One on One

by John Feinstein

  With nothing else to do, I went to see Arizona–New Mexico on Friday night. Naturally, Butch was there with Arizona, which was in the early throes of rebuilding under new coach Lute Olson. We talked about Blatnick, and I thanked him again for making me a hero for a night at the Post. Butch laughed and said, “You know, there’s a kid on our team who may be a more amazing story than Blatnick.”

  I found that hard to believe.

  “His name’s Steve Kerr,” Butch said. “He’s a sophomore, our sixth man right now. Lute took him at the last possible second two summers ago. He’d had no scholarship offers at all, and we had one open scholarship.”

  Okay, that was a nice story, but hardly in Blatnick’s class.

  “The thing is, his father was president of the American University in Beirut. Steve actually spent a lot of his boyhood in the Middle East. Last January, his dad was assassinated.”

  Now Butch had my attention. “Assassinated?”

  He nodded. “Two days after Steve’s dad was killed we played Arizona State. There was a moment of silence before the game. Steve played because his mom told him there was nothing his dad enjoyed more than watching him play. He came into the game six or seven minutes in, and the first time he touched the ball he had an open three.”

  “Let me guess…”

  “Drained it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. We won the game going away.”

  I was convinced. I was also surprised the story hadn’t gotten any national attention. New Mexico won a close game that night—surprisingly close because this was before Olson had rebuilt the Wildcats into a national power—and Butch had Scott Thompson, Olson’s top assistant, take me back to meet Kerr. I don’t think he was thrilled to meet me, not a few minutes after a tough loss. But he couldn’t have been nicer. I liked him right away. He had one of those dry, self-deprecating senses of humor. When he was talking about his recruitment—or, more accurately, nonrecruitment—he talked about his quickness.

  “I’m deceptively quick, actually,” he said. “When people first see me they think I’m a step slow. In truth, I’m two steps slow.”

  He talked about his father and his death and the hours and days and weeks and months following his death. “Anytime I play I think about him,” he said. “Because the truth is, if not for him, I wouldn’t be playing at Arizona.”

  It turned out there had been some confusion about whether Arizona was going to offer Steve a scholarship. Lute Olson and his wife, Bobbi, had gone to a summer league game in Los Angeles to look at underclassmen, and Olson had been intrigued by Steve’s shooting range. When he told his wife that he was interested in the pale, skinny jump shooter with the shock of Tom Sawyer hair, her response—according to Olson years later—was “Oh no, Lute, you can’t be serious.”

  He was serious enough to contact Kerr. At that point, Steve was planning on going to Cal State–Fullerton, where he had accepted a last-second scholarship. A chance to play in the Pac-10 had seemed like a dream come true, but when the Kerrs heard nothing from Arizona for several weeks, it looked like he was going to end up at Fullerton—until Malcolm Kerr intervened.

  “He called Lute,” Steve said. “He asked him what the deal was, why they hadn’t called back at all. Lute said he had thought I was going to Fullerton. My dad told him I really wanted to go to Arizona. Lute said, ‘Well then, we’d love to have him.’ The truth is my dad recruited them more than they recruited me.”

  As luck—bad for Steve, good for me—would have it, he tore up his knee playing in the World Championship in Spain in the summer of 1986. Initially the doctors told him he might not play again, the damage was that serious. But he went on a strenuous rehab program after his surgery and red-shirted that winter. As a result, he was a fifth year senior in 1987–88 on what had now become a very good Arizona team.

  By then, Steve was an icon in Tucson. He had made himself into a very good player—a solid point guard who became a big-time threat when the three-point rule became a part of the college game. But it was more than that. Everyone there knew his story and the community came to see him as an adopted son. He responded by showing up at every charity event there was and going to schools to read to kids and encourage them to learn to read themselves.

  Whenever Steve made a shot in McKale Arena, the announcer would scream, “STEVE KERRRRRRR!” Without fail, 12,400 people would yell back, “STEVE KERRRRRR!” It became both a tradition and one of the most spine-tingling moments in college basketball, even after you’d heard it dozens of times.

