Mike Celizic

I’m happy for Stan Van Gundy, who, after 24 years in the business, realized that coaching basketball isn’t conducive to a rich and full family life. But I’m more than a little worried about what would happen if everyone in sports had the same epiphany.

Van Gundy’s a lucky man. As a successful third-year NBA coach with more than 20 years of experience as a pro assistant and college coach behind him, he’s got some money in the bank and a front-office job with the Miami Heat. His family won’t suffer for material goods because he decided to give up a job literally millions of people think is the greatest job anyone could have.

His family is also lucky to have a husband and father who realized that his job wasn’t just a bit demanding on his time, it was all-consuming. Van Gundy said he looked at the schedule for this season and realized he would be home just 49 of the 170 days in the regular season.

This shouldn’t have been a revelation to him. He’d been involved in the NBA long enough to know how it works. College ball isn’t as bad; there are fewer games played over a shorter season, no two-week road trips and more opportunities to be home while the kids are still awake.

But in the pros, coaching isn’t just your job. It’s your life. In the NBA, after a game, coaches often take the game tape back to their hotel room or office and dissect it, always looking for what went wrong. Many can’t fall asleep, especially after losses. Rather, they stare at the dark ceiling, drawing mental Xs and Os on imaginary dry-wipe boards, trying to figure out what they and their team could have done differently.

They sleep little, get to the office early to watch more tape and draw up game plans and plot their practices. After practice, there’s more tape, more work, more scheming, more clumps of hair pulled out.

Everyone in sports seems to talk about how their families are No. 1, and that may be true as a concept; if a spouse or child faced a true emergency, every player would drop practice or ask out of a game to be there. But in daily practice, the game — the job — comes first.

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The history of coaches in every sport is littered with broken marriages and children who see their fathers more on television and newspaper photos than in the flesh. We don’t talk about it much, but that’s the reality. Even a good marriage is one in which Dad is more noted for his absence than his presence.

But if a coach is what you are, that’s what you do. Women who marry coaches go in with their eyes open. They are strong and independent people, able to take care of anything that comes up on their own. It’s the only way to survive.

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Van Gundy is one of the few — his brother, Jeff, quit the Knicks four years ago in a similar crisis of basketball burn-out but resurfaced in Houston — who have actually realized that maybe being a coach isn’t worth the sacrifice. Stan didn’t say his wife or children complained. He just said he was missing being part of a family. I suspect they know how lucky they are.

For NBA players, it’s not nearly as all-consuming as it is for coaches.