had requested a trade the night before in Utah. There was dissension among some players, who seemed united only in their dislike of Westhead’s coaching.

Out of this confusion the Riley era was born, with a 136-116 victory over the Spurs.

That first game turned out to be perhaps the easiest part of that tumultuous time.

The events of that Nov. 19 still are not totally clear, even after all this time. At a press conference, owner Jerry Buss announced Westhead’s firing and said that Jerry West, now general manager, was the coach. West rose and said that he was working for Riley. Then Buss said they were co-coaches. Eventually, it was determined that Riley was the coach, although at one point he said of his status, “Beats me. I just want to go to lunch.”

It was later reported that West had turned down the job but had agreed to help Riley, Westhead’s assistant only two seasons removed from the broadcast booth, for a short time: 10 games.

Whatever the case, it was the shaky beginning to a career that has included four NBA championships and has brought Riley to this impending milestone, becoming the NBA coach to reach 500 victories in the fewest games.

Riley’s recollections of Johnson’s trade request in Utah, of the who’s-the-coach routine and of his preparation for his first game are sharp even nine years later.

“I was numb,” Riley said. “Both Paul and I came in the office to work. We knew there was a problem. There are psychodramas going on all the time with players. They usually remain inside. We thought it would blow over. It always did.

“Then, I got a call about 11:30, as soon as I got home. They said to come to (Buss’) house. . . . But when I got into the press conference, I was numb and stunned. I think everybody was. You take a look at photos of that, look at all the faces. It looked like a funeral. Then, it got a little humorous with the whole (coaching mix-up) thing developing. I think I said, at one point, ‘If nobody wants it, I’ll take it.’ ”

Recalling that first game, and his first season, as well, Riley admitted to not having all the necessary coaching experience but maintains that he was prepared for the job, that he hit the ground running and has never stopped.

“I really wasn’t ready to be a head coach,” Riley said. “But I think being around for 15 years in the NBA and two years with Paul helped me prepare.

“There was a lot of on-the-job training, early. That’s what I always tell people when I go out and speak. Somebody presents you with a challenge like I got, opens the door for you, you can’t say, ‘Hey, give me a month to read a book on it.’ Most people don’t think they are ready, but they really are. They just have to take the next step, accept the challenge.”

There certainly was a challenge. Although Riley and others have joked that he just rolled out the basketballs for his players that first season, there obviously was more involved.

In dealing with the players, there was as much coddling and cajoling as coaching. And Riley also had to at least appear to be in control in every situation, even in new experiences. Quickly, he developed his well-groomed, calm and aloof sideline persona that he believes tells his players and others that he is in control. He also used psychological techniques he learned from his wife, Chris, a former family therapist; and from a reading list ranging from the history of samurai warriors to Shakespeare, American Indian myths to personal childhood experience.

“I felt in control, always,” Riley said. “Maybe I had already developed coaching instincts. A coach should really be judged on his image and control and his organization. The organization encompasses X’s and O’s during games and practices. These are things that people take for granted, how things are run.

“But image and control are probably the two most important. There really is a decorum a coach should have to gain respect of media, fans, officials, players, the whole thing. You can’t give the appearance of being totally out of control.

“When I was competing as a player and things got crazy, really crazy, you don’t want to see a coach go totally out of control. Normally, that’s what happens to the team. They get out of control.

“The image is not how well I dress and my hair. It is how people perceive you. If it’s one of control and strength, then that’s a positive.”

As confident as Riley says he was at the start, he admits to having made mistakes that first season. And Laker players don’t remember him as having been quite so in control then as now.

Said former Laker Mitch Kupchak, now the club’s assistant general manager: “His confidence grew. I was only with him about a month and a half before I got hurt (a serious knee injury). When I came back (in 1985), there was a great deal more confidence in Pat. But he was still growing even then. Pat is more confident now than he was five years ago.

“But his preparation was always good. That’s just the way Pat is.”

Riley did not have much time to fret about his first game. He was too busy preparing a game plan, a counterattack for any eventuality, and a speech with which to greet his players.

Riley, at the time, told reporters that his speech consisted of only this: “Just wing it, just like me.”

Now, Riley said he told his players this: “A house divided against itself surely is not going to stand. You are either with me or against me. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m here on an interim basis. I have no pressure on me. All the pressure is on you because everybody out there wants to know who really was at fault. Was it you or him (Westhead)?”

Michael Cooper, the Lakers’ veteran forward, said the team immediately responded to Riley’s approach.

“He just kind of let us play,” Cooper said. “Coach Riley knew what the team was about, first being with Chick (Hearn) in the broadcast booth and then as assistant coach.

“So that’s the way it was the rest of the first season. It was not the way it is now, where it’s organized and Coach Riley’s system. Back then, it wasn’t a matter of changing anything.” Even Riley admits that.

