Passion Show : George Karl Came Back From Coaching Exile in the CBA and Spain to Turn the SuperSonics Into Contenders

It’s past midnight, the civilians are snug in their beds, but the dance in George Karl’s head whirls on.

He already has all the NBA scores, without which sleep would have been impossible, so he calls the Continental Basketball Assn. scoreline. Albany won at Rapid City to break a two-game losing streak? Hot damn! He replays the tape of the SuperSonic game he just coached. He plays it again. Sometimes he used to run it so often, he could play it fast-forward and recognize what was going on.

It’s not easy caring this much, being this good.

At any given moment, NBA coaches are made up of a vast middle class and a few aces who have proved that they can improve any situation. This bundle of energy is clearly among the latter, 54-25 in his year in Seattle since being recalled from Spanish exile, even though the SuperSonics he was inheriting were DOA. They were dead on his arrival.

But it’s still not easy, making your living on this merry-go-round where the athletes have all the power, money and fun, not to mention the joy of physical effort and release while Coach tries to project his mind onto them from the sideline, wrestles his demons and winds up the evening a nervous wreck.

Thus the best and brightest NBA coaches tend to be, how shall we say it, a little . . .

Nuts?

“Oh yeah, I thought we had a wacko,” guard Nate McMillan says, remembering Karl’s arrival.

“He came in with a reputation of a guy who was a little bit on the crazy side--a yeller, a screamer, sort of a wacko-type guy. That’s what I had heard of him. Watching him when he was at Golden State my first year here, that’s all I thought of him.

“He did the same things he does here--knocking on the scorer’s table, grabbing his head, spinning around.”

The more fortunate of the ace coaches can hide their emotions, but Karl, the reigning enfant terrible , never could.

He surfed on his, to glory and disaster.

As a point guard at North

Carolina, he was the Kamikaze Kid. On seven other campuses, he was the most hated player in the Atlantic Coast Conference and an unconscionable hotdog.

At 33, he took over the Cleveland Cavaliers, who had five coaches in the previous three seasons, marched them right into the playoffs and was fired a year later.

At 35, he improved the Warriors by 12 victories, made the playoffs and was gone again within 12 months.

His sideline gyrations were mere warm-ups for the fury that ensued, capped by his signature blowup in Oakland, where he tore apart the locker of Joe Barry (Just Barely Cares) Carroll after one game, scattering its contents around the locker room before shocked players and reporters.

Years later, it still comes up, and Karl puts his head in his hands.

“Joe Barry deserved to have his locker torn apart,” he says, grinning his bad-boy grin.

“Joe Barry was just a real difficult human being to coach. It was at that point in the season, we knew we were ready to lose in the playoffs, we knew we were out, and I needed to vent my animosities. If it had happened two hours later, no one would have heard about it. I think now I might do the same thing, but I’d do it two hours later.

“I’ll be honest with you: Everybody says I’ve grown up, I’m more mellow, but I think Joe Barry would drive me to the same actions. But I don’t think I’d be as stupid to do it in front of the media.”

Actually, he has grown up.

He hasn’t turned into someone else. The rage still rises within him but he handles it better, and that’s all maturity is.

He did it the hard way: Drummed out of the NBA, forced to go back down to the CBA, bouncing back and forth between the Albany Patroons and Real Madrid.

He spent four years out of the NBA and learned a lot.

One of his Patroon teams went 50-6, never lost at home and sent six players back to the NBA, including Mario Elie and Vince Askew. Karl says it’s the most fun he has ever had coaching.

His Real Madrid star, Fernando Martin, died in an auto accident, turning the season into a national catharsis. Surrounded by Spaniards whose gift for expressing passion surpassed even his, Karl decided that he never wanted to experience, or vent, that much emotion again.

“That summer (after resigning under pressure from the Warriors), I sat around for three months feeling sorry for myself, not knowing what to do,” he says.

“The way the league was perceiving me, the perception that was coming out of Golden State, the control they had of the perception, the power they had--it killed me. It hurt me. It made me realize how small you really are in the world of basketball.

“That first year at Albany was hard. That first year, I felt sorry for myself. I would go to bars and watch the NBA games and be martyr-istic, saying I could outcoach that guy any day and I should be there and I’m being screwed.”

Somewhere in there, he learned to say those two all-important words: My fault .

“I think a lot of my outside then was protecting the scared-ness inside,” Karl says. “I was scared--33, having a lot of success. I was scared of a lot of situations. I was scared of a lot of games. I was scared of a lot of coaches. And I always put the face on that I wasn’t, that I was macho.

“The difference now is, I’m still scared but I’ll tell you I’m scared.

“It wasn’t until everything fell apart at Golden State and I went away from basketball that I could say that. I was searching--who am I gonna be? Am I gonna be a CBA coach? Am I gonna be a European coach? I think I realized I loved coaching more than I loved the NBA. That was important to me.

“I felt like I had a passion. I felt I had a greater passion than most people in coaching. I still loved the gym, I still loved the players, I still loved the camaraderie. I loved the things I think the game was made for.”

As opposed to the money and fame.

Once he realized he would always have the game, if not the league, he had less to fear . . . and was on his way home, even if he didn’t know it.

He was back in Madrid when SuperSonic President Bob Whitsitt called.

Whitsitt had a deep, divided, moribund team on his hands. It took Karl two weeks to put in his North Carolina-updated-for-the-NBA pressure defense and get his players in good enough shape to run it.

Then they took off and haven’t looked back.

“I definitely analyzed what I had to do to get back, both coaching-wise and personality-wise,” Karl says.

“I talked to people. A couple coaches told me, you’ll always have trouble coaching the star because you’re too demanding, too intense. I’ve changed. I know there’s a give-and-take. I know there’s a hypocrisy structure. Star, 12th man--you don’t treat them the same way.

“Derrick McKey wants to be coached differently than Shawn Kemp. Gary Payton and I have a totally different relationship than I (have) with Dana Barros. Gary Payton and I, we’re called Pac-man ‘cause we yell at each other every day. We yell at each other about buying a newspaper.

“I’m trying to act like I’m not volatile, but I think everybody knows I am. I think my desire now, when I do get volatile, is to communicate that passion to my players, rather than calling people stupid and lazy and soft.”

Karl’s players now swear by him. Suddenly converted into contenders, they have seen the passion and the possibilities.

“Oh yeah, I’ve seen him heated up,” McMillan says, smiling. “He yells and he sort of has a fit every now and then, but it’s bearable.”

Karl even despairs about benching Benoit Benjamin, his latter-day J.B. Carroll, who is saved from finding his clothes in the parking lot only by his coach’s emotional growth.

Benoit doesn’t grumble--out loud, much--and the SuperSonics wing onward.

Karl has come full circle with such a vengeance he doesn’t even like to think about it.

“The success we’re having,” he says, “I’d rather filter it to Shawn or Gary or Ricky (Pierce) or Eddie (Johnson) or Bob Whitsitt or Kloppy (assistant coach Bob Kloppenburg).”

Of course, living with success is the toughest test of all. Karl is about to find that out, reportedly close to signing a four-year contract.

“We still are waiting,” McMillan says, laughing. “Nothing changes. People are saying when he gets a new contract, he may go back to the old George Karl. We don’t know. We’re still waiting for that crazy guy to pop out.”

Karl says he has him tied up in the closet and he’s staying there, too.