Order on the Court

He couldn't figure out what they were looking for.

Three days earlier, in the summer of 1997, someone had burned his house, taken it right down to the dust and grit of the Texas plains outside of San Antonio. It was arson. There was no doubt about that, and the cops believed that the arson was largely motivated by the fact that Glenn Rivers was black and that Kris Rivers was not. That's what he believed, too, since he'd felt this fire before.

There were the times he'd been pulled over, at gunpoint, for no apparent reason, except for the most apparent reason of all. He knew that if he accidentally dropped something, he might be dead. His father had been a cop, and he'd warned Rivers about just that very thing. Don't give them a reason.

There was that time when he'd been a kid, back in Maywood, west of Chicago, and Proviso East High School had erupted in racial tumult so severe that the State Police had been summoned to escort groups of black and white students separately into what purportedly was a desegregated high school. And there was the day back in college in Milwaukee, back when Rivers was a star basketball player at Marquette University, and he'd started dating Kris, and some other somebodies had cut her tires and had written a racial epithet on the sidewalk, in case the slashed tires weren't a strong enough message.

So he knew what he was looking at there in the ashes of his home. It was as though his house had burned all the way down to something dark and primordial deep in the land, something you could see there now, plain and ugly, in the bright morning light. What he couldn't figure out was what all the cops were doing.

"I watched them," Rivers recalled earlier this month near his home in Orlando, Florida. "And they were going through everything with these long things like tweezers, and there's like eight guys there, and I'm asking them, 'What in the hell are you looking for?' And they say, 'Well, your All-Star ring is in here somewhere, and maybe it didn't melt, so we're looking for it.' And my thought was, 'Well, who cares about the damn ring?'"

He cared more about the dog, frankly. Still does. They'd bought Ginger when Rivers was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks in 1983, and the mutt had followed him through his 13-year career, surviving even the Los Angeles Clippers along the way. But by the time of the fire, the dog was old and blind and never made it out of the house. "Other than the dog, what I lost was . . . stuff," Rivers says. "The dog, though, that was something living, you know? That was hard."

He tells the stories, all of them, without rancor or obvious anger. There always has been about Glenn Rivers a kind of dogged living in the moment that seems all the more optimistic, given what he's seen and what he knows. "My wife's always telling me that I need to reflect, but I've never been able to do that," he says. "I mean, I have my bitter moments, but I don't hang on to them too long, because it doesn't get you anywhere.

"To me, bad things happen to you and good things happen to you, and I've always been a believer that you have to let go of both, that you don't hold on too long to either one. I mean, you win a big game, and there's no greater high for me than that. And you walk out of the building and you see a homeless guy, or you turn the news on and there's something horrific that happened, and none of those people care."

It reminds him of the time with the Hawks back in 1988, when they'd had a series won, and they let it slip away in Game 7, and then they were all in the airport, broken, waiting to fly home. "I mean, guys were destroyed. I was still water-eyed there in the damn terminal, because I couldn't believe it.

"But it was just us, you know? All around us, people were walking through the terminal on their way to their planes. Some are happy to be going, and some are not. We get on the flight, and the flight attendants don't care about that game, and I thought, 'This goes both ways.'"

'THEY ALL CALLED ME when I took the job," Glenn Rivers laughs. "Tree [Rollins] called me. Moses [Malone] called. Randy Wittman called me and told me he still couldn't root for the Celtics. Randy says, 'Doc, you wanted to hit Danny [Ainge].' I told him, 'Hell, everybody in the league wanted to hit Danny.'"

The old men in the grillroom laugh, too. It is a bright day at a golf course outside of Orlando, and Glenn Rivers is trying to decide whether his wife and four children will stay in Florida or move north with him. He has a 16-year-old son who's a high school basketball star, and he's reluctant to move him, and he likes his new house. "You know," he muses, "this is the first time since the other one got burned that we've built a real home. And I'd sit there in my office and look out on this humongous lake and see a guy go by water-skiing, and I'd think, 'Damn, this isn't bad.'"

But his wife had told him to listen to the offers, and then the old men in the grillroom got on him. "The older gentlemen told me I had to take this job," he says. "I said, 'I don't know,' you know, and one of them told me, 'Look, Doc, you're 42 years old. I'm supposed to be on the golf course every day. You've got to follow your passion a little longer.'"

So, in April, Glenn Rivers signed a $20 million contract to coach the Boston Celtics, a team that was floundering through a rebuilding process on the court and through overwhelming public apathy off of it, at the behest of executive director of basketball operations Danny Ainge, with whom he'd engaged in a number of spirited battles in the 1980s. Rivers played for the Atlanta Hawks then, and Ainge was a valuable piece of Celtic teams that were the biggest shows in town. It is a daunting task, even for a reflexive optimist like Rivers, who'd previously helped rebuild the Orlando Magic almost from scratch after the departure of Shaquille O'Neal to Los Angeles and who'd been fired from that job in November.

