Changing With the Seasons

Where have you gone, Pat Riley?

Only Riley knows what a journey it took to bring him back to the Finals, with his third team, after 12 years wandering in the desert, but he isn’t saying.

Still the most poetic of coaches, Riley is also the most secretive, but everything else has changed.

Once, merely getting here would have meant nothing to him. Now he’s 61 and knows better, having seen the wasteland up close and personal.

As his wife, Chris, who’s also been known for not confiding in the media, told the Miami Herald’s Barry Jackson amid the celebration after the Heat eliminated the Detroit Pistons, “I’ve never seen him as happy as this moment. Never has it been sweeter than this.”

Riley never celebrated conference titles before. If he didn’t go all the way, it was as if he were the lowest of the low. That was before he actually became the lowest of the low.

Once it was his imperial ego that Riley was hiding. Now, it’s the real story, convoluted as it is.

He’s actually back to something closer to the old unassuming “Riles” his old friends mourned when he changed so dramatically after becoming Lakers coach in 1981.

He still has the famous slicked-back hair. He sounds the same with his well-crafted lines, saying his players were “disgusted” by their Game 1 performance -- his way of informing them that after blowing that one they had better bring it for Game 2, letting the media in on it to dial up the pressure.

But he’s not the same. He was an emperor in Los Angeles when Michael Douglas copied his hair style to play Gordon Gekko, and the prince of New York City as coach of the Knicks when everyone except a tiny inner circle became subjects.

Riley actually rediscovered something of himself in 2003, after he quit coaching. Freed from a life of knife-between-the-teeth competition, he launched into a long-running mea culpa.

“What the ... have I done?” he told the Herald’s Dan Le Batard after his stunning exit on the eve of the 2003-04 season. “Nothing. It has been nothing here but failure.... What is Stan following?” he asked of his successor, Stan Van Gundy. “A name, that’s all.”

Riley is still doing it. Upon arrival here, he recalled the hubris of his Lakers days, when he visited more often -- in nine seasons, he made six Finals and won four titles -- and laughed at it.

“I was a lot different and I think most of you portrayed me accurately in those years as a very sort of selfish, ambitious young man in a lot of ways,” he said of reporters. “I wanted to succeed and whatever got in the way I would try to eradicate it....

“I actually thought I was the reason we won those titles. And I was serious. My line to everyone, and I meant it, was if I had a few more good players we could have won nine straight titles.”

It was primarily the media, the “peripheral opponent,” he was trying to eradicate. Nevertheless, his sin was not selfishness but self-obsession, an occupational hazard for superstars, even if he took it to unusual lengths.

Riley was lucky to take over the Showtime Lakers before he knew what he was doing, but it wasn’t mere good fortune. He booted them to back-to-back titles in 1987 and 1988 when they were past their prime, took the moribund Knicks to the 1994 Finals and the lowly Heat to the 1997 Eastern Conference finals.

His luck turned with a vengeance as Alonzo Mourning’s kidney disease undid all they had done in Miami. When Mourning, an all-heart competitor, had to retire amid life-threatening implications, the real world intruded on Riley’s illusions.

The coach who had finished first in his division for his first 12 seasons -- nine with the Lakers, three with the Knicks -- and never had a losing season, went out on 36-46 and 25-57 seasons.

“Payback time,” said a relaxed Riley a year later, laughing. “I thought about that so much.... That was the basketball gods paying me back.”

He was amazed to find how great life was without coaching. Everyone, including close friends such as Magic Johnson, thought he’d come back. Even more so after Shaquille O’Neal arrived. Indeed, the thought of coaching O’Neal was intriguing, but Riley was fine where he was.

Then Dwyane Wade got hurt last spring and the Heat lost a 3-2 lead and the Eastern finals to Detroit. Riley, the team president, said he would take “a more active participation.”

It was tantamount to announcing Van Gundy was on borrowed time, although Riley refused to accept that interpretation. Perceived as Riley’s naked ambition reasserting itself, it was a bungled attempt to quell the rising discontent.

There were reports that Mourning had asked Riley to return. After Riley did, Mourning asked, “Why not have the teacher here instead of the pupil?”

More to the point, anyone who has followed O’Neal’s career will have noticed his marked preference to choose his coaches, as when the Lakers hired Phil Jackson.

Not that anyone could tell it. O’Neal was so discreet about his role in Jackson’s hiring, no one knew about it until O’Neal disclosed it a year later.

The players tuned out Van Gundy, awaiting the inevitable. Sensing the end, Van Gundy offered to resign at the start of the season, although he claimed it was for other reasons.

Riley, taking over at 11-10, was stung at being ripped for stabbing Van Gundy in the back and closed down.

“It just makes me say sort of, so what?” said Riley. “So whatever happens, happens, and whatever is written and said happens, and I’m going to go home and enjoy whatever quality of life I have left, OK?”

More challenges awaited. Riley had always had warrior chieftains such as Johnson, Mourning and Patrick Ewing. Compared with them, O’Neal was like Ferdinand the Bull, who liked to sit under a cork tree and smell the flowers.

In January, with the Pistons leading the NBA with a 37-6 record and drawing away, Riley told ESPN’s Jim Gray that he might not coach next season. When everyone else followed up, Riley issued a non-denial denial.

“What I said, there’s some truth to that and maybe there might not be any truth to that,” he said. “However you want to deal with it, deal with it.”

With O’Neal trimming off 20 to 30 pounds at Riley’s orders, the Heat coasted into the playoffs 12 games behind Detroit. Then in the first round, the team found itself in a 2-2 tie with the scrappy Chicago Bulls. Wade and Gary Payton argued on the floor, an unheard of breach of solidarity on Riley’s teams.

The Heat escaped to win in six games, and Riley noted that everyone had been rooting for the Cinderella. It sounded as if he were acknowledging that the Bulls were more like one of his teams than his team had been.

Providentially, the mighty Pistons began to unravel in the second round when they had to rally from a 3-1 deficit against Cleveland. The revived Heat then put them out of their cold-shooting misery in the Eastern finals.

Guess who’s back?

In his first Finals since 1994 with the Knicks, with a chance at his first title since 1988 with the Lakers, Riley is plainly delighted but can’t talk about it without looking as if he’s crowing at Van Gundy’s expense.

Van Gundy hasn’t uttered a word of complaint, but in buttoned-up Heat style was told not to talk at all after making innocuous comments months later about what he was doing these days.

It remains to be seen if Riley will coach next season, but he’s not saying much about that, either. If he leaves, it’ll be another bombshell, as the first time was.

Anyway, he’s back and enjoying it as only someone can who’s been through what he’s been through. If he deserved his fall, he had this coming too.