CRUISE CONTROL

Doug Collins is what you’d have if the boy next door grew up to become a basketball star, coach and boss of his own NBA team. Of course, if you had been able to see into the future, you might have told the little tyke to become an accountant and save wear and tear on everyone’s nervous system.

Among the best, brightest and most mercurial, Collins has crossed the sky like a meteor. Unfortunately, meteors burn out or crash, and he has done that too.

A four-time all-star, he played 60 games in only three of his eight seasons and finished unfulfilled and unwanted. As a coach, he improved his first Chicago Bull team by 10 victories, his second by another 10, made the conference finals with his third and was then fired.

In Detroit--between gigs he was an award-winning TV commentator--he improved the Pistons from 28 victories to 46, lost Allan Houston to free agency and now, when he’s supposed to be struggling to make the playoffs, is on pace to hit 60.

He has a long-term multimillion-dollar contract and operational control. He’s the coach of the East All-Stars, as excited as only he can be.

“I love the game,” Collins says, boyish and breathless as ever. “It’s been something--I was a kid from southern Illinois whose life and the passion that I have, everything runs through the thread of basketball.

“Everything in my life has been through basketball.”

That includes a lot of highs and lows, although he says he’s mellower as the 45-year-old coach of the Pistons than he was as the 35-year-old coach of the Bulls.

Imagine what he must have been like 10 years ago. Last week Terry Mills, a 6-foot-10 forward with a fondness for desserts who once challenged him to fight, made a key three-point basket against the Milwaukee Bucks. Collins ran up to him, grabbed his face in both hands and kissed him on the lips.

Said Collins: “It was a beautiful moment.”

Said Mills: “I don’t want another one.”

*

Where Collins comes from, somewhere between Norman Rockwell and real life, little boys don’t get jaded.

Born in the hamlet of Benton, Ill., the son of the local sheriff (for years, they lived adjacent to the jail since his dad was obliged to provide meals for the prisoners), he was one of those mop-topped kids living out their dreams, however improbable, on driveway courts.

He was a million-to-one. He wasn’t simply small, he was slow too. In a high school with a few hundred students, he didn’t dress with the varsity as a freshman or sophomore. He didn’t start as a junior.

“His physical structure,” says Rich Herrin, who coached him at Benton and is now at Southern Illinois, “as a sophomore, he was about 5-9, 150 pounds. His junior year, he was about 6-1, 135 pounds. . . .

“We didn’t have a lot of weight equipment. We had a leg press. We did rope skipping, quickness drills with spats on our ankles--I’m not sure that didn’t have a detrimental effect on his ankles. He ran cross-country, he ran track. He did anything he could do to build himself up. Quickness drills aren’t any secret, you just have to pay the price.”

Collins played in the morning before school and in the evening after practice. When Herrin went on scouting trips, Doug came too, to see other high schools or area colleges with players like Southern Illinois’ Walt Frazier or Earl Monroe when he came through with Winston-Salem or Phil Jackson of North Dakota.

At the end of his junior season, Collins came off the bench to make five consecutive shots--”Now they’d be five three-pointers,” Herrin says--in a regional finals upset. As a senior, newly sprouted to 6-3, he was all-state.

He was still a small-town boy, though. He turned down the University of Illinois, which hadn’t paid much attention to him. Herrin thought it best to avoid Southern Illinois’ flinty Jack Hartman--”As a young boy, Doug was really tenderhearted; he didn’t take criticism too well”--so Collins enrolled at Illinois State, where he emerged for real.

By the end of his junior year, he was an Olympian. He made the free throws that would have won the title game until the Russians got three tries to win and stole their gold medal. He was 6-6 and 180, blade thin, bottled lightning. One NBA general manager called him, “Quickest white boy I’ve ever seen.”

The Philadelphia 76ers took him with the first pick in the 1973 draft, and he emerged there too, playing as if possessed. His cuts were so violent, he shredded sneakers, tearing the tops of his leather adidas right off the soles. He was so high-strung, a writer called him “ragingly insecure”; Collins later said he liked the piece. Teammates called him “Scoop” because he was so eager for the latest information.

It was a dream come true, except for his feet. He had one stress fracture after another. In anguish, he saw his friendship with teammate-turned-taskmaster coach Billy Cunningham splinter. In his last three seasons, Collins played 95 games, so estranged that trainer Al Domenico refused to tape his ankles.

Collins became an assistant coach at Arizona State, then a television commentator before getting his big break, the Bulls’ head coaching job.

The Bulls were a bedraggled crew, a bunch of used-up veterans and Michael Jordan, then starting his third season. The season before, when he’d missed 64 games, they’d gone 30-52.

Collins tightened up the defense (they rose from No. 17 to No. 2) and made them rebound. In his third season, they took the Pistons, en route to their first championship, to six games in the conference finals.

The veterans like Dave Corzine and Gene Banks had been replaced by youngsters like Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant. Collins was hugely popular . . . right up to the day he was fired, without a hint of warning, the week after the draft.

Behind the scenes, the Bulls were a mess. Collins was either hugging players or screaming at them. Of course, Jordan got most of the hugs and they got all the screams.

