Chapter One: The Interrogation
They were sitting across from the most notorious villain in professional sports, four men with the same thought:
Was Latrell Sprewell going to help us or kill us?
For more than a year, Sprewell had been branded as America's Thug. A self-described loner, he had developed a reputation on the court as a malcontent, and his career was scarred by violent altercations with those who were supposedly on his side.
His team, the Golden State Warriors, was going nowhere and Sprewell was feuding with his coach. His frustration and anger boiling inside him, on December 1, 1997, Sprewell had lost his mind and control of his senses. He assaulted P.J. Carlesimo during a practice, grabbing his coach around the throat and threatening to kill him.
This reckless incident set off incendiary reactions from network television and national radio commentators and newspaper columnists. Sprewell was the subject of dinner table conversations from Portland to Poughkeepsie.
The National Basketball Association acted swiftly, banning Sprewell for a year. Now, thirteen months after taking his last shot in anger, Sprewell's basketball future, and perhaps his life, rested with the four men sitting on his living room sofa in the dead of winter.
Dave Checketts, Ernie Grunfeld, Jeff Van Gundy, and Ed Tapscott flew 1,200 miles to Milwaukee on January 17, 1999. Like the reviled Sprewell, they were on a mission; the four men represented the New York Knicks, one of the NBA's cornerstone franchises, and now they were in the home of the player who had choked his coach.
"Anybody want anything to drink?"
"You got any Diet Coke?" Van Gundy asked.
Their host retreated to his kitchen. He was unshaven and wearing gym clothes. His ultracasual appearance aside, Sprewell seemed personable and polite -- unlike the man portrayed as a menace to sport and society in all the hysterical media accounts of the past year.
They sat down on three sofas in front of a large-screen television tuned to The NFL Today, and began talking about the possibility of Sprewell coming to the Knicks. Everyone tried to treat the occasion like a social call, a bunch of guys getting together to watch the AFC Championship Game between the Jets and the Broncos. But eventually the time came to get beyond pleasantries.
"Latrell, you mind turning the volume down on the television so we can talk?" Checketts asked.
"No problem," Sprewell said.
The purpose of the visit became clear. This was Sprewell's parole board hearing. Checketts, the Madison Square Garden president, was the warden. Image-conscious to a fault, the forty-four-year-old Mormon had no patience for outlaws. Nonetheless, he was desperate for a winner; he was willing to soften his hard-line rules of the past if Sprewell said the right things over the next one and a half hours.
Grunfeld, the team president and general manager, had his own agenda: He needed to impress his boss, the press, and the fans with a blockbuster deal.
Tapscott, the assistant general manager, had done extensive background checks on Sprewell. He had spoken with Spre-well's high school coach, James Gordon; his former teammates at Golden State; NBA security officials -- basically anyone with whom the player had come in contact during his basketball career.
Van Gundy, the head coach and the only member of the Knick management team not wearing a sports coat, understood the risk involved in acquiring the volatile shooting guard. He did not see a coach-killer sitting three feet in front of him; Van Gundy saw a job-saver, a slashing, scoring force of a type unseen at Madison Square Garden for the past decade.
On the two-hour flight to Bradley County Airport, Checketts had decided how the interview would be conducted. It was vital that Sprewell not feel as if he were on trial, and that Van Gundy spend considerable time speaking with him, so that the player would feel comfortable with his prospective new coach.
The conversation was going smoothly. But inevitably, it progressed to that morning when Sprewell attacked Carlesimo. Speaking calmly, Sprewell told them of the background behind his desperate act. Listening closely, the four executives could appreciate the motivating power of frustration; their coming to Milwaukee was a fairly desperate act of their own.
The Knicks had been eliminated four straight years in the second round of the playoffs and were searching for new blood. Sprewell, twenty-eight years old and in his athletic prime, was the best available player out there. He was still under contract with Golden State for two more seasons, but the club had decided he would never play for the Warriors again after he had put his hands around Carlesimo's throat. They would hold an open competition for his talents, and New York was among the highest bidders.
In order to conduct this face-to-face interview with Sprewell without risking tampering charges, the Knicks sought and were granted a special dispensation from NBA commissioner David Stern for the visit.
Just ten days earlier, the longest and most contentious labor struggle in the fifty-two-year history of the NBA had ended with a new agreement between players and owners -- and a shortened season that would begin February 5. The NBA would try to cram fifty games into ninety days, and would have to do it without its greatest star: Michael Jordan had retired on January 13. Again.
The chase for Sprewell was on.
For all his baggage, Sprewell's talent was mesmerizing. At Golden State, where he made the All-Star team three times in his first five seasons, the explosiveness and production masked his liabilities. Sprewell's 6-foot-5-inch sinewy frame could dart through mounds of muscle on offense. He played with passion and fire on defense. This was the kind of player the Knicks had long hoped to place alongside All-Star center Patrick Ewing, the scoring threat who could lighten the burden that Ewing had shouldered for so many years.
In his first six seasons, Sprewell averaged more than 20 points per game four times, but his teams appeared in the playoffs only once, getting swept in three games by the Phoenix Suns in 1994. That was also Sprewell's breakout year: He averaged 21 points, made the All-Star team for the first time, and became the unquestioned centerpiece of the Warriors. Even Jordan took notice after his first retirement, calling Sprewell one of the top two shooting guards in the game.
Yet even with such early success, disturbing signs developed. After that one playoff season the Warriors began to implode; trades and losses mounted, and so did Sprewell's frustration. He feuded and fought with teammates and never accepted a leadership role. During his rookie season in 1992-1993, Sprewell had gotten into a wild, free-swinging brawl with teammate Byron Houston. In 1995, after a fight in practice with Jerome Kersey, he tried to go at Kersey with a 2x4 before two other teammates restrained him.
But even these incidents did not prepare anyone for what was to come.
If ever a coach and player were likely to clash, it was the freewheeling Sprewell and the hard-nosed Carlesimo. Carlesimo was a taskmaster from the old school, nearing fifty. He had spent twelve seasons at Seton Hall University, taking a program from the bottom of the Big East to within seconds of winning the 1989 national championship before falling to Michigan in overtime. He also gained a reputation as a screamer, doling out constant criticism that some of his former players construed as verbal abuse. In college, Bob Knight and others can get away with this behavior, but in the NBA, where the majority of the players earn more than the coach and where some have more say in personnel matters, Carlesimo's style was seen as abrasive rather than productive.
He became coach of the Portland Trail Blazers in 1993, la
