“I may play aggressive, but when it comes to refereeing and coaching and things like that, I’m totally respectful with those guys.” LATRELL SPREWELL

Latrell Sprewell, celebrated coach choker, is a lightning rod for people’s emotions. Mention his name and they either stand on a soap box – or these days in front of a radio microphone – and bury him, or in some rare cases defend him.

As Sprewell makes his way back into NBA life with the Knicks, it’s become clear that at the very least, he is an approachable menace. Visit him after Knick practice and on occasion he’ll let down his corn rows, sit back and talk basketball or his other business Sprewell Racing in San Gabriel, Calif., a high performance tire and wheel shop, where you can accessorize everything from a Ford to a Ferrari. Sprewell, a computer freak, even has his own website: spreewellracing.com.

“I’m into Chevys,” he says. “The shop is basically wheels and tires and accessorizing specialty items.”

His grandfather in Milwaukee is a mechanic and Sprewell’s brother works with him. “I know the basics,” he says of tinkering under the hood.

After the long layoff created by his suspension, Sprewell is tinkering with his game, but still managed to score 24 points and be a defensive force in the Knicks’ 93-85 opening-night loss to the Magic. Today he gets to experience the Knick-Heat rivalry first hand in the home opener at the Garden.

Sprewell watched the battles last spring, including Jeff Van Gundy being dragged across the court by Alonzo Mourning. Considering his woes with P.J. Carlesimo, Sprewell was impressed. “I saw a coach who is behind his players and does everything he can to support his players,” he says of Van Gundy’s grab-fest. “It’s nice to have a coach like that.

“Everybody’s been great, accepting me with open arms. I just hope I can keep playing well and I want to have a better start.”

Sprewell’s choking of Carlesimo created a firestorm the league has never seen before. He became the poster child for anti-social behavior. Sprewell, who owns just one technical foul in his career, has said he just had “a bad day.” Maybe that’s all there was to it. Of course his next bad day could end his career.

“I may play aggressive,” he says, “but when it comes to refereeing and coaching and things like that, I’m totally respectful with those guys.

“That’s one of the points I always tell people,” he explains. “If I was one of these, quote, unquote bad boys and things like, every time there was a call that I thought was bad, I’d be all in the ref’s face. But that’s not my personality and not the way I am.”

Veteran sharpshooter Dennis Scott offers an interesting perspective on the Sprewell matter.

“We were talking about this the other day,” Scott says, “I think it’s one situation that got blown out of proportion. I kind of compare it to the Bill Clinton situation. I mean, can Bill Clinton still do his job? Yes.

“What Clinton did was something he and his wife need to work out. What Spree did, that’s something that he, [Carlesimo] and Golden State had to work out. It shouldn’t have gotten to where the media got a hold of it. Once television gets a hold of it then everybody looks at it in a different way.”

Scott speaks from personal experience. His diatribe against the Magic at a basketball camp a few years ago was shown coast-to-coast. He says it was frustration with Magic management that caused him to snap. But his was a verbal, not an ugly and dangerous physical blowup. “It was seven years of being very quiet and being the whipping boy,” Scott says of his soundoff. “When we lost, it was my fault because I was a one-dimensional player. I didn’t rebound enough. I was the one partying too much and I was the one sleeping and Shaq [O’Neal] was still riding around and I’m not with him, but it’s my fault. It’s little things like that after seven years, it’s like, ‘I’m tired of this, just trade me, I can’t deal with this no more.’ “

Sprewell could not deal with Carlesimo or the Warriors. While he says he has made peace with Carlesimo, apologizing to the coach, he still is upset with the Warriors.

“I’m not too fond of the Warriors organization,” says Sprewell, who continues to press lawsuits against the NBA and his former agent Arn Tellem. “I will be honest and say that. I just didn’t like the way they handled the situation. It could have been a thing where the team totally could have kept it within the team, instead of having it be everything that it was.

“It happened and it’s over, but I’m not going to act like we can just go to dinner and everything’s OK.”

He says there are a number of people rooting for him in a “David vs. Goliath way.” He says he will stand his ground in the lawsuits. “You have so many people telling you not to do it,” he explains. “You have so many people just saying, ‘Go away.’ Even some people who are really close to you.”

His mother has been a tower of strength throughout. “I just want this thing to be looked at in a fair forum and put all the facts out there and let somebody really see what happened,” he says. “Let the world see. I came this far, why quit?”

Sprewell also watched as the NFL’s Kevin Greene incident with his coach was played by the media and quickly went away. “I thought that was a little unfair,” he says. “But there’s nothing I can do to really change it.”

He said there was much misinformation about his altercation. “I heard stuff that I hit [Carlesimo] with a two-by-four and this and that,” he says. Certainly, choking Carlesimo was bad enough. Then there was the incident with former teammate Jerome Kersey, where he was said to have hit Kersey with a two-by-four. “I didn’t,” he says. “It wasn’t that. That was a big mess.”

Now Sprewell is looking ahead. Instead of a big mess. There’s a big game today at the Garden.