Blood in the Garden by Chris Herring

Blood in the Garden by Chris Herring

Author:Chris Herring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00


* * *

It didn’t take long at all for Checketts and the Knicks to put two and two together.

Within days of Riley’s resignation, Arison and Heat executive Dave Wohl had been quoted in the news, saying they’d be interested in getting Riley—even if it meant handing him a contract in excess of $20 million to sign him. But because he’d resigned with a year left on his Knicks deal, Riley was still under contract in New York, meaning other clubs needed the Knicks’ permission to negotiate with him first. And Miami hadn’t gotten that.

As the Riley-to-Miami speculation was intensifying in the media, though, New York got hold of something important: the fourteen-point memo outlining Riley’s demands from Miami. (Asked who leaked the documents to him, Checketts said he couldn’t share a name. “Let’s put it this way: they were Knick fans and New Yorkers, but also well connected to the prior owners in Miami, who’d sold the team to Arison,” he says.)

The memo, dated June 5—ten days before Riley’s resignation—gave New York the ammo it needed to file tampering charges against the Heat, who’d clearly interfered with the deal between Riley and the Knicks.

Each club argued its case before David Stern on August 4. But Checketts, wounded by the ordeal, was out for blood and had put his organization’s entire collection of nine lawyers on the case.

“What bothered me most was that [Miami] took Pat’s attention away from what we were doing,” Checketts says. “To this day, I maintain that Pat abandoned the team by losing his focus in the middle of that season.”

On September 1, just hours before Stern was set to issue a ruling on the tampering charges, the teams reached a settlement agreement. The Heat would hand over their first-round draft pick in 1996, and give the Knicks $4 million—$1 million for interfering with New York’s contract with Riley, and $3 million to cover the loan the Knicks had given Riley to pay for his home in Connecticut upon accepting the job back in 1991.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to debate the logic of what Riley chose to do, even if he broke a whole carton of eggs in making his omelet. His deal with the Heat wasn’t handled by the book. Not even close. But it included a sizable ownership stake and would pay him $40 million over five years—far more than the $15 million over five years he would’ve gotten from the Knicks, who weren’t giving him a stake.

Maybe the “Disease of Me,” which Riley railed against in his book, had taken root in the coach himself. Or maybe it was something more.

Months later, Riley told Mark Kriegel of the New York Daily News that he’d grown “miserable in New York,” citing the city’s tabloids as a cause of his malaise. He also mentioned that coaches there rarely make it beyond three or four seasons.

“I could have seen myself ending my career in New York, even though I don’t know if any coach could ever last that long there,” Riley said.



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