The day our season ended, Dick and Rick were already talking about what we needed to do the next season. That’s why I know they are the perfect guys for me, because I was thinking the very same thing.
On Coaching
Today in the NBA
I
’ve had a lot of really good coaches during my career, and when one of them did something that had an impact on me, it stays with me. I’ve taken a little something from each coach I’ve played for along the way, and I know it’s made it easier for me to understand the players I’m trying to teach.
Looking back, I can go right to my two high school coaches, Jim Jones and Gary Holland, who taught me how to establish a work ethic and to develop sound fundamentals. Jim Jones was the first person to stress to me how important it was to use my left hand. At the time, I’m not sure I understood why that was such a big deal, but the better I got and the tougher competition I played, I appreciated that advice. Jim Jones was always around in the summer when my buddies and I were playing basketball. He’d drop by to check on us, then tell us, “I’ll be back around to see how you are doing.” We never knew what that meant. Some days we’d play for another hour and he’d show up. Other days we’d be out there for five hours, afraid to go home until he came back, because we didn’t want to disappoint him. That was something I kept up right through my pro career. I always wanted to impress my coach. When I got older, I asked Jim Jones where he went all that time, and he told me, “Hey Larry, I was playing golf!” Jim Jones is also the one who drilled the idea of boxing out into my head until I wouldn’t dream of not doing it. I wasn’t a great rebounder because I was stronger or could jump higher than anyone else, because I couldn’t. I was a good rebounder because I knew how to get position under the boards. I was lucky to start out with someone like Jim Jones, who would meet me and my friends before school to practice our free throws. When he left in my senior year of high school, Gary Holland picked up right where he left off. Coach Holland wasn’t quite as firm as Jones, but by then I was policing myself. Coach Holland let me experiment with a little more offensive freedom, and it felt great. No wonder by the time I got to the pros everyone was talking about what a sound fundamental base I had.
I’d have to say Bill Fitch, my Celtics coach from 1979 to 1983, is the best coach I’ve ever played for. Bill was organized, he preached discipline, and he had us in the best shape of our lives. We won the 1981 NBA championship under him, and I have a great deal of respect for him. That’s why I asked him to be one of my escorts when I was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last October.
Some of the guys who played for Fitch in Boston resented how hard he pushed us and how much he rode us, but they will also be the first ones to tell you he was a big reason why we were successful. Take Robert Parish. He played in the league twenty-one years and is a guaranteed Hall of Famer, but it wasn’t always that way. Bill Fitch saved his career. When Parish came over to us in a trade with Golden State in 1980, he was horrible. Fitch would have us running all day—he was killing us—but Robert would only run free throw line to free throw line. He was never involved in any of the action. Fitch taught us, “Get the ball, and go!” so somebody would take the outlet, run up the floor for a layup, but by the time Robert caught up with us at the free throw line we were already going back the other way. It was no good, and we all kept looking at Fitch, waiting for him to explode, but he never did. He just kept running and running us, until finally we got into shape. Then, all of a sudden, one day we were running down the court and we realized, “Hey, Robert’s under the basket.” It changed his whole game. Plus, he had his turnaround jumper. Robert discovered he could shoot fast, and sort of be falling and still be able to run down and get back on the other end. Bill Fitch is the one who did that.
The truth is, I had never heard of Bill Fitch until the Celtics drafted me. I just didn’t follow pro basketball that closely. I knew of Red Auerbach, and Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, but that was about it. I remember the day they flew me into Boston for my press conference. They had it at the Boards and Blades Club, which is a big function room in Boston Garden, and I was standing around waiting for everything to start. There was a lot of press around, and this guy comes up and starts talking to me. I was a little nervous about everything that was going on that day, so I was polite to this guy, but I really wasn’t listening to him. Anyway, this guy was doing most of the talking, telling me how much the Celtics had a chance to contend for the title, and how I would really enjoy Boston, and then someone tapped me on the arm and said, “Okay, Larry, we’re ready.” I go up to the podium, and there is Red Auerbach sitting there, and then the guy I had just finished talking with sits right down next to him. That’s when I realized, “Holy smokes! That’s my coach!” I knew the name, Bill Fitch, but I had no idea what he looked like. He must have thought I was some kind of jerk. I mean, there he is, talking to me about my future, and I’m blowing him off. So now I’m sitting next to him, and I think it’s funny as hell. I had probably the best coach I could possibly have, sitting there talking to me, and I didn’t even know who he was. I’ve got so much respect for the man, but you never would have known it that day.