  Arizona had been occasionally good in basketball, but never great. It had never reached a Final Four. But the team Olson had put together by Kerr’s senior year—with Steve and Craig McMillan in the backcourt and Sean Elliott and Tom Tolbert up front—was clearly going to be a national contender. They started the season by winning the Great Alaska Shootout, which back then always had a great field, and then went to Iowa, where Olson had once been a hero, to play a Tom Davis–coached team that had reached the Elite Eight a year earlier.

  My lead in the Washington Post the day after that game said this: “Vice President George Bush came to Iowa today to campaign for president. He might as well have been invisible. Why? Because Lute Olson, the prodigal son, had returned to Iowa.”

  Okay, overwritten and maybe I enjoyed it a little too much given my political biases. But it really wasn’t far off. There were—without question—more camera crews chronicling Olson’s walk back onto the court at Carver-Hawkeye Arena than anything Bush did in the state that day.

  Which was fine with me. I was there to see Kerr. I had lunch with him after the team’s shootaround that morning. We talked for several hours. At one point, Olson walked by our table and shook his head disapprovingly.

  “Don’t keep him too much longer, John,” he said. “We do have a game to play tonight.”

  “We do?” Kerr said. “I’d completely forgotten.”

  Even Lute laughed at that one. Later he told me if it had been anyone but Kerr, he’d have been apoplectic about one of his players spending time with a reporter a few hours before a difficult road game.

  “I knew Steve could handle it,” he said. “Steve can handle most things.”

  Kerr’s sense of humor did get him into a little bit of trouble later that month. After Arizona had beaten Duke to win its own post-Christmas tournament (the Wildcats also won in Olson’s return to Iowa, meaning they ended up doing a lot better in the state than Bush would do), Kerr was on a postgame radio show in Tucson. The host asked him if he and his teammates had made any New Year’s resolutions—no doubt expecting Kerr to say they had all resolved to make it to the Final Four.

  That just wasn’t Steve.

  “Yes, we have,” he said, sounding quite serious. “We’re all very determined to help Coach Olson overcome his heroin addiction. We really want to help him deal with it.”

  One could almost imagine Arizona fans driving home from the game swerving into trees at that moment. “As soon as I said it I knew I’d gone too far,” Kerr said later. “I mean even then Lute was God in Tucson. It wasn’t a good place to go for a joke.”

  Olson forgave Kerr for the same reason he had let him talk to me on the day of the Iowa game: it was Steve. “I was mad at him when he said it,” he said. “But I have trouble staying mad at him.”

  Arizona made it to the Final Four that season. I’d flown from East Rutherford on Saturday to Seattle on Sunday to see the Wildcats play North Carolina for the last spot in Kansas City. Duke, Oklahoma, and Kansas were already in. It was the first time all season I’d seen Kerr nervous.

  “I can’t believe this is really it,” he said before the game. “We’re either going to the Final Four or we’re not. Period.”

  I had another of my “Dean encounters” that day. When I walked into the Kingdome a couple of hours before tipoff, he was standing outside his locker room. He had quit smoking by then but was working the Nicorette hard.

  “Didn’t you go to see Duke yesterday?” h
e (of course) asked me.

  “I did. Then I flew here. That was a nice win you guys had on Friday.”

  “Except that [senior Steve] Bucknall got hurt. I’m not sure we’ve got anyone else who can guard Sean Elliott.”

  “Oh, come on, Dean. Bucknall will play, you know that.”

  “Only if the trainers and doctors say he’s okay.”

  “They will. I know you want to leave doubt in Arizona’s mind, but he’ll start.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “I’m sure. In fact, I’ll bet you he starts.”

  Dean smiled. “Okay, I’ll bet you a dollar.”

  Knowing how competitive he was, I nodded and said, “But you can’t not start him the first two minutes just to win the bet.”

  Sure enough, when the lineups were introduced, Bucknall started. I looked across the court at Dean. Seeing me, he reached in his pocket and held up a dollar bill. He paid me too—even after Arizona won the game.

  In the movies, Arizona would have won the national title and Kerr would have dedicated the championship to his father. In real life, he shot two for eleven against Oklahoma and blamed himself for his team’s loss.

