Let’s Forget Civil War Stuff and Keep This Series Civil

Can’t we all just get along: As the Heat and Knicks have demonstrated, this rivalry stuff can go too far.

In the hope that the lovely city of Seattle and our own beloved, sprawling, traffic-choked, 70-degrees-every-day-how-is-it-

where-you-are Los Angeles can survive this series, we’re asking all writers to treat it as a basketball contest, rather than a war of civic and cultural values.

There’s nothing wrong with Seattle, even if everyone there hates the Lakers. It has the mountains, Puget Sound, the islands, the ferries. It rains a lot, but you can breathe without checking the air quality index.

And, although there are few SuperSonic fans here, this is a fine place to live and would be even better if any of us could afford what we’re paying to live here. It’s a little slow on the 405 around 5 p.m., but then there’s the I-5 between Seattle and Tacoma.

Likewise, the “issues” that have dominated the last week have been a trifle overdone.

Shaquille O’Neal may, indeed, use his prodigious body to move defenders aside, but they seem to have a good time trying to saddle and ride him too. Trust me, George, if he had elbowed four or five of your guys in Game 1, you wouldn’t have had to tell the press about it. They’d have seen the players being carried to the ambulances on litters.

No, Shaq, George Karl isn’t a woman, or if he is, it’s one of the best-kept secrets in NBA history. In the playoffs, you have to discount anything coaches say, since they’re only trying to:

* Sway referees;

* Call players’ attention to any insults to fire them up;

* Insult players, themselves, if no one else will, to fire them up.

If you advance, Shaq, Jerry Sloan, who as a player would have taken a charge from a freight train, will start mewing like a kitten about what you’re doing to poor Greg Ostertag. If you meet the Bulls, forget the number. When Phil Jackson finishes his opening remarks, you’ll look like a worse menace than Godzilla.

On the bright side, maybe you can get a movie out of it!

(Hint to Shaq: Although you’ve been bombing him for 35 a game since, I don’t think Karl had anything to do with the West players jumping you in the ’94 All-Star game. I think they did it on their own because they were tired of seeing you in the ads for “Blue Chips.” You hoop, you rap, you act. It was all getting a bit much for them.)

Our own Pulitzer Prize-winning Jim Murray started this travelogue-from-hell thing, which has been copped by every writer who ever had an early column due, including yours truly. So when the Tacoma News Tribune’s John McGrath zinged one of our local institutions, Jerry West, in his penetrating analysis of the Laker media guide, he was just carrying on a proud tradition.

Of course, times have changed.

We have Jerry Springer these days. We have Latrell Sprewell. We have Pat Riley.

We have Alonzo Mourning dragging Jeff Van Gundy around by the ankle. Thank heaven, Mourning didn’t step on him or we might have had another round of suspensions, news conferences, hearings and possibly another walk-on by Johnnie Cochran.

We have Turner Sports stretching these games out until 15 minutes before deadline. We can’t afford any game-ending violence or we’ll have to put it in a box that says: “Lakers and Sonics rumble. For details, see tomorrow’s paper.”

Give peace a chance. We may not be able to handle the alternative.

HAVE A NICE SUMMER, OH FATHER OF MAYHEM

What in the name of Attila got into Riley that led to this blood-dripping-from-fangs incarnation, this spewing of drivel, equating “losing with death,” mourning that Mourning “didn’t connect when he tried to punch that . . . in the face?” adding, “If it costs us the series, that’s the way it goes.”

It cost them the series. That’s the way it went.

If this white-hot thing with the Knicks flipped Riley out, a lot of people here could tell you it was a long time coming. The Lakers were the last people who saw the old Riles, the down-to-earth guy everyone liked, who was replaced by this ever-more-designing, self-styled motivational genius/icon for winning.

Maybe he thought he was firing his team up for Game 5. Didn’t work too well, did it?

Maybe he didn’t like being blamed for the Heat-Knick mess in the New York press a few years back. Riley felt bad enough about the few murmurs he heard after leaving here but his escape from New York made him a war criminal in Gotham.

Not that the conclusion was anything but inescapable. This was his new team against his old one, Riley vs. his protege, Van Gundy. Of course, as defender of all that was right and true, and a man who warns players and even coaches against talking to opponents, Riley had no choice but to start a feud with Van Gundy, who had named one of his kids after Pat.

