This Decision Is Just Like Coach: Tough

Time was, the truth would set you free.

These days, it only gets you fired.

So it went Monday for Bill Fitch, who suffered the same fate he often bestowed on his players, that of being quickly and unceremoniously benched.

Only he didn’t whine about it.

He didn’t gripe to the media, he didn’t run to a higher power, he didn’t make snide remarks under his breath and blame everyone but himself.

He handled it as he always expected his players to handle things, like an adult.

Which, of course, was why he was fired in the first place.

“We had a terrible season,” Fitch said from his home after the firing. “It was really tough to get through that. It was really hard to grow through that.”

For four years, he told it like it was, unafraid to bench the star or teach the phenom.

But for most of four years, his team refused to believe it like it is.

If only Rodney Rogers had acknowledged that he needed to chill out . . . or Brent Barry acknowledged that he needed to play defense . . . or Stanley Roberts had looked in a mirror.

Unfortunately, in today’s NBA, the attitude of the Clipper players was not unusual.

The attitude of the coach was.

So it went Monday for Bill Fitch, the best pure basketball coach in this town, tossed out for being in the wrong place at the worst time.

Did the Clippers have to do this?

For the sake of their marketing, absolutely. This was their savviest business decision since they ordered the Sports Arena ushers to keep the cheap ticket-holders from sneaking out of the cheap seats.

With one season remaining before their move into the Staples Center, the Clippers will spend the next 17 months behaving as if it is New Year’s Eve.

As everyone on Donald Sterling’s block knows, nobody goes outside on New Year’s Eve without a new haircut.

Firing Bill Fitch and eating the remaining two years of his contract was like getting a $4-million haircut.

It hurt, but the Clippers are convinced it will make them look more attractive in the waning hours before the new arena lights come up.

And they are probably right.

A flashy new coach like George Karl--my early favorite for the job--will sell a lot more suites than a plumber like Bill Fitch.

And goodness, the Clippers did win only 17 games this season, and only 99 of the 328 games Fitch coached here, about 30%.

It will be a lot easier for the ticket salesman to blame one coach than years of bad personnel decisions.

And after all, in a month or so, the team across town could be firing a coach who won 61 games this year, and the Lakers will be cheered.

This success-hungry town is that kind of place, which can be neat.

It’s this attitude that stinks.

It seems nowhere outside of Salt Lake City--where Jerry Sloan has spent 10 years essentially imitating Bill Fitch--can a tough guy survive without winning an NBA championship.

The players have to like you, their agents have to love you, your team accountant has to give you a good performance review . . .

“You’ve got a 12-man roster, and five of them may love if you start and play them 48 minutes every night,” Fitch said. “But if you have to win a vote, and you don’t have a sixth man who runs in there right after ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ then you’re gonna get beat 7-5 every time.”

Then, Fitch said, there are all the other people who coach the coach.

“There are so many people in the pecking order,” he said. “Your team gets beat, and even if they played hard and learned something, by the time everyone gets done pecking at you, you end up in team accountant’s office with a problem about per diem.”

Plenty of coaches handle the pecking, and handle it well. The amazing thing about Phil Jackson is not that he has won all those championships, but that he has done so by not selling out.

It is Fitch’s curse that he cannot be Phil Jackson.

It will be his legacy that he refused to believe in anything other than teaching and winning.

He wasn’t supposed to hold three-hour practices in a sweltering neighborhood Carson gym in the middle of the season, but he did.

He wasn’t supposed to bench high-scoring players who refused to play defense, but he did.

His doctors told him to stop studying films until 3 a.m., but he wouldn’t.

“It works,” Fitch said of his methods, “but you’ve got to be doing it with the right people.”

Last spring, for two splendid weeks, the Clippers were the right people.

Outmanned during a first-round playoff sweep by Utah, the Clippers nonetheless fought the Jazz to the floor, literally, scratching and shoving and pushing them harder than the Lakers later did. For three games, Fitch stalked the sidelines like an inspired professor emeritus, directing and nagging and ultimately making his players believe.

Then came the summer, always the worst part of any Clipper year.

Bo Outlaw and Malik Sealy left the team because they were tired of being Clippers. Loy Vaught started feeling back pain that later caused him to miss the season. Darrick Martin somehow lost his April magic.

A new season started, and the aura of the hopelessly overmatched Clippers returned, and in the end, the old coach never stood a chance.

His last victory was something he probably doesn’t even consider a victory.

Brent Barry, never able to understand Fitch was simply trying to make him better, was traded to Miami . . . where Pat Riley quickly discovered Fitch was right.

The old coach never stopped working, never stopped nagging.

When he discovered a couple of his players were leaving town on the first plane out Sunday morning after a late Saturday night season finale, he asked them, “You’re staying that long?”

It will be great fun in the next couple of months trying to figure out which hotshot will replace Bill Fitch.

But it might be appropriate to pause a second and remember the era that has disappeared with him.