  Even though Kerr was drafted in the second round that spring by the Phoenix Suns, I didn’t expect him to play very long in the NBA, and I don’t think he did either. He went from Phoenix to Cleveland to Orlando—always in a limited role as a shooter off the bench but, nonetheless, in the NBA. Then, prior to the 1996 season, he signed with the Chicago Bulls.

  Most people know the rest of the story: Michael Jordan, after starting a fight with him in his first practice, became Kerr’s biggest supporter. In 1997, with game six of the Finals on the line, Jordan reversed the ball to an open Kerr, who drained the three pointer that clinched the title. It was at that point that I called Steve and said, “Now your life is a movie.”

  I had really believed for years his story was worthy of a movie, but, like with A Season on the Brink a few years later, it lacked an ending. Now that it had an ending, Steve didn’t want to do it.

  “I just can’t picture my life story up on a movie screen,” he said.

  “Most of it was in a book,” I answered.

  “I know,” he said. “But it’s different.”

  He was right, and I certainly wasn’t going to push him. It was, after all, his life.

  Kerr ended up with five NBA championship rings—three in Chicago with Jordan, two more in San Antonio with David Robinson and Tim Duncan.

  “Right place, right time,” he likes to say.

  Perhaps. But Kerr played a major role, in the locker room and on the court, in all those titles. And I can’t think of anyone who deserved good things more than—as they still say in Tucson whenever he’s back there—STEVE KERRRRRRR!

  10

  Junior and Friends

  AS MUCH AS I have always loved college basketball, and as much as I now enjoy covering golf, the truth is, the sport I dreamed about covering when I was young was tennis.

  Part of that, no doubt, had to do with my parents. Tennis was the one sport they both truly enjoyed. My parents were the antijocks. Music and the performing arts were their great loves. My mom, Bernice, got her PhD in music history, played and taught the piano, and taught music history at Columbia and George Washington University. My dad—Martin—grew up in Brooklyn in the shadow of Ebbets Field. Just as I would do with sports as a boy, he rode the subway often to pursue his passion: classical music. He would pay the nickel fare to get into Manhattan to go to the Metropolitan Opera House or Carnegie Hall. As a teenager he sold librettos at the Opera House so he could get into all the operas for free.

  When he got out of the Army in 1945, he refused to listen to his family’s pleas to go to work with his uncles in the garment district, and instead he pursued a job—any job—in the performing arts. He finally landed one as an assistant public relations director with Sol Hurok, the Russian impresario. He stayed there twenty-seven years before becoming the first executive director of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington. Later, he was the director of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington Opera.

  As a kid, my parents’ involvement in the arts world was something I rolled my eyes at most of the time. The fact that their West Side apartment was often filled with artists such as Isaac Stern (my dad’s best friend), Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, Vladimir Horowitz, and Marian Anderson hardly impressed me. Why couldn’t it have been Tom Seaver, Willis Reed, Brad Park, or Joe Namath?

  I still remember a night in 1971 when my (then) beloved New York Rangers were playing the Chicago Blackhawks in a critical game five of a Stanley Cup semifinal series. My parents were throwing a party for Marian Anderson, the great singer, who had retired by then but had remained a close friend of my dad’s. Deep into overtime, Bobby Hull scored off a faceoff to give the Blackhawks the game and a 3–2 series lead. I was furious. I began screaming at the TV, throwing pillows around the room in complete frustration. I was, um, loud.

  My father burst into the room. “What the hell is going on in here?” he demanded.

  “Goddamn Bobby Hull just scored and the Rangers lost,” I said, as if that would completely explain my behavior.

  I guess, to some degree, it did. “Well, keep it down, will you? Miss Anderson is singing!”

  To him Marian Anderson singing was somehow more important than Bobby Hull scoring.

  My parents often took me to the ballet, to the opera, to concerts when I was a kid. In fact, I remember my mother forcing me to go to Marian Anderson’s farewell concert at Carnegie Hall when I was eight years old. “It’s an historic day,” she said. “You can miss one ball game.” I’m forever grateful to her for that.

  Once, my dad took my younger brother, Bobby, and me to a dress rehearsal of Aida. If you love opera you love Aida. If you are ten or eleven years old and you want to go home to watch a baseball game, you hate Aida. That goes double for the final scene, when Aida and Radames are sealed in the tomb and sing of their love to each other as they wait to die. They sing. And sing. And sing.

