by Glenn Stout
These past months have been an emotional time to be around him; the public highs and lows have been mirrored by the most difficult private challenge he’s ever faced. Not long ago he said the scariest thing in the world was “extinction,” or the emptiness that might swallow him if he ever managed to leave basketball behind, which he’s considering. Waiting out the start of the game, we circle a familiar subject: there are changes he’d like to make in his life, if he could ever escape the seductive rhythms of the NBA calendar. The prayer cards being passed out downstairs have a quote on the back, part of which asks: Will I lie down or will I fight? For the past 50 years, and especially this season, that question has been central to Riley’s daily life, a man perpetually seeking out opportunities to prove himself worthy of his reputation. The problem is that every time he proves himself, he puts off his future by another day.
A horn sounds somewhere below, breaking the stillness of his office.
“Watch the time,” Karen says.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Three minutes to eight,” she says.
Riley slips on his jacket, and we walk past the empty offices. His feet don’t make any sound on the soft red and black carpet in the back stairway down to the court. The noise of the arena gets louder the closer he gets, thumping bass at first, then the high-pitched whine of a packed house. He loves these gladiatorial walks, a feeling few people ever know, the pounding adrenaline and the roaring, unseen crowd. Minutes from tip-off, he passes the empty locker room. His team is on the floor. There’s a mural there in the hall, a blown-up photograph of Ray Allen’s famous 2013 buzzer beater in the Finals, and he stops to stare for a moment. He looks at the fans in the background of the photo, studying the desperation in their faces, he says, like he’s looking in a mirror at himself.
This season has challenged Riley as much as any in the past 50 years. The troubles began swirling three years ago, in the summer of 2014. Behind the Big Three—LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh—the Heat had been to four straight Finals, winning two titles, and Riley felt as if he had built something greater than his Showtime Lakers, something to rival even the Bill Russell–led Celtics. But James was a free agent that summer, and Riley and his guys flew out to Las Vegas to make their case for him to stay in Miami.
Riley told his lieutenant, Andy Elisburg, to get the two championship trophies LeBron had won and pack them in their hard-shell carrying cases. Elisburg also brought charts and an easel for a presentation about the free agents the Heat would pursue. The day of the meeting, a hotel bellhop followed them with a luggage cart carrying the presentation and the two trophies. Riley brought wine from a Napa vineyard named Promise. It was the same label Maverick Carter had presented Riley with when they did the deal four years earlier. Riley respects Carter, and when he walked into the suite and saw James with agent Rich Paul and friend Randy Mims but no Maverick, part of him knew the meeting wasn’t sincere. He told Elisburg to keep the trophies and easel in the hall. James and his associates were watching a World Cup game, which they kept glancing at during the presentation. At one point, Riley asked if they’d mute the TV.
Riley flew home worried and got a text telling him to be ready for a call. About 15 minutes later, his phone rang and Paul was on the other end. The agent handed the phone to LeBron, who started by saying, “I want to thank you for four years . . .”
“I was silent,” Riley says. “I didn’t say anything. My mind began to just go. And it was over. I was very angry when LeBron left. It was personal for me. It just was. I had a very good friend who talked me off the ledge and kept me from going out there and saying something like Dan Gilbert. I’m glad I didn’t do it.”
The next year, the Heat missed the playoffs, Riley consumed with self-doubt, his own mind whispering that he’d stayed too long. Then last season Miami lost Bosh to blood clots, but the team still fought to the playoffs, falling to the Raptors in seven in the Eastern Conference semifinals. On the flight back from Toronto, Riley and his staff drank wine and debated the free agents they’d get to join Wade for another deep playoff run.
The beginning of July, all that fell apart.
Wade decided to leave Miami, his bond with Riley fractured. They’d been like family once, with Wade visiting Riley at home and Riley a guest at Wade’s wedding. But with Bosh’s return in grave doubt, Wade saw an uncertain future in Miami—and just like that, the Big Three had disintegrated. Hurt and wounded, Riley and his wife booked a last-minute trip to Paris, leaving three days later for a reprieve and a few Bruce Springsteen shows. During the first one, Springsteen played Riley’s favorite song: “Land of Hope and Dreams.” It’s an anthem for Riley, because he spends a lot of time imagining the future he might have, when all his battles have been fought and won. He dreams of a different life, and not in an abstract way. He sees it, down to the taste of the dinner he’ll eat and the music he’ll play.
