Can he be the Hornets’ head coach and the dad he always wanted to be — at the same time?
It’s late in the game, and Charlotte Christian’s eighth-grade girls basketball team is beating Charlotte Country Day by a country mile, so James and Megan Borrego’s focus drifts a bit, from their daughter Grace’s game to son Zac’s competitive pursuits.
“I don’t know if Megan told you, but I went to the Robotics World Championships in Kentucky with him last spring,” James Borrego says, as he gently pats Zac — seated in the row in front of him — on the shoulder. “That was awesome. That was so fun.”
Then, to his son: “We goin’ back this year? You gonna make it?”
Zac, 11, swivels his head around and nods, smiling confidently.
“Come on, man, we gotta go, we gotta go,” his father says, as he proceeds to reel off the name of the hotel they’ll book in Louisville, if Zac’s team makes it — again — and the restaurants they’d eat at, if they make it — again.
It’s clear the Charlotte Hornets head coach has fond memories of the father-son trip they took together late last April, when Zac and two other then-fourth-grade boys represented their school against peers from as far away as China and Paraguay.
In fact, he speaks about it with such extraordinary fondness that you’d almost think Borrego is thankful his NBA team didn’t make the playoffs last year.
The reality, of course, is that Borrego was devastated after that professional disappointment, and the pain didn’t go away quickly. At the same time, though, an earlier-than-hoped-for end to the season made the road trip with Zac possible; and hanging with his son at the competition will almost certainly be a dad highlight Borrego will cherish for the rest of his life — one he wouldn’t, at this point, trade for anything in the world.
It is a perfect example of how the Hornets’ coach wrestles with the two sides of himself every season.
There’s Borrego the coach: He’s 100 percent committed to proving he can turn this team into a winner, and as a veteran of 16-1/2 seasons in the NBA, it’s in his blood now. He’s long known that being on the road and away from loved ones, almost constantly for the better part of every year, is just part of the deal.
Then there’s Borrego the dad: He’s 100 percent committed to proving he can be a present and engaged father for his daughter and two sons (the youngest, Nick, is 9) — who, like all kids, are growing up too fast and are involved in more activities than ever.
He’s long known this would be a priority, because his own father was neither present nor engaged.
How realistic is it for him, truly, to expect that he can honor both of those commitments?
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Determined to be different
Lydia Borrego remembers being in the kitchen of their Albuquerque, N.M. home, talking with her son James and her daughter Jessica, back when he was a junior or a senior at Albuquerque Academy, where he was a star basketball player.
This was some 2-1/2 decades ago — he’s 42 now — and while Lydia can’t recall exactly how they’d gotten to talking about her kids’ futures, she has a vivid memory of 12 words James said during the conversation, and the conviction with which he said them.
I know what kind of a dad I don’t want to be.
“He went on to say that he wanted to be present,” Lydia Borrego says. “That he wanted to be involved with his children, when he had them. That he wanted to do everything different than what his father did.”
For the first few years of their kids’ lives, Lydia’s husband did more drinking than parenting, and when Jessica was 4 and James was 3, he abruptly decided he didn’t want to do any parenting at all. There wasn’t some sort of argument that precipitated it, Lydia says; he just vanished from their lives, packed up one day, left, and headed 600 miles west to his original hometown of Las Vegas.
In the years that followed, there was a lot that Lydia struggled with as a single mother of two, mostly as it pertained to making ends meet while working multiple jobs. As a beautician, she’d make $5 for a haircut. As a maid, $20 for cleaning a house. In menial jobs for the Albuquerque Public Schools district, $3,000 a year.
One thing she didn’t struggle with, though, was her dedication to James and Jessica — to being there for them, to making sure they didn’t grow up feeling bitter, to making sure they felt loved.
She decided never to date or re-marry because she wanted to be able to devote every bit of free time she had to her children, and that’s exactly what she did, somehow never missing a single one of James’ basketball or baseball or football games or any of Jessica’s cheerleading competitions or gymnastics meets.
And on the rare occasions when one of them would bring up their father, Lydia deliberately avoided saying anything bad about him, resigning herself to the fact that doing so would only hurt them. (“I didn’t want to put that bitterness in their hearts,” she says.)
“My mom was Superwoman pretty much, did the best she could do with what she had,” says Jessica Schaefer, who now lives with her husband and their 9-year-old daughter Jade in Lincoln, Neb. “But there was always that piece missing, like, when you’d look at other families. And because James got into sports, and he saw those dads there, and the dads coaching, he probably felt that missing piece earlier than I did.”
