The Nba

Striking Back
Union president Patrick Ewing agrees that he takes too many shots...from the media

Patrick Ewing isn't looking for a shoulder to cry on, and he certainly doesn't think you will commiserate with him over what the last 14 months have wrought: a wrist injury that forced him to miss most of last season, marital problems that spilled over into the tabloids and a labor fight that tarred his image.

A new season should mean a clean slate, but Ewing is still in the news. Every Knicks fan, it seems, worries that the 13-year veteran won't accept a reduced offensive role now that Latrell Sprewell has been added to the Knicks roster. "Everybody talks about my shots," says Ewing , "but they've gone down almost every year. Of course, that doesn't matter, because people believe what they want to believe." (The numbers support his contention. Since the 1995-96 season, when he averaged 19.2 shots a game, Ewing 's field goal attempts dropped to 17.2 two years ago and 15.5 last season.)

Ewing has spent his entire career in New York , watching teammates come and go, all of them leaving without a ring. He stays on, playing hard, playing hurt, hoping this year will be the one. Ewing will be 37 in August, and his knees are creaky. But he offers none of that as an excuse. He has guaranteed championships and delivered none, and that is his cross to bear. He says he does not look back, but surely Game 6 of the 1994 Finals, when the Knicks were up 3-2 over the Houston Rockets and within one John Starks bomb of winning a championship, must creep into his dreams. One swish would have changed his legacy. "I swear that as Starks 's shot was in flight, people were saying, 'Patrick's not a winner, Patrick's not a winner,' " says exasperated New York coach Jeff Van Gundy . "If it goes in, Patrick's a champion. But because it doesn't, he's not a winner. That's preposterous."

Ewing knows that's how it works, especially in a city as unforgiving as New York . He has stiff-armed the media since he was a high school sensation in Cambridge, Mass. , and he has been indifferent to public ire since the day he crushed the hopes of Bostonians by choosing Georgetown over Boston College . His validation has always come from teammates, who respect his leadership. "I get tired of the media," Ewing says. "Sometimes I think they're hypocrites. Like during the lockout—a lot of them knew the players were giving up a lot, but they wouldn't write the truth, because they wanted to stay in the good graces of the NBA ."

Ewing knows his disdain for the press has cost him. He has also paid dearly for his considerable efforts on behalf of the union. He was chastised for his hard-line stance and ridiculed for some of his pronouncements. "It was a thankless job," he says. "There were times I thought, What the hell am I doing? But I fought for what I believed in."

He does not regret anything he did or said during the lockout, not even the comment that players were fighting for their livelihoods. "We were fighting for our lives," he says. "I'm financially secure, but most players weren't making anywhere near the money Michael Jordan and I made. This is the entertainment business, and most guys have very short careers. If people want to give me grief for it, I don't care. If they don't like it, that's their problem."

Ewing—and those fickle Knicks fans—may yet regret that union duties prevented him from maintaining his normal off-season workout schedule, but he says he still squeezed in almost three hours of work a day, and he disputes reports that he arrived at camp 20 pounds overweight. He averaged 20.5 points, 13 rebounds and 38.5 minutes during the Knicks ' 0-2 start, but there were moments when he appeared to be running in waist-deep water.

The Knicks enter this short season as a work in progress, with Sprewell , Marcus Camby and Kurt Thomas still trying to find their way. With the departure of enforcer Charles Oakley and amid speculation about Ewing 's role, Van Gundy has asked his center to produce a career year in rebounding. Ewing , in turn, has his own goal: a long sabbatical from the headlines.

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