SPORTS THE MOTTA METHOD

HOWARD COSELL contends that a sure way to bring out the dark side of Don Meredith is to discuss the ex-quarterback’s relationship with Tom Landry. But it’s also been said that Landry, when compared to Dallas Mavericks coach Dick Motta, is an emotional slob who weeps uncontrollably every time Tony Dorsett skins an elbow.

Listen, Dandy. If veteran Maverick forward Mark Aguirre were so inclined, he could tell you stories that would cloud up your dandy Lipton’s Iced Tea.

It’s true that after three seasons, Aguirre (who was the nation’s top collegiate basket-ball prospect in 1981) has become The Great Mocha Shark, an all-NBA caliber player. But that development hasn’t always been a pretty thing to watch.

Back in 1968, the Chicago Bulls-like the Dallas Mavericks-were an expansion team, and not a very good one. It took Motta just three years to transform the team into a winner. Then Motta moved on to the Washington Bullets, and reached the pinnacle as coach there when the Bullets won the NBA championship in 1977. His accomplishment was embellished during the 1977 playoff finals when Motta, with the Bullets trailing three games to one, coined the phrase, “The opera’s not over until the fat lady sings.” No one was quite sure what the motto meant, but in the end it made a lot of sense: The Bullets, using the slogan as their battle cry, rallied to win three straight games and claim the title.

Even as a junior high school coach at Grace, Utah, in 1959, Motta imposed a guideline of players’ rules: Dick’s Commandments. Since then, he has carried them under his arms on stone tablets like a Moses as he trudged up the basketball mountainside. (“The rules?” Motta says. “I have about 20. They deal with punctuality, primarily, and courtesy and common sense.”) As time passed, Dick’s original commandments were amended to include provisions dealing with the excessive volume of tape players on airplanes and with the unauthorized use of Pharmaceuticals.

Unfortunately, after the Bullets’ 1977 championship, some cracks began to appear in the sidewalk. Motta’s relationship with several key players began to deteriorate. Some of the players, notably Elvin Hayes, began to regard some of Dick’s Commandments as a bit too pristine for a championship NBA operation. Motta, in turn, developed a “to hell with it” attitude, retreating to a self-imposed exile at a fishing cabin in Fish Haven, Idaho, from which he was determined to never emerge again.

But Motta’s sanctuary was invaded in 1980 by a single-engine aircraft that contained businessman Donald Carter of Dallas. Carter, president of Service Industries Inc., was the man who put up the money to bring the National Basketball Association to Dallas.

It was expected that in its debut season, the Dallas team would consist of the usual assortment of has-beens and never-will-bes that are generally produced from expansion pools. But Carter had heard that Motta could be the key to the equation that might get this turkey going. And Carter and Motta did share some areas of common ground: Theologically and professionally, they were both straighter than 20 miles of West Texas highway.

During negotiations, Motta emphasized that he wasn’t going to put up with any of the problems he had encountered during the Bullets’ post-championship aftermath in Washington. Carter agreed, and they shook hands on the deal. Since then, no formal, in-writing agreement has been drawn-up between Motta and the Mavericks.

The inaugural edition of the Dallas Mavericks began workouts in the recreation room of the Royal Lane Baptist Church, where Motta quickly confirmed what he had already suspected: The members of this team stood little chance of ever entering any Hall of Fame-except, perhaps, that of a radio talk show sports trivia quiz. Motta’s first Mavericks team, with a strong, late-season showing, succeeded in winning 15 of 82 games.

But the team’s futile efforts were rewarded with the number-one selection in the first round of the 1981 NBA draft. As the draft approached, Motta with Mavericks General Manager Norm Sonju and Player Personnel Director Rick Sund narrowed their choices to three candidates: Buck Williams, a big forward from the University of Maryland; Isaiah Thomas, a point guard who had directed Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers to the national championship; and Mark Aguirre, a two-time All-America forward at Chicago’s De Paul University. It had been generally determined that Aguirre was the best raw prospect of the three. But a wealth of negative innuendoes about the 6-foot-6 Aguirre had been circulating throughout the basketball underground.

“The negative stuff was pretty well documented,” Motta says, “and we were aware of that and as concerned about it as anybody. The word on Mark Aguirre was that he was a hot-dog, didn’t practice and was a malingerer.”

