METUCHEN, N.J. — For more than two and a half years, Mike Rice had receded into the shadows after Rutgers fired him because of a scandal that wrecked his coaching career and turned him into a pariah.
On Wednesday, in an empty gymnasium five miles from the arena Rice once called home, there was plenty of evidence of how far he had fallen — and of how he was trying to build himself up. In his first head-coaching job since he encountered the wrong side of fame, Rice walked the sideline as the interim head basketball coach at the Patrick School, a parochial high school powerhouse in New Jersey.