You Really Should See Act Two

The conversation, as happens this time of the year, quickly turned to coach of the year in basketball. Jim Harrick was a hands-down winner in the college phase, but the pro game provided lively argument.

Del Harris has turned the Lakers into potential 50-game winners.

Bob Hill of the San Antonio Spurs was proposed. But it was pointed out he had the Admiral, David Robinson, his own self, in the pivot and the Worm, Dennis Rodman, pulling down those rebounds. Who couldn’t win with those troops?

A few held out for Phoenix’s Paul Westphal, but there was Charles Barkley to be concerned with. Does Sir Charles really need a coach?

Phil Jackson of the Chicago Bulls had pulled the coup of the year, finding a banjo-hitting baseball player and persuading him to try basketball. But maybe he had Donald Fehr to thank for the return of Michael Jordan. If the Bulls win it all again, maybe Fehr is the coach of the year.

Then the bombshell proposal hit the table. Maybe Bill Fitch was the coach of the year.

Bill Fitch!? Sixteen and 60-something? Sure!

Of course, you had to take into consideration Coach Bill had the Dream Team.

The Clippers.

They dream of being in the playoffs, they dream of playing .500, they dream mostly of getting traded out of there.

That other Dream Team had Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson, Karl Malone. Fitch’s Dreamers have Michael Smith, an Outlaw, several four-points-a-night guards, and their own basketball. That’s not a team, that’s a suicide note.

When Fitch was put in charge of this army without banners, it reminded some of the general who had been put in charge of the routed French Army in 1940 who said, “They have handed me a disaster.”

The Clippers were like that man-eating plant. They ate coaches alive. Or sent them screaming into the night. The smarter ones, like Larry Brown, kept the motor running and suitcase handy when they took the job. Great players like Danny Manning, Dominique Wilkins, Ken Norman and Ron Harper kept going over the wall. You would have thought the Clippers were a leper colony. Every game was like an Italian opera. Everybody dies coughing in the end.

Some thought Fitch hadn’t been paying enough attention when he took the job. He was like Little Red Riding Hood failing to notice that was a wolf in grandma’s clothing.

Not so, Fitch said when we caught up with him at the Sports Arena the other night where his Clippers had just lost their 60th game of the season, rather embarrassingly to the Sacramento Kings, whom nobody ever mistook for the 1960 Celtics.

“I’ve been through this before,” he pointed out. “When I took over the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1970, we went 15-67. A couple of years later, we were 49-33 and won the division. When I took over the New Jersey Nets in 1989, we went 17- 65. Two years later, we won 40.”

When he took over the Boston Celtics in 1979, he was inheriting a team that had finished last with a 29-53 record. They went 61-21 under Fitch and won the division title.

Outstanding strategy? Fitch grins. “No,” he says, “Larry Bird.”

His first season at Houston, the team won 29 games. The next year, the team won 49 and the following year, 51. Coaching genius? No, Fitch tells you, “Olajuwon.”

Adds Fitch: “They have a nice custom in this business: You finish low, you draft high. We just need a couple of players better than our best player.”

Since he had major input in the selections of Bird and Olajuwon, he believes he can help find a solution for the Clippers.

So why doesn’t L.A., which has had some image problems of its own of late, take the Clippers to its heart? Like the city itself, the Clippers just can’t seem to get it right. Why aren’t they a cult following, like the 1962 Mets? Why doesn’t owner Donald Sterling rate the sympathy Gene Autry evokes? Is L.A. ashamed of them? Are we a town that only cottons to the overdog?

Finally, are the Clippers a bunch of underachievers or is 16 victories a major accomplishment?

What can a coach do? A Rockne would call out the emotional harangues. But you can’t win one for the old Gipper in basketball in 1995. You win one for the old paycheck.

“Oh, I yell at them. And they yell at me,” Fitch concedes. “But the thing I like about this team is, they don’t just accept defeat. They go out there every night as though this were the seventh game of the playoffs. If they just went out there like a bunch of guys going to the electric chair, or if they just went though the motions, you’d say the hell with them. But they play just as hard when they’re down by 20 as they do when they’re up by two. They don’t go out there downcast.”

They frequently come back downcast. But they are not the most inept team in NBA history. That dishonor belongs to the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers, who won only nine games and lost 73. They are not even the worst Clipper team. That would be the ‘86-87 bunch that won 12 and lost 70. Dallas was 11-71 in 1992-93 and improved only to 13-69 the next year.

Those who expected to find Coach Fitch in a straitjacket, poised on a ledge or on his way out of town by this time were disappointed.

“Are you going to stick around?” he is asked.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “I’ve seen this play before. It gets better.”

You always wait for the second act before you get your hat, is Bill’s belief. There’s nothing wrong with the Clippers that a Hakeem Olajuwon or Michael Jordan couldn’t fix. If there’s one out there, Bill Fitch will spot him. There’s nothing that makes you better able to spot a good player than looking at a lot of bad ones.

If he is chosen coach of the year, then he can always say, “Thanks. But I did a better job in 1994-95.”