The one scene that will always stand out in my mind was the first day we had practice. It was the same day Cedric Maxwell, Sidney Wicks, and Curtis Rowe were giving me all that grief about being the Great White Hope. You could tell those guys had their own little thing going. They were smart-mouthing everybody, and calling me the savior—here comes the savior—being really smart-ass about it. I bet we weren’t in practice twenty minutes, and Fitch started killing us. He just ran us into the ground. I didn’t know any better; I thought it was normal. All of a sudden Fitch blows the whistle and says, “Okay, Curtis. Why don’t you go on and get dressed. They’ll send you your checks. You’re done here.” I was thinking to myself, “What is he talking about?” But there goes Curtis Rowe, out the door. We practice another hour and Fitch blows the whistle again, and he sends Sidney Wicks packing.
Now all of a sudden the whole atmosphere has changed. I think Max was a little ticked off, but he got in line pretty quick. I didn’t know what was going on, really, so I just put my head down and kept working.
So that’s how I knew that Bill Fitch was going to be demanding. A Bill Fitch practice is all movement. That’s what I want our Pacers practices to be. With Bill, you always ran a lot more than you think you did, and that’s what I loved about it. He just kept it coming, one drill after another. The one thing he always did was make me play one-on-one against guys after practice. In the beginning it was M. L. Carr, but as soon as he got fatigued he’d send somebody else out there. One day it might be Max, another day it would be Dave Cowens. It was just so exhausting.
In my first year, after we had played about 30 games I went to see Doc Silva, because I was losing a lot of weight. I was down to about 208 pounds, which was about 25 pounds under what I usually was, and Doc Silva said, “He’s working you too hard, kid. You probably should take a week off.” I was having trouble visualizing that, telling Bill Fitch I needed a week off, but Doc Silva was insistent. He said, “You can’t continue to lose weight like this. Go to Florida. Put your feet up for a bit.” I told him, “I don’t need to go to Florida, but could you tell Coach not to run us so hard? Then I wouldn’t be losing so much.”
Bill Fitch was the best coach for me at that time, because I had no clue what I was getting myself into. He would put me through these grueling drills just to get a reaction out of me, but he never did get one. The truth was, I loved it when he worked us like that. He kept me hungry. He never let you know where you stood, so you kept on working so you could impress him.
The funny thing about it is that as a coach, I’m the opposite of Bill Fitch. I don’t yell like he did, and I give my guys a lot more freedom, but I find myself using so much of Bill’s stuff, especially when it comes to conditioning drills.
We won a championship with Bill in 1981, but you could see his ways were wearing on the team. When Robert Parish says something, then you know there’s a problem. Guys like Max and M. L., they always had something to say, but Robert never said anything bad about Coach Fitch, even though there were times you could tell he’d had enough. When even he finally spoke up, then I knew Fitch was gone. All those guys respected Bill Fitch as a coach, but they had trouble not taking his comments to heart. The things he said to them when he got them in a corner, that’s all part of coaching, but they couldn’t separate that. Fitch would say things to Kevin McHale, and he’d get all flustered.
I was really disappointed when they let Bill Fitch go, because I learned so much from him, but I knew it was time. I truly believe three years is the max for any coach with one team. That’s why when I signed my contract with the Indiana Pacers, it was for three years. I guarantee I will not be coaching for them any longer than that. Things get stale to players real fast, even more so today, and they need a fresh look at things. I’m not even sure I’ll make it to three years. I told Donnie Walsh I would reevaluate things after every season.