"To be honest," Rivers says, "I think we are better off in Boston than when I took over in Orlando. There, we had 21 guys, no real stars, and 19 of them were in the last year of their contracts. But, you know, every common sense told me that there would be, quote, better, unquote, jobs out there if I just waited. My agent said it. Everybody said it."

Rick Majerus certainly said it. He recruited Rivers to come to Marquette, having already given him his nickname when the young Glenn Rivers had shown up at Majerus's basketball camp one day wearing a Julius Erving T-shirt. "The one thing about Doc," Majerus says, "is that he's always grateful for the opportunity. He'll work it, because he knows he's got one of the 30 best basketball jobs in America. What Doc doesn't realize, I think, is the level of frustration that can come with that, what a hard position it is in which to be successful.

"You look at that team, and you see a lot of decent players, and then there's Paul Pierce, whom I think could be the worst NBA nightmare, because he's just good enough to be a star, but somebody else's going to have to score [too]."

In a very real sense, Rivers is trying to rebuild the present and the past at the same time. The present is a team with one star, Pierce, who's already showing signs of wearing down, and a team that's committed to developing its roster through what's becoming an increasingly adolescent National Basketball Association draft. At the same time, Rivers has to do a job thickly shadowed by a history of extravagant success -- albeit a history that means almost nothing to the young players with whom Rivers will attempt to reestablish it.

"It's corny, but the mystique stuff does matter to me," Rivers explains. "I mean, Red Auerbach called me yesterday. You get that kind of thing in New York, with Walt Frazier. But that's it. You don't get that in any other place. That can't be bought, and it means so much to me.

"But, for the young players, you still have to sell yourself first. I mean, for the young guys, it's like, 'Larry Bird? He's a GM, right?' Once you get them into it, you can sell it to them, when they see those original banners hanging in the practice gym. Those aren't divisional championship banners, you know. It will matter to them when we start to win."

Once, while coaching in Orlando and wooing free agent Grant Hill of the Detroit Pistons, Rivers whispered up at Hill during a stop in play: "Eighty degrees and no state income tax." That's how it works in the 21st-century NBA. The greatest obstacle to Rivers's success here may well be Boston's status as one of the modern NBA's museum pieces. Even older players -- like Los Angeles Lakers forward Karl Malone, whom Ainge and the Celtics courted as a free agent last spring -- are more likely to look at the Celtics as part of the league's past than of its future. Every losing season that the team posts both reinforces that opinion and summons up social and cultural factors that have less to do with the Celtics than with the city in which they play. Just a year ago, the then-coach of the New Jersey Nets, Byron Scott, said Boston still had not been able to shed its reputation as a racist town. (Scott would later back off his comments.) "A lot of black players feel that way," Scott said. "We did in the '80s. And I know in the '80s, at least some of their black players still couldn't go to certain places. And that was their own players. Some cities or organizations or whatever you want to say haven't caught up to the year 2000 yet."

The history of the Celtics is a tangle of paradoxes. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the team won 11 NBA championships in 13 years, they were largely an afterthought, regularly performing to a half-filled Boston Garden and outdrawn by the pathetic Boston Bruins in that same building. They were slightly less of one during the Dave Cowens era in the 1970s. However, in the 1980s, behind Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, they were the prestige attraction, much in the same way that the New England Patriots are now.

But even that success brought its own conundrum. Because of its reliance on white stars -- even though two of them were among the 15 greatest players in NBA history - and because of the historically bad image that Boston maintained among African-American athletes dating back to Jackie Robinson, the Celtics of the 1980s became derided as the country's great white hope among those young black players who are only now starting to show up in the NBA. In fact, the record contradicts this impression. For example, Rivers is the fifth African-American head coach the Celtics have had, a record not likely to be matched by any of the city's other professional franchises any time during what is admittedly still a new century.

"I know the image," Rivers says. "I heard about it when I played. But I think it may have dissipated a little. With Paul, and with Antoine Walker when he was there. Even Reggie Lewis was getting to dispel that notion when he passed. You can be a star in Boston. Reggie would have been a star in Boston." Rivers even heard the talk himself, when he came into the league with Atlanta.

"You know players," he recalls. "We go hotel-arena-airport-next town. Unless you're in the playoffs. Then you get to stay in a place for a few days. I had a cousin named Gary Hathaway who was in medical school in Boston, so he took me around a couple of restaurants, and I started visiting some jazz clubs; Moses Malone got me started going to them. I got to like the town."

It's a question, always, the way it was that day in the Texas sun, of looking for only those things that you believe really are worth the effort.

Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff.