I love this place," says Pat Riley, inclining his face to the sun, squinting a little, bathing in the light. He is sitting on a bench on a bluff overlooking Santa Monica Bay. Below is Will Rogers State Beach, known as State Beach to the volleyball players, sand-encrusted philosophers and other energetic malcontents who populate it, as Riley once did. I think that way is north," he says, pointing west, up the bright path of the late September sun to the horizon, where steel-blue water becomes cottony air, and the canyons above Malibu come down to the sea in a misty joining.
Riley is deeply tanned and wrapped in soft sweats. The famous swept-back hair is lighter and drier than one might have expected after studying him standing in profile beside the L. Lakers' bench throughout every NBA championship series game for the last four years. His has been a remarkable stewardship. The Lakers won the NBA title in , his first year as their coach, defeating the Philadelphia 76ers.
They lost to them in , and lost to the Boston Celtics in the overheated series of Then last season, in the most gratifying circumstances possible, L. More than half of the 15 championship banners hanging in the rafters of Boston Garden represented bitter Laker defeats.
Riley ended that. Yet little has appeared that might allow one to discover just how he did it. Riley's wardrobe has often been celebrated, as has his bizarre ascension to the Lakers' coaching job in at the age of That a natty boulevardier was able to step from the broadcast booth to the bench often leads to the suggestion that Riley is a "caretaker" coach.
Even his splendid marriage of 15 years, says his effervescent wife, Chris, diverts the casual eye from the substance of the man and his achievement. But Riley knows about diversion. A team can have its attention divided by peripheral opponents like the fans, the press, even players' families, though it seems wrong to call a family an opponent. Just now the distraction is all this talk about no team having repeated as NBA champions for 16 years. Indeed, 10 minutes after the Lakers had whipped Boston, Abdul-Jabbar, at the apex of his exultation, was asked if the Lakers could repeat in It was a measure of the man's control that he refrained from even the mildest epithet.
