Suns Brighter Under Ainge

THE SUNS' future has brightened considerably since Danny Ainge took charge. The rookie coach not only kept his sense of humor, but helped Phoenix find respectability despite early-season disasters.

PHOENIX - Basketball joke between father and son.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Owen.

Owen who?

O and 13.

The son laughs hysterically. The father is hesitant at first, but joins in a little later. Five months later.

"Yeah, that was a good one," said Danny Ainge, rookie coach of the Phoenix Suns. "It was pretty funny then, but it's much funnier now. At the time, I'm thinking, `Where does he get this stuff?' "

Kids will say the darndest things. They'll say what everyone is thinking and whispering behind your back and talking about on the radio shows. They will laugh at you along with everyone else and expect you to join in.

So there's Tanner Ainge, 13, doubling over because he's pulled a fast one over on the old man. And there's Danny Ainge, speechless.

O and 13. Funny?

"Not really, but it was true," he said. "We were 0 and 13 and people were laughing at us."

Two weeks on the job and already he was the town's laughingstock. He knew he always wanted to be an NBA coach. Knew it when he was batting .243 with the Toronto Blue Jays and winning championships with Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics.

But this - basketball jokes from his kids - he wasn't ready for. And all he could think about was, "What has Cotton gotten me into?"

Cotton Fitzsimmons was the man who lured Ainge away from his cushy broadcasting job with Turner Sports. He offered to groom Ainge in Phoenix as an NBA coach.

But after three weeks of apprenticeship and an 0-8 start, Fitzsimmons resigned as coach and Suns President Jerry Colangelo gave the job to Ainge.

The losses continued. His first head coaching game was against the Los Angeles Lakers. Then Chicago and Houston and Miami and Denver.

The Ainge-led Suns finally won their first game of the season against New Jersey. From that point on, they compiled a 40-29 record. They finished the season with a 19-4 mark that featured an 11-game winning streak. They rose from the bottom of the Western Conference standings and finished sixth with a 40-42 record. It was the first time an NBA team had started so poorly and made the playoffs.

Ainge cannot look back on the season and say he planned it this way. Things just happened. Much like his widely scrutinized four-guard offense that has some calling him an offensive wizard and others an idiot.

"I'm still learning how to coach and learning about this team," Ainge said. "There's been so many changes that we're just starting to feel comfortable with each other. And it's my job to get them to play with each other and win games."

Kevin Johnson, who has played in Phoenix longer than any other current player, remembers when his former teammate became the head coach.

History and Ainge's resume will say it happened on Nov. 14, 1996, when Colangelo removed the "assistant" from his title.

But Johnson is thinking about Jan. 5, 1997, and the Boston Celtics. He remembers the final minutes of a disappointing loss and disgruntled forward Robert Horry throwing a towel in the face of Ainge.

It was the climax of a long-standing feud between player and coach. And it happened on national television and in front of 18,000 Celtic fans in the city where Ainge starred for seven of his 14 playing years.

"That was one of the most incredible acts of non-violent resistance I had ever seen," Johnson said. "That's Martin Luther King all over again. The fact that Robert did it, I don't even hold it against him.

"What shocked me was Danny Ainge's reaction. To be able to sit there. Take the towel and continue coaching. . . . He knew that wasn't the time. There's nothing good or positive that could have come from that situation.

"But in the locker room, he made his point. He said, `You will not ever get away with that. I didn't say anything out there, because that wasn't the time.' It was just a whole different deal in the locker room and I think that gained the respect of everybody on this team."

Five days later, Horry was traded to the Lakers for former Sun Cedric Ceballos.

To many in the Phoenix locker room, Ainge will forever be the baby-faced prankster who once dressed up as a doctor before a playoff game. "I did it to lighten the mood," he said, "to check and see if they still had a heartbeat."

"I laugh when the younger guys call him "Coach Ainge," said Danny Manning, who played with Ainge on the 1994-95 Suns team. "Coach Ainge? Be real. C'mon, he's Ainge. And sometimes Danny. That's not any disrespect toward him, but he's played with half the guys in this room.

"If he'd walked in here and said, `It's Coach Ainge from now on,' a lot of guys wouldn't have took him serious. And deep down, he'd probably laugh, too."

Ainge is 38 years young with no gray hair and no wrinkles. He looks the same as when he left Brigham Young and entered the league in 1981.

"Wait a while," Ainge said. "They tell me that coaching ages you twice as fast as playing."

The idea has been broached that Phoenix is just the first stop of a coaching career that will end in Boston.

Ainge shrugs. "I don't know about that. I'm here and I'm happy. That's what's important. We're a young team and it wouldn't be bad to grow old with these guys."