ESPN Article on JVG

Jeff Van Gundy wipes a plate of eggs clean with a piece of white bread, then orders a peanut butter sandwich chaser before mulling the advice of a Houston society columnist. She thinks he needs to buy a Ferrari because in Houston he'll be "expected to rise to a certain level of social prominence." The new Rockets coach rubs his eyes, somehow still red despite two years' rest. "Social prominence? Me?"



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Yup, Van Gundy is not one to hang with the jewelry janglers. This is, after all, a guy who's never come as close to commanding the spotlight as when he wrapped himself around Alonzo Mourning's ankle in 1998. Truth be told, even on his best nights Van Gundy comes across as what he is: a short, pasty-faced workaholic with a bad haircut and a rumpled suit who shows up at postgame press conferences looking like he's chugged some old milk. Then there are the nights he's a guy with Homer Simpson luck, like when he returned from a road game in Miami to find his Honda picked up and tossed on top of three other cars by an engine blast from the Knicks team charter. Only that act of God has him in the silver Mercedes SUV he wheels around in now -- and that was a present from the Knicks. A Ferrari? Not going to happen.

Let Phil Jackson sell serene; Jeff Van Gundy sells struggle. "Think about your biggest mistakes being your defining moments," he says. "Just think about that." He does, all the time. More than he thinks about being this past summer's hottest free agent, or about parlaying that into an $18 million, four-year deal that puts him in charge of an upwardly mobile team. He thinks about it, because his mind has always taken him to the worst possible places. "By the end of my time with the Knicks, I was way too far to the dark side," Van Gundy says. And now he just doesn't want to go there anymore.

"This time around, I have to enjoy the wins," he says. "I have to."

On a hot late July day in Long Beach, Van Gundy sits in the stands at the Southern California Summer Pro League. Courtside, assistant coaches Tom Thibodeau, Steve Clifford and Andy Greer, who left the Knicks in May to join their old boss in Houston, bark out instructions. A new addition to the crew, Patrick Ewing, quietly studies the makeshift squad from the middle of the bench. Of the 15 players in uniform, only one -- Bostjan Nachbar, Houston's second pick in last year's first round -- will wear Rockets pinstripes this season. The Grizzlies are hammering these Rockets. "We're getting killed," Van Gundy says when the lead hits 24, but he betrays no real concern. The tanned -- that's right, tanned -- coach spends most of his time signing autographs and chit-chatting with fans, looking up every so often to muster a half-hearted "that's a horsesh -- call." Tomorrow, he'll fly back to New York to put his house up for sale.

Don't let the bronze skin and the relaxed attitude fool you, though. Van Gundy is back in the game. After spurning advances from the Cavs, Sixers, Hornets and Wizards, he decided to take Rudy T's seat on the Rockets sideline on June 11, just over 18 months after walking away from the Knicks. He's since watched tapes of every play of every Rockets game last season, an off-season habit he honed in six years as head man in New York.

A few weeks before making the summer league rounds, Van Gundy flew to Silver Spring, Md., to meet with Steve Francis. Francis was criticized last season for not monopolizing the ball, unjustly. He took a career-high 1,312 shots and was third among point guards in shots per game (16.2) behind Stephon Marbury and Gary Payton, neither of whom plays with a 7'5" center. In no uncertain terms, the coach, who pined for a point guard of this caliber in New York, said the new Rockets offense was going to look a lot like the old Ewing-centric Knicks offense. And then he challenged Francis. "The question isn't, 'Do you want to win, Steve?'" Van Gundy said. "It's, 'How much will you sacrifice to win?'"

Sacrifice. It's kind of a touchstone for Van Gundy. He gave up a Yale education when the basketball coach told him he wouldn't play. He went first to Menlo Junior College in Atherton, Calif., and then to D3 Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y., where he could. He took a job coaching at Rochester's McQuaid Jesuit High after graduating in 1985, and began a life of giving up outside interests -- movies, tennis -- to pore over tapes and tendencies. After brief stops as an assistant coach at Providence and Rutgers, he joined the Knicks in 1989. By the time he replaced Don Nelson as head coach in March 1996, he was trading in a home life for endless hours in his office, starting each day as early as 5:45 a.m. "I've never been around a head coach who works as hard as he does," says former assistant Brendan Malone, now back with the Knicks. "Nobody knows when he gets to the office because nobody beats him to the office."

