An Escape to . . . ny : Don Nelson Left the Peace and Tranquillity of Maui to Return to Turmoil of NBA as Coach of Knicks

Spike Lee has left the building.

Two strangers sat in his $1,000-a-game courtside seats when the Portland Trail Blazers were in town. There was a Jack Nicholson sighting, but it was in Miami where Pat Riley now works, not in Madison Square Garden, where celebrities are fleeing as fast as their limos can take them. The biggest danger for Knick fans is no longer disappointment, but being knocked down by a departing supermodel or sitcom star.

Despite an 18-6 start that qualified as one of the underappreciated miracles of the season, Knick players have been acting as if they had one eye on the door too, and their 4-7 record since, going into tonight’s game against the Clippers, shows it.

Patrick Ewing, one-time good soldier, complained about the new offense and many of the new coach’s initiatives. So did Anthony Mason, installed as the focal point of the offense. Team grump Charles Oakley, an equal-opportunity complainant, zinged everyone. Team leader Derek Harper suggested everyone zip their lips, but at 34, he’s at the end of his contract and has yet to be told he’ll be back, so how long can they count on him to keep his head on straight?

Young hopefuls Doug Christie, Monty Williams and Charlie Ward, who thought they would play this season, failed auditions. The local papers chronicled their grief as exhaustively as if they were boat people.

For this, Don Nelson left Maui?

Nelson says he missed the sense of family that coaching may afford (to say nothing of the money, power and fame), but this team is not only dysfunctional, it’s someone else’s. The Knicks were built by Riley to play a game the mirror opposite of Nelson’s. They’re haunted by the title they missed under Riley and measured by Riley’s unforgiving standards. It doesn’t matter if they’re aging, declining or overmatched, they’re supposed to compete for a title. They had better because management just doubled the price of courtside seats.

Management is on the usual merry-go-round. Within three years, Paramount, which hired Dave Checketts and Riley, merged with Viacom and spun off Madison Square Garden to ITT and Cablevision. MSG, with its prime Manhattan location, basketball and hockey teams and cable TV networks, is a $1.07-billion empire, too expensive for an individual, which means corporate ownership, bureaucracy and intrigue of the kind that just finished off the Riley-Checketts alliance.

Checketts, the survivor, must prove his economic mettle to his new boss, he’s more inclined to patch on the fly than rebuild.

And who gets to bridge the widening gap between reality and aspiration?

Let’s have a big New York welcome for Don Nelson.

“A lot of people told me I was crazy,” Nelson said recently in his office at the team’s training site in Purchase, N.Y., “because the team was going down and it was a terrible place and the press is awful and they’ll run you out of town--all that kind of stuff.

“And I listened, but it never impressed me that that would be a reason why I shouldn’t take the job.”

He didn’t think the Knicks’ decline was irreversible. Nelson, who had won 817 of 1,421 regular-season NBA games, can always think of something.

He didn’t think New York was a terrible place. He was one of those Illinois farm boys who dreamed of being the toast of the Great White Way.

Besides, he needed to work. He’s a coach. It’s what they do.

Heaven help them.

*

Nelson was rich.

He was making more than $1 million a year with the Golden State Warriors (Riley once called Nelson to ask for advice in negotiating his own deal). When Warrior owner Jim Fitzgerald, Nelson’s long-time patron, sold the team last summer, he gave Nelson a cut--estimated at $4 million--of the sale price.

But Nelson was a poor boy at heart.

He was raised on a hog farm by a father named Arvid Nelson who was so tight, he squeaked. Once Arvid took young Don to a dentist to have a tooth pulled. Told a shot of painkiller for the lad would cost $5, Arvid told the dentist just to pull it.

“He figured I could stand it, I guess,” said Nelson, laughing. “That’s not right. If he’d have told me, I’d have gone and got the five bucks myself.”

Nelson became a basketball star, but above the college level, athletically, he was a bumpkin. He lasted 14 seasons in the NBA and played on five champions on intelligence, dedication and the good fortune of finding someone--Red Auerbach--who recognized it.

If playing was a reach for Nelson, coaching was perfect. He became an idol in Milwaukee, where he built a winning team, wore fish ties and drove a tractor around Wisconsin to raise funds for poor farmers.

Fitzgerald was then the Bucks’ owner, and Nelson’s era didn’t outlast his by much. Shortly after Fitzgerald sold the team, Nelson fell out with the new owner, resigned and went back to work for Fitzgerald, who had just bought the Warriors.

