Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  The three teams that emerged were Atlanta, Indiana, and the Los Angeles Clippers. I first talked to the Hawks, and I was interested in them. Marilyn and I liked Atlanta as a city. The Hawks were a decent team the year before, a 43-39 record. Nothing special. They had been swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Bulls, and hadn’t been past the first round since 1988. But they had some talent to work with.

  The Hawks wanted me to sign a three-year contract, but I told them that I also wanted to talk to Indiana and the Clippers.

  “Promise me one thing,” said Pete Babcock, the Hawks general manager.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “When you go to the Clippers, make sure you talk to the owner [Donald Sterling],” he said.” Don’t decide anything until you talk to him.”

  I promised Babcock that I’d do just that.

  The Clippers started as the Buffalo Braves back in 1970, moved to San Diego in 1978, then settled in Los Angeles in 1984. No team has been more futile, made more bad trades, lost more games, and been in such complete disrepair as the L.A. Clippers.

  So why even talk to them?

  My family and I do like Los Angeles. One of my daughters was attending UCLA. Larry Brown had just left after coaching the Clippers to a 41-41 record, so there was some talent there, including Ron Harper and Danny Manning. The situation wasn’t hopeless, as is usually the state of affairs with the Clippers. I also liked Elgin Baylor, the long-time general manager. My talks with Elgin went very well, until I asked him about Stanley Roberts, the Clippers’ young center who had just had Achilles surgery.

  “What are you doing about his rehab?” I asked. “Who’s checking on him?”

  No one in the front office had a clue. I asked about some other players with injuries, and received the same nonanswers.

  “You really need to follow up on guys in the summer to make sure they’re working out and following their rehab programs,” I said.

  This seemed like an entirely new concept to them, which raised a red flag in my mind.

  Next, I met with Donald Sterling, the real-estate tycoon who owns the team. He seemed a little distant, not locked in to our interview. I’d ask him if he planned to sign this player or trade that guy, and he’d just look at me and say, “Ooh, everybody on this team loves each other.”

  The guy had no grasp of what was going on with his own team.

  We talked some more, then he had to leave. I really needed him to talk to my agent, but Sterling was taking the next day off. Baylor said he didn’t even know where Sterling could be reached, or where he was going. If the general manager couldn’t find the owner, if management doesn’t communicate better than that, it’s no wonder the Clippers have been such a mess for so long. I called my agent and said, “Lonnie, I’m outta here. This is no place for me.”

  My next stop was Indiana, which was the best of the three teams. I liked general manager Donnie Walsh a lot, and then I let Lonnie Cooper take over. Both Atlanta and Indiana offered three-year contracts, so it was great to be wanted by two very solid organizations. Marilyn liked Atlanta as a city best, and then the Hawks upped their offer to five years at $1.5 million annually—and that clinched the deal. I know that one of the members of the Hawks board—Mike Gearon—was surprised when I agreed to coach the Hawks. He thought I was just using them as a bargaining tool with other teams, because I had interviewed first with Atlanta, then went to the Clippers and Pacers.

  The Hawks had some talent—Dominique Wilkins, Kevin Willis, Stacey Augmon, Mookie Blaylock, and they traded for Danny Manning in the middle of the 1993-94 season, my first as the team’s coach. We started the season at 1-4, and I had to convince the guys that I wanted the ball to move, and I wanted them to defend. To do that, I had to bench some people to get the point across. In one of our first games, I sat Dominique for nearly all of the second half of the game because he needed to become more team-oriented. Dominique was thirty-four years old and not the explosive scorer that he had been early in his career. We ended up trading Dominique at midseason to the Clippers for Danny Manning.

  We had a very nice season, winning 57 games, to tie a franchise record for the most victories in a season. The Hawks had been in existence since 1950, when they were called the Tri-City Black Hawks and were coached by a young Red Auerbach, so those 57 victories were a very special accomplishment. I was my old self again. My health was back. My energy returned. I had a good group of guys willing to work together, and we made it to the second round of the playoffs—the first time since 1988 that it had happened in Atlanta. And that 1993-94 season was special for me because I broke Red Auerbach’s record of 938 career coaching victories. For the first time in my career, I was voted the NBA’s Coach of the Year. It also put me in position to become the coach of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THERE WAS A TIME IN THIS COUNTRY when many people thought a black man couldn’t coach a professional sports team. He could play the game; he could win every individual honor available to an athlete; he could lead his team to a championship with his sheer drive, skill, and athleticism. But he couldn’t coach. He didn’t have the mental ability to do it, or the character—or maybe, both.

  When I broke into the NBA in 1960, there were no black head coaches in any of the big three professional sports—basketball, baseball, and football. Yes, there were black players, and blacks were starting to dominate in every sport. But some people had an ugly explanation for that, too:

  Black players were great athletes. They succeeded because they could run faster, jump higher, and were physically stronger than white athletes. It was genetic, a gift from God.

  Of course, no one said this outright.

  They talked about the black star being “a wonderful athlete.”

  The white star was “savvy, a smart player, an overachiever.”