That night, standing close to the stage, he sang along. The people who recognized him in the general admission pit saw the exterior: good-looking, tanned, and well-dressed. Most can’t see past that image, which is perhaps its point. His inside is as messy and complex as his outside is manicured and defined. Chris Riley has always viewed any issue, including the pain over losing Wade, through her intimate knowledge of her husband’s hidden motivations and scars: it’d been 60 years since he scored 19 points as a sixth-grader, and the same nun who locked him in the church basement, forgetting him there with the rats and cobwebs, gave him a standing ovation after the buzzer, setting into motion all the urges that sent him running to Paris.
Back home, his friends wondered how he might be handling such a public failure. Two pals from various yacht trips over the years, Dick Butera and Peter Gubar, ran into each other during the off-season, their conversation recounted by Butera.
“Have you seen Pat?” Dick asked. “Is he gonna stay?”
“Pat will be always be Pat,” Peter said.
“You mean the contest is still on?” Dick asked.
“The game is never gonna be over,” Peter said.
His friends know him well. Eight days after returning from Paris, Riley went to Erik Spoelstra’s wedding, at an old mansion and gardens on the water in Miami. Randy Pfund, who left his job as Heat GM after Riley stopped coaching in 2008, walked over to his table to say hello. Riley didn’t open with tales of Paris or gushing praise for the flowers or bride. Almost immediately, he started giving his side of the Wade departure.
“Within 15 seconds,” Pfund says.
Even as he obsesses over the Heat, in this or any other year, part of Riley’s mind is never far from his estate on the Pacific in Malibu. Sometimes he checks the live security cameras just to feel close to the place. He and Chris spend about a month there at the end of every off-season, surrounded by their oldest friends. She calls it their “heart home.”
Last year he took the most concrete action he’s ever taken to make that dreamed future a reality. He signed a new five-year contract, with the understanding that he can work anywhere, including his perch overlooking the Pacific. His friends have been wondering for years when he’d head west, all of them following the internal conflict they’ve come to know as Miami versus Malibu. “I love the schism because that’s all he talks about,” says his friend, the actor Michael Douglas. “That’s all he talks about, getting back to Malibu to that house.”
When Douglas discusses Riley’s life in Florida, and the one he might live in California, he’s not talking about geography. Each place serves as an easy code to describe the competing sides of Riley’s personality. Miami represents the man living six inches in front of his face, Douglas says. One of many examples: near the end of his last season with the Lakers, in 1990, he screamed at the players in a hotel ballroom and punched a mirror, shattering it and cutting his hand so deeply that bright red blood covered the sleeve of his crisp white shirt. He has punched mirrors and walls, wept and raged and trashed locker rooms. He has carried and nursed gr
udges. “Is Pat a dick?” Pfund says, repeating a question. “I know hundreds and hundreds of people who would say worse than that.”
The other Riley loves emojis—texting hearts, smiley faces and sunsets, praying hands, cute baby heads, and palm trees. He has written six unproduced screenplays. Enamored with his five-year-old grandson, he’s teaching him about old cars and buying him toys that play the Motown classic “My Girl.” There’s a contagious joy in his eyes. At bar mitzvahs, he’s been the only adult on the dance floor of kids, leaving when the music stops and he’s covered in sweat. He shows up for people who matter to him; when his college teammate Tommy Kron died, the family walked into the church that morning to find two people: the priest and a grieving Riley. He’s been all over the world with friends on boats; he’s often the one with binoculars scanning coasts for little bars where they can surrender for an afternoon and night. “They drink and they sing and they play music,” says actress Lynda Carter, a longtime friend best known for playing Wonder Woman. “And he loves Springsteen and Motown and doo-wop. He and my daughter, Jess, were singing these duets, ‘Red Dirt Road,’ by Brooks & Dunn. They are crooning together and playing air guitar.”
