Christaan Felber for The New York Times
Mike Rice, the former head basketball coach at Rutgers University, coaching at a training camp at Albright College in Pennsylvania in August.
Mike Rice is coaching again. Or rather, he's running after-school clinics for third-to-sixth graders at a vast, four-court indoor basketball facility in Neptune, N.J., where he also works out local high-school players on Friday afternoons and coaches his son's high-school team in a fall recreational league.
Keith Srakocic/Associated Press
Coach Mike Rice with a Robert Morris University player, Karon Abraham, during a timeout, February 2010.
Considering where Rice was a year ago — preparing for his third season as head coach at Rutgers University with a guaranteed salary of $700,000 — it is quite a step down. Of course, considering where Rice was seven months ago — a figure of national disgrace who was fired for mistreating his players — it's a little hard to believe he's coaching at all. "It helps when your best friend owns the place," Rice said.
We were watching his son's team, Red Bank Regional High School, warm up before a recent game against the inauspiciously named Brick Township High. Red Bank looked like your average suburban high-school team, with the exception of one kid. When I asked Rice about him, he said: "The big man is terrible. Just watch."
The instant the game got under way, Rice started pacing manically up and down the floor, yelling nonstop, his raspy voice echoing across the gym. He hollered at his team after every trip down the court, invariably singling out players both for doing something right ("Are you kidding me?" he said, when one of them squeezed between two defenders and laid the ball in off the glass. "You've got ballerina feet!") or wrong ("Ben, you're fighting for time! You get in the game and the first thing you do is give up an and-1?").
Rice wasn't berating anyone, and he definitely wasn't abusing anyone. Yet if you'd been watching him that night, you might very well have thought, That guy is nuts.
He was right, though: The big man had a long way to go. After he made one halfhearted attempt to stop a much smaller opponent from driving to the basket, Rice did a sideline demonstration for him: "This is a lion," he said, proceeding to roar loudly and menacingly raise both arms above his head. Then Rice lowered his arms limply by his side. "This is a wimpy little cat: Meow. Be a lion!"
The big surprise of the night was Rice's son, Mike III, a skinny sophomore guard who looked like a boy playing with men. He came off the bench midway through the first half and reeled off a couple of 3-pointers, a reverse layup and a teardrop shot off the dribble in the lane.
Rice and I had talked about his son's game a few times, and Rice did not always sound optimistic. "I've got to get him more into academics," he told me once, after receiving a text message from his wife informing him that Mike III had just been benched after going 0 for 3 in an A.A.U. game.
Mike III has no shortage of ability and an excess of basketball intelligence, and Rice personally works him out in their driveway regularly. But he has a tendency to overthink things, which can be deadly for an athlete. It also makes him very different from his father, and his father's father. As Rice put it: "Rices generally go in headfirst and then think later."
Mike Rice was introduced to America last April when ESPN aired footage of him screaming at and demeaning his players, yanking them by their jerseys, shoving them, kicking them; throwing balls at their heads and groins; taunting them with homophobic slurs. Within 24 hours, millions of people had watched it, and Rice had been denounced by everyone from LeBron James to Gov. Chris Christie. He was soon fired and disappeared from the public eye as abruptly as he entered it.
I first met Rice at the gym in Neptune on a hot, humid night about two months after all this happened. His daughter's under-12 A.A.U. team, which Rice also coaches on a volunteer basis, had just annihilated an opponent, 47-11. The other team could barely keep possession of the ball, never mind get off a decent shot. I introduced myself to Rice and told him that I felt a little sorry for their opponents. "I don't," he said. "Tell them to work harder."
After the game, Rice invited me back to his house in nearby Little Silver, N.J. Rice is frenetic on the sidelines of a basketball court, but his resting state is pretty wired to begin with, his voice often rising to a half-yell even in casual conversation. "Have a beer, for Christ's sake!" he shouted at me after I initially declined.
His wife, Kerry, offered to go out and get some dinner for us but couldn't find her car key. After some searching around, Rice produced it from his pocket. "Sorry, Pookie Bear," he said.
For the next two hours, we sat at a table on his deck, swatting mosquitoes, drinking beer and eating Italian takeout. His kids were inside, watching the N.B.A. playoffs, and Kerry eventually came out and joined us.
It was the first time that Rice had spoken to a reporter since delivering a brief statement of apology from his doorstep the day he was fired, a strategic decision that was not easy for him to accept. "Everything I've ever done is fight, scratch and claw," he told me, "and now I have to sit back and take it, listen to people say I was abusing my players? I was an idiot, but I never abused anybody."
Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer for the magazine, a columnist for Bloomberg View and the author of ''Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.''
Editor: Dean Robinson
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