Mike Lupica On The Loyalty Of Patrick Ewing

[Way Of The Ray <wayray@ix.netcom.com>]

Ewing's Good Fight 

Mike Lupica
New York Daily News



Patrick Ewing has already made his last great money grab, because of the contract he signed last year. 
Maybe, if Michael Jordan retires, this is Ewing's last great chance to make it back to the NBA Finals
one more time. He is 36 and running out of time, doing that on knees twice that old, coming back from 
a terrible injury to his shooting hand last season. Ewing fights this fight against the owners anyway.

David Falk, Ewing's agent, wants the fight more. Maybe Falk did put Ewing up to this at the beginning,
made him go after the job as president of the union. But now Ewing takes it all the way, willing to
gamble one of the handful of years he has left in basketball. He has caught a public-relations beating
already because of some of the things he has said. All of the players are catching this kind of beating. 
Still Ewing keeps going.

He has been the most intriguing figure of the lockout from the start, running interference for Billy Hunter 
the way Charles Oakley used to run interference for Ewing himself. Oakley has even joked that if Ewing showed 
this kind of vocal leadership with the Knicks, maybe they would have won a championship together.

This isn't about rooting for Ewing and the players, or against them. This isn't about whether you think their 
strategy against the owners is right or wrong, and I think it has been something out of a Mel Brooks movie. 
This is about Ewing. The center as point man. There is nothing in this for him, and he has still put himself 
on the line. You have to admire that. He has lost about $9 million and could lose twice that on Thursday if 
the season is called off.

"Patrick," John Thompson, his old Georgetown coach, said once, "is loyal. He is true blue."

He is stubborn, too. Maybe that is where loyalty really begins. He has always been stubborn about the way he 
played the game. Last year, when no one believed he could come back to the Knicks before the season was over, 
he always believed. Slowly he made everyone, the doctors, believe. He walked on the treadmill in hotel gyms 
and had to have a stepladder next to him while he did, because he had to rest his clunky cast on the top of it. 
Then he ran and played and practiced and made it back for the Pacers series and who know how that would have 
come out if Reggie Miller hadn't done it to the Knicks at the Garden again?

Now he is out front on an unpopular cause. He takes so much of the heat for his union the way he has always 
taken so much of it for the Knicks. Maybe he thought he owed this to his slippery agent, Space Jam Falk, even 
though agents go forever and players certainly do not. Maybe he does feel insulted by the way the players have 
been treated.

But he takes this thing all the way. He comes plodding into this week as though plodding up the Garden court 
at the end of a long hard game. He still thinks he can win. He always thought he could beat Jordan, too. 
Patrick Ewing doesn't quit.


Original Publication Date: 01/03/1999