The flexibility in his contract about Malibu, then, isn’t about distance. It’s a vow he’s making—about the kind of person he can still be, even as a 72-year-old man. The entire estate, from the porches with the million-dollar views to the bocce ball court near the beach, is full of little promises.
He’s got a guitar collection out there, because one day he swears he will learn to play “My Girl” for Chris. He dreams of strumming her that song, and she dreams of planting a garden, and they both dream of hammocks on the beach. He’s planning to move half his antique cars—he’s got nearly a dozen—out to Malibu. Five minutes from the estate, he found a storage facility to keep them all. He rented every available bay, so they’re all sitting there empty, waiting. The owner called him not long ago, worried that one person had all his space and wasn’t using it, wanting a long-term tenant and not some fickle rich guy who might up and leave.
“What is your plan?” the man asked.
“These are going to be filled one day,” Riley said.
He owns three houses in a row, purchased one at a time starting in the Showtime days when his kids were young. One of his many dreams is for the family to have a compound, for Pat and Chris to have a house, and for James and Elisabeth to each have one too. That vision got him through many long seasons and those lonely nights in hotel bars—the belief that he wasn’t giving up a life, just postponing it a bit. For 30 years, he’s told himself a story about the man he will be, about the family he will have, once he reaches his destination. But now his kids are grown, 32 and 28, with lives of their own and no time for a compound. They’re busy.
He waited too long.
Pat Riley began his NBA playing career in 1967. In October, when the 2016–2017 campaign began, it marked the 50th year he’s lived by the code of Riley: when the team sucks, he sucks. And the Heat suck. They suck in ways big and small. The team blows a 19-point lead in the home opener. Wade beats the Heat in his return to Miami, off an infuriating and iffy foul call. On December 12, they are third to last in the conference, 7-17, when the Riley family gets news that makes all that losing cease to matter.
Lis, their 28-year-old daughter who’d gotten married the year before and moved to Denver, notices she has massively swollen lymph nodes. Pat and Chris rush to Denver, where a doctor tells them what they’d feared the most: it looks like cancer, lymphoma, and they should schedule a procedure and then wait for confirmation.
The Heat lose four of five, but Pat’s mind is elsewhere. For all his children’s lives, he has felt as if he could solve any problem they encountered. When his son, James, went to boarding school, Pat flew up early to make sure the young man’s room was arranged perfectly, likely in search of a grand gesture to ease his guilt for all he’d missed. The morning James was scheduled to report, Pat found the dorm locked around 5 a.m., so he climbed in the window and went over everything again, down to the space between shirts in the closet. On the day of Elisabeth’s wedding, he raised hell with the planners, making them redo the draping and piping on a table minutes before rushing to change clothes and walk her down the aisle.
“He was hysterical,” his close friend Steve Chabre says. “He was almost manic.”
But illness he cannot fix.
“A father’s worst feeling,” Riley says, “is the feeling of helplessness when his little girl is exactly that: helpless.”
On Christmas Eve, Pat and Chris fly to Denver to see Lis and her husband, Paul. The four of them pile into a hotel suite. Pat opens a few bottles of Screaming Eagle, a cabernet they love. Lis gives them matching red-and-black-checked pajamas, so Pat and Chris put them on and all four curl up to watch movies, like they did when the kids were young. Outside, the snow comes down. Chris holds Lis on the couch, while Pat and his son-in-law sit on sofas on either side, all eight feet on the same ottoman. In the hotel suite, Pat thinks about game days when the kids were growing up. It’s funny what comes back when you’re scared. Chris would keep the children occupied so he could nap, and then he’d get up and come down to the big center landing and whistle. He can really whistle—once he randomly saw Magic Johnson walking down a beach in the Bahamas and hid behind a dune and let out a loud one, watching the star jump and swivel—and when he whistled for his kids, he’d yell, “Triple kisses!” They’d come running and give him a kiss good luck. Sitting on a couch, wondering if his daughter might have lymphoma, he remembers triple kisses.
