Chron: Van Gundy born to coach

BORN TO COACH
Van Gundy brings lessons of father, mentors to Rockets

By JONATHAN FEIGEN
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

On all those long northern California drives to the games Bill Van Gundy was coaching, he and his boys would talk basketball until they imagined themselves someday behind the wheel. They would be in the locker rooms and behind the benches, in the coaches' offices while the tapes played.

Surely, Stan Van Gundy and his younger brother Jeff dreamed, as boys do, if not of last-second shots, at least of triumphantly raising arms, suit jackets flapping in front of the bench, as champions in their father's profession.

The stories of Jeff Van Gundy diagramming plays in crayon while the other kids scribbled happy faces are exaggerated. He was certainly out of diapers before he drew his first pick-and-roll and probably was on to solid food, and maybe even kindergarten.

He was well into the fourth grade when Bill Van Gundy had brain surgery to remove a tumor, and Jeff took over the scouting. When he was cut from the Yale basketball team, he immediately planned his transfer to community college not only to play but also eventually coach.

He imagined himself in the profession he revered most, as a coach.

And then his life exceeded his imagination.

But on the day he was named Rockets coach, in many ways a coaching star at the sport's highest level, he did not see it that way.

He is once again all he ever wanted to be -- simply a coach. He cannot imagine himself doing anything else. But he is in many ways still Bill Van Gundy's kid in the back seat, still Stan's little brother, studying tapes and doing the job like all those anonymous coaches.

"(With) players, the best just rise up; they keep going on and on," Van Gundy said. "That's not true in coaching. Some of the best coaches there are are in high school, small college. There is no sure path for advancement in coaching. That's why I'm so fortunate to sit here today as Rockets coach. So many coaches never got that opportunity."

Van Gundy never imagined himself coaching the world's best talent in the big and bright new arenas. But it seems that was only because the lights and stars never were the point.

All those miles and coaching stops later, Van Gundy became the Rockets coach last week, and his joy was clear. He was again what he had wanted to be all those years ago in his father's car. He was a coach.

"It started out as nothing more than wanting to do what your dad does," Stan Van Gundy said. "If your dad's a carpenter, you start building things at a young age. My kids now, when I'm watching film, want to sit down and do diagrams. But with my dad's illness, he (Jeff) was in elementary school when he started to do the scouting, and he just had a passion for the game."

Perhaps this is how NBA coaches who were never NBA players get their jobs. They start with that passion, work themselves raw, get a few ridiculously fortunate breaks that tie together like a cross between a flowchart and the New York subway system, then work even harder.

So Jeff Van Gundy landed a job coaching in high school and was happy to have it when he had a player good enough to bring around the college recruiters. One recruiter was Stu Jackson, who became an assistant coach at Providence. Jackson, now an NBA vice president, didn't land the player but he recommended Van Gundy.

Rick Pitino, then the Providence coach, hired Van Gundy as a graduate assistant in 1986, and when Jackson replaced Pitino as Knicks coach three years later, he brought Van Gundy to the NBA. After a few more Knicks coaching changes, from Pat Riley to a Don Nelson cameo, Van Gundy was an NBA head coach.

For some reason, all those nights in the back seat of the family car, Van Gundy did not imagine all that. But he is all he wanted to be, a coach.

"I come from a coaching family," he said. "My dad (who was in Italy last week running a basketball clinic) coached for 40 years. My brother has obviously been very successful in many places, but now in Miami (as an assistant under Riley). I was able to tag along and learn a lot. The best experience for me was coaching in high school. I had a pretty good team."


This could be his revenge, his answer to all those who mocked his gloomy, baggy-eyed appearance or discounted him as an anonymous drone squinting at game tape under fluorescent lights.

Van Gundy, 41, was such an easy target, he usually shot first, as he did Wednesday when an interviewer stammered his way in that general direction, or even when he was asked about the Rockets' new arena across the street.

"I look like a clown in a hard hat," he said of last week's tour of the new facilities. "The building was beautiful. The pictures were awful."

He did remind of Michael Dukakis in that tank. Van Gundy has not, in the 18 months since he left the Knicks, grown shampoo-commercial hair, or for that matter, shoulders.

But somehow, somewhere along the way, the little guy who left Yale for Menlo Junior College in Menlo Park, Calif., just to have a chance to play has become a coaching celebrity. He spent a year next to Marv Albert and Mike Fratello broadcasting games for TNT, was courted by five teams and chose the one that could offer him All-Star starters Steve Francis and Yao Ming and a four-year, $18 million contract.