Nelson coached with his heart, rescuing players and careers. He helped Chris Mullin through alcoholism, brought back exiled-to-Europe George Karl as an assistant, taught players such as Avery Johnson things that raised them from journeyman to starter, unearthed one Continental Basketball Assn. unknown after another: Vincent Askew, Mario Elie, John Starks. . . .

They built what looked like a rising power in Golden State until Nelson met the youth rebellion with a thunderclap that laid waste to an entire franchise and sent shock waves throughout the league.

Briefly, Nelson traded Billy Owens, angering Chris Webber who was already up to here with Nelson because he didn’t like being yelled at. Webber demanded a trade that--in the worst mistake of Nelson’s professional life--was granted, turning the team ordinary overnight, infuriating pro-Nelson veterans such as Tim Hardaway and Webber intimates such as Latrell Sprewell.

Sprewell, another project who had flowered under Nelson, quit on the spot. The whole team was a basket case. Nelson, once the most powerful of coaches, the only three-time NBA coach of the year, became a shell of himself. Illness and depression finished him; he almost begged to be fired.

“What happened was the No. 1 pick in the draft [Webber] ended up in a youth rebellion--or whatever term you want to use--and that led to some other young people getting on board and rebelling with him,” Nelson said.

“The mistake I made was, I got the team too young, too many young players. The veterans who I expected to teach my young were injured when I needed them most: Mullin and Hardaway. . . . We had the same problems the first year [with Webber]. We won 50 games and we controlled it until that summer. After the team broke for the summer, it was never going to get back together. We got through it OK, but it wasn’t an enjoyable 50-win season because we had so many problems.”

The young players were outrageous, but Nelson had changed too. Once easy-going and humble, he was now secretive, always, it seemed, working on one scam or another while insisting on his innocence. He vowed to quit coaching before trading Webber, then traded him.

The blowup consumed them all. Owens admits he punted the season in Miami. Webber went to Washington for Tom Gugliotta and led the Bullets to a 21-61 season. Nelson left. The Warriors snookered themselves again, trading Gugliotta to Minnesota for Donyell Marshall, a bench warmer with six more years and $24 million left on his contract.

The Warriors are no longer regarded as a rising power.

*

When you have spent your adult life living by your wits, a retirement in Maui, where Nelson and his wife, Joy, had a home, must seem a little . . . quiet.

It was, and when Riley left and Chuck Daly turned the Knicks down, Nelson jumped at their offer.

Nelson says he always wanted to experience New York and he is. Now the man who looked like an old sofa after games has an endorsement deal for Tommy Hilfiger suits--and still looks like an old sofa after games. He and Joy live in leafy Greenwich, Conn., like Riley, and after games, sometimes go to Elaine’s, like Riley; the New York Daily News reported Nelson gets Riley’s old table.

“I missed the association with a team where you’re trying to build something together--ownership, the general manager, assistant coaches,” Nelson said. “You know, that kind of a thing.

“Because it’s kind of like family. And it’s all the same in every situation you’re in. And that’s really fun, doing things like that.

“It’s a hard job. I tell my wife every day it’s a hard job. I can’t tell you I don’t dream about Maui every couple of days, but there’s a lot of rewards too and financial is one of them, for sure. And then watching the young guys--they do change as they go through their lives.

“They start out at 19, 20, 22, at a certain level. Like Gary Grant. Someone wrote an article about him. You know you mature as you go through life and you make some changes and they’re positive changes for young people.”

Grant, the former Clipper party animal, is one of Nelson’s latest reclamation projects, along with Mason, who has been converted from heavy to point forward, a concept Nelson invented for Paul Pressey in Milwaukee and one that been copied for players such as Scottie Pippen and Grant Hill.

If this were a fair test, Nelson would figure out something, but it’s not. Checketts is trying to figure out how to trade a 32-year-old power forward like Oakley for a 26-year-old star like Jim Jackson. Breaking the Knicks up is a last resort; New York may understand but won’t pay $1,000 a night to see it.

For the moment, Nelson has all he can do to foster the illusion the Knicks are still an elite team. Whatever happens, he says he can deal with it. That’s good because he isn’t working for Fitzgerald anymore and this isn’t Milwaukee.

On the other hand, it is a job.

“I felt bad that it was perceived that I was a dinosaur, but people that I care about didn’t believe it,” Nelson said.

“I didn’t believe it. I knew it wasn’t true. My mother still loved me. I mean, if I would fail at this job and get fired--which is probably going to happen eventually, you’re going to get fired from every job--it has no effect, really.”

It just feels bad for a while.

“This is him,” Knick forward Charles Smith told New York magazine’s Gary Smith. “This thing, the NBA, is part of him. He’ll be wheeled out before he can’t coach any more.”

New York loves a challenge.