When Fitch left the Celtics we knew it would be different with K. C. Jones, who was promoted from our assistant coach to our head coach, but we picked up Dennis Johnson that summer, and I felt we’d be fine as a group. K. C. couldn’t have been any more opposite than Fitch. It took a lot to get K. C. really riled about something; it didn’t take much at all for Bill. K. C. doesn’t get a lot of credit for the job he did with our 1984 and 1986 Celtics championship teams, because everyone thinks we were so talented that we could just do it ourselves. That’s not true. K. C. was the perfect coach for that team, because he gave us the freedom we wanted and needed, but also because he knew when it was time to step in and make his presence felt.
K. C. didn’t waste a lot of words. He’d just walk over to you and say, “Hey, you can make a better effort than that.” I remember right from the beginning, K. C. said, “I don’t care what you guys do off the court. When we throw the ball out there, it’s time to play, and you better be ready.” That’s one thing that stuck in my mind. We only needed to give him two hours a day, so get to work. I’ve tried to treat my Indiana players the same way. I promised them I would never yell at them, and, for the most part in my first season, I kept my word. If one of my guys is doing something I don’t like, I pull him aside and say, “I need a better screen from you. Don’t set a lazy pick. Set a good one.” And, if they don’t do what I ask, I call them over a second time and say, “This is the last time I’ll tell you. If you can’t set a good pick, I’ll go out and find myself someone who can.”
One of the things that K. C. really helped me with was controlling my emotions on the court. When I was young, I could be really hotheaded at times. If something set me off, especially early in my career, I would end up with a technical, or sometimes even be thrown out of a game. I remember after one of my outbursts, when I got tossed, K. C. called me aside. He said, “Larry, you aren’t thinking. You are forgetting how valuable you are to us. You don’t do us any good when you’re sitting in the locker room all ticked off about something. You’ve got to understand that when you’re out on the court, we’ve got a chance to win every game. But when you’re sitting in the locker room, and we’re out there playing, we have very little chance of winning.” What I remember most about that was how calmly K. C. said all of it to me. He wasn’t shouting. He explained it very simply, like it was so obvious, and by the time he was done it was obvious to me he was right.
So now whenever I see my star player, Reggie Miller, getting all worked up about something, I tell him the same thing. He’s a very emotional player, which is fine, but not when he gets caught up in those emotions and lets them affect his play. I sat him down early in the season and gave him that whole talk about how when he’s sitting out, he’s not helping us. So now Reggie knows where I got it.
K. C. was an easy guy to play for. He loved to win, but win or lose, he’d call us together after the game and say, “Okay, go in there and wash your asses, and let’s get out of here.” I always got a kick out of that. In fact, after one of our Indiana games, it just came to me that’s what K. C. used to say, so I called my team together and told them, “Okay, go in there and wash your asses, let’s get out of here.” You should have seen them looking at me. They thought I’d lost it.
One other thing I stole from K. C.: not being afraid to sit back and go with the flow of the game. I remember one time we were playing the Clippers, and we were running a play called “32,” for Kevin McHale (his number was 32). It’s basically a play where a guy spins off from the weak side and sets a pick for Kevin. We ran the play two times in a row, and Kevin scored both times. So K. C. yells out, “Thirty-two.” Again and again. He wouldn’t get off it. Finally, the Clippers called time, and K. C. got us in the huddle and said, “We’ll run it fifty times if they don’t stop us.” I love that. I don’t understand why more coaches don’t do that. They all want to save their big plays. But if you save it and the other team gets on a run and scores 15 points, they might have built up enough confidence to stop “32” at that point. I find myself calling out the same play over and over if it’s working. Maybe not to the extent that K. C. did, but I’m with him. Why not keep coming at ’em until they stop you?
When K. C. decided he had coached enough, after the 1987–88 season, everybody knew the next guy in line was Jimmy Rodgers, who was K. C.’s top assistant and had been part of probably the best coaching staff ever in 1986—Bill Fitch, K. C., and Jimmy. I was really excited that Jimmy got the head job, because he had already been so valuable to our team, and he had very patiently waited for his turn. Jimmy had head coaching offers at other places, including New York, but the Celtics wouldn’t let him out of his contract because they wanted him to be the successor to K. C. I was hopeful that things would go well for Jimmy, but his first season was the year I had surgery on my heels and only played in six games. I came back for the 1989–90 season, and it was a tough year.