Rivalry Aside...   

Front-office infighting and a labor dispute that threatened the season itself--few institutions were as cutthroat and competitive as NBA basketball in 1999.

Except maybe New York City journalism.

So when the hoops beat reporters from the rival New York Times and New York Daily News proposed collaborating on a book about the New York Knicks, some in their newsrooms cried foul.

"Just Ballin': The Chaotic Rise of the New York Knicks," by Mike Wise and Frank Isola, chronicles the soap-opera story of the team that improbably made it to the 1999 NBA finals before losing the championship to the San Antonio Spurs.

What Wise and Isola won was scrutiny from management, since they usually cover the NBA for the Times and the Knicks for the News, respectively. "We wanted to be sure that we would expect we're not going to read things in the book we haven't already read in the newspaper," says Bill Schmidt, the Times' associate managing editor for news administration.

The issue was omnipresent. Wise got around some of the restrictions by arguing that, as the Times' NBA reporter, he didn't actually cover the Knicks on a daily basis. The two men waited until the season was over to ink the contract. And Wise and Isola took five weeks of their own time to write the book. "Getting ourselves off the hook a little bit, we didn't sign a deal until the first week in July," Wise says. Adds Isola: "If we knew we were doing that in, say, February, when the season started, that could have created some awkward moments."

They also continued to compete. Wise was on the street before Isola with the nugget--attributed to unnamed sources--that the Knicks were talking with ex-Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, though Isola rebounded by being first to get a confirmation of the story from Madison Square Garden President Dave Checketts.

And even as the two sportswriters labored away together on the book in a stuffy office in Isola's New Jersey home, Isola slam-dunked Wise with the story that the team had signed coach Jeff Van Gundy to a contract extension. This on a day they had driven together to the team's practice.

"I don't think he talked to me for two days after that story came out," Isola says. "It's not because Mike was jealous, but he's competitive like anybody else." Wise says he's "still pissed off" about the incident. But, he says, it proves "we weren't going to damage our competitive relationship."

"I'm sure there were some whispers from behind the scenes," Wise says. "You know: 'How can these guys work together?' But anyone who thought we were squirreling away some bombshell, making sure we got a bestseller, found that really wasn't true." If one of them had, he says, "I would have been publicly embarrassed, because I have a problem with people who withhold information from their readership."

Isola seconds that. "Mike is a professional. I like to think of myself as a professional. If we found something big, we would report it. It was our beat."

Truth be told, says Wise, there wasn't a lot of time for much additional original reporting; the publisher, Simon & Schuster, wanted "Just Ballin' " in stores by November. The result is a book rich with detail and behind-the-scenes color, but no major breaking news. And, Wise says, considering the competitive nature of New York sports journalism, there were few bombshells left to break.

It's not the first time rival beat reporters have collaborated on a book. Bob Klapisch of the Daily News and John Harper of the New York Post co-authored a volume about the Mets, for instance.

But it might be the last time for Isola and Wise. Isola says he wants to try writing his next book by himself. As for Wise, he deadpans: "Being the ethical and concerned journalists we are, the first question would probably be, 'How much?' And it would have to be a lot more."