Wilson Still Has Questions

By BILL PLASCHKE

May 31, 1997 12 AM PT

Ten days after being skulled by the Mighty Ducks, Ron Wilson hears ringing wherever he goes.

The doorbell rings with strangers offering condolences. The telephone rings with high school kids offering encouragement. His ears ring with job offers.

All this ringing, but not one call from Tony Tavares.

Ten days, and still no explanation.

Ten days, and still confusion.

“It’s like there’s still all this smoke in the air, and people are waiting for it to clear, waiting for a real reason,” Wilson said. “And I tell them, I still don’t know what happened. I honestly just do not know.”

By Sunday, Wilson hopes to be the coach of another team, which would end this sordid chapter just as it started.

One giant company, one little payroll number deleted, no reasons given.

In a conversation from his Phoenix hotel room late Thursday after an interview with the Coyotes, Wilson spoke with the bewilderment of a man trying to peer through unsettled dust.

There was no anger, no bitterness, none of the traits displayed so colorfully by his former employers.

“I’m still just somewhat heartbroken,” he said.

He still had not cleaned out his Pond office. He still had not returned his Disneyland pass.

He said the realization of this town’s strangest coaching dismissal in years did not finally sink in until he was driving to the airport to begin a four-city tour of potential employers.

He was somewhere on the Century Freeway. He was listening to a Cat Stevens CD, his car filled with a song about a son leaving his father.

“I have to go, I have to go . . . “ went one chorus.

“I’m thinking, ‘You got to be kidding me,’ ” Wilson said. “It really got to me. I got real emotional.

“I pull into the airport and I stop the car and I say to myself, ‘Damn, it’s true. I really have to go!’ ”

And without really knowing why.

That is what bugs Wilson, the mystery of it.

A man spends four years in a place, gets tossed out one morning, and nobody will even give him 10 minutes in the parking lot?

Wilson still has not spoken to Disney sports boss Tavares since before the season-ending series with the Detroit Red Wings.

“That’s not for me to initiate,” Wilson said. “I’m sure by now, Tony has moved on to other things.”

Wilson has not spoken to Jack Ferreira, Duck general manager, since their five-minute conversation during which Wilson was released.

Not that Ferreira would have anything to say.

“When Jack gave me the news, it didn’t come out smooth,” Wilson said. “You could tell he was uncomfortable.”

Wilson, however, has spoken to just about everyone else.

Won’t Disney be surprised when they hear what he is saying.

He is no longer their coach, but he is still motivating their players, which is either the classiest or dumbest thing we’ve heard this week.

Paul Kariya, his star forward, called him several times, furious with Disney, wondering about his future here.

Wilson talked him off the ledge.

“I said, ‘Paul, do not let this change your attitude here,’ ” Wilson said. “I told him this happens all the time in sports. I told him he cannot be bitter, that he is the best player on a team that has a chance to really do something.”

Teemu Selanne called him, not angry, but sad.

“I told Teemu that they have a good thing going here, and there is no reason to think that a new coach would change anything,” Wilson said.

Seemingly everyone else in Wilson’s world has called to offer condolences and admiration--”It’s been incredible, like I’ve had a chance to witness my own funeral”--and he has told them all the same thing.

“I like Disney, I’ll be cheering for the Ducks when they play anybody else but my new team,” he said. “I gave part of my life to them. You can’t just leave that behind.”

But he, like thousands of others, would like to know why he has to leave anything behind.

The Ducks have told people they didn’t like his playoff quotes concerning the Red Wings, whose coaching position he likened to a “dream job.”

Wilson said because his father and uncle were both fired as Red Wing coaches, he always has talked emotionally about the franchise.

“If anybody ever brings up my dad, I get all choked up. I say things. That’s the only way I can get through it,” Wilson said. “There was certainly no harm intended.”

The Ducks have told people that Wilson talked too much, in general. But Wilson confirmed that, like other great motivators, he sometimes spoke to his players through the media.

“While I may have been honest in my postgame comments, sometimes, I would say something hoping that a particular player would read it, would get the message,” he said. “With some players, that is the best way to get through to them.”

And of criticism that he played his best players too much, and his younger players not enough?

“If that is so, then I missed out on their intentions,” he said of Disney. “I was under the assumptions that this was a win-at-nearly-all-costs year. If that was not the case, then I did make a mistake.”

Finally, to Disney’s claims that Wilson could have signed a new contract with a month left of the season. . . .

That contract included no raise. It was offered only after Wilson had visited the front office about once a month since last summer, asking them to fulfill their promise to negotiate a new deal.

“All year long they kept saying, ‘Next week, next week . . . ‘ “ he said. “I didn’t think it was fair to finally start those negotiations while I was trying to prepare my team for the Stanley Cup. If I was being selfish, looking out only for myself and my team, so be it.”

Any day now, Wilson will show up on TV in another town, holding up the sweater of another team, being acclaimed by another general manager as the brightest young coach in the game, and aren’t they lucky to get him.

At this point Disney officials will loosen their belts, sigh and say, “This is finally over.”

And they will be right. Until it is their turn to introduce a new coach holding up a Duck sweater.

Then it will start again.