Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  Sarver admits that the idea of renegotiation is hard for him. “In sports, you have a good year and all of a sudden everyone wants more money,” says Sarver. “I understand it at some level because people in sports are getting fired all the time, whereas such insecurity is not present in other businesses. So the sports business breeds insecurity, and I’m not used to having people work for me who have that insecurity.”

  But one man’s “insecurity” is another man’s “ambition.” A team came along, recognized Colangelo’s talents, and wanted to give him a lot more money. That’s how it happens in sports. And Sarver, a self-described man of action, took none. The only logical conclusion is that Sarver wanted Colangelo out, because he didn’t like him, didn’t like his work, or could put himself closer to the action without him. Colangelo didn’t want to leave, his wife didn’t want to leave, and their children, Mattia and Sofia, didn’t want to leave. “Any thought or notion that I wanted to leave or that there was something concrete for me to stay is absolutely a misnomer,” says Colangelo. But, the way he sees it, he had to go. Were he a player, Colangelo would’ve almost certainly said, “I was disrespected.”

  At root, the Colangelo-Sarver story is a story about fathers (as it so often is). Jack Sarver was a self-made man who built a mini–hotel empire and began a savings and loan in 1964 in Tucson. When Robert was sixteen, he got a call from his dad. “Put on a coat and tie and get down here. You’re going to work.” He started his son as a teller.

  Jack Sarver valued education above all else, having not had the money to attend college himself. He sent Robert to the University of Arizona, but the son, as freshman often do, spent most of the first semester screwing around. He managed just a 2.1 cumulative grade-point average that put him on academic probation. “It crushed my dad,” says Sarver, “just crushed him. He couldn’t go to college, so he really wanted me to do well. And look at what I did with the opportunity.” Sarver shakes his head. “I was on academic probation when he died.”

  Jack Sarver had a fatal heart attack when he was fifty-eight, leaving behind a self-made estate of $6 million. His widow, Irene, gave Robert $150,000 in 1984, when at the age of twenty-three he became the youngest person in the United States ever to start a successful bank (the National Bank of Tucson). Irene added an investment of $250,000, and that was all the capital Sarver needed to get started. Once he got started, he never stopped. Sarver owns four million square feet of commercial office space, 3,500 apartments, 700 hotel rooms, and a couple thousand acres of land, along with being CEO and chairman of Western Alliance Bancorporation. And the only thing he is really known for is owning the Phoenix Suns.

  Irene Sarver attends games frequently, sitting next to the Sarvers—Robert; wife, Penny; and sons, Max, Jake, and Zach. “My mom is beyond proud of me,” says Sarver. “If I robbed a bank, she would figure out why that was the right thing to do. But I think about my father a lot. I wish I would’ve been able to show him my success.” He turns serious. “I’ve been luckier than I’ve ever deserved to be, in life and in business. I talk about this with Steve Kerr, who also lost a father too young, all the time. [Kerr, a former NBA player and now a TNT commentator, is part of Sarver’s ownership group and a respected advisor; Kerr’s father, Malcolm, president of the American University in Beirut, was assassinated in 1984.] ‘There is someone up there looking after us, Steve. It’s probably our fathers.’ ”

  By contrast, Bryan Colangelo’s father was always around. They were close. Bryan ached when he sat in the stands and heard Jerry criticized and got in more than a few fights protecting his father’s name. And the son made the father proud, too. No academic probation for Bryan. He was a terrific student and a solid basketball player at Central High in Phoenix, then at Cornell. When he graduated from college, Jerry would’ve been overjoyed had Bryan come back to join him. But the son felt he needed some time away, some time to forge his own identity before coming back, which he did in 1990.

  Bryan put in six years as the second-in-command in personnel before Jerry anointed him and said, “Congratulations, and the first thing you’re going to do is trade Charles Barkley.” Bryan did it. The joke around the franchise was that every time there was credit to be taken, Jerry would step forward, and every time there was blame, it fell on Bryan, standing in the background. That was okay with the son. He didn’t need the attention.