“I really didn’t change anything in the offense for two years,” he said. “Most of the stuff was the stuff we’d done. It was a state of mind, more than anything. Usually, after a coaching change, there’s a honeymoon period and players just go crazy. That’s what happened. Especially Earvin. He felt the pressure, and all he could do was play. He could not have bad games.”

Again, if Riley felt pressure, he did not let on. West, who dislikes coaching, stayed on the bench for a few weeks to help ease Riley into the job and, according to Kupchak, West played a significant role.

“They spent a lot of time with each other early,” Kupchak said. “Between what (Riley) thought and what West thought, they knew what had to be done.”

West was a stabilizing force, Riley said, but he maintains that, from the start, he coached the team.

“I did all of it,” Riley said. “Jerry . . . never even got involved in game plans. I did all the videotape. He’d be there at shoot-arounds.

“A funny thing: As soon as I came to the head coaching job, I said something to him the next day about videotape and he (looked surprised), you know. I did 90% of the X’s and O’s of coaching. But he made some great suggestions during the rhythm of the game about personnel. . . .

“I think in (Buss’) mind, he went, ‘Hey, we better put somebody down there with him, because we don’t know how this is going to turn out.’ ”

Said West: “I was just there to be another pair of eyes on the bench that have been there before. It was never my intent to rant and rave and do all that. I did help out in certain game situation areas, like substitutions.

“He had a veteran team then with great talent. That made the transition easier. But, I think, in the long run, Pat had to prove himself as a coach. And he did.”

Riley tried so hard to prove himself, preparing so diligently, that it might have been the cause of severe stomach pains that prompted him to seek acupuncture treatments early in 1982. After a few treatments, which included needles stuck into his head, Riley said he felt better.

“It could’ve been because of pressure the first year,” Riley said. “I had real bad stomach cramps. I drank a lot of Maalox in those days. Finally, I went to an acupuncturist, and I haven’t had problems since.”

Riley, by his admission, worked too hard. He said he believed a coach could never be too prepared.

“I was over-prepared,” he said. “I can remember spending all night and all day working on game plans and watching films, having 15 pages of notes. Then I would go to talk to the team and have only 10 minutes to say it all.

“But I did a lot of over-preparing, nervous writing and preparing, to make sure I had enough. Maybe from out on the floor, I wasn’t as much a teacher . . . during practices, it was more or less, ‘These are the drills. Just run them,’ without explaining how or why the drill should be run and the proper techniques. That took time. That, I had not learned.

“There was very little coaching, in a hands-on type of way, until another year or two. I didn’t coach them, really coach them, for about a year or two. Then, I really started to develop things that would make them even better.”

The Lakers won 11 of their first 13 under Riley, allowing West to bow out. Riley then hired assistant coach Bill Bertka, whom Riley calls invaluable. Riley got his 50th victory on the final day of the regular season and the Lakers went on to beat the Philadelphia 76ers for the NBA championship. Even so, Riley was largely dismissed as a caretaker coach.

As years passed, however, Riley’s contribution became more difficult to ignore. And soon, he will replace Don Nelson of Golden State as the coach who won 500 regular-season NBA games the fastest. Nelson did it in 817 games. Other than experiencing a feeling of being alive, as Campbell puts it, how responsible has Riley been for this milestone?

“I think I’ve had some influence in some games, but I also think (the players) have had a lot more influence than I have had,” Riley said. “The talent wins it for you. These guys have done 10 times more for me than I’ve done for them.”

Ten years removed from that first season, Riley now wants to make his players achieve that inner value of being alive, rather than being content to subsist on memories of success past. Riley worries about the Lakers’ desire. He always has to worry about something.

“I’ve been (a coach) for 10 years, and I have a storage of wisdom,” Riley said. “I understand more now of how the game is played. It really is predicated on, No. 1, your talent. But the key is, your talent has to be hungry and competitive and challenged. I never worry about these guys being competitive and accepting the challenge.

“I do worry about their hunger, but that’s natural. They have arrived at a position they worked hard to get. But I keep questioning that hunger in our guys. I see it now, in innocent forms, in San Antonio and the Clippers and in New York, to a certain extent.”

Riley paused, then pointed to a framed poster of the 1987-88 NBA champion Lakers, a team that made good on Riley’s prediction of consecutive titles.

“Are we committed to be like that team, to win three seven-game series? Sometimes, I don’t think they are hungry enough, but I see that disproved all the time by these guys. Still, I worry.”

Riley rubbed his fingers into his temples, looking as perplexed about the state of this season’s Lakers as he had earlier about the meaning of life.

He sighed. “I’m always working for perfection,” Riley said. “And I know I can’t have it.”

As Riley himself read in Campbell’s philosophy: “The perfect human being is uninteresting. . . . It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.”