There was also the rumor that for all of his basketball skills, Aguirre was strictly a free-lance operator on the court who considered the team concept secondary to his personal statistics. If that proved to be the case, it was thought that Aguirre would fit in with Mot-ta’s highly structured offensive scheme about as comfortably as Eddie Murphy at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Mavericks conducted extensive interviews with each of their draft “finalists,” but the longest sessions were reserved for Aguirre.

“Donald Carter himself had a long talk with Mark,” Motta says. “And at one point, I sat down with him [Aguirre] for about four hours. We started with the usual pleasantries, and then it got serious. I asked Mark some hard questions. I was trying to determine if he was incorrigible or just immature. Also, I tried to paint a picture about what life with me would be like for him, and I tried to paint as bleak a picture as possible. And I laid down the law-or rather the rules [i.e., Dick’s Commandments]-to him.”

Motta explained that the rules were, as they say, non-negotiable: “I also spent a lot of time hanging around a greasy spoon near the De Paul campus, talking to everyone about him-students, the cook. Their opinions varied, but they all had an opinion. Finally, I made two determinations about Mark, and they haven’t changed. Number one: He loves basketball-he’s a basketball junkie. And number two: He’s a good kid.”

The story goes that Motta began to insist to Sonju and Sund that Aguirre was their man after he learned that Aguirre had devoted many hours to sitting up with a nun who was sick with cancer. Aguirre, in the meantime, wasn’t sure what to think.

“But,” Aguirre says, “I could basically understand because they were making a large investment with that draft choice. It might be the only number one pick they might ever have.”

Aguirre attributes his bad reputation at De Paul to the aftereffects of growing up on the streets of the south end of Chicago: “Growing up in a city as big as Chicago was an everyday hassle. It was hard to get any peace of mind. There was no time to do anything constructive.” He says that he was impressed with Carter’s down-home approach. “As for Coach Motta,” he says, “I figured I could learn to deal with him.”

In August 1981, Aguirre signed a $2 million, five-year contract with the Mavericks. Shortly after that, he and Motta began their Richard Gere/Lou Gossett Officer and a Gentleman relationship. “My approach with Mark was distant, aloof, hard and uncompromising,” Motta says. “That was calculated-a planned thing. I saw all that unrefined talent wallowing around, waiting to be tapped.”

At one point, Motta was quoted in a local newspaper as saying, “I’ve said things to Mark that I wouldn’t say to my dog. I have a nice dog.” Now, Motta says, “I regretted saying that about Mark because I was afraid somebody might imply that I was calling him a dog.”

Still, Motta’s tactics with Aguirre seemed to be based on guidelines similar to the obedience-training curriculum at a dog kennel.

On the eve of the 1981-82 season opener, Motta did inform Aguirre that he would be in the starting lineup. But, he added in tones of rare fatherly warmth, “Making the starting lineup with an expansion team is no accomplishment. My grandmother could get playing time on this team.”

In the early games, Aguirre occasionally demonstrated some of the promise that had beguiled the management to invest $2 million in him. But the Mavericks lost 13 of their first 14 games, and the spectators at Reunion Arena witnessed Motta shrieking insults at Aguirre that couldn’t have been reprinted in Hustler magazine.

“I was actually embarrassed at some of the things I had to say to him,” Motta says. “But that’s what the guy [Carter] pays me to do. The thing that most infuriated me about Mark was his inconsistency. He’d make a great play-just a great play-and then a whole quarter might pass before I’d see another one. That, plus rebounding and defense. Maybe if he’d been drafted by Boston or Los Angeles or one of the really top teams, he could have gotten away with just using his shooting skills. But on an expansion team like ours, we had to have his total game. There was something else-the facial stuff. Whenever he felt he was getting a bad call from an official or made a mistake, he’d get this pouty look on his face.”

Then, only a month into the season, Aguirre broke his foot in Kansas City. With Aguirre in mothballs, Motta gave his small forward job to another rookie, Michigan State’s Jay Vincent, who (although drafted 26 slots behind Aguirre in the 1981 draft) began rattling off a sequence of 25- and 30-point games and campaigning impressively for Rookie of the Year honors.

