JEFF VAN GUNDY knows how good he had it.
He knows how hard the Knicks played for him, how willingly they allowed themselves to be coached, how they took him to places a slow-footed Division III point guard had no business seeing. Maybe he even knew it when he coached them. But he surely learned that lesson traveling around the NBA last year, broadcasting for TNT, getting an eyeful of the insolent and the indignant, coach killers and clubhouse cancers.
“I mean, I look at the game the Knicks played against Orlando [Monday] night,” Van Gundy said last night, maybe 90 minutes before his new team, the Rockets, would play his old team’s former patsy, the Nets. “I see Charlie Ward . . . I mean, whenever it looked like things weren’t going your way, there was always Charlie Ward. I see Kurt Thomas get 11 rebounds. I see Allan Houston, playing hurt . . .”
He paused. You could actually see the nostalgia filling his eyes.
“I only wish,” Van Gundy said, “that I would have said ‘Thank you’ more.”
Van Gundy will have a hard time believing this, but there is a city stuffed with Knicks fans who would rush to tell him how mutual that feeling really is. Somewhere beneath the 365-day obsession with all things pinstriped lies the heart of a basketball city that never beat louder, or with more intensity, than when Van Gundy was pacing the sidelines at Madison Square Garden, guzzling Diet Cokes, losing his voice, wearing every loss like a 200-pound albatross.
Those are just memories for Van Gundy now. He has a new city, a new team, a new franchise center, and a new batch of challenges lined up neatly before him. He’s already had an interesting start, trying to figure out how to turn Steve Francis and Yao Ming into Kobe and Shaq; dealing with the sadness that has become Eddie Griffin’s career, and life; losing to Memphis at home; bludgeoning the Bulls in Chicago.
Getting back on the bike, getting back in the arena, learning how to mainline stress, all over again.
“Coaching really isn’t fun,” Van Gundy said yesterday. “It’s rewarding a lot of the time. It’s frustrating a lot of the time. But you never hear a coach who’s out of coaching say to anyone, ‘I just miss the fun of coaching.’ “
No, they all miss something else. Van Gundy was a TV temp last year, and he was a natural at it, and he could have retired to a safe six-figure bliss that only the cable networks can provide. But he wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t do that. Even last night – deep into the first stage of coaching exhaustion, working on about four hours sleep, the first traces of rings already encircling his eyes – he looked a thousand times happier than he did at any time during last year’s playoffs, when he could sleep until noon if he wanted.
“I am happy,” Van Gundy said. “This is what I’m supposed to do.”
He keeps his eyes focused on three teams now. The Rockets, of course, get most of his attention, and they will get him back to the playoffs this year, and who knows how far that journey can go. He’s all but signed on to become a member of the Miami Heat Booster Club, thanks to the recent elevation of his older brother, Stan, to head coach. The two brothers talk almost every day, and both are looking forward with equal parts excitement and anxiety to next weekend’s meeting in Miami.
And, of course, there’s that other team.
“I’m still a fan,” he said. “I still have awfully fond memories I don’t want to let go of.”
What he should know, if he doesn’t already, is this: So does everyone else.