THE LIFER RILEY

When Phil Jackson, who’s running out of fingers for championship rings, wants to remember how blessed he’s been, he thinks of Pat Riley.

This may be Phil’s town now, but once it was Pat’s, in Showtime (a name Riley popularized), when his Lakers won four titles and made the finals seven times in his first eight seasons . . . when he guaranteed their 1987-1988 repeat and no sooner delivered than he began planning the “three-peat” (a word Byron Scott coined but Riley, the land shark of marketing, copyrighted).

Those were the days when Riley’s friend director Robert Towne tried to get him to star--not merely appear--in his movie “Tequila Sunrise,” and when Riley said no, made do with Kurt Russell, telling him to slick his hair back like Riley’s . . . when Riley’s friend Michael Douglas won an Academy Award with a Riles-like do as Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street,” and Riley sent him a congratulatory telegraph that said: “I have to believe it was the hair.”

When Riley’s time in L.A. ran out, he simply went east and became prince of another city, New York, where limos whisked him everywhere, heavies like David Halberstam and Ken Auletta profiled him in slick magazines and star anchors like Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose vied for sit-down interviews with him.

He was the first Star Coach, leading peers from the days when people said they “rolled out the balls” to one when they controlled everything from the pace of the game to seating on the charter (sometimes even barring the team’s paid broadcasters), when an ace like Phil Jackson makes $6 million . . . and one like Riley gets 20% of the Miami Heat.

Of course, now they have to answer for everything too.

With money comes expectations. With Riley’s money came heartbreak on an annual basis.

He never won another title after his last one with the Lakers in 1988.

“To be honest,’ he says now, zinging himself, “the only things I’ve ever done were when I was riding the coattails of Magic [Johnson] and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar].”

He has finished atop the Atlantic Division for the last four seasons in Miami but hasn’t made it out of the second round of the playoffs in three, eliminated each time by his old team/new archrival, the Knicks.

He used to say that NBA life was divided into two parts, winning and misery.

Winning, he said, was further divided into being too tired and too busy preparing for the next game to enjoy it.

In other words, he was either winning a title or suffering. No wonder he swore he’d never be a lifer. He was afraid it would be a short life.

By his old formula, he hasn’t drawn a happy breath in 12 years but--happily--he has reformulated.

“Probably the one intelligent cell I had in my brain at that time,” Riley says. “I took things very hard. I said, nobody can do this forever. This business is going to take its toll.

“Now it’s getting easier. I just keep going along ‘cause I like doing it. I feel more comfortable in it. I’m not as anxious, not as self-blaming or other-blaming. . . .

“Thank God for age. Age has a tendency to give you a perspective about things. When we’re young and ambitious and pushing and climbing and all those things, we have a tendency to not have an understanding.”

If you last long enough, perspective is what you’re left with. What Riley has endured since he left the Lakers . . . lionization in New York . . . escape from New York . . . vilification in New York . . . worst of all, domination by New York . . . was almost as much as he could bear, but here he is, a lifer.

He has the scars to prove it. When camp opened last fall, before he even got the bad news, he mused, “I don’t know if these players feel they’ve been humbled enough. I know I have been.”

Riley, humbled?

Isn’t this where we came in, 20 years ago?

Rise and Fall of Riles I

“At the arena, he’s all business. But there’s a side to him that’s human.”

--Jackson on Riley, this season

Imagine Phil’s surprise.

There was a time when Riley was a well-known and well-liked human around here, a former Laker who became Chick Hearn’s sidekick, then young Paul Westhead’s assistant, then the Accidental Coach.

In those days, Riley’s humility was complete. Early in his tenure as coach, he asked some friends in the press lounge after a game if they could come up with the two words that explained his surprising success.

His friends said things like “Honest” and “Communicator.”

Said Riley: “ ‘Magic’ and ‘Johnson.’ ”

By the ‘90s, when he’d relocated to New York, he was more like Riles I. Indeed, Gotham swooned as if he were of royal blood and it was Peoria.

Elsewhere, it wasn’t the same since Riley’s post-Showtime “game of force” tended to dent opposing players when it wasn’t actually fomenting riots. Toughening up those Laker artistes was one thing, but turning loose Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason and John Starks was quite another.

The Knicks, dormant for decades, became the hottest ticket in Manhattan and let the Chicago Bulls know they were around too, especially in the first Riley-Jackson faceoff, a brutal, rhetoric-trading, seven-game, second-round series in 1992. But Jackson had Michael Jordan and always won.

Riley had Patrick Ewing, who was 33 when Jordan retired the first time. Riley booted the Knicks into the 1994 NBA finals in the longest postseason ever (25 games, including three seven-game series, eclipsing Riley’s 24 with the 1988 Lakers, who also played three Game 7s), but they didn’t have enough left to get past the Houston Rockets.

A year later, with everyone exhausted, players no longer responding to his ever-more-strident challenges and Madison Square Garden politics treacherous as ever, Riley bailed for a killer deal in Miami, going from New York demigod to devil (“Pat the Rat,” the New York Post called him) overnight.

He arrived in Miami with the usual fanfare and started in the usual style, acquiring Alonzo Mourning and turning a 32-50 team into an Eastern Conference finalist in two seasons.

After that, it was more like water torture:

1998: The Knicks and Heat, whose rumble the previous spring resulted in suspensions to six players, go at it again, with Larry Johnson swinging at Mourning, who retaliates, getting both iced for the deciding Game 5.

