The Tense Life of Riley : Ex-Laker Coach Undergoes Drastic Transformation From Cool Leader to Tough-Guy Mentor With Knicks

Riles, are you in there?

You still look the same, like a model on a runway, but this can’t be Pat Riley they’re talking about.

Donnie Walsh, the Pacers’ president, says you’ve “gone from an orchestra leader in L.A. to Hannibal Lecter with this team.”

Your buddy, Bulls Coach Phil Jackson, suggests you’re running a police state.

“Like, his players can’t talk to my players,” says Jackson. “His coaches can’t talk to my coaches. That’s the difference in our style. My style is open. I close my practices as he does but my style is open. Freedom with the basketball club, closed basketball team.”

Remember when you were a Laker?

If your name ever came up, people said you were the luckiest man alive and you agreed and that was that. If they wanted to be mean, they said you were coaching a bunch of softies. By way of an answer, you won four titles and made the finals seven times in nine seasons.

You talked about grace and athleticism and giving your players freedom to express themselves on the floor.

Now you are coaching the Knicks and you say, “The game of the ‘90s has become a game of force where people say, ‘I’m going to impose my will on you.’ ”

Lo and behold, here you are again in the finals, with a team that went 39-43 the season before you arrived and ate up five coaches in five years. Maybe it is a game of force. Maybe everything has changed.

Maybe nothing has changed?

“It’s not any different at all,” says Riley.

“I’ve been part of two great organizations that had talented players and managements that were committed to doing everything they could do to win. I’m a lot more experienced now. I don’t approach it any differently.”

*

Actually, he’s right.

The changes started well before he left the Lakers, although it was little noted and dimly appreciated.

In the beginning, he was just the lucky stiff sitting one seat down when the high-stepping Laker players offed Paul Westhead. By 1985 when they overcame their Celtic curse, he’d become a real coach and by the back-to-back titles of 1987-88, he had taken over the program.

They were widely written off in 1986 when Houston’s Twin Towers toppled them and everyone, including Riley, said they needed another tower. But every year as the Lakers’ scoring average dropped, their defensive average came down with it. That was Riley’s contribution and it was critical.

Magic Johnson calls him the difference in the ‘80s. Celtic players unhorsed their own hard case, Bill Fitch, got an easy rider who’d do it their way in K.C. Jones and won three titles. Riley drove the aging Lakers to two more titles in ’87 and ’88 to give them five in the decade.

Two years later, Riley was gone. He kept getting hungrier and his players kept getting older.

They went up in a puff of smoke in 1990 in a five-game upset at the hands of the Suns, by which time Riley had alienated himself from the players and worn down his last defender, Johnson.

“What happened,” says Johnson, “was he made more money, commercials and things than players. He became a national figure, bigger than some of the players. And then, with the complaints--he just had to go.

“It wasn’t any two ways about it, It was one way. He had to go. It wasn’t because he was not a good coach . . . . He could never come back to that team and coach those guys.”

Riley, having poured the passion of his youth into the Lakers, was heartbroken at leaving and dismayed all over when reports of hard feelings leaked.

For two years, he refused to acknowledge it before telling his one-time NBC partner, Bob Costas:

“The thing I regret most about it is how it ended. I looked at that Laker team in the ‘80s as a team that was significant, that was unique, that did things no one ever did. And one of the things that we had there was the sense of being family and being solid.

“It ended a little bit bitter and it ended a little toxicly and to me, I regretted the fact that the team would not embrace protecting the ‘80s . . . . I’m just talking about the team. When it comes down to it, it’s really 12 players, three coaches, really. Those are the people that go through it. I mean, management is very, very important but the ones that are on the floor, that are sweating, that are going through the whole thing, the ups, the downs, are the ones that have to preserve that time. And you preserve it by protecting each other, by taking care of each other.

“And I’m sure, five to 10 years from now, when we look back on that time, nobody’s going to remember that last year. But there’ll be someone who remembers and they’ll say, ‘Well, they fragmented.’ You know? ‘They couldn’t keep it together.’

