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holfresh
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Reporters Flag Down Brown and Get a Roadside Interview
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By MAREK FUCHS
Published: May 31, 2006
GREENBURGH, N.Y., May 30 — For weeks, reporters have been trying to get someone within the Knicks to comment on the franchise's fractured state of affairs. On Tuesday, Larry Brown obliged, climbing out of his Audi after reporters approached him at a traffic light and saying that he felt "like a dead man walking."
Brown spoke with a smile, and why not? Tuesday's setting with curious motorists driving past while Brown discussed life on a limb was on par with the other bizarre scenes the Knicks have produced in recent weeks.
Four times during the past 10 days, including Tuesday, Brown has worked out prospective draft picks while Isiah Thomas, the team's president has watched from the sideline of the Knicks' practice facility. Reporters were not allowed to watch the workouts or talk to Brown or Thomas, who, along with the team owner James Dolan, apparently wants Brown sent packing.
Instead, the college players were marched into the Knicks' news media room and asked by reporters to deconstruct every interaction between Brown and Thomas they had witnessed. In somewhat bemused fashion, they tried to comply.
At one point last week, reporters tried to approach Brown by walking to the exit of the players' parking lot. Security guards ordered the reporters to leave and soon the police were on the scene, threatening to make arrests.
The reporters ended up standing in the weeds alongside a busy street that cuts in front of the facility and eventually Brown left, waving from behind the windows of a sports utility vehicle as he passed.
On Tuesday, Brown did more than wave. He pulled over. The reporters had camped several blocks from the first traffic light Brown was likely to stop at. When he saw them, he steered his car onto an access road, parked and did something he could not stop himself from doing all season. He talked.
"As many questions as you have, I have," Brown said when asked to address the notion that he is finished as Knicks coach after a disastrous 23-59 season.
Brown said he had not spoken to the front office about his status and was operating in the same information vacuum that many others are. But he maintained that he wants to stay with the Knicks.
"I have no answers," he said. "I don't know what they've done in the past with the coach. Have they always had police escorts?"
The remark could be taken as a dig at an organization that grew increasingly agitated last season as Brown expressed his discontent with the Knicks' expensive and unproductive roster and with his feud with point guard Stephon Marbury.
Brown has made it clear that he thinks the Knicks need an overhaul. But Thomas and Dolan have apparently concluded that could be messy, expensive and perhaps unrealistic, and that it might be easier to dismiss Brown, even though he is owed $40 million for the remainder of the five-year contract he signed in July.
For now, Brown, a 65-year-old Hall of Famer who thought New York would be the last stop in his career, is awaiting clarification.
Brown won a championship with the Detroit Pistons in the 2003-4 season, and he said he was having trouble watching them struggle in the Eastern Conference finals against Miami.
He said that as he was driving home Monday night to Greenwich, Conn., from his summer home in East Hampton, he received telephone updates on the Detroit-Miami game from Knicks assistant coach Dave Hanners.
Detroit lost and is a game from elimination in its first season under Brown's replacement, Flip Saunders. But Brown said the turn of events in Detroit gave him no sense of redemption. "They win games, they're better," he said. "They lose games, they need Larry. I don't have any fun in that."
Asked if he wanted to return as Knicks coach, Brown nodded: "I'm doing my job. I want to coach."
"You don't want it to end like that," he added. And with that, he climbed back in his car and drove off, leaving the Knicks behind, at least for the rest of the day.
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5/31/2006 1:34 AM
