Starks reality

Sporting News, The, March 10, 1997 by Michael P. Geffner

It is the sound of a single basketball bouncing on the floor. Some teen-aged kid playing all by himself in the creaky hollowness of a near-empty gym. And with every dribble, every shot--especially the missed ones off the backboard--he creates these thuddingly loud echoes that all but drown out the shockingly gentle voice of one of the most notorious bad boys in the NBA.

Knicks guard John Starks--head-butter, trash-talker, chair-kicker,ref-baiter and occasional instigator--sits hunched over, with his hands loosely clasped between his spindly legs, in the first row of the wooden bleacher at SUNY-Purchase College, where the Knicks practiced earlier this afternoon. His voice is so painfully low that at times he seems only to be mouthing the words.

"I think people are pretty surprised when they meet me for the first time," says Starks,31, who is in his eighth NBA season, his seventh with the Knicks. "But the thing I tell people all the time is: Don't judge me by the way I am on the court. That's just my job, not me. And my job is to win games. That's what they pay me to do. And sometimes I'm pretty, sometimes I'm not, but I do whatever it takes to win."

For a whole two weeks I had eagerly awaited this moment, a chance to talk with Starks, about his wonderful resurgence this season. Of being sharper and more productive in fewer minutes; of attacking the basket again; of showing incredible control, like never before, at critical moments in games. And most of all, of accepting his new role--as a bench player--without even a whisper of complaint (unlike last season, when Starks went public with rancor after his demotion by then-coach Don Nelson, a man Starks loathes to no end).

Yet, strangely for two straight weeks Starks seemed to duck me like the plague, to the point where I wasn't sure whether he simply wanted me to give up on the story. "It's just that he doesn't care about stories about himself," a Knicks employee told me. "His ego doesn't really need it, and he almost never reads the stories anyway."

Still, Starks first asked me to meet him at an off-day workout, though, afterward, he blew me off, saying he had something else to do. The very next day he stood me up again, this time at an upper Manhattan hotel, where he often stays in getaway days. The Knicks P.R. department finally tracked me down, by phone, in the lobby to tell me Starks wouldn't be there.

Then, on a game day, he showed up so late for another appointment he offered only the slightest of small talk before saying he really needed to get to the locker room--and fast. And even now, after I've waited patiently for more than an hour for him, Starks emerges from a practice as if he want to talk on the fly, all zipped and bundled up already, cocooned in a bulky black-and-white leather jacket with the collar flipped up, a gray scarf wrapped around his neck and a bright blue designer baseball cap turned backward and pulled down low.

But what you quickly discover about the off-the-court John Starks, as I did that day, is that he's the type of guy you just can't stay angry at for very long. Fact is, once you get to know him, he's actually immensely likable--polite, endearingly shy and totally sincere. He also has this puckish wide-eyed little boy's face, chipmunk cheeks and all, that frequently beams with the sweetest of smiles.

"If I had one day left on Earth," former teammate and now TNT broadcaster Doc Rivers says, "I'd probably want to spend it with John."

Starks quickly apologizes for taking so long, saying he was working out in the weight room, performing his normal routine that focuses mostly on his legs, particularly his knees. Starks tore up his left knee nearly three years ago and it required major surgery to fix; since that operation, the Knicks have privately never stopped worrying about Starks, or that knee, or felt completely certain he would return to his All-Star form of 1994. "I'm still trying to get back the explosiveness I had," Starks says in a haltingly, thick-tongued North Tulsa drawl. "I'm definitely a different player now; I won't say that I'm not. I don't jump as high as I used to, I don't have that lightning-quick first step anymore and I don't have that hard push to the hoop I once had. But, for the first time since I hurt my knee, I finally feel like I'm getting back close to where I was. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting real close."

Starks is the Knicks' most exciting, fearless and infuriating player of recent times--a tightly wound, in-your-face Tasmanian devil who combines the streakiest of outside shooting with a seemingly anal-compulsive urge to heave up 3-pointers. "(He) can put you up by 20 points as easily as put you down by 20," says Jeff Van Gundy, who took over as Knicks coach after Nelson was canned 59 games into last season. A "feast or famine player," is the way Pat Riley used to describe him.

Indeed, for many years, especially under Riley, it was said that the Knicks relied too much on Starks, a player deemed not good enough even to be drafted when he left Oklahoma State in 1988. In the Knicks' most important game in nearly a quarter-century--Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals against the Rockets--they died as Starks, at his over-the-top, out-of-control worst shot 2-for-18 from the floor, including 0-for-11 from 3-point range. To this day, it is one of the most infamous, if not pathetically feeble, displays by any player in a championship game.