With This Team, He’d Better Have a Sense of Humor

Bill Fitch begins spinning yarns almost immediately. He slides into a booth on the patio of a restaurant near the basketball arena, wearing rose-tinted glasses and a shirt with “L.A. Clippers” on the pocket. (Perfect.) The new coach of the Clippers is the old coach of practically everybody else, so as a storyteller his only real challenge is where to start.

Like, there was the time he worked in Cleveland, oh, 24 years ago, erecting an expansion pro basketball franchise out of little more than old jocks in new socks. Around town in those days strutted a combination self-made millionaire and crackpot named Ted Stepien, a sporting impresario with lots and lots of ideas.

“Softball was all the rage back then, so they started up a new league with teams in eight cities. And Ted owned six of them,” Fitch says, just getting rolling. “And none of the six won the championship, which was typical Ted luck.

“Anyway, Ted gets a brainstorm where he’s going to go to the roof of the tallest building he can find in Cleveland and have somebody drop a softball. You know, and if the guy down below on the street catches it, he wins a prize.

“So, they drop the first softball and down it goes, down, down, down, picking up speed, and what happens? Some poor woman is standing there watching it and it hits her right in the face.

“So, they help this poor woman regain her senses or whatever, and then Ted says, ‘Let’s try it again,’ only this time Ted will drop the softball himself. You know, so it’ll be done right. And Ted takes the softball and down it goes, down, down, down, and it crashes right on top of a car.”

Yeah, Bill Fitch has seen it, done it, been there. He has built basketball mountains out of molehills. Or sometimes they simply stayed molehills, because there were only so many ways to get all the moles to cooperate. For nobody has been a champion of more lost causes than Fitch, who now has a real beauty on his hands with the Clippers.

Fitch squints through those shades above a crooked grin and says, “Hey, nobody knows more about losing than me. I lead the world.”

He does. He has lost more NBA games than any other coach. He could become the only one to lose 1,000 games.

“Some guy draws a cartoon of me in the paper and some kid clips it out and sends it to me,” Fitch says. “The cartoon’s all about me losing and going after a thousand, and the kid says he knows this really isn’t a compliment but would I please autograph it for him anyway?

“That’s my reality.”

So, oh, what will become of him with the Clippers? We have here a team that, over one slap-happy summer, was abandoned by both its best forward and its best guard, traded its other starting guard and canned its coach. The backcourt of Ron Harper and Mark Jackson is gone, and as for that All-Star forward, well, the best way Fitch can assess the damage is, “You can’t count Danny Manning and Dominique Wilkins as two separate players. One came for the other.” OK.

But if you think this discourages Bill Fitch, then you do not know Bill Fitch, because if you want to know about discouraging, then you should have been around when he was trying to assemble something out of nothing back in Cleveland, or when he took over a Boston Celtic team that had lost 103 of its previous 164 games, or when he inherited some Houston Rockets who had just gone 14-68 under Del Harris, or when the New Jersey Nets asked him to take command after winning 45 games in two seasons.

Fitch’s phone number is the 911 of coaching. You call him in an emergency, like a Ghostbuster. He puts out oil fires, like that Red Adair guy.

“Yeah, I know Red pretty well,” Fitch says.

Naturally. He has gotten to know pretty much everybody. Fitch can remember being the only pair of headlights on a lonesome stretch of North Dakota road, out recruiting a gangling high schooler named Phil Jackson. He can remember coaching at Minnesota when the youngster Dave Winfield was an up-and-comer. He can remember when Richie Guerin was coaching in St. Louis and tried to snooker him in the expansion draft by activating and then not protecting none other than himself, Richie Guerin.

There is a ring on Fitch’s finger the size of a Volkswagen, symbolic of a championship he won with the Celtics, not long after fleecing a gentleman from the Detroit Pistons out of a couple of No. 1 draft choices.

“I owe this ring to the wisdom of Dick Vitale,” Fitch says.

And to what does he owe the pleasure of coaching the Clippers, who open training camp this week? Oh, what’s the difference? Fitch always did enjoy a dare. He still has so many things to iron out, like why the roster has so many men who play the same position that his team has become Small Forwards R Us, or why center Stanley Roberts evidently has mushroomed back to his previous shape.

But he also has some sharp young kids eager for a shot at playing, and a lovely new training facility in beautiful downtown Carson, and, of course, that bottomless well of anecdotes and jokes that he has accumulated over the years, the ones the Clipper coach can relate to any situation, including his current one.

“There was this guy who went to Las Vegas with a quarter in his pocket, and he ran it up to $500,000,” the set-up goes. “Everybody urged him to quit, but he didn’t, and he lost every penny.

“Now he’s all depressed. He goes to the washroom, but when he gets there he finds that it’ll cost him a quarter to use it. The washroom attendant takes pity on the guy and gives him a quarter. Then the guy goes to use the facility, only to find the door’s unlocked.

“He takes the quarter back to the casino, makes a bet and starts winning. He runs the quarter all the way back up to $500,000. Everybody begs him to quit, and this time he does. And somebody says, ‘Boy, I’ll bet you’re eager to find that washroom attendant to pay him back.’ And the guy says, ‘Not really, but if I ever find that guy who left that door open . . . “‘

Bill Fitch, who leads the world in losses, is back in action.