Said Riley, in another in a series of memorable quotes: “Coaching transcends friendship.”

Maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of what he saw coming--a humbling loss to the hated Knicks. Before the last game, Tim Hardaway told a confidant the coaches were so down, the players could sense it and it didn’t look good.

They tipped it off and it started looking worse. Riley started Duane Causwell, who hadn’t played in the series. Causwell got two rebounds in six minutes and left for good as the Knicks ran away and hid. Riley held out Mark Strickland, who led their late rally, until the second half, a mistake so patent, he second-guessed himself publicly for it.

The series ended appropriately enough. Players from both teams had been meeting before and after games to pray together, but before the last one, none of the usual six or seven Knicks joined the Miami players, not even Terry Cummings, an ordained minister. The postgame midcourt prayer circle drew only Knicks, not Heat players.

Hardaway walked to the Knick bench and hugged several players. Most of the other Miami players skulked off to consider their loss/deaths.

Riley isn’t inclined to self-examination, but he’d better try it fast because he’s in a death spiral with this stuff. What’s the use of being bad dudes in feuds if it scares everyone else into challenging you, after which the league office hands out the suspensions?

“Teams take on the personality of their coaches,” said Doc Rivers, once Riley’s point guard in New York. “He never said to go out and hit somebody. He said bump them, fight for territory.

“He never told us to be violent . . . but people don’t like being bumped. When you get in peoples’ faces, tempers flare. When we got into altercations, it was more others trying to stand up to us than us starting it.”

Tenacious to a fault, Riley keeps ignoring the hints history keeps bashing him over the head with. His “game of force”--the logical extension of toughening up the Lakers and taking over the marginally talented, muscle-bound Knicks--is going the way of the dinosaurs. David Stern legislated it out from under him years ago, thankfully.

Tests of their manhood? Riley, Mourning and the guys had better worry about tests of their adulthood, not to mention their future together.

FACES AND FIGURES

Now all he has to do is get in shape in a day or two and slay Reggie Miller and Michael Jordan: Hats off to Patrick Ewing, who persevered when everyone told him he wouldn’t be back this season, giving New York a chance to relive its favorite myth, the wounded center returning against all odds to save the Knicks. What’s life without a dream, especially there? . . . Having assumed responsibility for decorum, Stern is finding, to his dismay, the little devils can think up new pranks as fast as he can bar them. The latest: throat-slitting gestures that blossomed in the--you guessed it--Heat-Knick series. “That’s disgusting,” Stern told the Washington Post. “It’s also gang-related and it is being done by example-setters.”

Oops: No more sneering at Avery Johnson, who once couldn’t hit the ocean from a boat, now averaging 19.5 points in the playoffs, shooting 65%. And Larry Johnson, who isn’t an easy man to like, is still pricey at $10 million a year, isn’t what he once was but is still OK. . . . Riley wants to re-sign Brent Barry, whom he left off the playoff roster. Barry, unusually adept at concealing problems, like, say, a running feud with Bill Fitch, sounds as if he’d like to be assured next season will be different: “I’m leaving all my options open but I would like to return to Miami. I’m going to go where I get a chance to play and win.”

Good tactical and strategic move: Everyone in Atlanta was puzzled by Coach Lenny Wilkens, who played presumed-outgoing Christian Laettner, who struggled most of the fourth quarter of Game 4 against the Hornets, while keeping Alan Henderson on the bench. “There are several places I could go and start, so I’ll look and do what’s best,” said a rueful Henderson, also a free agent. “I’ll look at all my options.” . . . Hawk General Manager Pete Babcock, asked what his principal concern was: “That we took a clear step backward. There’s no other way to say it.”

He’s a lot more sensitive than he looks: Whenever Karl Malone is asked about hitting David Robinson with that elbow, he ends the interview session. . . . The Minnesota Timberwolves had pro wrestler and local resident Jesse Ventura slide down a rope from the top of the Target Center in the Seattle series. He did it last season too, prompting Houston Coach Rudy Tomjanovich and several players to burst out laughing. Pat Reusse of the Minneapolis Star Tribune said Ventura was selected for two reasons: “1) Jesse’s well-known enthusiasm for the Woofies; and 2) they wanted a civilian who would suffer minimal damage if he took a long, hard fall and landed on his head.”