  As we walked out, my dad, riding high on the performance the way I might be riding high after a Final Four game, asked my brother what he had enjoyed most about the opera. Bobby was about seven at the time. “When they died,” he answered.

  Looking back now, I realize how fortunate I was to be exposed to all that my parents exposed me to. I still love the ballet and I enjoy some—if not all—opera. There are few things in life I enjoy more than the theater. I can remember vividly the night it first really clicked with me.

  I was twelve. My parents were insistent that I see Hamlet, which was being put on by the Old Vic, the forerunner to the Royal Shakespeare Company, at City Center on 55th Street in Manhattan. I went alone—I was too embarrassed to ask any of my friends if they wanted to go see Hamlet—and sat on the aisle in the tenth row. If I was spoiled as a kid in any way, it was in the seats I got for the theater because of my dad.

  I went from wondering how long the damn play was going to take to screaming “bravo!”—I’d learned that from my dad too—when the final curtain came down. I was transfixed by the play and by Richard Pasco, who played Hamlet. When Horatio whispered, “Good night, sweet prince,” I can remember feeling as if the entire audience took a deep breath. I was crying. The next time I would feel that exhilarated was when the Jets beat the Colts in Super Bowl III.

  I went home and went to bed. My parents hadn’t gotten home yet. Sometime after midnight, my dad came into my room and woke me up.

  “What did you think of Hamlet?” he asked.

  “Dad, it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever been to,” I said. “The guy who played Hamlet is the greatest actor I’ve ever seen in my life. He was incredible!”

  “Well,” Dad said. “He’s in the living room right now. Would you like to meet him?”

  Understand, famous people from the performing arts were in my parents’ house throughout my childhood. I came home one night while
I was in college and walked in to find Victor Borge sitting at the piano making up songs while my parents and Jason Robards sang along with him. My brother and I routinely played basketball in the driveway with Richard Cragun, the brilliant dancer for the Stuttgart Ballet.

  But this was a big deal. Richard Pasco was in the living room? I jumped out of bed and padded into the living room in my pajamas. Pasco was sitting in a chair that I’m looking at right now, drinking coffee. His wife, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, was on the couch next to my mother. If Tom Seaver had been sitting there I might have been more excited. I began gushing to Mr. Pasco about how brilliant he had been. I did have one question though: When Laertes’s poisonous sword cuts him on the arm, how did he make it look as if his arm was suddenly spurting blood?

  Pasco laughed. “Red toothpaste,” he said. “You notice when he cuts me, I reach”—he demonstrated—“with my left hand to the spot where I’ve been stabbed? I have red toothpaste in that hand. I quickly spread it on the white shirt I’m wearing so it appears the blood is spurting out of my arm.”

  Wow. How cool. I was rattling on about the entire performance when my mother broke in. “You know, John,” she said, “Mrs. Pasco played Ophelia tonight.”

  Barbara Leigh-Hunt was a very beautiful woman. I had barely noticed she was in the room. “Oh yeah,” I said. “You were fine.”

  My parents loved telling that story.

  It was that same year that I first really fell in love with opera, or one opera specifically. It was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (Pique Dame in Russian), which was being performed by the Bolshoi Opera in Montreal. My father was sent there by Mr. Hurok to hear the Bolshoi’s repertory, since the company was supposed to come to New York for their American debut the following year. The trip was canceled because of politics, and it wasn’t until 1975, when my dad convinced the Russian government to send the Bolshoi to the Kennedy Center, that they finally appeared in the United States.

  That night in Montreal I went with my father. As always he told me the story before we got to the theater, since I wouldn’t understand the words, which were being sung in Russian. I didn’t need to understand the words. The music was completely overpowering. By the middle of the second act I was entranced. At the beginning of the third act, Hermann, the protagonist—hardly a hero—is singing on the dark stage. He is being stalked at that moment by the ghost of the Queen of Spades, whom he killed in act two. As he sings, she creeps up behind him, singing too. Just before the ghost reached for Hermann, I jumped out of my seat and yelled, “Watch out!”