The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (40 page)

The big surprise of the night was Rice's son, Mike III, a skinny sophomore guard who looked like a boy playing with men. He came off the bench midway through the first half and reeled off a couple of three-pointers, a reverse layup, and a teardrop shot off the dribble in the lane.

Rice and I had talked about his son's game a few times, and Rice did not always sound optimistic. “I've got to get him more into academics,” he told me once, after receiving a text message from his wife informing him that Mike III had just been benched after going 0-for-3 in an AAU game.

Mike III has no shortage of ability and an excess of basketball intelligence, and Rice personally works him out in their driveway regularly. But he has a tendency to overthink things, which can be deadly for an athlete. It also makes him very different from his father, and his father's father. As Rice put it: “Rices generally go in headfirst and then think later.”

 

Mike Rice was introduced to America last April when ESPN aired footage of him screaming at and demeaning his players, yanking them by their jerseys, shoving them, kicking them; throwing balls at their heads and groins; taunting them with homophobic slurs. Within 24 hours, millions of people had watched it, and Rice had been denounced by everyone from LeBron James to Governor Chris Christie. He was soon fired and disappeared from the public eye as abruptly as he entered it.

I first met Rice at the gym in Neptune on a hot, humid night about two months after all this happened. His daughter's under-12 AAU team, which Rice also coaches on a volunteer basis, had just annihilated an opponent, 47–11. The other team could barely keep possession of the ball, never mind get off a decent shot. I introduced myself to Rice and told him that I felt a little sorry for their opponents. “I don't,” he said. “Tell them to work harder.”

After the game, Rice invited me back to his house in nearby Little Silver, New Jersey. Rice is frenetic on the sidelines of a basketball court, but his resting state is pretty wired to begin with, his voice often rising to a half-yell even in casual conversation. “Have a beer, for Christ's sake!” he shouted at me after I initially declined.

His wife, Kerry, offered to go out and get some dinner for us but couldn't find her car key. After some searching around, Rice produced it from his pocket. “Sorry, Pookie Bear,” he said.

For the next two hours, we sat at a table on his deck, swatting mosquitoes, drinking beer, and eating Italian takeout. His kids were inside, watching the NBA playoffs, and Kerry eventually came out and joined us.

It was the first time that Rice had spoken to a reporter since delivering a brief statement of apology from his doorstep the day he was fired, a strategic decision that was not easy for him to accept. “Everything I've ever done is fight, scratch, and claw,” he told me, “and now I have to sit back and take it, listen to people say I was abusing my players? I was an idiot, but I never abused anybody.”

From the beginning, Rice was clear he wasn't going to make any excuses for his behavior, and he didn't. But when your life has been reduced to a few minutes on YouTube and you've been living under a self-imposed gag order for two months, it's impossible to not want to explain yourself. “When you look at those moments, they're ugly moments, there's no way of describing them any way else,” he said, adding, “Once every 20 practices doesn't make it that way every day.”

It's true that what the American public saw was a fraction of the hundreds of hours of practices Rice conducted over the course of his first two seasons at Rutgers. It's also true that the video was made by a spurned ex-assistant who would end up filing a wrongful termination suit against Rutgers. This was a video intended to destroy Rice, and in some respects, it did. The question is to what extent—and what kind of man will emerge now.

Going into the evening, I was expecting a cautious, scripted conversation. What I got instead was my first glimpse of a man who's not really capable of guarded moments and whose carefully managed rollout could be managed only so carefully.

Over the course of the next few months, I would spend many hours with Rice and gradually get the feeling that he wasn't just agreeing to each of my requests for more time because I was writing “the profile,” a key component of every shamed celebrity's blueprint for rehabilitation. My sense was that Rice genuinely wanted to figure out how he ended up in this position, or at least to help someone else figure it out. “It will be interesting to read how you piece this damn thing together,” Rice told me during our last conversation a few weeks ago.

 

Rice, who is 44, was raised in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, where his father was the head basketball coach at Duquesne University.

