The Skiles way

New Bulls coach's intense approach to basketball leaves little gray area, according to those who know him best

November 30, 2003|By Melissa Isaacson, Tribune staff reporter.

He may have mellowed over the last few years, sanded down the edges, acquired a sense of humor about himself. Scott Skiles, in fact, may evolve into a regular Renaissance man. Who's to say, really?

But that simply is not the Scott Skiles his friends, former teammates, coaches, casual acquaintances and parents know and love, and not the one John Paxson sought out to breathe life and fire into the Bulls.

"Everybody calls Jon Gruden `Chucky' (for the horror-movie doll of the late 1980s)," said Nick Anderson, a Chicago native who was Skiles' teammate in Orlando. "But we called Scott Skiles `Chucky' 12 years ago. He's the real Chucky, not Gruden. He'd lose his mind when we'd lose."

In sports, they call that intensity, and Skiles' father, Rick, takes full responsibility for it.

"I had a basket in his playpen when he was 2 years old," said Rick Skiles, whose own athletic career did not go past four years of high school basketball. "A lot of dads take their kids hunting and fishing, and I wish I had done more of that as relaxation instead of just ball.

"When Scott was small, we'd play in the driveway and I'd knock him down and tell him, `This is how it's going to be when you get up there.' No matter what he had done, I'd criticize him and never build him up. He may have scored 35 points but had six turnovers, and I'd ask him about the turnovers. I regret that now, that I pushed him that hard."

Skiles, named the 15th head coach of the Bulls on Friday, said he's pretty sure he does have a hobby.

"I don't know how Webster's defines hobby, but I would think it would have something to do with recreation, and this is recreation for me," he explained as bouncing basketballs punctuated every sentence of his news conference. "I love being around the game and around the players. It's not a job for me. It's a lot of fun."

Ask him to explain his core philosophy and Skiles will say: "There is a right way to play. There isn't a lot of gray area there."

And there isn't a lot of gray area to him.

Perhaps the best hope for the Bulls is if Skiles hears of someone doubting his ability to make this team a winner.

When they doubted him in high school, he scored 20 of Plymouth High's 29 points during two overtimes to lead the team to the Indiana high school state championship. Like something from the movie "Hoosiers," Plymouth became the smallest school in 28 years to win the title.

When his size and speed discouraged all but Michigan State and Fresno State from recruiting him seriously out of high school, he accepted the offer from Michigan State. He said no to latecomers like Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps, who coincidentally had a seat next to him on his recruiting trip to Fresno.

When they booed him at Ohio State, jeered him at Iowa and spit on him at Purdue after three highly publicized arrests during a 1 1/2-year period in college, Skiles simply tuned it out and lifted a Michigan State team picked to finish near the bottom of the Big Ten to the top tier in the nation while finishing second nationally in scoring with 27.4 points a game in 1985-86.

And when they closed the cell door behind him for 14 days just after he was named the Silver Basketball winner as the Big Ten's most valuable player, Skiles accepted it with the same resolve as everything else.

Jud Heathcote, his college coach at Michigan State, took more than a little heat back then for continuing to play Skilesin the midst of his legal troubles.

"I don't think it's fair to Scott to go into it now," Heathcote said. "But the media made him into an ax murderer when there was little to nothing there. In fact, he took the rap rather than have his teammates testify for him, and I knew all that."

Skiles' attorney, Charlie Scruggs, knew it too and was convinced Skiles would have been acquitted at trial--in part, he said, because the search of his car was illegal. He also was convinced Skiles did not know about the small amount of marijuana and trace of cocaine--too little to ingest--in a Baggie inside a gym bag in his car that belonged to one of his roommate's friends.

"But 20 minutes after he talked to Jud, Scott called and said he wanted to take the plea agreement so that he didn't have to embarrass his school and teammates further with the spectacle of a trial," Scruggs said. "I said, `But Scott, you'll have to say you knew [the drugs] were in the bag,' and he said, `I'll handle it.' And he did. He never complained. He never whined. He never tried to lay it off on anyone else. He just took it and became a better person."

Skiles was funny Friday, unwilling to divulge the current non-fiction book he's reading because it would have been too personal a revelation but quite willing to address a dark chapter in his life that took place nearly 20 years ago.