At the same time, his exposure to the present, loving fathers of his friends, and the care and attention he received from coaches — particularly, he says, Mike Brown and John Whisenant when he played in high school — were immensely impactful.
So, Jessica says, reflecting on that day when James said what he said about fatherhood: “I think he just really decided from early on that he wanted to be a family man and have kids. I think there was always just something in him that knew, ‘That’s not who I’m gonna be. That’s not the family I’m gonna create. I’m gonna create my own family. I’m gonna be a great dad.’”
In 2006, five years after marrying his high school sweetheart while working as an assistant in San Antonio under famed Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich, James and Megan Borrego welcomed their first child: daughter Grace.
He would finally get his chance to be the father he always wanted to be, and he was overjoyed.
But it wasn’t going to be easy.
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‘This job really consumes you’
Summers are always special for the Borregos.
They’re all about family time, whether it’s hanging out by the pool in the backyard of their Myers Park home, or family trips. (Last summer, they got away to the Primland resort in Virginia for R&R; to New York City for “The Lion King,” a Mets game, and all manner of touristy stuff; and to Albuquerque, to spend time with his mom and with Megan’s parents.)
In the summer, Dad can be a dad.
But otherwise, the NBA can be a cruel life for a family man — especially if you’re a head coach. Especially if you have young children who crave attention. Especially if you’re someone who feels like you have something to prove.
The regular season consists of 82 games, exactly half of which are on the road, and lasts from the final week of October into April of the following year. There are also preseason games, and, if your team is good enough, a postseason that can extend into late spring. From start to finish, it overlaps almost perfectly with a standard school calendar year.
Lydia Borrego, against astonishing odds, found a way to be there for every one of her kids’ activities. For her son, however, there are simply too many odds to overcome for him to follow in his mother’s footsteps in that regard.
“There’s not much you can do about the schedule. You gotta play the schedule,” James Borrego says, while sitting in his office deep inside Charlotte’s Spectrum Center after a weekday practice in December. “But it’s not ideal for raising a family. It’s just really not. This job really consumes you.”
He does passionately love his job, though, and he appreciates how hard he worked to get where he is. Starting in 2001 with his working basically for free as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, the University of San Diego, under then-head coach Brad Holland. Then spending a dozen years in various assistant capacities for San Antonio (including on Spurs teams that won NBA championships in 2005 and 2007), New Orleans and Orlando. Then serving two months as interim head coach in Orlando before returning to San Antonio to work under Popovich again, for another three seasons. Then making history in 2018, upon joining the Hornets and becoming the first Hispanic head coach in the NBA.
Now in his second season in Charlotte, Borrego doesn’t take his professional responsibilities lightly, or for granted.
“I’m very fortunate; I understand that. It’s a dream opportunity. To be one of 30 (NBA head coaches) in the world is an incredible honor. ... I want to succeed at this job. I want to put everything I can and have in me into it.”
Yet as thrilled as he is to be here, he is also a man who is almost constantly teetering along a tightrope.
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‘The balance I have to walk’
“On this team, I have 15 kids. Right? These 15 guys are like children to me, in a way,” Borrego says.
“I’m always thinking about them. But I’ve got three at home that are the priority. That’s gotta be my focus. ... I mean, it’s very difficult when I miss competitions or games, or events, school events. It’s very difficult for me. Because you only have your kids so long. I don’t get these moments back. I don’t get these events back. ...
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“That’s the balance I have to walk. I don’t want to back off of that work ethic and that mentality as a head coach. But I also don’t want to lose the long-range perspective of what’s most important in the end.”
Megan Borrego says the kids sometimes get frustrated because their dad can’t always be there, but she points out lots of dads can’t always be there. She says they’ve known NBA families who allow the children to travel more with their dads, but she and her husband have decided that’s not what’s best for their kids.
For one, she says, if they make a commitment to be on a team, it’s important for them to honor that commitment. But more generally speaking: “They only get one chance to be an eighth-grader, or a fifth-grader, or a third-grader ... and we try to make sure that that part of their life stays normal.”
And during the season, when James is not on the road, he’s making them breakfast, he’s dropping in to have lunch with them at school, he’s taking them to sports practices, he’s helping them with their homework, he’s volunteering at their schools, he’s playing video games with them, he’s being intentional about finding a way they can all have family dinner together.
“As they’ve gotten older, it gets trickier,” Megan says, “and sometimes (with the family dinners) it might be at 4 in the afternoon, because that’s the break in between when one of the kids has practice. But if he’s not working, he’s with his kids.”