  But though the son was a button-down man, he was a bold GM. He hired and fired coaches and reshaped the team a couple of times, most notably when he traded Stephon Marbury and Penny Hardaway to New York, a move that cleared cap space to sign Nash, Quentin Richardson, and a few other pieces. He wore suits and custom shirts. But he had cojones.

  Still, there was that shadow. Bryan always refers to his father as “Jerry” in public, but what he really needed was a new surname for himself. “A lot of people still think I’m here only because of Jerry,” he said back in January before the Raptors’ talk had started getting serious. Had Sarver treated Bryan differently, let him know he was wanted and upped his salary via the nasty but necessary business of renegotiation, Colangelo would’ve stayed in Phoenix. But deep down, he also knew that he needed to get out, to get in the sun instead of being the son.

  Perhaps it will work out for Bryan in the long run. The Raptors, after all, have nowhere to go but up. The saddest person in all of this, though, might be Jerry Colangelo. He doesn’t say much about it in public, but he wanted his son to stay and perpetuate what he had started. Jack Sarver would’ve probably wanted the same from Robert.

  D’Antoni doesn’t mention the let’s-beat-Bryan angle before the game. The Sarver-Colangelo split monopolized headlines in Phoenix for a few weeks, but, in truth, the dispute had markedly little effect on the team. The players generally liked Bryan, but they are, after all, players, interested in the outside world only as it happens to intersect their own. “If it doesn’t affect the flow of money on the first and fifteenth of each month,” says Gentry, “everything’s pretty much okay with them.” One school of thought even holds that the players would’ve been disappointed in Colangelo if he hadn’t taken the Raptors’ offer: He’s getting all this money—why wouldn’t he go?

  Anyway, any Colangelo-against-his-old-team talk is obscured by this being the Steve Nash Favorite Son/Sun game. “Whatever happens tonight,” says Gentry, “I’m hanging with the Canuck after the game. The whole country is his ’hood.”

  “Yeah, like he wants you around,” says Weber.

  Nash finishes with twenty points and ten assists as the Suns win an entertaining, offensive-minded game 140–126. Gentry terms the Raptors “the Chevrolet version of what we are,” which is accurate. Clearly, Colangelo has some work to do.

  Accompanied by his father, the new Toronto GM comes into the Suns’ locker room to congratulate the players and coaches. Bryan is flying back that night on a private plane with Jerry to see his wife and kids, who are still in Phoenix. He is friendly but clearly disappointed that the Raptors—his Raptors—did not perform better.

  “They got a lot of diseases up here, B?” D’Antoni asks, his eye on Colangelo’s heroically sized vitamin bag. Colangelo is a bit of a germaphobe, and D’Antoni always kids him about it.

  “SARS, I think,” says Gentry. “Isn’t that big up here?”

  “Right now it’s losing I have to worry about,” says Bryan. He shakes everyone’s hand solemnly. “I hope you guys go all the way.” He departs the locker room no longer the GM of a championship-caliber team he had assembled, but, rather, the boss of one trying to find some measure of respectability.

  Chapter Nineteen

  [The Second Season]

  Phoenix, May 23……………….

  GAME 1 OF MAVERICKS SERIES TOMORROW

  “We can play the underdogs to the outside world, but in here we know we’re gonna bust their ass.”

  From the upstairs coaches office at US Airways Center, Alvin Gentry places a call to San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich, whose Spurs had been eliminate
d by the Mavericks twelve hours earlier. Gentry and Popovich were fellow assistants on Larry Brown’s staff—it seems like Gentry has been on everyone’s staff—and wants some feedback on what Popovich believes did and did not work against Dallas. Such calls are not unusual in the NBA; if a coach feels like he can use a prior relationship to gain intelligence, he will do it, and if the other coach feels comfortable dispensing such intelligence, he will do it. In this case, the Suns know they won’t get all that much because the Mavericks coach, Avery Johnson, is also close to Popovich, having been his point guard when the Spurs won the championship in 1999.

  Pop isn’t in, but his secretary says that she’ll get a message to him.