The memories come, Lis in her wedding dress, the day they brought James home, stopping first at the Pacific Ocean so the baby boy could see the wonder and the power Pat and Chris loved so much. Sliding back, his own wedding, the yellow 1967 Corvette he drove when he met Chris, the last time he spoke to his father, his bench-warming in the pros, everybody’s All-American at Kentucky, back to the streets of Schenectady, New York. He can smell the high school gymnasium.
Maybe it was his senior year. He drove the lane and thought he’d been fouled. When the referee called a charge, he turned and headed the other way. The gym got murmuring and tense, and Riley didn’t see his father running drunk onto the court—exactly like the scene in Hoosiers, he’d tell people years later, on the rare occasion when he’d share the story—and going after the ref. Lee Riley had been a baseball player and often blamed people for his unrealized dreams, including this particular official, who’d umpired the minor league games he managed. Pat didn’t even know his dad was at the game, Lee having hidden beneath the bleachers, and Pat saw his beloved high school coach, Walt Przybylo, take charge and escort Lee off the court so the game could resume.
Riley adored Walt, later hiring one of his sons as a scout for the Heat. The night before Kentucky’s NCAA final against Texas Western in 1966, stress caused Pat’s feet to break out in painful sores. While Pat tried to sleep, Walt sat up all night gently soaking his feet, an act almost biblical in its devotion.
Lee and Mary Riley did not come to the game. They never saw him play a single time in college or the NBA. They never explained why.
Lee played for 17 minor league teams in 16 seasons and quit in 1943 to work in a factory during the war. A year later, the Phillies offered him a major league contract, and for four glorious games, he was delivered this miracle of a second chance. He got one hit in 12 at-bats, on April 30, 1944. The next day the organization bought a minor league team in upstate New York and sent Lee to play for it. Pat was born 10 months later. In 1952, when Lee was managing a minor league club, he got suspended 90 days for stalling during a game. He quit professional baseball. When he got home, he burned all his gear and memorabilia and rarely spoke of those lost years. In 1970, he died, leaving many things unsaid. “I can’t remember my father ever telling me he loved me,” Pat says. “Not much from my mother either.”
In his mind, Pat finds himself pulled toward 58 Spruce Street.
He remembers it as a dark place, loud with unspoken words. The Rileys didn’t talk about anything. Pat had a sister die in infancy 10 years before he was born, according to a book about World War II baseball, which dedicated a section to Lee Riley. Until I brought this to his attention, Pat had never heard the story of his infant sister. It’s possible the book is wrong, he says, or that his parents kept the secret to themselves. His mom rarely left the house, and he’d come home to find her sitting downstairs, on top of the only heat register, trying to stay warm. Another family lives in the house now, but there remains a worn spot on the floor and wall in the shape of Mary Riley.
He remembers his trips back home through the years and how every single time, he would find himself driving past all these places, his house, Walt’s house, the bar where his dad drank away a decade, the high school gymnasium. Once he accidentally set off the alarm in the gym, which is now named after him. He remembers his greatest games and the time his dad ran onto the court to defend him. That’s how he decided to eventually tell that story, cleaning up his father whenever he could, even to himself. Riley talked about Lee to his players, to schoolkids and corporate executives. Over time, he rewrote his own father, punching up stories and inventing others, a mixture of Lee and Walt and the books Pat read for inspiration. Imagination and willpower were always Pat’s two most important gifts, and along the way he used both to create the man he thought Lee Riley deserved to be. Before one speech in 1997, at the ceremony naming the high school gym in Riley’s honor, a friend’s video camera catches Pat and his mom talking.
“Make sure you don’t tell anybody when I’m not telling the truth,” he said.
His mom and older sister burst out laughing, and he went onstage.
He told that auditorium of students about his dad coming into his room at night to give him wisdom, telling him he was made of special stuff. Chris Riley, a trained therapist, saw through him then and sees through him now. Over the years, she’s watched her husband construct the dad he wanted. There were no fatherly bedside chats on Spruce Street.