And when he’s there, he’s there.
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Striving to be a present father
While attending his daughter’s game at Charlotte Christian earlier this month — though the Hornets suffered a discouraging loss to the Pacers the night before and were set to play a tough Raptors team the following evening — James Borrego seems fully engaged with being with family and watching Grace’s team coast to a 33-11 win.
He beams as he introduces a guest to his son Nick, affectionately referring to him as “Red” or “Redman” due to the color of his hair, boasting of his soccer skills and explaining how Nick’s newfound love for a sport other than basketball (all three kids play) has broadened the family’s horizons in a fun way.
He laughs as he scoffs about the officiating — mostly in jest, and in hushed tones — with Megan. He shakes his head and smiles as Nick and Zac scramble out of the bleachers at halftime, when the court opens up for kids to shoot around. (“They just wait for that,” he says. “That gets them through the first half.”)
Not once, over the course of nearly 90 minutes, does Borrego get distracted by his cellphone.
It’s not always easy to tell if someone is genuinely happy to be somewhere, but on this day, Borrego’s happiness to be here with his whole family is obvious.
Indeed, despite the challenges he faces in finding a manageable work-life balance, he does, in a way, have the best of both worlds: a family he adores more than anything and that adores him right back, and a prestigious, coveted job that invigorates and inspires him every day.
And perhaps the most interesting thing about all of this?
His father’s decision to walk out on the family may have in fact set Borrego down the path that got him to this place.
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‘Fuel to motivate me’
Borrego’s father died in 2009 at age 60 — as a result, the family says, of health issues related to alcoholism.
Though he’d briefly visited James and Jessica a couple of times when they were in elementary school, he didn’t resurface into their lives until they were on their own and both living in San Diego. Upon hearing he was ill, they went to Las Vegas to see him, and in the years that followed, they talked to him on the phone two or three times a year, Jessica says.
After James joined the Spurs, their father attended a couple of games and once was invited to James’s house, when Grace was an infant. They never became close, per se, but James Borrego says he is “really at peace with my relationship with my father. Before he passed, I think we entered a relationship that was very loving and caring.”
He pauses, for several seconds, and it’s difficult to tell whether he’s feeling uneasy about delving into this subject, or whether it’s that he simply wants to take great care — as his mother always did, when they were kids — not to say anything bad about him.
Then he starts again:
“Him not being there did motivate me to be better. There was a real motivation factor behind it. Even though I probably didn’t know it at the time, as I grew ... I understood a little bit later that maybe the pain or the resentment I had was used as fuel to motivate me to make it in life. To stand out. To make my family proud. My mom proud. And probably, ultimately, my father proud as well.
“I think those are things that we all struggle with, you know, is trying to find peace with making our parents proud, our family proud. Those are issues that we all as human beings struggle with and try to deal with as life unfolds.”
But as he talks candidly through the feelings he has about the man who abandoned him, his sister and his mother, as he politely gives thoughtful answers to a parade of questions related to his struggle to find a balance between work and life, there’s a tenseness that seems to be lying just beneath the surface.
Something seems to be gnawing at him.
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What it’s all about, in the end
And after wrapping up what would be the last in a series of interviews for this story, Borrego stands in the middle of his office rubbing his beard and finally lays it out there.
“I just — you know, in our family, in our life, so much is about me now, right? As you can imagine. So my hope is that this piece is more about them,” Borrego says, referring generally to the collection of people who set positive examples for him — from his friends’ dads and his high school coaches to Brad Holland at USD and Gregg Popovich with the Spurs — but also very specifically to his mother’s dedication and his wife’s commitment to keeping the family running when he can’t be there.
“I get a little uncomfortable because I get so much of the attention,” he continues. “I mean, I’m not telling you what to do — that’s just my hope in doing this, that it’s a reflection of all those other people. That it’s less about me, more about them. For whatever it’s worth.”
If you want to see extraordinary parenting, he says, look at what his mom single-handedly did for him and for Jessica. If you want to see extraordinary parenting, he says, look at what his wife does, by pouring every waking minute into loving and caring for Grace, Z and Red, into striving to keep them healthy and happy, so that he can pursue his professional passion.
They are the real superheroes, he says.
James Borrego, meanwhile, is simply doing something he’s dreamed of doing since he first started really thinking about his place in the world:
He’s trying to be the absolute best dad he possibly can.
Théoden Janes: 704-358-5897, @theodenjanes
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