The elder Rice was an honorable-mention All-American in college, a six-foot-three, 195-pound guard. (“Let's just say he wasn't the cleanest player,” Rice says.) He grew up playing pickup in Detroit—his own father, Rice's grandfather, worked at a Ford factory and played semipro baseball—and he wanted to replicate that experience for his son, to instill in him the values of the streetballer. “He was a white kid playing in the middle of Detroit,” Rice says of his father. “He wanted me to play the way he learned.”

Rice's father refused to buy him a hoop, forcing him instead to ride his bike to a schoolyard and find some competition when he wanted to play basketball. By the time Rice was in middle school, his father was taking him along to adult pickup games. “These were some of the meanest, nastiest places in all of Pittsburgh,” Rice says. “That's how I grew up, and how I was taught to play basketball, and how I was taught to handle myself.”

In one conversation, Rice described his father as “the most competitive human being on the face of the earth.”

“More competitive than you?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Rice said. “I'm calm compared with him. He's renowned.”

There's some evidence to support this claim. In 1994, Mike Rice Sr. was ejected from a Portland Trail Blazers game—as a broadcaster, a first for the NBA. (Now 74, he still works as a color commentator for the Blazers.) Rice Sr. once threw his tennis racket after losing a match to one of his daughters. On the other hand, it was Rice who knocked out one of his father's teeth during a pickup game with his groomsmen on the day before his wedding.

When Rice wasn't playing basketball, he was watching it. Over the summers, while his mother took his two older sisters to tennis tournaments across the country—both became nationally ranked juniors—Rice tagged along with his father on his recruiting trips. During the school year, he spent most afternoons at his father's practices.

By age 12, Rice was barking directions at his father's players. “He'd be in their ear, saying they have to work on their jump shot or challenging them to a game of one on one,” Rice Sr. says. “I'd run him off. I'd say, ‘I'm not letting you come if you're going to be a distraction.' But he was always there.” After practice, Rice Sr. sometimes found his son taped to the training table or stuck in the locker-room wastebasket, his hands and feet bound with athletic tape.

Rice idealizes his childhood, and his old-school basketball upbringing. “My father taught me the greatest game in the history of the world and the passion you have to have for it,” he says. When I asked him if having such a hypercompetitive father might have had something to do with his behavior at Rutgers, he bristled. “Am I going to blame my father? No. That was on me. He also taught me right from wrong.”

As a player, Rice did the best he could with his size and ability, earning a scholarship to Fordham University in 1987. By then, though, he had long since committed to following his father's career path. “Unfortunately, he had his mother's speed, so we ruled out the NBA early on,” his father says. “His life was going to be coaching.”

 

In early August, I was on a flight to Chicago with Rice when a woman sitting on the other side of him asked him what he did. It was her second attempt to engage him, having asked a few minutes earlier if he was a professional tennis player. (Rice was in his usual sports attire: synthetic striped polo, shorts, and sneakers.)

“I'm a college basketball coach,” Rice replied.

He turned back to me. “That's always a tough one to answer.
Uh, I'm sort of between jobs right now.
”

We resumed our conversation, but the woman, whose interest in Rice was evident, soon asked him where he coached.

Rice paused. “Do you follow college basketball?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Remember that coach who was fired from Rutgers? That's me.”

“Shut up!”

Rice nodded. I asked if she recognized him now that she knew who he was.

“I just remember hearing the story over and over,” she said. “Did you see the
Saturday Night Live
skit?” A few days after the video of Rice first aired, he was the subject of an
SNL
parody in which Melissa McCarthy played a psycho basketball coach.

“No, I still haven't seen it,” Rice answered. “Everyone in my family has.”

“Oh, my God,” the woman said. “You have to watch it. It's hysterical!” She proceeded to recap the skit, in which McCarthy does everything from making her team serve her a meal at center court—“Where's the
bread?
”—to throwing a toaster at a player.

