Riley's Marketing Idea: 'Just Stay Out of the Paint'
We had some technical difficulties with the blog today so unfortunately I couldn't post some vignettes like I wanted to from the day at the Hall of Fame in Springfield until now....
Pat Riley told a great story about one of his first meetings after he arrived as coach of the Knicks. He made it clear he planned to leave his "Showtime" days in LA.
Riles met with the marketing department who wanted to ask him for ideas for that season's campaign.
"We had Patrick. We had Oak. We had Mase, Xavier McDaniel, John Starks, Mark Jackson," Riley recalled. "These guys are tough guys, they're mentally tough, physically tough, that's who they were."
So when the staff asked Riley for a theme, here's what he suggested:
"Take a camera. Put it at the top of the Garden. Shoot it down at the key. And put the chalk line of a dead person there and say, 'Just stay out of the paint.' "
"I think that's the kind of team we had," Riley said. "Maybe if I gave them a little bit more finesse, we would have won a title."
Actually, Riles did admit that the 1994 series still haunts him to this day.
"I always think I could have done something just a little more," he said. "I don't know what it was, but . . .
[Bloghost note: Um, maybe chain No. 3 to the bench in the fourth quarter (0-for-11) of Game 7??!!]
"We jumped out to a 15-7 lead in the first quarter of Game 6 and I thought our guys were ready," he said. "But, I go back and I always second-guess myself on that series. When you get there, you gotta win it."
I wandered over to chat with Hakeem Olajuwon (who looks like he could still step on the court and play today...tremendous shape) and we got to talking about that '94 series. Remember he helped off Patrick on the pick-and-roll with Starks and tipped Starks' three-point attempt that would have won it. Olajuwon's block gave the Rockets an 86-84 win and forced a Game 7.
“It was a pick-and-roll and the way he had been shooting throughout the whole game, he was unconscious. I mean, he was shooting it!" Hakeem said. "So I didn’t want to take a chance of going with Patrick and letting him shoot the ball. I had to make a decision.”
Starks had 27 points in that game. His hand went infamously ice cold in the next one.
So I asked "Dream"...what if Starks had made the pass to Ewing, who rolled to the basket?
“I gambled," he said with a smile, "and it worked.”
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Comments (9)
The clip brings back so many memories... PASS THE BALL, STARKS... Oh well, I wonder what would have happened in overtime...When John sees Olajuwon coming over, with no one to defend Patrick under the basket, who knows, it could have been a basket and a foul... Just move on...
The Real Pat Riley, courtesy of Sports Illustrated and Curry Kirkpatrick on April 1, 1991.
Newsday's scribe and his white 'burbs feelings on this issue, like the current presidential campaign, have been well documented.
Don't ever forget who Riley really is.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
In 1966, an all-black lineup from Texas Western beat all-white Kentucky for the NCAA title. College hoops hasn't been the same since
Curry Kirkpatrick
WHEN IT WAS OVER WE GOT THE
watch and all but it wasn't really that big a deal.
What did it mean, what did we win?
Now I look at it on TV with all the pain and all the
joy and hype. So much has changed....
But now I know what we won.
—WILLIE CABER
ALL I EVER WANTED TO DO WAS DANCE.
-PAT RILEY
TURN!TURN!TURN!
—THE BYRDS
Pat Riley , Kentucky '67, Hollywood forever, his glorious clothes matched only by his looks, is still dancing. Willie Cager, Texas Western '69, in a sweatshirt and windbreaker, his head cocked from an awful stroke that nearly killed him five years ago, can barely walk. Yet 25 years ago Cager's team won and Riley 's team lost a college basketball game that changed the sport forever. And maybe changed a nation as well.
Oh, nobody knew it back then. Nobody realized the significance of the NCAA championship game in College Park , Md., on March 19, 1966, in which Texas Western, playing black men exclusively—five starters plus two reserves—defeated Kentucky , suiting up only whites, 72-65. Would the amazing racial transformation of basketball, of college athletics, of all sport, have happened if dust-blown, independent, absolutely unheard-of Texas Western hadn't shocked traditional, blue-blooded, four-time NCAA champion Kentucky ? Certainly. Just as humanity would have lifted off without the Wright brothers and rocked around the clock without Bill Haley.
But to everything there is a season...turn, turn, turn. An all-black team had never played an all-white team in the NCAA title game, much less beaten one. And it would never happen again...turn, turn, turn. Curiously, in the explosive mid-'60s, black-white was for the op-ed pages. In Games 'R' Us, college basketball, folks wore the phrase "color blind" on their cardigan sleeves. Black-white? Following the '66 championship game, Don (the Bear) Haskins, the 36-year-old white coach who masterminded the El Paso -based Miners to the title, met the small press contingent covering the game for a full 10 minutes, and black-white never came up.
"A landmark game?" said Tommy Kron, one of the Kentucky guards in '66, just the other day. "Nobody looked on it as that important. If it was, it was luck. Just a happenstance."
"That part [black-white] never crossed our minds," says former Texas Western guard Orsten Artis.
"Just business," adds Artis's backcourt mate, Bobby Joe Hill. "We weren't on a crusade."
Color-blind or blind fools?
Revisionist historians maintain that black development in basketball, from the touring professional New York Rens in the 1920s and '30s through the glory years of the Harlem Globetrotters in the '40s and the college stardom of Bill Russell , Wilt Chamberlain , Elgin Baylor and Oscar Robertson in the '50s, had already reached a crescendo by the mid-'60s. The University of Cincinnati started four black players on its 1962 championship squad; Loyola of Chicago started four when it won the title a year later. But never had anyone gone for the big five. And never, but never, five against five. "TWC...TWC?" Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp supposedly said, spitting out the initials of Texas Western College after his most harrowing defeat. "What's that stand for, Two White Coaches?"
