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There's a story they tell in Philadelphia about Larry Brown and coaching basketball. Not Brown coaching pros. Not Brown coaching college kids. Just coaching.
It was the NBA's lockout winter (1998-99), and the 76ers were trooping some management types to an inner-city Boys Club on a marketing mission. Only, when the head coach was summoned to address the function, he'd wandered off to the next room.
That room was a gymnasium, the place Brown is most comfortable. It was filled with kids playing pick-up ball. Brown sauntered over. He started a conversation. And within minutes he was organizing, fussing, teaching teenagers to play the right way.
He can't help himself. He's a gardener passing a flower bed – you pull a few weeds before moving along, right? For him, it's a compulsion – the only thing he ever wanted to do. But it's also a pact of sorts.
Through happenstance – and happenstance is not a word often associated with the Charlotte Bobcats' head coach – Brown received a gift of knowledge from three men, three of the best coaches ever. To not pass on that gift would dishonor them.
“Nobody has ever been as fortunate as me,” he said of his mentors. “They all cared about the kids, valued the game and raised the bar.”
That man you'll see tonight, coaching the Bobcats in their season opener in Boston – a 69-year-old wrapped in Armani suits and designer specs – is quite different from the kid who showed up on North Carolina's campus in 1959, fatherless, poor and insecure.
Fatherless and insecure
Frank McGuire, the gregarious rogue who recruited Brown down from New York, was something different in practice.
“Coach McGuire had a charm that was unique. He could walk into a room of a thousand people and there'd be one light – shining on him,” Brown said. “But coach McGuire could use every four-letter word” in the practice gym to berate his players.
McGuire's talents were obvious; he coached North Carolina to a 32-0 season and the national championship in 1957. But he also cut corners; he left in a rift with the school over recruiting violations.
McGuire's assistant, Dean Smith, took over. Smith was less flamboyant, less crass, yet even more intense. The precision he demanded seemed unreasonable, the scolding constant.
“With coach Smith, he would say things that would make you feel so small and so bad,” Brown said.
They'd run forever after practice, sometimes 100 laps up-and-down the court and not a ball in the gym. That never made sense; why hold back in practice, just to save energy for that run?
Brown understood the discipline it invoked, the sense of mission. But why run just to run? Why scream just to scream?
Brown was 6 when his father, a traveling salesman, unexpectedly died at 43. His mom carried on, working at a bakery, paying the bills, but there was no male mentor, no model.
So he asked an uncle what to do with these coaches, these relentless scolders.
The uncle said when coaches stop correcting, they stop caring. Attention – no matter how loud, no matter how testing – is still attention. Brown needed, maybe craved, that attention.
And with that, he heard Smith's words a different way. It was – Brown repeats this all the time – coaching, not criticism.
Smith got what he needed; Brown pushed the Tar Heels to a 15-6 regular-season record in his senior season. As Brown neared graduation, Smith started searching out jobs – first for Brown as a player, eventually for him as a coach.
“I really learned about him after I came back (to coach North Carolina's freshman team) after I graduated,” Brown said. “The special thing about coach is you never had to ask for help. He'd always figured it out” before you approached him.
Case in point: Smith had the foresight to shepherd Brown away from signing to play as a pro before trying out for the 1964 Olympic team. Back then, professionals were barred from the Olympics, and Smith knew Brown would benefit from international competition and a whole new coaching influence – Henry Iba.
Iba had coached Oklahoma State (then Oklahoma A&M) to back-to-back national championships. From 1944 through '46, Iba's teams went 58-6.
If Smith was the offensive innovator – remember the Four Corners? – then Iba was similarly creative on defense. Iba's helping man-to-man principles are still the basis for much of the defense NBA teams play today.
Brown went to the Tokyo Games as Iba's starting point guard. He returned with a gold medal (Team USA went 9-0) and a whole new resource in Iba, who went on to coach two more Olympic teams.
“Sometimes you thought they were unrealistic,” Brown said of McGuire, Smith and Iba, “but that meant they had great trust” in what you could be.
Who wouldn't pass that on?
A ‘particular' sort
The word new Bobcats center Tyson Chandler uses to describe Brown's approach – “particular” – is telling.
Chandler is a guy who could get away with shortcuts. He's long, he's graceful, he was good enough to be a lottery pick out of high school.
He learned the risk of shortcuts after a pre-training camp pick-up game in Charlotte – a pick-up game he never played. His surgically repaired ankle encased in a boot, Chandler hobbled out to toss up some layups between runs.
“Tyson! No! No! No!”
It was Brown. Chandler hadn't established a pivot foot. And he wasn't using his fingertips to launch the ball through the rim. Nevermind that the ball still fell through the net.
To Brown, that was happenstance – testing the odds that doing something the wrong way would elicit the right result. That made no sense.
And instantly Chandler got it: Never had someone coached him like Brown. Some NBA players take to coaching more willingly than others. Some are too young to understand. Others are too old or rich or entitled to change their ways.
“He's very particular,” Chandler said. “A lot of young players – actually, a lot of older players – don't want that.
“I think later in your career, you'll think, ‘I wish I'd let somebody maximize my potential.'”
Relentless
Maximize. That's what Brown does.
It doesn't always work out – he was fired after a single 23-59 season in New York and failed to coach Team USA to the gold-medal game at the 2004 Olympics – but the body of work is striking. He's never coached the same NBA team in consecutive seasons without reaching the playoffs. And that accounts for seven franchises.
He improves players, even when there's no immediate reward, perhaps any reward.
He worked out now-Golden State Warrior Anthony Randolph before the 2008 draft. The Bobcats weren't looking to draft Randolph. Yet at the end of that workout, Brown pointed him to a side basket and spent a half-hour correcting Randolph's release on free throws.
It was tedious, almost painful. Brown kept demonstrating fingertips. Randolph kept using his palm. Finally, Randolph got fingertips.
Happens all the time. When the Bobcats audition second-rounders or kids who will never be drafted, Brown personally runs the workouts.
He says it's good business – you never know when a kid might become a player – but that's not what it is.
It's passing on the gift.