Sacrifice has always been the cornerstone of Van Gundy's formula for success. But it takes a toll. A trip to the '99 Finals -- the one made possible only because Allan Houston's first-round, last-game, last-second double-bouncer dropped through to stun the Heat and Van Gundy's mentor, Pat Riley -- fooled the Knicks into thinking their flawed team was a serious contender in no urgent need of help. So when key players broke down and others got old, it was left to Van Gundy to micromanage every detail and find an edge. Yes, he wrung out every ounce of potential -- 98 wins, the East Finals over the next two seasons -- but the product was dreadful to watch and wrenching to produce.

Mark Jackson saw how the job had affected the coach. He fondly remembers Van Gundy as a wisecracking young assistant under Riley. "He was one of us," Jackson says. Later, when Jackson came to the Garden as a Pacer in the spring of '96, he saw a frenetic hobbit who high-fived and butt-patted his guys during timeouts. But by the time Jackson returned to the Knicks five years later, that man was gone. In his place was a frazzled head coach who locked himself in his office after games, pacing incessantly as he clicked the VCR remote like an obsessed teenager playing NBA Live. At practice, Van Gundy stood in silence, furiously filling notepads, every frustration backing up into an emotional traffic jam.

"You knew he'd been up all night," Jackson says. "The bags under his eyes, the hair, the body language. He'd lost the fun side of him." On the day in 2000 that Malone left New York to join the Pacers staff, Van Gundy told him what a nice job he'd done. "You know, Jeff," Malone said, not unkindly, "you really should tell that to people while they're working for you."

Outsized expectations eventually set off intense infighting in the Knicks offices. First to fall was GM Ernie Grunfeld, in the spring of 1999. Then Ewing, a Van Gundy loyalist much diminished by age and injuries, was traded after lobbying for a contract extension. Finally, team president Dave Checketts, who'd talked to Phil Jackson behind Van Gundy's back, was dismissed after a first-round knockout in 2001. Increasingly, the local tabs went after the coach. Van Gundy had survived the civil wars but, he began to wonder, at what cost? On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as Van Gundy was preparing for his sixth full season as head coach of the Knicks, an aide ran into the team's practice facility to shout that a plane had rammed into the World Trade Center. Like most of us, Van Gundy turned on his TV. Then he picked up the phone and called Farrell Lynch.

Lynch was his college roommate, one of those guys 15 others call their best friend, as loose and open as Van Gundy is intense and guarded. Lynch would call his old roomie from time to time, more often than Van Gundy had the time to call back. But when the Knicks coach scanned the stands at home games, he wasn't searching for Woody or Spike, but for Lynch.

Lynch worked construction soon after college and was standing on a scaffold outside a Manhattan skyscraper one day when he struck up a conversation through an open window. "You interested in doing something else?" the man inside shouted. "I'm freezing my ass off here," Lynch yelled back. "You're damn right I'm interested." The next day, Lynch started a career in finance that led eventually to a house in the suburbs and an office in the Twin Towers.

Van Gundy kept calling. Lynch never picked up. Three months later, on a flight back from a win in Milwaukee, Van Gundy couldn't shake a feeling of isolation and emptiness. He resigned four days later. "I don't think his decision to quit was due to any one factor," his older brother, Heat assistant Stan Van Gundy, says. "Sept. 11 was important; that was one of his closest friends Jeff lost. But he was already questioning his priorities."

The abrupt departure stunned Knicks management, who wondered if Van Gundy quit because he figured he was about to be axed, ignoring the fact that, with a season remaining on his contract, he left $7.5 million on the table. There were also whispers that Van Gundy was using Lynch's death as an excuse. Van Gundy bristles at that charge, but treads warily around the subject. "I'm sorry I ever brought it up to the press," he says. "I'm still not sure how it affected me. The only thing I'm sure about -- and regret -- is that Farrell was a better friend to me than I was to him."

