Basketball Finally Takes Fitch to Heart

The old coach returned to the main stage Friday night, and somebody should have put a frame around him.

The crooked stance, the folded arms, the gaunt stare, the piece of gum doing 100 mph inside the tight jaw.

Three months after emergency heart surgery, the old coach was where he was supposed to be, standing in front of a gang of runts, staring down another bully.

The outmanned Clippers lost by seven points to the Lakers at the Forum, 15 points fewer than it should have been. Yet the old coach scuffed his leather on the hardwood trying to figure it out.

“These guys are unsung heroes trying to get the job done,” Bill Fitch said of his Clippers. “Coaching them is what I do for a living.”

And what a living it is these days for the old coach, a treasure finally being treasured, lauded with letters and calls and congratulations at every NBA stop.

Congratulations not for actually coaxing the Clippers to play hard every night against overwhelming odds, which he has done.

Congratulations not for winning half of his first eight games without Brian Williams or Brent Barry, which he has also done.

Congratulation for simply being Bill Fitch, a name that no longer induces shrugs, but salutes.

In a cynical NBA world that only now realizes how close it came to losing him, basketball’s losingest coach has become one of its most endeared ones.

“Usually, when somebody sends all these cards and flowers and fruit, you’re dead, and you don’t know anything about it,” Fitch said. “I’m lucky. I know.”

As Fitch has shown in this season’s first three weeks, it is this town that is lucky.

We can watch a guy who has coached more games than anyone in his league’s history still coaching as though that night’s game was his first.

“Is Bill Fitch fun to play for?” Clipper guard Eric Piatkowski said. “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

They’ve been saying exactly that for 38 years now, since Fitch started coaching at Coe College in Iowa.

Twelve years later he was in Cleveland with the expansion Cavaliers, one of the worst teams in basketball history, a stone that sunk his winning percentage forever.

With the exception of coaching an NBA championship team in Boston in 1981, he has since been best known for taking Cleveland-type clubs and making them better.

He has not so much coached as chewed bullets. But in early August it wasn’t indigestion that led girlfriend Joni Nelson to drive him to the Texas hospital while his chest burned.

Tests showed that three of Fitch’s heart vessels were at least 75% blocked. An immediate bypass was followed by an immediate decision.

“The doctor told him four to six weeks, I looked at him, and I knew,” Nelson said. “There was never any question he was going to coach again.”

Unlike Los Angeles baseball counterpart Tom Lasorda. Unlike many other 61-year-old men with a newly implanted zipper in their chest.

“They told Tom Lasorda that it had a chance of coming back, and it did,” he said, referring to heart problems.

And what did they tell Fitch about the dangerous condition returning?

“I’m not going to let it,” he said.

Colleagues who used to walk into his hotel room at 3 a.m. and discover him watching films with a remote control in one hand, and a pizza slice in the other, were not surprised.

“If he’s walking, he’s coaching,” said Del Harris, Laker coach. “He is what a coach should be.”

But who could have thought he would come back like this?

He is 15 pounds lighter, but solid as ever.

He checks his pulse and blood pressure in his office after every game, but is still feisty as ever.

He eats salads, but is tougher than weeds.

“I don’t sense much difference,” Piatkowski said. “If you don’t do it his way, you don’t play.”

He is one win from his 1,000th loss but, considering 229 of those losses came in his first four years in Cleveland, one might think he would be proud of that statistics’ tribute to longevity.

One would be wrong.

“It’s not something I’ll brag about,” he said.

He is the leader of an increasingly lovable band of underdogs, of outsiders in a one-Laker town, and you might think he would relish the position.

One would be wrong.

“It’s hard when people make jokes about you, don’t care to come see you play,” he said. “It hurts your players, it’s not nearly as much fun.”

He shook his head. “I want to be top dog in this town.”

So he continues to throw down fives against aces, shuffling and scheming and letting the guy across the table know that he will stay there until they make him leave.

He was asked about Cotton Fitzsimmons’ sudden resignation from his position of coach of the Phoenix Suns.

“They gave Cotton one of those things inside that say, ‘I’ve had enough,’ ” he said. “They didn’t give me one of those things.”

So Friday night he took the main stage with Stanley Roberts on Shaquille O’Neal, and Pooh Richardson on Nick Van Exel, and Bo Outlaw on Eddie Jones.

He had no chance, but being a man of no sunsets, he had every chance.

Did you read two months ago where he promised that for the first time in his three years in Los Angeles, he was going to drive from his Manhattan Beach home to the beach? To momentarily forget basketball and recognize his mortality by appreciating his surroundings?

He lied.

“I’ll get there,” he said.

We hope not.