Collins engaged in a power struggle with General Manager Jerry Krause, who had brought him in. Collins fought with his assistant coaches, barring Tex Winter from practice after Winter critiqued his work. Collins suspected Phil Jackson of spying for Krause and froze him out, talking to him only during games. Jackson succeeded Collins and now often leaves Jordan and the first team on the floor against Collins’ Pistons to run up the scores.

“I’ll admit it,” Collins later told the Chicago Tribune, “when I got into it, it was for recognition. I felt like I was robbed of my career because of injuries and maybe gave up the game too soon. I was fighting for my life in Chicago from Day 1.”

He lost.

For six seasons, he was a widely praised TBS color commentator, but it wasn’t that inner-core thing. He waited for his son, Chris, to finish his Duke career, flying from Chicago to Durham to watch games, then entertained coaching offers. When the Pistons offered to let him call personnel shots too, he was back.

Says Collins: “I looked at the Pistons--I think Marty Schottenheimer said it the other day, ‘There’s three things to being a coach: the owner, the owner and the owner.’ Mr. [Bill] Davidson is the best. And he believes in me and he’s given me the opportunity to put my imprint on the Detroit Pistons. . . . I think he believes in the quality of people I want in the organization, the type of play, the way we try to represent ourselves on and off the court.

“And as long as all that’s there, the love, for me, can be there. It’s when you get in crises and controversies and have all these different thoughts and get pulled in all these different directions, is when a coach gets strung out. Then you have no chance. . . .”

*

Collins says he can change. Really.

“A reputation is always about seven years behind you,” he says. “So it’s going to take a while to change what people think about me. But I know what they think is not the case. The key thing is I know my team believes in me.”

For a honeymoon, his first Piston season, which ended with their first playoff appearance in four years, was pretty intense. As Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune put it, “Everyone thought he [Collins] stopped wearing a tie so he wouldn’t be able to hang himself.”

Collins cried when the Orlando Magic swept them in three games. He made little secret of his disappointment with Grant Hill, the budding superstar he hoped to mold in the image of Jordan, the one he had worshiped and who had been taken from him.

At Collins’ introductory news conference, he promised Hill wasn’t going to “hide in the last three minutes of games.” But in his first NBA playoffs, Hill stepped back rather than up. Collins turned the offense over to Houston.

Hill held his tongue, but there were reports the new Prince Valiant was upset at his liege lord. It looked like the Chicago days where players complained Collins accepted credit while apportioning blame to others, shrilly.

“Last year was very hard because the bottom dropped out,” Collins says. “There was no pride. Joe Dumars was dressing in a separate locker room, going out late to warmups. . . . Grant Hill, Allan Houston and Lindsey Hunter didn’t understand what you had to do on the pro level to win. Terry Mills could average 15 points and eight rebounds, but they were losing numbers.

“Last year was by design. I knew what I was doing.”

The summer was not by design. The Pistons were $5 million under the cap, which, with the popular Hill, seemed to make them one of the big dogs. Then Houston stunned them, departing for New York, and they were dead dogs. Juwan Howard, their first option, wasn’t interested with Houston gone. They passed on the pricey Dikembe Mutombo.

Now they were an uninspiring group--Don Reid and Otis Thorpe at center?--in a conference with improved entries like the Atlanta Hawks, Knicks, Miami Heat and Washington Bullets, plus old standbys in Chicago, the Indiana Pacers and what was left of Orlando. Preseason predictions had them down the line somewhere.

Instead, they hit the All-Star break with the league’s third-best record.

Collins backed off Hill--”Last year, I had to push Grant Hill, this year I don’t”--and found a scheme that worked, Hill penetrating with Dumars, Hunter and Mills on the arc, waiting for the defense to collapse on Grant. Hill leads the team in points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals and minutes.

It won’t get them a title, but there’s still a world out there to be won after you-know-who retires. The Pistons have only about $20 million tied up after next season, putting them in prime position for the next big shopping opportunity in the summer of ’98. Their long-term prospects will be excellent if Collins can keep from burning out himself and everyone else in the short term.

“I would never have dreamed we would do what we’ve done,” Collins says, “but that’s the beauty of the game. You have to play them all. I think that’s what our team does. . . .

“I’d like to maybe do this [coaching], oh, maybe seven, eight years and then--it’s too taxing. You know, it is. Pat Williams [former 76er general manager] had a great line a long time ago, he said, ‘It’s a suffering business.’

“And it’s getting more suffering because all the things that go into it. The media, the scrutiny, everything is just getting larger and larger and larger. And it takes its toll after a while. See, because you always have to answer for something.”

For one glorious weekend, anyway, he doesn’t have anything to answer for that isn’t wonderful.

It may look like Cleveland to everyone else, but to Doug Collins, it’ll be Paradise.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Collins as a Coach

Head coaching record of Piston Coach Doug Collins: *--*

YEAR TEAM W-L PCT 1986-87 Bulls 40-42 .488 1987-88 Bulls 50-32 .610 1988-89 Bulls 47-35 .573 1995-96 Pistons 46-36 .561 1996-97 Pistons 34-12 .733

*--*

PLAYOFFS: Qualified for playoffs each season. Reached the Eastern Conference semifinals in 1988 and 1989.