San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Hardaway taking his place alongside Mourning, Riley
Tim Hardaway was halfway to what on Saturday formally became a Hall of Fame career, and suddenly there was question about whether he had enough remaining fight.
Enter Pat Riley, Alonzo Mourning and the Miami Heat — and immediately the gloves were off.
The rest of the story now can be told in September in Springfield, Mass., when Hardaway follows Riley and Mourning into the sport's ultimate shrine.
The Class of 2022 includes Manu Ginobili, former coach George Karl, former WNBA champion and two-time college national champion Swin Cash, longtime college coach Bob Huggins, WNBA champion and two-time Olympic Gold Medalist Lindsay Whalen, NCAA national championship coach and former WNBA Coach of the Year Marianne Stanley, and former NBA official Hugh Evans.
The class will be enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., on Sept. 10.
“We put the Miami Heat on the map and made them what Pat Riley wanted the Miami Heat to be,” Hardaway told the South Florida Sun Sentinel from New Orleans, where on Saturday at the NCAA Final Four he formally was named to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame's Class of 22. “It started when I got traded there in February in ‘96.”
That also was when Hardaway, in the wake of his Run TMC success alongside Mitch Richmond (the “M”) and Chris Mullin (the “C”), found himself benched by Golden State Warriors coach Rick Adelman, some left to wonder whether, at 29, Hardaway had run his course as an elite-tier point guard.
Enter Riley and thenHeat general manager Randy Pfund, who saw anger that could be channeled into what would become perennial Heat playoff runs.
“That,” Hardaway said to the Sun Sentinel ahead of his media session in New Orleans, “was just the faith of Pat Riley understanding that I could still play, Pat Riley and Randy Pfund understanding that I could still play, that I had still a lot left in the tank.”
Only for all the flash and sizzle that Hardaway had displayed under his best of Warriors days under coach Don Nelson, Riley was looking more for fight and snarl.
Even now, that draws a knowing laugh from Hardaway, 55.
“That's the way I grew up in Chicago,” Hardaway said. “That's the way I grew up on the South Side. We get real nasty and we go out there and just play. And we can talk a bunch of stuff and still go out there and play. And when I saw I had that chance to come to Miami, I told Zo, ‘He needs to trade for me.' And I knew what I could do.
”I can play both ways. I can play nasty, I can play mean, slap you, knock you down. So it wasn't like I had to turn into this, I had to turn into that. It wasn't a switch I had to turn. I was like, ‘This is cool. This is the way I play, anyway.' This is how we play in Chicago every day. So it wasn't new to me.”
Still, there were rough patches between the headstrong Hardaway and the demanding Riley, at one point Hardaway's salary tied to weekly weigh-ins.
In retrospect, it was coach making strong-willed player stronger.
“I don't think he really knew how much I had in the tank, or how good I would be once I got back in shape,” Hardaway said. “I think he was openly surprised at what I could do and how I could do it, and my basketball IQ of running his team and running his system.”
Having previously been a finalist for selection, Hardaway acknowledged that his anti-gay comments during a 2007 radio interview factored in his wait.
In the interim, he made a point to not only express contrition but also work to educate others, just as he came to be enlightened.
“I'm happy that we can forgive,” he said. “I'm happy that we can give people a second chance. I think about that, and I truly do, I just don't say this, I think about that comment every day.”
Hardaway played 15 NBA seasons from 1989 to 2003 with Golden State, Miami, Dallas, Denver and Indiana.
Karl played in the NBA for five seasons with the Spurs before coaching for 27 years, during which he won 1,175 games — placing him sixth all-time. He was named NBA Coach of the Year in 2013.
Huggins has more than 900 NCAA wins in a college coaching career that began in 1977 and is currently at West Virginia.
Cash, who already has been elected to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame, is currently an executive with the NBA's New Orleans Pelicans. She won two NCAA national titles with Connecticut and a WNBA title with Detroit. She also worked as an executive with the WNBA's New York Liberty.
Whalen is a five-time WNBA All-Star and fourtime champion. She is now the head coach at Minnesota, where she also played in college.
Stanley, who is currently a WNBA head coach with Indiana, has spent 45 years in coaching, including 22 years at the college level with Old Dominion, Pennsylvania, Southern California, Stanford and California. She was WNBA coach of the year in 2022, when she also was elected to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.
Evans officiated more than 1,900 regular season games, along with 170 playoff games, 35 NBA Finals games and four NBA AllStar games from 1973 to 2001. He also was the NBA's Assistant Supervisor of Officials for three years after stepping away from oncourt officiating.