After Van Gundy quit, he spent his time reconnecting with those he'd neglected. He went apple- picking with his wife, Kim, and daughter, Mattie, now 7. He went to spring training games with his dad, Bill, who'd retired after 41 years of coaching college hoops. He hung out with Stan. One morning, on the spur of the moment, he drove to Babe Ruth's grave site in Hawthorne, N.Y., with Malone. Van Gundy, a diehard baseball fan, had lived 10 minutes away all those years and never knew it was there.

On one humid summer night, he passed three kids flashing dunks at one another on a schoolyard rim, guided only by a car's headlights. Van Gundy stopped and watched for 45 minutes. Not until he was driving home did he realize he'd been smiling the whole time.

He took a job with TNT, playing the everyman foil for Marv Albert and Mike Fratello, countering their jibes about his wardrobe with the self-deprecating sense of humor that had once helped him to push his players so hard. And as he toured the league, he caught himself trying to figure out why it had gone so wrong in New York. He kept going back to that playoff game, the one that put him on the roll to the Finals. After Houston's bucket, Miami's Terry Porter took the inbounds pass with less than a second left, and fired. His miss set off a giddy Knicks celebration. But the coach wasn't part of it. He was yelling at the refs for not waving off Porter's shot after the clock had ticked to zero. "We won, and I'm chasing the referee," he says. "How insane is that?"

He never doubted he'd coach again, but in the spring of 2003, his Knicks deal was just months from ending, and he had to finish sorting things out. He asked Jackson to dinner. What, he asked his old player and friend, should I do to change? "You can't take losses so hard," said Jackson, who then told him to remember that wise-cracking assistant under Riley. "You need to bring both of those sides of yourself together, Coach."

Van Gundy is still a work in progress. Soon after he was hired, he walked into one of Houston's more fashionable restaurants with Rockets GM Carroll Dawson. A fan gave him a Texas-style welcome. "Hey, Jeff, what's going on?" the guy yelled with a friendly wave. Like a bad reflex, 13 years of parrying with New York's press kicked in. Before he could catch himself, Van Gundy snapped back at him.

"The guy stared at me like I was crazy," he says, shaking his head. "I had to apologize. I need to remember, hey, this is a new place." One with a new arena, the $235 million Toyota Center. And each time Van Gundy looks up from the action on his home court, he'll see Tomjanovich's uniform high in the rafters. Rudy T, who took a front-office position after learning he had bladder cancer last spring, was a beloved local legendand a player's coach. He gave his guys the ball and let them figure it out. Van Gundy doesn't know what it's like to be hands-off. "I don't care about anything that doesn't have to do with winning," he says. "But I want complete control of everything that does."

And the fact is, the Rockets need what he has to offer: intensity, preparation, defense. He's already flashed a temper. Making it clear to Yao's translator that he means to keep distractions to a minimum, he barked: "I can be a motherf -- er. A real motherf -- ing motherf -- er." But this team, as it stands, is more finesse than force, so it'll be interesting to see how it takes to the new coach.

In Yao and Francis, Van Gundy sees the inside-outside combination he loves, but he needs his guys to see it too. So he's made the lights brighter at the team's practice facility, and he replaced the 36-inch TVs with full-screen projection sets -- both touches meant to make Yao loom even larger for Francis and backcourt mate Cuttino Mobley.

If Van Gundy can add a handful of W's to last season's 43 - 39 record, the Rockets will make the playoffs for the first time in five years. Still, this is the West, and the first round is about as far as they can be expected to go. It's only a matter of time before the pressure starts to build and the misery starts to well. Van Gundy knows this -- heck, he may even relish the return of the old sensations. This time, he swears, he'll handle it all differently.

"I'm not saying I'll come in singing 'Kumbaya,'" he says. "I don't want to lose my intolerance for error. But I'd like to get more joy out of the people around me. Go out to dinner more. Maybe play some tennis. And enjoy the wins. Yeah, enjoy the wins."

He pauses. "At least, that's the plan."

This article appears in the September 29 issue of ESPN The Magazine.







Pretty good read.Oh, and if this has been posted, my bad.