He might enjoy his triumph but never seemed particularly bitter, anyway. More than that, he was raised to respect the profession too much to care about proving himself to anyone but his players.

"I never thought about it that way. I'm a coach," Van Gundy said. "That's my job. I've been fortunate I've been able to do it at a level I never expected. I was a coach at McQuaid Jesuit High School (in Rochester, N.Y.), and believe me, I wasn't a star then, but it is the same job as I have now. It's just different players."

At times, he almost seemed to enjoy taking his turn reveling in normalcy among the pretty glory-seekers. Other coaches had their suits custom-made. He was a decidedly store-bought kind of guy, an off-the-rack coach, assuming the rack was in a store that also sold lawn mowers.

He showed off his $8 watch. Even as a Knicks head coach he famously drove his 1995 Honda Civic until it was fittingly tossed aside when he parked it too close to the exhaust gusts from the Knicks' charter jet.

He would let the cameras catch him wearing sweaty, stretched T-shirts. After practices, he grabbed lunch at McDonald's or Pizza Hut and joked that Pat Riley had dined at Elaine's.

He did seem proud that he rose through the ranks solely on merit, effort and training. Descriptions of his unmanageable wisps of hair or dark-circled eyes seemed to herald success that was not built on anything as superficial as stage presence.

Instead, Van Gundy has risen to his position as coveted coaching commodity without the benefit of a reputation built as a player.

In New York, he succeeded Nelson, a broad-shouldered star with the Celtics dynasty, no less, who had become a celebrated coaching "genius." With the Rockets, he follows Rudy Tomjanovich, not only a Houston icon but also a 6-8 college All-American and NBA All-Star whose uniform number will hang in the team's new arena.

But by now Van Gundy is no longer confused with Woody Allen, somehow getting the girl and then clumsily blowing it in the end. And he knows it. It really did not matter, anyway, because he is coaching, and that has been more than enough.

Getting paid to coach is enough. But now that he has been cast as a big-time savior instead of the little guy who made good, he is ready to move on to whatever image attaches itself -- as long as he returns to the "field of battle" he could not find as a broadcaster.

"That schtick worked well for a while," Van Gundy said. "But none of that is what really matters. The media paints you any way it chooses fit. The underdog thing was a nice story. But it runs out and then there's a new description.

"Certainly you aren't what you drive or what you wear. You are what your results say you are."

But maybe when we read into his appearance, we just came to the wrong conclusion.

The most enduring image came in 1998 in one of the Knicks' bitter playoff series with the Heat. As the burliest of bare-fisted NBA fighters began to square off at Madison Square Garden, Van Gundy wrapped himself around

6-10 Alonzo Mourning's ankle as if someone forgot to lock the gate and the mailman had become a terrier's chew toy. But there is something telling even in a moment Van Gundy considers a mistake.

Van Gundy, all 5-9, 160 pounds of him, did charge onto the court that day to stand up to the most menacing of angry giants.

He also once dared to trade derisive verbal jabs -- coaching trash talk -- with the master, Phil Jackson. His mocking label of Jackson, "Big Chief Triangle," stuck.

Van Gundy has even taken on Michael Jordan. Van Gundy criticized the superstar's tendency to buddy up to young players who once idolized him to set them up to be embarrassed by Jordan's merciless supremacy. Jordan was furious that someone who could not play in the NBA would dare criticize him. But he could not deny the charge.

Maybe that comes from all those years standing up to Stan, three years his senior and always thicker and stronger, in one-on-one battles and debates. They were, and remain, remarkably close. But the older brother helped toughen the younger brother.

"All siblings compete to some degree," Stan Van Gundy said. "We were always very, very close, but there were a fair share of fights brought on by competitiveness. I don't know if it has anything to do with where he is, but he was always hanging out with me. He developed confidence in himself always being against older people. He grew up pushing himself. He had that in him for a long, long time.

"He's extremely competitive, and was extremely competitive as an athlete. He was not gifted enough to play at the major-college level. But he is as competitive as anybody I've ever been around."


New York was stunned. Others have walked away from other jobs, but Van Gundy had seemed hopelessly hooked to his, a lifer by choice. He truly had spent almost all of his life preparing to be just where he was until he suddenly left the Knicks on Dec. 8, 2001, after a 10-9 start.

Those close to him knew he wasn't entirely satisfied, but no one else noticed because he never seemed particularly happy on the job.