  “I know what you mean,” Gentry says to her. “It’s sort of like playing the Iraqi national army team.”

  Gentry is exaggerating his negative feelings toward the Mavericks. But only slightly. There isn’t much of a natural rivalry between Phoenix and Dallas, other than, based on empirical evidence, they seem to be vying for the title of Boob Job Capital of the U.S. But there is little love lost between the teams. Some of the animosity (if that’s not too strong of a word) was hatched during last year’s conference semifinals, which the Suns won in six games. Even though they were the higher-seeded team, the Suns felt that the Mavericks took them lightly; their star, Dirk Nowitzki, was among those who said that Dallas had the superior team even when it was over.

  Moveover, they messed with Nash. Don’t mess with Nash around Phoenix, certainly not when you’re the team that told him you didn’t want him. In that playoff series last season, the Mavs espoused the theory (other teams did, too) of allowing Nash to shoot but taking away his passing lanes, i.e., turn him into Kobe Bryant. It worked in Game 4 when Nash had forty-eight points but the Mavs won. But in Games 5 and 6, both of which Phoenix won to close out the series, Nash scored and distributed (thirty-four points and twelve assists in Game 5, thirty-nine and twelve in Game 6), absolutely torching his old team. Nash finished the six games with an average of 30.3 points.

  Plus, Phoenix and Dallas are, to some degree, perceived as doppelgangers of each other—entertaining and talented, yet hard-wired to fall short of a championship because they lack some toughness gene. Each hates that reputation and wants to slough it off on the other. Both franchises have crawled their way to near the top of the NBA food chain, and now both are looking to beat the other to the very top.

  But they want to do it in different ways. Phoenix accepts—nay, embraces—the idea that an entertaining and talented team can win a championship. D’Antoni hates it when Dallas’s offense is spoken of in the same sentence as his offense. “If we don’t score a hundred and ten points a game,” he said in the preseason, “we’re Dallas.” The Mavericks, by contrast, grew tired of being called “soft” and have attempted to remake themselves as a down-and-dirty team that hangs its hat on defense. They would scoff at the notion that Phoenix’s defense is even in the same league as theirs.

  To some extent, the teams can be defined by the demeanor of their head coaches—the smiling, loose and affable D’Antoni wants to have fun while he’s beating you; the defiant, Napoleonic Johnson, who roams the sideline with his lower lip thrust out, wants to stomp you while he’s beating you. Dallas’s personality change can be traced to the hiring of Johnson, who replaced Don Nelson late last season. Nellie liked to run and play small, and his 2002–03 team, which started Nash and Bell in the backcourt, was a kind of precursor of D’Antoni’s teams in Phoenix. (Except that he insisted on playing a stiff of a center, seven-foot-six-inch Shawn Bradley, who established a world record for covering up when someone dunked on his head.) Nellie has admitted that part of his heart went out of coaching when Nash left for Phoenix. Nellie is a former forward with the heart of a running point guard; Avery is a former point guard with the heart of an aggressive forward.

  It so happens, too, that Johnson and D’Antoni finished 1-2, respectively, in balloting for coach of the year. D’Antoni professes not to be bothered by it—“Hell, I’m amazed I won it last year,” he says—but he would like nothing more than to outcoach the Little General, Johnson’s perfectly apt nickname. They respect what Johnson has done with the Mavs and it’s difficult not to like him. Nash and Bell do—they were with the Mavs when Johnson was winding down his playing career in 2002–03. (Bell says that Johnson was the one who got him to attend chapel services on a regular basis, where, apparently, he picked up a lot, though not that turn-the-other-cheek thing.)

  Johnson notwithstanding, there is something irritating about the Mavericks. Jason Terry, who plays both point and shooting guard, for example, runs onto the floor with his arms spread like an airplane because his nickname is “Jet,” a fact that most fans outside of Dallas are unaware of. Plus, Jet believes God has a “destiny” in mind for the Mavericks. Jet had no comment on what God thought of his punching the Spurs’ Michael Finley in the groin in Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals.

