Patrick Dorsey of The Miami Herald writes about Pat Riley, who has been asked about the likelihood that he will soon make the Hall of Fame.
Riley's response is brilliant. He uses some self-deprecation to, all at once, elevate the profession and dull his critics who claim that success was handed to him with a stacked Lakers roster.
More than anything, it shows that Riley understands what it's like to be a regular, as opposed to a superstar, basketball coach.
Here's what Riley says about the Hall of Fame:
I look at it this way: I don't belong there.
I really believe in the coaching profession and what the word coach means, and the gentlemen that are in -- all the gentlemen that are in that Hall of Fame as coaches -- [I know] why they are deserving, and why I don't belong, but why I'm there. ... I never coached a [Catholic Youth Organization] team. I never hauled a group of wannabes in the back of a truck to Central Park and worked them out from dawn to dusk. I never took a kid home in my car and treated his athlete's [foot] in my house when I was in high school. I never did the 8 million hours of work that a student-manager/assistant coach did.
I never did any of that stuff.
I was pushed through a door and a silver spoon was shoved in my mouth, that had Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] and Magic [Johnson] and [James] Worthy and [Bob] McAdoo and [Byron] Scott and [Michael] Cooper and [Norm] Nixon. I mean, that's how I got my start. And most of the guys that are in [the Hall] did it the other way. So that's how I look at it.
