A Coach Dressed for Success

I knew I was in trouble when Pat Riley showed up and he wasn’t wearing a coat and tie. For Riley, it was the wildest kind of informality.

To be sure, his sport shirt was neatly washed and ironed and buttoned all the way up to the top button, but you have to understand, Pat Riley is normally the pinup boy of every tailor in town. This was like seeing the Pope in bathing trunks.

Riley is usually as impeccably--and formally--dressed as a Norwegian diplomat. His shoes are bench-made, his shirts hand-sewn and the crease in his pants could cut butter.

Riley makes very sure you know he is a man of substance. No blue jeans and ponytails for him. He may be the last man in America still to use hair oil--but there isn’t a lock out of place. Ever. You never catch Riley unshaven. His shoes are laced, his socks match. The tie coordinates. He projects cool. He looks in charge.

It is no accident. Riley likes to project authority. The life of this Riley is control. He controls his environment. He doesn’t do anything slovenly and this includes dressing for the game.

Basketball is a game in which the coach comes clothed as if for a day at the office. But some coaches--Doug Moe comes to mind--have usually ripped off their tie, flung their coat behind the bench, let their shirt hang out, rumpled their hair, bit their nails and, in general, become sideline slobs by the third quarter.

Not Riley. He is as band-box neat in the locker room after the game as he is going to the opera. No one has even seen him sweat.

He is a man who doesn’t make waves. His expression seldom changes, whether he’s ahead by 20 or behind by 30. He makes adjustments, not noise.

A lot of people thought it was easy to coach that way when he was on the Lakers and had Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the floor. You could come in a tuxedo. Bring a book. Catch up on your sleep, they said.

Riley’s teams (and Magic Johnson’s and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s) receipted for a (more or less) annual championship and they were aided by adroit and artful mentoring on the part of Riley but, but many gave the team, not Riley, all the credit. The supposition was, he didn’t kick the water-cooler enough, yell at the refs enough, get technicals, get thrown out of the game.

Not Riley’s style. So, when he retired from the Lakers, opted for TV for a year or so, and then decided to return to the game’s coaching lines, the wise guys snickered behind their hands. He would find few Magic Johnsons on the New York Knicks.

The Knicks were a classic collection of klutzes, underachievers, the most uncoachable cast of individualists in the game. Riley’s tie would get ripped off, all right, torn in half, maybe. His hair would be mussed, his pants baggy and his temper frayed. These guys were not Magicians, these guys would really saw the girl in half.

Then, the New York Knicks came within a free throw or two of winning their way to the title round. If they’d had anybody to beat but Michael Jordan, they doubtless would have made it. Riley had taken the misfits and made them into a force.

Pat Riley was in town to promote his book, “The Winner Within” this week. It’s not exactly a story of the Knicks’ success. It’s a story of success generically. It’s not a sports book, as such. It’s a motivational book, even an instructional book. Like the man himself, it’s a study in controlled imagery, almost mysticism, the mythos of success.

But Riley is no beaded guru. He’s as practical as a loan officer. He deals in the possible.

Pat Riley’s thesis is that there is no such thing as individual success. We are each part of a team and, until or unless the team succeeds, neither do we.

His is probably the only sports book peppered not only with recollections of the high moments of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar but also with the sayings of team players from the past like George Santayana, Honore de Balzac and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“Teamwork,” writes Riley, “is the essence of life. Without it, we are marooned.”

Success sends its own messages, which must be heeded and understood. Riley calls this “The Innocent Climb” and it can range from the advent of Magic Johnson to the Lakers to the taking over of a labor-racked auto plant in Marin county by reasonable men.

Riley addresses the stereotypical selfish player--”I got mine, too bad about the team”--by identifying this as “The Disease of Me,” which has wrecked more franchises than a .410-shooting backcourt. A Michael Jordan who throws up 50 points a night while his team loses is, like a general who looks good in retreat, not a success by Riley’s definition.

Complacency, he finds to be one of the worst words in the language. In sports, it ranks with carcinoma.

Writes Riley: “People who think they are ‘game players’ (as opposed to practice-court players) are what coaches call ‘floaters.’ They don’t see what all the fuss over concentration and work ethic is about--until players of lesser talent start scoring in their faces. ‘Floaters’ ultimately become victims of their own talent. Complacency is the last hurdle standing between a team and its (destiny).”

He cites the last-second shot by Ralph Sampson in the 1986 playoffs, which threw the Lakers out of the tournament that year. “Complacency had come to collect.”

For Riley, the art of leadership is the art of recognizing the onset of “the disease of me,” the epidemiology of complacency and the moment when a team starts to fragment and is no longer whole.

He cites the time he took over the leadership of the fragmented Knicks.

“All the sources said, ‘They just don’t like each other. There’s a lot of cliques.’ ”

So, Riley set 12 chairs in a room, separated them in groups of two or three, called the roll of people to sit in them by clique and identified them as not a team but a body of warring factions.

“We got to field one team, not three,” Riley told them. “These divisions show up on court, in selfishness, in failing to work hard for each other. It’s taking us right down the tubes!”

It worked. The chairs came together. So did the Knicks. They became a team, not a turmoil. They might even have become a championship one, but they ran into that perennial championship team--Michael Jordan.

Unless they can get that team fighting with himself, the Knicks’ winner within will be frustrated by that winner without. When they deal with that, only then will they be able to enjoy the life of Riley.