  There is a certain collective smugness about the Mavericks, much of it stemming, obviously, from their deep-pocketed owner, Mark Cuban. The dotcom millionaire has turned American Airlines Center into his own version of the Twilight Zone—“a dimension of not only sight and sound, but of mind”—all geared toward ragging on the opposition and lifting up the Mavs.

  Cuban would be the last person to admit that the Mavs have a rivalry with the Suns, not after he had spent the previous two weeks insulting San Antonio with the hopes of amping up the intrastate antagonism for the future. He sold the idea that Finley, a former Maverick (and former Suns player, too) and about as classy a guy as the NBA has to offer, was somehow at fault when Terry low-belted him. The scoreboard poked fun at Finley, and Cuban told the newspapers that “Dirk wants everybody to come out and boo Fin.” Then Cuban repeatedly found ways to insult the Riverwalk, San Antonio’s major tourist attraction. (Being a fervent patriot, he left the Alamo alone.)

  Cuban unquestionably saved the franchise, which was among the worst in pro sports when he bought it six years ago. But in the process he has also coarsened the culture, turning the majority of his fans into bleating homers who don’t respect opponents and who treat every official’s call that goes against the Mavs like a crime against humanity. Cuban no doubt senses that his Mavs could not beat the Suns in a personality contest. So in his sights are the Spurs, bland as broth in their no-nonsense black and silver uniforms, not the Suns, all smiles and lightness in their purple and orange. Some of it has to do with Nash. Cuban somehow sold the idea during the San Antonio series that Finley had deserted Dallas—in point of fact, Dallas waived Finley, once the cornerstone of the franchise, to save money with the amnesty clause—but he would have trouble turning everyone against Nash. Nash is too popular. Nash wanted to stay in Dallas but Phoenix guaranteed $60 million over six years, and Cuban didn’t think Nash was worth that much. He liked Nash personally and loved what he did for the franchise, but he believed that Nash wore down over the course of the season and was not the point guard to take his team to the Promised Land.

  Nash understood that it was a business decision, but there is no denying the redemption he felt last season when he and the Suns stuck it to his old team in the postseason. Nash has never publicly blasted Cuban, but he does get in his shots from time to time. After a recent press conference unveiling the new Wheaties edition bearing Nash’s face, he was asked if he would be sending a few boxes to Cuban. “Sure,” said Nash, smiling. “Looking at his waistline, I’m not sure how healthy he eats.” That had to sting Cuban a little even though Nash was kidding; the owner is a workout freak who conducts sweaty pregame interviews from a vertical climber.

  Still, the Mavs are a strong team, and, to their credit, they kept their entirely legitimate complaints about the NBA’s seeding system largely to themselves during the season. They finished with six more wins than the Suns yet were consigned to the fourth seed in the Western Conference because Phoenix and Denver, by dint of winning their respective divisions, were seeded second
and third, respectively. That meant that the Mavs had to meet the top-ranked Spurs in the conference semifinals rather than the finals. (The system will change for the 2006–07 season, with the NBA going to a system that seeds the top four teams in the conference based on wins rather than divisional alignments.)

  The Mavs are such a strong team, in fact, that there is a consensus among Suns coaches that they would’ve matched up better with San Antonio. There is much work to be done, particularly in devising a plan to stop their high-scoring power forward, Nowitzki, and not much time to do it. The good news is that they feel they know the Mavs fairly well, having split four games with them during the season.

  Dan D’Antoni is alone in his opinion that the Mavs are not as good as their record. All year long that’s what he’s been saying, and, when Dan believes something, you’re not getting him off it. “He’ll fight you to the death,” says his brother, “even if he’s wrong. Sometimes he prefers it when he’s wrong.” But like all the assistants, Dan has learned to compromise, learned to stop arguing so the strategy sessions don’t continue right up to tip-off. Watching Dan’s adjustment from high school (he won more than five hundred games in thirty years as a head coach at Socastee High School in Myrtle Beach) to the NBA game has been a fascinating process, akin to watching any rookie trying to find his way. This one just happens to be fifty-nine, four years older than his younger brother/boss.