  Those were the code words: “great athlete” for blacks, “smart and savvy” for whites. Blacks didn’t think, they just played the game, did what came naturally. Whites could only play the game by thinking.

  This was not only insulting, it was racist. We couldn’t win in the court of public opinion. If a black athlete was better than a white athlete, well, what’s the big deal? Blacks are physically superior, right?

  If a white athlete prevailed, it was because he “outsmarted” or “outhustled” the black athlete.

  In other words, whites had more character than black athletes.

  That always galled me, and I’ve spent a lifetime in professional sports defying that stereotype. When I played, people spoke and wrote about me as if I were a white athlete.

  I was “the coach on the floor.”

  I was “the heady point guard.”

  I was “an intelligent player.”

  I was thrilled with those compliments. I just wished the people writing and saying those things didn’t believe I was such an exception. If they could watch the game with unbiased eyes, they’d see that a lot of black players played smart. And they’d also see some white players who were pretty good athletes and didn’t always squeeze the last drop out of their talent. The truth was, some of them didn’t have the aptitude to do so.

  One of my hopes for sports is that people can learn to judge each other as people, not by race or stereotypes. This goes back to my days at Providence, when some professors didn’t think an athlete, especially a black athlete, could also be a serious student, and it carried over into the pro game, where blacks supposedly couldn’t play point guard because they lacked a deep enough understanding of the game. Black quarterbacks fought that same stigma in the NFL for too many years.

  Lord knows, no one thought a black person could ever coach a team.

  That’s why being named head coach of the 1996 Olympic team meant so much to me. A black man was not merely going to represent the United States of America, he was going to lead a group of those representatives onto the world stage.

  It wasn’t long after the 1992 Olympics that I began hearing
I’d be the head coach of the 1996 team. I loved my Olympic experience in 1992, and I wanted the rumors to be true. I wanted the job, but I didn’t say much about it because I was afraid it wouldn’t happen, even though I felt I was very qualified. Between the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, I’d passed Red Auerbach’s NBA record of 938 coaching victories. I’d started to receive a fair amount of national publicity, and a lot of people were writing that I had been underappreciated all these years. I was the logical pick. I had been on the 1992 coaching staff, so I was very familiar with taking NBA stars and adapting them to the international style of play, which has slightly different rules than our pro game. I also was known and respected by the players. If ever I was going to be the head coach of the Olympic team, 1996 was the year.

  And when it happened, I was very pleased. I knew the moment would be special, but when I was alone and had a chance to think about it, I was surprised at how emotional I became. I was talking about it with some friends, and I got a little choked up. I started to think of where I came from, of all the things that had to happen for me to reach that point, of the odds against a kid who played only a half-year of high-school basketball going on to have a longer career as a player and coach than anyone in NBA history.

  Now, I was the head coach of the 1996 Olympic basketball team.

  I was proud because I knew I had earned it. They wanted a good coach, an experienced coach, a winning coach, and I was all of those. That’s what made this so meaningful to me.

  But after I was named the head coach, I had one profoundly felt wish—that my father could have been there to see it. This has happened to me on a few occasions in my life. I wanted my father there, to see what his son had become and to hear what he thought of it. The great thing was that my mother was still alive. She always told me two things: that I’m always accountable for what I do and say … and that I should let honesty and integrity define my character. I don’t care if that sounds corny. Being accountable, being honest, being a man of integrity—that’s how I’ve tried to live my life, and, in some ways, I viewed the Olympic coaching job as a reward for all that.

  Then, I got scared.

  Suddenly, I understood how Chuck Daly felt in 1992. I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to become the first coach to lose in the Olympics with NBA players. And I sure didn’t want the first coach to lose to be a black coach.

  Any reasonably intelligent person knows that the 1988 Olympic team didn’t lose because John Thompson was the coach. It was simply a matter of the rest of the world’s pros catching up to our college kids; there was nothing John Thompson could have done about that. But he was the first black head coach in U.S. Olympic basketball history, and the first to legitimately lose the gold medal (the Russians had won in a controversial final in 1972). His race obviously had nothing to do with it, yet I know there were whispers …

  I didn’t want to leave any room for whispers.

  Deep inside, I knew no one in the world could beat us. I knew this without even being sure of the composition of the team. I had too much respect for the character and competitiveness of the top NBA players to believe that they’d lose in the Olympics. But what if something happened…

  That always runs through a coach’s mind, especially when your team is an overwhelming favorite. What if you have a night where no one can make a shot? Those nights happen to the best players and best teams. In the playoffs, that’s not the end: It’s just one bad game. But in the Olympics, one bad game in the medal round and you’re done.

  I didn’t dwell on this. I don’t think I ever talked about it. But once in a while, the thought, the fear—it was there. What if we lose?

  I also knew that this was going to be a tougher job than coaching the 1992 team. Part of it was that some of the older stars weren’t taking part. Magic and Larry Bird had retired. I talked to Michael Jordan, and he said, “Coach, if I thought you really needed me, I’d play. You know that I’d love to play for you. But you already have so many good players to pick from, I think it’s good to let some of the younger guys have a chance.”

