COMMENTARY : Quick Fix Won’t Solve Knicks’ Woes

As President Reagan was fond of saying about the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, now there ya’ go again. People get hired and fired -- general managers and coaches come in, and then clean out their desks -- and what changes?

What doesn’t change is the corporate structure. The Knicks basketball club is part of the MSG Sports Group of Madison Square Garden, a Paramount Communications Company. It means, ultimately, that the wrong people are blamed.

Let’s think about Martin S. Davis, the chairman and chief executive officer, and Stanley Jaffe, president and chief operation officer at Paramount, and Richard H. Evans, president and chief executive officer of Madison Square Garden. The history of that operation is that the biggies are terrified of bad reviews. They shouldn’t be protected by personal anonymity.

The guys who get blamed in public are the working stiffs with earaches from the telephone and heads throbbing with the mentality of their players. Meanwhile, the guys in the corporate offices preen with the notion that a showpiece acquisition will make the chief officers look brilliant.

That’s what’s scary about the drumbeat for Pat Riley; it’s what those people have always tried to do. Make him an offer he can’t refuse.

What the expression means is to convince a man it’s in his real best interest to do something he doesn’t want to do. It means, perform this function we ask, or see about a knee replacement. Riley was a winning coach full of Los Angeles glitz. He’s a televison personality now; says, “I like what I’m doing.”

Does money make him change his mind or does it cause him to take on a job he doesn’t want to do? As Jack Diller, recently deposed as president of the Knicks and Rangers, said: “We have a situation where somebody can come in with Hollywood glitz and say, ‘Pizzazz is what we need.’ ”

Is it Hollywood or Jollywood? It would be one more page out of the history.

Gulf & Western engulfed and devoured the Garden operation in 1977 and then became Paramount. The Knicks had won two championships and went to the final of another not long before. There have been 30 seasons for the two teams since then and how many championships have those people won? When I was in the Army I learned the expression, sometimes a blind pig finds an acorn.

Is it bad luck that has thwarted management, or the lust for a quick fix, the lack of stomach to pick good people and a course of action and stick to it? Remember how the Knickerbocker people tried to buy a championship with Spencer Haywood in 1975 and then Bob McAdoo in 1977. Those guys were stars.

Remember how they tried to fool the league by illegally signing George McGinnis, a star, or how they flirted with Wilt Chamberlain’s comeback. They fooled themselves. The quick fix seldom works.

Go ahead, run out Al Bianchi and John MacLeod and Bob Hill and Hubie Brown and Red Holzman and Scotty Stirling and Dave DeBusschere and Eddie Donovan. Surely some of them had the mind for the task. But the high-up management minds run around like a cat trying to dig a hole in a marble floor -- another expression I learned in the Army.

Neither the New York Giants nor the New York Mets got any good until they let professionals do a professional job. So we got George Young’s success with the Giants, and whatever you think about Frank Cashen’s current phumphering, he did make the Mets worth fretting about.

The media are obligated to report when things are bad. Management is obligated to understand that it gets a fortune in free publicity and to understand criticism.

Corporations in the business of show business are especially media conscious. Jaffe, who recently became the chief of Paramount, is a movie producer. He produced “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Bad reviews can cause a movie to flop. It’s the nature of a public company that producers have to answer to stockholders, who don’t care about art but about fannies in the seats.

Bad reviews of Ewing vs. Cartwright did not cause the Knicks to flop. Now, the stories that the Knicks are a flop might keep some fannies out of the seats at those prices -- and should.

A lot of corporate names have passed through these last 15 years: Arthur Barron, Alan Fields, Mike Burke, Sonny Werblin, Jack Krumpe and more. Richard Evans qualified to be the present president of Madison Square Garden Corp. by turning a profit at the renovated Radio City Music Hall.

He has hired Dave Checketts, a Utah man not intimate to the ways of New York to run the Knicks, and he has hired Ernie Grunfeld, a New York inmate, to consider whether moving Patrick Ewing is the answer. Maybe they’re right if they’re permitted to be right.

The Knicks look years away again. “Who knows, they may be 30 minutes away,” says Red Holzman. “We thought DeBusschere was a good player; when we got him he was better than we thought he was. We didn’t know his leadership qualities. We got Earl Monroe and people didn’t know how well he knew to play the game. Jerry Lucas, everybody knew he was a great outside shooter; we didn’t know how intelligent a player he was.”

It’s a nice thought -- like Lenny asking George to tell him again about the rabbits in “Of Mice and Men.”

Better we should remember the table of organization of Paramount above Evans: Martin Davis, Stanley Jaffe, Michael Hope, Donald Oresman, Lawrence Levinson, Eugene Myers, Ronald Nelson, Peter Butler, Earl Doppelt, Michael Estabrooks, Rudolph Hertlein, Raymond Nowak, James Parent, Jerry Sherman, Grace Fippinger, J. Hugh Liedtke, James Nicholas, Lester Pollack, Samuel Silberman, George Weissman, Irving Fischer, Frantz Lutolf, James Pattison, Irwin Schloss, Henry Walker Jr.

Standard & Poor’s Register is more to the point than the NBA Register.