With no ‘Zo, the Heat loses at Miami by 17.

1999: The No. 1-seeded Heat fall to the No. 8 Knicks, who win the deciding Game 5 in Miami--again--78-77, when Allan Houston bounces in a 15-footer off the front rim and the backboard with :00.8 left.

2000: Guess who’s coming to dinner in the second round this time?

The Knicks rally from a 3-2 deficit in the series, winning Game 6, 72-70, in New York and Game 7, 83-82, in (where else?) Miami.

It’s a ragged bunch of Heat players who finish the season. Tim Hardaway, playing with a sore knee, shoots 29% against the Knicks. Dan Majerle, the other starting guard, is 34, playing with a bad back.

Riley has been alternately threatening and stroking them. In January, he calls them a “dead team,” adding: “If the players want to be dispassionate, I can find another team for them to be dispassionate. The more they’re doom and gloom, the more I want to get their butts out of here. . . . There are a lot of players who would like to come to Miami.”

He subsequently lashes out at opposing players who say he’s too tough, at referees, at the media. (“The referees can do it, the opponents can do it, you’re entitled to do it. We’re being trashed and maybe rightfully so. We have the right to say, ‘The hell with you.’ ”)

By the Knick series, he has his players sequestered in a hotel. He tells Mourning he doesn’t like him going out after games with Ewing and their college coach, John Thompson.

Says Mourning, normally Riley’s staunchest ally: “I’m a grown man, and I’ll do what I want to do.”

Leading the series, three games to two, the Heat blows a 15-point lead in Game 6 in New York and then loses Game 7. Riley afterward says it’s the lowest moment of his coaching career, even worse than the ’84 Laker “choke” against the Boston Celtics or Scott and Johnson pulling hamstrings before the ’89 finals after the Lakers went 11-0 through the West.

“You don’t learn anything from this other than pain,” Riley says. “Do that three years in a row, it gets old.”

He looks so miserable, even the New York reporters feel for him.

Who’d have thought there was worse news still out there?

He Comes in Peace?

“I see the end for me somewhere close. Thirty years is enough. Not now and not next year--I’ve got to wait another year to see what this team is, to wait for ‘Zo to come back--but I see an end to this. . . .

“This job totally preoccupies your life and mind. You get to a point where you think about all the things you’ve missed and you lament. When I’m on the road there will be a thought: ‘Why am I here?’ My wife’s been waiting 30 years for me to come home. Every night my daughter leaves a white sheet of paper with a heart on it on my desk that says, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ ”

--Riley, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 16, 2001

By the time camp opened in fall, Riley, who has been the most successful of the coaches-turned-administrators, had acquired Eddie Jones, Brian Grant, Anthony Mason and, it seemed, the beast of the East.

Then Mourning came back from the Olympics feeling bad. Tests subsequently showed he had a kidney disease, would have to sit out this season and then see if medication would ever enable him to return.

“It was a haymaker,” Riley says. “. . . It hurt for ‘Zo. I really care about ‘Zo.

“Unless people are around him, you don’t understand the depth of his desire to win and do the right thing. He has changed so much in five years. From the day he came to Miami to now, he has matured in so many ways. It’s a tough hit for him. And the franchise. But it’s all about his health. That transcends anything else.”

People who saw the Heat in the weeks following Mourning’s announcement said the team was out on its feet, that it couldn’t score, that it would be awful.

Three months later, Miami is pretty good. Riley will still tee off on the players, as when he asked when they were “going to step up and show some guts” after they blew a 24-point lead at Sacramento, but he understands, they are all they can be.

These days, he has something new: a life outside basketball, even during the season. Now when he’s away, he talks of missing his family; that never came up before.

When the Heat lost early this season at New Jersey, coached by Scott, Riley came down the sideline to congratulate Byron, beaming.

“I saw him on the sideline,” Riley said. “It just hit me. I said, ‘Man, it was 15 years ago [actually 11, since they were Lakers].’ I mean, it’s like that [snapping his fingers]. It flies. I was really proud of him.”

Scott, who once complained as much as anyone about Riley’s brutal three-hour drills, now runs a tough program himself. Johnson, attending Scott’s first practice and seeing him jam a list of drills into his pants--just the way Riley does--called him “Riles Junior.”

So they’ve come full circle. His players won titles for him, complained about him . . . and now emulate him.

Once, Riley hated any suggestion that the Showtime Lakers’ family “fractured,” to use his word. Now, he understands that. It took a decade, but he understands.

“It’s the natural process that that team went through,” he says. “We all were sort of down that road that it’s time for a change. I don’t think there was any malice. At that time I was younger. It was 10 years ago. I was 44-45 years old and it was like sort of a divorce.

“We’ve all remained good friends. I just hope one day I can come back here and retire here. Buy seats to the Lakers and not get booed.

“I hope it can happen with the scribes, also. That one day when it’s all said and done, regardless of what was coached and what was said and how it was received and what was written, we all can walk down the street one day and look each other in the eye and embrace one another for being part of a great industry and a great job.”

This is getting gooey. The Heat isn’t giving out weekly updates on Mourning’s progress, but Mourning has told friends he hopes to return next season.

If he does, Riley will have a full-fledged power on his hands again and, who knows, might not be as mellow as he is now.

On the other hand, those Knicks are going to be in trouble.