Game 15: Pat Riley - Star of the Sea Salad

““My father was a very dapper man. I can remember him and his closet. He had these wonderful, heavy, 15-ounce wool sportcoats and these heavy gabardine shirts that he’d button at the top with a big collar and big, baggy, pleated pants. He was a very, very dashing man. Also, his hair was slicked back. He was a coach, by the way,” - Pat Riley”

It’s too bad Pat Riley’s father, Leon Riley, played baseball instead of basketball. As a minor league manager, Leon never got to enjoy the sartorial freedom that he relished off the field. In baseball, managers wear the same uniform as their players. It often makes pot-bellied skippers look like the fat guy in a sketch group forced to play a pajama-clad child. 

And in the even more conservative NFL, coaches roaming the sideline in suits was once the iconic norm. But due to 9 figure sponsorship deals with companies like Reebok and Nike that don’t make suits, the last coach to regularly wear a suit was Dan Reeves in the mid-90s. But in the NBA? After the stiff ‘50s and ‘60s, NBA coaches ran wild in the ‘70s, matching the off-court Studio 54 looks of their players.

Riley was one of those strutting disco dandies as a player, but once he rejoined the Lakers, first as a color commentator and then as an assistant coach, Riley switched up his style. Out went the long feathered hair and fu manchu, in came the proto-Gordon Gecko hairstyle and a closet full of slim black suits made by his good friend, Georgio Armani. Riley wasn’t the architect of the Lakers’ fast-paced offense -- that would be Jack McKinney, whose 1979 bike accident changed NBA history -- but he revolutized the NBA in other ways. By the early 2000s, nearly every coach in the league had adopted the idea that men leading other men into battle should look good. But by proxy, it also led to the 2005 implementation of one of the NBA’s most embarrassingly racist rules: The infamous dress code.

Just a year after a fight between the Pacers and Pistons spilled over into the crowd, David Stern (and the rich white billionaires he served) were in panic. The intrinsic link between hip hop culture and basketball culture had cross pollinated too much for their liking. The pants were getting baggier, the gold chains were getting blingier, the Timbs were too Timby, especially outside of New York City and Minneapolis. So Stern laid down the law: Players were banned from going to games while wearing jerseys, sunglasses, jewelry, or hats and faced heavy fines if they violated these new norms. ESPN talking heads and drive time sports talk announcers debated its implicit racism, but the explicit form was obvious to most. However, the players had no choice in the matter. For a few years, locker rooms and benches were filled with players in badly-fitted baggy suits. This was, after all, just a few years removed from the Jiggy Era of rap. It was also a few years before men in suits tanked the economy and faced no jail time.

NBA players slowly started adapting to the new limitations on their wardrobe. Like the coaches who took after Riley in the ‘90s, they began to slowly one up each other. Armani vs Gucci vs Prada. But then Russell Westbrook happened. The L.A. native and then-Thunders superstar started showing up to games looking straight out of a GQ shoot. Not the GQ shoot of Riley’s day, but the GQ of the 2010s: Colorful, expressive, and often genderfluid. He was initially ridiculed online but within a few years, his colleagues started stepping up their wardrobe. David Stern crushed the player’s ability to express themselves through clothes but forgot that fashion, while predictably cyclical, is constantly evolving. Baggy pants and gold chains was just a fad; it said nothing about the character of the black men wearing them other than we thought it looked cool at the time. 

So what does the NBA look like in 2019, post Pat Riley and post Russell Westbrook? Check every team’s social media accounts to see how important fashion has become to marketing the league’s stars. Especially here in Hollywood. Before every Lakers game, the team’s Instagram page showcases at least one player in his ready-for-the-runway look.

-------------------------

Star of the Sea Salad

½ cup mayo

¼ cup milk

2 tablespoons white raisins

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon curry powder

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon cocktail sauce

4 hearts romaine, torn (about 8 cups)

1 pound cooked shrimp, lobster, king crab legs, or any combination

Combine mayonnaise, milk, raisins, sugar, curry powder, lemon juice, vinegar, and cocktail sauce. Peel or shell seafood. Cut lobster or crab into bite sized pieces. When ready to serve, toss dressing with romaine and seafood.

One caveat about my preparation: I omitted the white raisins. I’m trying to make these recipes as accurately as possible, but if I know for certain that a non-essential ingredient will ruin the meal for me, I skip it. Raisin’s are fine; I’m not writing an Agree Tweet to The New York Times about a chili recipe. I just don’t think we need them playing a starring role in this movie. Also, I’m currently unemployed, so the less money I spent on this project, the better.

I also went with 3 hearts romaine instead of 4, but if I make this again, I’ll use the suggested amount. And if you decide to make it, get an extra pound of whichever meat you use. 1 pound of crab legs won’t satisfy any seafood craving you and a guest will have after going through all the work of cracking them legs. But other than the worst ratios you’ll see outside of Twitter, this salad was A Very Good Salad. If I made millions of dollars from coaching and didn’t have to perform the arduous manual labor of getting crab out of its shell, I’d be eating this twice a week. Between his stints in L.A. and Miami, you just KNOW Pat Riley had frequent iodine poisoning.