The woman asked if I was his lawyer, and when he told her I was a writer following him around, she asked why he waited so long to tell his side of his story. Rice said he didn't want to sound as if he were making excuses, because what he did was wrong.

“Did you not know that?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “But you want to win. You'll do anything if you think it will help you win.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“I've been doing a lot of basketball camps.”

“Do you show up with a toaster?” She told him again that he had to watch the
SNL
skit. It was on YouTube; it was hilarious.

“I promise I'll eventually get to it.”

 

Rice began working as an assistant coach at Fordham the day after he graduated from college in 1991. He spent the better part of the next 16 years bouncing between assistant jobs: Marquette, Niagara, Chicago State, Saint Joseph's, the University of Pittsburgh. In 2007, at age 38, he was named head coach of Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, at a starting salary of $100,000, $80,000 less than he made at Pitt.

The Robert Morris team Rice inherited had just finished tied for fourth in its conference, but Rice thought he could get much more out of his players, especially because they were one of the league's worst defensive teams. He pushed his players to work harder and play more physically. “You had to give 100 percent at all times,” says the captain of Rice's first Colonials team, Tony Lee, now a corrections officer in Massachusetts. “He demanded that from his players.”

On the court, Rice refused to accept that his players might have limitations. Off the court, he seemed to understand that they were kids. At Robert Morris and at Rutgers, he assigned all of his players a “life coach,” an assistant coach who made sure they attended classes and did their homework on time. At both schools, the team's cumulative grade point average rose considerably on Rice's watch.

Rice's Robert Morris players talk about the team ethos he built; during practice, no fallen player was allowed to get up off the floor until a few teammates had hustled over to help him. Rice basically shaped the team in his own image. “My players would rip your throat off,” Rice told me. “We were an aggressive, intense team with an aggressive, intense coach. We believed in togetherness and toughness. We were old-school.”

One part of coaching is pushing players to do things they don't necessarily think they can do. Another part is showing them how to lose. Not in the simple, good-sport way, but in how to take a loss and make something of it. Yet losing invariably set off feelings in Rice that he seemed constitutionally unable to process and that drove him outside the pages of the conventional coaching manual. “It was pathetic the way we defended and represented Robert Morris University,” Rice said after one game. “It was an embarrassment.” Rice was angry, and he wanted his players to get angry too, even to feel shame. “It's a hard paradox to explain or understand,” says Andy Toole, one of his assistant coaches at Robert Morris. “He cares about you so much and he wants so much to win, he's willing to maybe go into a gray area with you to motivate you.”

Still, the former Robert Morris players I spoke with said they were shocked by the Rutgers video. “Every coach yells—but throwing balls, kicking balls at players, the physical contact?” Lee said. “We had never seen that.”

There are some obvious reasons that Rice might have been able to exert more self-control at Robert Morris. For starters, it's not a big-time basketball school; he was under less scrutiny there. Also, his Robert Morris team was well suited to his coaching style. The players were gritty kids at a commuter college outside Pittsburgh, not NBA prospects with a lot of other options. “Where were they going to go?” Rice says. “They were already at Robert Morris.”

Rice might not have crossed the line at Robert Morris, but he also wasn't a completely different person there from the one he would become at Rutgers. When you think about it, all of the words people use to describe him at Robert Morris—“passionate,” “emotional,” “intense”—are not that far from “out of control.” We tend to treat competitive sports, often justifiably, as a vehicle for all sorts of noble principles. But they are also, maybe more fundamentally, a realm in which men can behave like emotionally stunted rage machines. Anyone who watches college hoops is familiar with the sight of a coach in a suit and tie, neck veins bulging, screaming his head off. This may have something to do with the nature of the sport itself. Because basketball is so free-flowing, there's room for only so much strategy. A coach's ability to motivate his players—to somehow will them to play over their heads—is paramount. In this context, the raging coach seems perfectly normal. Out of context, you would be inclined to conclude the individual in question is seriously disturbed.