  I know he’d have played if I pressed the issue, but Michael was right. There were a lot of other guys who’d love to be on the Olympic team. Michael had been in the Olympics as a college player in 1984 and as a pro in 1992, so he had done his part.

  No matter what happened, I realized our team was destined to be compared to the 1992 team, and I knew that wasn’t fair. 1992 was the first time we used pros in the Olympics. With Michael, Magic, and Larry, we had three of the five best players in NBA history. That was a team for the ages. Some of those guys were already legends. It was in Spain, where the European fans were in total awe of the Dream Team; the 1996 Olympics would be in Atlanta, where the fans still loved us and we were mobbed wherever we went, but American fans are more used to seeing NBA stars than the fans in Europe.

  And our team didn’t have Magic, Larry, or Michael.

  We had great talent, but we didn’t have players who were considered giants of the game. I’m not criticizing the roster. I was blessed to have a team with John Stockton, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Charles Barkley, Gary Payton, Reggie Miller, Mitch Richmond, Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, Grant Hill, and Hakeem Olajuwon.

  That’s not exactly a bad team.

  But we were a different team, and I immediately stressed that to the players. We would find our own identity. We would not compare ourselves to the 1992 team, even though people would ask us about that. I stressed that I’d try to play everyone some quality minutes, and I planned to use a lot of different lineups.

  We were also facing a bigger challenge than the 1992 team. We were together for a shorter time, only a month. After taking just the bronze medal in the 1988 Olympics, our team had to qualify for the 1992 Olympics by winning the Tournament of the Americas, which gave us some additional time to play together. The rest of the world had continued to improve; more and more foreign players were competing in the NBA, then returning to play for their countries in the summer. But I did have four players who had been on the 1992 team—Stockton, Pippen, Malone, and Barkley. They were a great help to me, just because they had already had the Olympic experience.

  I have to say that the Olympic Committee could not have been better to me. I was allowed to pick my own assistants, which was nice: In the past, the committee sometimes wanted their own people as assistants. I asked for Bobby Cremins, Jerry Sloan, and Clem Haskins. There was some debate on the committee, then Wayne Embry spoke up for me and said, “I think the coach should have people he wants. He knows who he needs to help him win.”

  I always appreciated that. To see Wayne go to bat for me like that really meant a lot. I thought I’d left the Cavs on good terms, but sometimes there are hard feelings anyway. The committee is a collection of people from the college and pro ranks—mostly former coaches and current executives. Receiving all that support and friendship made me put even more pressure on myself to make sure everything went right. I didn’t want to let these people down.

  Then we played our first exhibition game. It was against a bunch of college stars called the Select Team. This probably would have been our Olympic team if the pros weren’t taking part. Anyway, this was my first game as Olympic head coach, and we came out of the dressing room totally flat. I mean, we couldn’t make a shot, we didn’t play with much intensity, nothing.

  At halftime, we were down by 17 points.

  Really, this wasn’t much different from that first scrimmage the 1992 team had against some college stars, with one major exception: that scrimmage was played behind closed doors, in front of no one but the players and coaches, while this was on TV in front of a sellout crowd in Detroit. The whole country was watching, and probably wondering just what the deal was with us. I kept telling myself, “We’re not gonna lose to a bunch of college kids,” but we sure were playing like it.

  At halftime, I really jumped on the guys. During practices, we had talked about defense being our calling card, our
identity, and we had some spirited practices. The guys worked hard. They were very serious about the Olympic team. They knew that we were carrying the legacy of 1992, that we were the team that represented the best of U.S. basketball.

  And we were being embarrassed.

  In the second half, I started Olajuwon, Barkley, Pippen, Richmond, and Payton. We pressured the ball, to play a fierce trapping defense, forcing turnovers and creating some easy baskets. The game began to turn in our favor, and I’m telling you, I was relieved. Malone and Robinson played well off the bench, and we won—which was the best thing I could say about it.

  We were criticized in the media for our lackluster effort. I knew that was coming, and I was sure it wouldn’t happen again. The players didn’t like what happened any more than I did. People then said we’d never compare to the 1992 team. I knew that was coming, too: The second-guessing was sure to start, even from some of the members of the Olympic Committee who had voted for me to coach the team. I could still see the doubt in the eyes of some of the people. They’d deny it now, but I knew they wondered if I could do the job. I sensed it. I felt it. No one had to say a word, it was just there, hanging over the room.

  If they wanted to compare us to the 1992 team, or compare me to Chuck Daly, there was nothing we could do—but we were a different team. All I could do was stress that over and over, hoping people got the message. But that still didn’t make me feel much better after that first game. Later that night, I called my wife, and even Marilyn told me how lousy we played. The one good thing was I knew the players were also hearing it, and they weren’t going to like it any more than I did. In retrospect, that game was the best wakeup call we could have had.

  Some people think it’s hard to coach a Dream Team because of all the egos involved. They’re shocked when I tell them that was never a problem.

  When we first came together, I told the players that this was a special opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime thing for most of them. They would be representing their country. We were going to play as a team. No one should worry about individual statistics. We had one—and only one—goal, to win the gold medal.