“It’s still going on. It was too good and it was too glorious and it doesn’t happen that much . . . . That’s what I wanted most out of that thing and I don’t feel it was that way.” He hasn’t looked back since.

“It was a great moment in my past,” he said a few days ago. “It’s over with . . . . I’m not as sentimental about it as I used to be.”

*

He’s never really been Riles in New York.

Riles was that nice, down-to-earth guy who’d been a Laker all his life, who hung out on the beach in Santa Monica, did color for Chick Hearn, went out with the press guys as a young coach and gave them the lowdown on everything, even if there was little left of that incarnation left by late ‘80s.

He arrived in New York with a program worked out to the most minute detail, including the proper placement of podium, VCR and TV in a meeting room and the arrangement of a dining room for team dinners: round tables seating four players, cloth napkins folded into triangles.

That was just the window dressing.

The heart of it was the practice schedule. Two-hour drills were standard for the NBA, and off-days common. Riley often went three hours and gave them only enough off-days to keep them off balance.

“Pat had an interesting theory on this,” says Dave Wohl, an ex-Laker assistant. “He felt . . . . if you backed off and made things easier, they would tend to respond less, that if you made things harder--for instance in the three years I was there, I don’t think he ever gave Magic a day off and Earvin worked very hard.

“But Pat’s theory was, ‘If I give Earvin a day off, he’s going to believe he needs a day off. There are days he’s going to begin to feel somewhat sorry for himself if he’s tired or there’s too big a burden. So what he’s going to do those games, he won’t bring his best. Not that he doesn’t want to but he’ll allow his body and mind to convince him that he can’t bring his best.’ ”

Of course, the Knicks’ bodies and minds would need a little work to get to that point.

“I heard he practiced tough but I didn’t think it would be like that,” says the Cavaliers’ Gerald Wilkins, then a Knick.

“His practices are long, long and hard. Everybody else’s practices are either short and medium hard, or short and hard. Or if they’re long, they’re not really as hard as his practices . . . . He demanded a lot. I guess that’s what I want to say.

“Practice started at 9:30. You look up, it’s 10:30, 11:30. OK, practice is getting ready to stop now. Well, 12, not yet, 12:30. All of a sudden it’s almost 1 o’clock. You know we’ve been in there three hours. The players have never done it. I don’t think any players in the league have done it.”

In their first season, the Knicks tied the Celtics for first place in the Atlantic Division--in 12 seasons Riley has never finished second--and took the Bulls to seven games in the Eastern semifinals.

Last season, they won their division, earned home-court advantage over the Bulls but lost to them in six games in the Eastern finals.

This season, with a little help from Michael Jordan, the Knicks made the finals. What was left of the Knicks, anyway.

*

Last season’s team would probably have plowed this field under but this season’s Knicks were undercut by injuries to John Starks, Doc Rivers and Charles Smith.

They had to find a point guard in the middle of the season and rehab Starks in the playoffs, five weeks after he underwent arthroscopic knee surgery.

Their offense, never potent, sagged. Before Game 7 of the Chicago series, Riley wrote 80 on the backboard in the dressing room; that was what he thought they had to hold the Bulls to in order to win.

They won, 87-77.

They had to go seven games, and come from 3-2 behind, to survive the Pacers.

They were suspected of being out on their feet coming into this series but they upended the Rockets in Game 2 . . . . before the Rockets turned around and upended them Sunday.

But the Rockets are going to have to go over Riley who is everywhere, demanding his players seize the moment (“If in some way shape or form this summer they’ll say, ‘Well, it was a great learning experience to get there, now we know what it’s all about,’ then they’re missing a great opportunity”), ordering them to start making their shots (“You’re a professional player that gets paid a lot of money, you make those shots. You make ‘em.”)

He is perfectly engrossed, perfectly miserable and perfectly fulfilled. If he steals this title, he’ll need a bigger bust in the Hall of Fame and he’ll be perfectly happy, at least for the summer.

Oh, he still keeps his watch on West Coast time. You’re still in there somewhere, aren’t you, Riles?