Few noticed the previous summer when he felt himself losing some of that passion, or again in the fall when his "laser-like focus" was slipping. Then he announced he was through, and the NBA was stunned.

Van Gundy was labeled a "burnout." Coaches shook their heads, part in sympathy and part in thanks they were spared Van Gundy's fate.

Van Gundy knew why he left. He had changed. He had lost some of his intensity. He needed these past 18 months removed from the demands of his obsession and mostly avoided the NBA except when working for TNT. He needed to deny his craving for a while to feel the hunger again.

But why he had changed remains difficult to know.

Van Gundy's college roommate and best friend, Farrell Lynch, died in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It would be an easy leap to assume the score of a basketball game no longer seemed to matter after Lynch and thousands of others had been senselessly taken on the other side of town.

Van Gundy, having witnessed so much heroic resilience, does not blame that horrible day. He might have lost too much of his interest in coaching when he lost Lynch to stick around. But he was heading that direction, anyway.

"His loss profoundly affected me and many others," Van Gundy said. "He was a great man. If it changed me, I would hope I changed for the better."

Pitino understood. He understood how much Van Gundy was taking from himself, and why he had to.

Pitino lost his brother-in-law, Billy Minardi, one of his closest friends, in the attacks. When Van Gundy consoled Pitino, Pitino began to see the changes in Van Gundy.

"Jeff knew my brother-in-law very well," Pitino said. "He visited me to talk to me about it and then told me about his best friend. Any time you go through the experience we all went through, it changes you forever. We're all basketball junkies and will be all our life. Yes, we love the game. But it totally changes your outlook on life, not basketball."

Van Gundy had noticed his focus starting to blur. His edge began to dull. Losses didn't hurt quite as much, and wins were not as satisfying. He had not gone so far as to develop other interests, never mind anything as normal as a hobby. But he was considering how he was spending his life when New York's guts were ripped apart and Lynch died, and Van Gundy was no longer as sure of his obsession.

"I don't think it was one factor," Stan Van Gundy said. "I think 9/11 was certainly an important event in his life. It was very upsetting and caused him to do a lot of thinking. To say everything was sailing along great and he wasn't giving any thought to his motivation in coaching and then 9/11 and Farrell dying happened and everything changed would not be right either. But it did change him."

So he quit. Others might not have noticed, but Van Gundy would not accept the changes in the way he believed he was doing his job.

"Jeff's going to do it the right way, the way he feels is correct," Pitino said. "He would rather step away from it, in his eyes, than to tolerate mediocrity in himself. That's just him. And he's totally secure in his ability to do that. He needed a break. It was great for him to do the commentating and realize how much he missed (coaching)."

Van Gundy is a coach's kid who had become a coach. He could not give that up.

"He's too competitive," Stan Van Gundy said. "He's too competitive to be in a job that's not competitive. He needed to be back in there to fight the battle and to win. Guys like Jeff, this is what they do, what they know they're good at. He needs to compete."


In many ways, the image is true.

"I had a great staff then," Pitino said of his time at Providence. "I had Stu Jackson. I had Herb Sendek, who is now at North Carolina State, (and) Billy Donovan, who is now at Florida. Jeff had the best threshold I've ever seen for work in my life, like none I've ever seen to this day.

"He is someone ... with very, very few hobbies or interests outside the game of basketball. His total interest is on the game. His dedication is unparalleled."

Jackson could not have seen all that the day they met. But that night, he told Pitino that he would be bringing back his next graduate assistant coach. But as scouts discover gifted players, Jackson knew he had seen more.

"That first time that I met him I knew he was going to be a great coach," Jackson said. "I never watched him practice. We (Jackson and Sendek) simply met with him for a couple hours. There were characteristics that came through loud and clear. His basketball knowledge was already very extensive. He had a very good way with other coaches that was endearing. He had, even at a young age, a very sound philosophy, offensively and defensively. It was obvious to me that his work ethic was extraordinary. He was special. He still is."

He might never have imagined it quite this way, coaching a 7-5 center from China in Houston. But in some ways, this was the dream.

He was a coach, maybe all those years ago, and he is a coach again.

"I don't think anybody that knew him thought he was done coaching when he left the Knicks," Stan Van Gundy said. "Everybody thought he would come back. It surprised me he was as patient as he was. He's matured enough to know ... what kind of job he wanted, what team to get. And he is smart enough to know this job and this time is right for him."