As the Mavericks showed significant mid-season improvement with Vincent and with rookies Rolando Blackman and Elston Turner, Motta hinted that he wished he’d used his number one draft pick on Buck Williams. Isaiah Thomas had started the year impressively for Detroit, and the media openly began to question whether the Mavericks should have gone with a play-making guard instead of Aguirre.

“When I was out with the broken foot is when I started to get discouraged,” Aguirre says. “Until then, I thought I was moving along just about on schedule.”

Aguirre still isn’t exactly eager to discuss that first season under Motta: “It was tough. He [Motta] rode me hard every minute of the way. I reached the point where I was afraid to look over his shoulder. Motta is a lot more of a disciplinarian than my college coach [Ray Meyer]. He’s got that rulebook that lists everything you do or could think about wanting to do-on or off the court.”

The only thing Motta could say on behalf of Aguirre during that first season was, “He could have always gone crying to the general manager about the way I was treating him. But he never did that. I never gave him one inch of leeway, and I handed him plenty of fines. Mark demanded my full off-court attention.”

During the off-season, Aguirre was the topic of trade rumors, but nothing materialized.

When Aguirre returned to Dallas for his second season, Motta didn’t let him know right away, but he was delighted with what he saw: “Terrific improvement with his body and in his physical shape,” Motta says. “It was obvious that he had made a hell of an off-season sacrifice.”

Aguirre re-established himself as the starting small forward ahead of Jay Vincent and began playing with an intensity that, on occasion, would lessen Motta’s fury. “When Mark gets into it, he can carry some games by himself,” Motta finally said.

The Mavericks improved their record to 38 wins that year and attracted an average attendance of more than 12,000 people per game at Reunion, thereby removing the considerable doubt during the early days of the franchise about Dallas’ willingness to support an NBA team.

Last season, Aguirre began to detect a softening of Motta’s overall approach: “I knew that he was still watching me close-he started yelling less and instructing more. And as a result, I began to better understand what he wanted-why and how I was supposed to fit in on the court.”

Now that Aguirre has developed into one of the leading scorers in the NBA and the Mavericks have emerged from basket-case status to playoff contention, Motta has transferred most of his intimidation tactics to rookies Dale Ellis and Derek Harper- particularly Harper, who wears gold studs in his ear lobes. Motta finds this fact deeply antagonizing and eventually plans to chisel a passage about such affectations in Dick’s Commandments.

But Aguirre is not totally immune to Motta’s tirades; during a timeout in a recent game, Motta could be heard hissing at him, “You gonna carry us, or you gonna let us down?” But that came during the heat of combat. Now, during quieter moments, Motta says that Aguirre is on the verge of establishing himself in the elite status of the NBA.

Motta’s theory of player development is improvement through intimidation. He will humiliate players by shouting invectives into their faces in front of an audience of 17,000. In less public circumstances, Motta might introduce techniques that are far less subtle. But even Motta admits that nobody has been subjected to more concentrated doses of The Treatment than Aguirre. “But I had to take this atomic bomb, neutralize it and head it in the right direction,” he says.

Motta is regarded as something of an oddity as far as professional basketball coaches go. That fraternity usually consists of former NBA players who worked hard, kept their mouths shut and were given their jobs as a gratuity when their knees finally gave out. Motta never played pro basketball. (“I was cut from my high school team, for God’s sake.”) And that was in Idaho, where spectator interest in basketball falls well below that of trout fishing, bronc riding and donkey polo.

Back in 1959, Motta was teaching junior high school in Grace, Utah, where he worked part time as the basketball coach. From there, he moved on to the high school level, then junior college-which, in turn, became a college position when the junior college was elevated to a four-year institution called Weber State. Throughout this tedious progression, Motta always fielded winners. At Weber State, his team won so often that he gained the attention of basketball’s highest competitive echelon. That’s when he was appointed coach of the NBA Chicago Bulls.

“In the coming seasons, as Dr. J and Marques Johnson begin to taper off some and Mark continues to improve,” Motta says, “he’ll be regarded as the premier small forward in the league and be regarded in the same category as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

“We still have to work on Mark’s defenseand rebounding before that happens, but it’scoming. He goes into a funk sometimes, too,but we all do that. I think that he does try toplease me.”