54 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
Since his childhood, Starks had always held optimism
that he could dig himself out of a bad situation.
As an 11-year-old, during his first day of sixth grade
in 1976, Starks was walking down his school hallway
in Tulsa when one of his white classmates purposely
knocked one of Starks’s books out of his hands. When
Starks demanded he pick up the book, the child said no
and called Starks the n-word.
“I exploded and beat the kid up,” said Starks.
Starks’s classmate received no punishment. But Starks got
suspended for three days, the principal telling him he’d been
the one to escalate the incident. When Starks asked whether
he could stay at school
until classes ended that
day, since he relied on
the school bus to get
home, the man said no.
Afraid to call his
mother—who’d surely
give him a whooping for
the suspension—Starks
tried to make sense of
the city’s bus system.
But he had no clue
where he was going,
and, being a painfully
shy kid, couldn’t muster the courage to ask anyone for help.
So despite living south of the school, he took the northbound
bus until he realized he was in no-man’s-land. And even
when he used the majority of the change he had left in his
pocket to head back south, he still wasn’t totally sure where
he was. He f inally recognized a dry-cleaning shop he was
familiar with and found his way home.
Similarly, earlier in that 1993–94 season, on a trip where
Riley took the Knicks on a gambling trip to Reno and
handed each player $500 in chips in the midst of a four-
game losing streak, Starks burned through his money.
But he wasn’t capable of folding. So he dug into his own
pockets and eventually got so hot that Saunders literally
had to drag Starks away from a craps table and onto the
team bus, where the rest of the Knicks had been waiting
for nearly half an hour.
These instances crystallized who Starks was. When
things didn’t go his way, he doubled down instead of taking
a breather—perhaps a byproduct of his unrefined basket-
ball education. (Starks played less than one year of high
school varsity basketball, had a nomadic college run at four
schools, then played in two pro leagues before making it
in the NBA.)
In Game 7, though, there simply was no improvement
coming. He abandoned his wayward jumper and went to
the rim on one play, but Olajuwon swatted the offering out
of the air, dragging the guard to 1-for-8.
By the time he was 1-for-10, Starks’s boyish face looked
longer than usual. His eyes began darting as he looked
over to the bench. The question on his face was the sameone going through everyone else’s head: With the game in
the fourth period and a title on the line, was Riley going
to let him work through this funk?
Even those who’d never doubted Riley were second-
guessing his choice to keep Starks on the floor. “I won-
der if maybe this would be the time for us to take a shot
with [backup Rolando] Blackman,” ex–Knicks coach
Red Holzman said as he watched the action from the crowd.
(“It’s the closest I ever heard Red come to even mildly
construing a disagreement with Pat,” says Ed Tapscott,
then a member of New York’s front office, who was sitting
next to Holzman during Game 7.)Meanwhile, the Rockets were counting their blessings.
“[Starks is] our best player right now,” Houston guard
Scott Brooks recalls thinking from the bench that day.
“After a while, his shot looked more like a medicine ball,
with how much he was struggling to shoot it. All of us
on the bench—players, coaches—kept waiting, thinking
Pat was going to use Blackman. Because for years [with
the Mavericks], he’d just killed us, and we couldn’t stop
him, no matter how hard we tried.”Y
OU HAVE TO go back two and a half weeks earlier,
to what took place right after the Knicks’ Game 7
victory over Indiana in the Eastern Conference finals, to
understand how the Rolando Blackman dilemma might
have come into play against the Rockets.
The Knicks players, who collectively had zero rings,
were in a great mood, having just won the biggest game
of their careers. Riley had just congratulated them in the
locker room. The next step was to head down to Houston.
But before dispersing, Blackman asked Riley a ques-
tion: Could the players bring their wives along for the trip?
Riley’s answer, in front of the entire team, was a swift no.
The four-time All-Star failed to understand the logic and
pushed back—something that rarely happened with Riley,
the league’s highest-paid coach and one with four rings to
his credit. Blackman asked for an explanation.
But Riley simply repeated his answer from before: Wives
wouldn’t be making the trip to Houston.
The tone of the exchange stunned the players, not only
because they hadn’t seen Riley challenged that way inMA
NNY (^) M
ILL
AN
Recalls Brooks, “After a while, his shot
looked more like a medicine ball.
All of us on the bench kept thinking
Pat was going to use Blackman.
Because for years, he’d just killed us.”
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