The story may be apocryphal. Rupp 's feelings, however, were always simmering right there for all the world to know. In public, Rupp usually was a charming p.r. rogue, brimming with diplomacy and psychology; regrettably, his politics leaned more toward the KKK . "I always wondered if there would have been all this interest if Texas Western had beaten Duke [ Kentucky 's NCAA semifinal victim] instead of us," says Larry Conley , a Wildcat starter in '65-66.
Hardly. This was Texas Western and this was Rupp . Every Quixote needs his windmill. Against the Miners in '66, the Man in the Brown Suit was twirling round and round in a gale.
Soul and Inspiration
—RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS, 1966
It had been 12 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. But only four years earlier, in 1962, SEC champion Mississippi State had refused an invitation to the NCAA tournament because the school had a policy against playing integrated teams. In '63, Bulldog coach Babe McCarthy , defying an edict from the Mississippi legislature, had sneaked his team out of the state to play—and lose to—Loyola of Chicago in the Mideast semifinal.
The sociopolitical atmosphere during the 1965-66 season, virtually midway between the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. , was charged with turmoil and change. President Lyndon Johnson ordered his generals to win the war in Vietnam within two years. Muhammad AH refused induction into the Armed Forces. Congress passed the first Voting Rights Act, despite bitter opposition from Southern congressmen. It had been three years since James Meredith had enrolled at Mississippi with the help of the National Guard . And sizable numbers of black athletes had begun to claim scholarships at schools outside the South. But in several major conferences, including the ACC , SEC and SWC, not a single varsity basketball player was black. In Lexington, Ky. , the tenor of the time was manifest the previous summer when the publisher of the Lexington Herald-Leader , Fred Wachs, a drinking buddy of Rupp 's, had refused to print a word about the riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles , for fear that local blacks would get ideas. "OF Fred couldn't comprehend blacks might have access to a TV," says a fellow Kentuckian.
A couple of years earlier Rupp , under pressure from Kentucky president John Oswald to recruit minority players, had attained much publicity while recruiting a black center named Westley Unseld , who instead chose his hometown school, Louisville . Years later Unseld would tell friends that Rupp made a single visit to his house, during which Rupp made it plain to Unseld's parents—Westley wasn't even home—that he didn't want to be there. In a 1979 book entitled Adolph Rupp As I Knew Him, the Baron's longtime assistant, Harry Lancaster , revealed his boss's recruiting agenda more fully. Returning to his office after yet another meeting with Oswald, Rupp told Lancaster , "Harry, that sonofabitch is ordering me to get some niggers in here. What am I going to do?"
I'm going to cry. Can we never speak of the 1994 series again? That was, by far, the most traumatizing moment of my childhood.
Alan,
You look at the passion , heart & soal that patrick played
with each game, then you see a dog like Zach Randolph
out there now & you appreciate all patrick did.
Zach randolph has to be moved !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Please never do a post that revolves around Pat Riley again.
Yo Alan what's going on man? So Darko wants to come play for us because he loves how Dantoni handles European players. I actually like Marko so I may have to live with Darko coming also. Marko has 3 years left on his deal and Darko only has 2. They both make 7 million a year pretty much. Would we be under the cap by the time LBJ is a free agent? I could've swore I said on this blog before that the Knicks were going to get more foreign players and it looks like we'll have 3 new additions. I can envision a line up of Duhon at the 1, Chandler at the 2, Marko at the 3, Danillo at the 4 and Darko at the 5. Does anybody know if Darko has a good jump shot? What can Darko do well? I'm only asking because I think everybody remembers he was the #2 pick in the draft right behind Lebron. Man this is getting exciting. Pardon any errors, I'm using my cell phone/PDA on the blog for the first time. Now when I travel, I can always check in with the fellas.
Change in 08!!!!!
Obama is here for the people!!!!!
4 MORE MONTHS!!!!!
4 MORE MONTHS!!!!!
4 MORE MONTHS!!!!!
Alan wants two white guys, Darko and Marko, in place of one black guy, Zach.
Sounds like he's been talking to the neighbors at the community meeting in the 'burbs.
[bloghost note: what, there are no black people in the burbs? What's wrong with you. Don't bring that garbage to my blog ever again. Besides, your ignorance shows by the perception that I "want" Darko and Jaric, as if this news is my own imagination. You are dismissed.]
Isola spoke to Donnie Walsh today who confirmed discussions with
Memphis. He also said there is to deal yet, but he didn't completely rule out a deal either.
Alan, it would be great if you could find out what is really going on?
Is the hold up the money? Is DW asking for an additional player?
Is Memphis getting cold feet?
Still seems to be that getting $10m in cap room for Randolph is an excellent deal and one that should be made. Zach plays completely the wrong style for D'Antoni's offense and he and Curry are not compatible at all.
I'm still hoping the deal happens soon.
Kind of amazing that Isola and Berman have jumped on the Zach to Memphis bandwagon. Alan reported these talks over a week ago to silence in the other NY papers/blogs. But then, Ron Tillery of a Memphis paper reports the same, and Isola and Berman are all over the rumors.
Alan's story today did say that Randolph expects a deal to Memphis. Let's hope he's right.