One on One

by John Feinstein

  I wasn’t there that night but I was in a Patriot League town—Worcester—where a first- and second-round subregional was being held. I had just watched another stunning upset, Vermont over Syracuse, and was sitting down to write when someone told me Bucknell was still leading Kansas with five minutes to play.

  Afraid to watch, I started writing my Vermont column. But the shouts coming from the TV area were too much to resist, and I walked over to watch the final few minutes. When Simien’s shot was long, I actually felt my knees buckle slightly. I was so happy for everyone in the league.

  “Hey, John, you gonna write another book?” someone shouted while we watched the Bucknell players celebrate.

  No. But I’m awfully glad I wrote the first one.

  I NEVER WROTE A book or tried to sell a movie on Steve Kerr’s life, but I honestly believe it could have been done. Even if you just look at it in a basketball sense, Kerr’s story is remarkable: he went from an unrecruited high school senior to the starting point guard on a Final Four team. Then he went from what looked like it would be a brief—at best—NBA career to spending fourteen seasons in the league, winning five NBA titles along the way, including one that climaxed with Michael Jordan throwing him the ball for the clinching three-point jumper in the NBA Finals.

  That’s not a movie?

  Kerr laughed when I brought it up again on a snowy night in New York last winter. He was in town to do the Knicks and Heat the next night on TNT. I was en route to Worcester to do the just-as-glamorous Colgate–Holy Cross game. We met at one of my favorite New York steakhouses, Smith & Wollensky. Kerr walked in with snow in his hair.

  “This is just from getting out of the cab,” he said. “It’s coming down out there in buckets.”

  He didn’t look a lot different at forty-five than he had looked when I first met him shortly before he turned twenty. He had the same easy smile and the straw-colored hair and Tom Sawyer look. But he had traveled a lot of miles in twenty-five years.

  “I still think about my dad all the time, as you might imagine,” he said. “It happens more now in life situations. I look at his grandchildren and know how much he would have enjoyed them. But I always thought about him when I had my successes as a player because I think he would have been amused by it. I got my wise-guy sense of humor from him. I can almost hear him saying to me, ‘Steve, you just aren’t that good,’ when everything happened, and he would have been right. When I was younger he’d say, ‘You’re a modest guy with much to be modest about.’ ”

  It’s a good line, but Kerr has spent most of his life disproving it. Even though his shooting ability was the key to his surviving fourteen years in the NBA, there had to be more to it than that.

  “I think there was,” he said. “But I also think you have to go all the way back to my senior year of high school to see how events conspired to get me where I eventually got. Lute [Olson] gets the Arizona job that spring and he loses five players to academics or transfers before the end of the school year. He’s desperate and then he sees me. If I had been a senior when his program was established, I’d have never gotten recruited and never gotten in the rotation. But we were so bad I had to play right away. That helped me build my confidence and gave me a chance to see what I needed to work on. Then we got [future NBA star] Sean Elliott and all of a sudden I’m the point guard on what’s now a very good team.

  “When I got to the NBA, my shooting kept me in the league early. But I really kept working because I knew I wasn’t as talented as other guys. I actually got to be a reasonably good defender. It hurt to play defense, physically hurt, because I wasn’t very big or very strong and I had to fight through screens all the time and I got knocked around. But I have a pretty good pain threshold, so I was able to deal with it.

  “Then I ended up with the Bulls on a team with Jordan and later on the Spurs with David [Robinson] and Tim [Duncan]. I played a role in those championships, but I think those guys might have played a slightly larger role.”

  Kerr vividly remembers the aftermath of his first title in 1996. That was the year Jordan had returned to the Bulls following the murder of his father a couple of years earlier. After the Bulls won, Jordan took the championship trophy and collapsed on the floor of the locker room, hugging the trophy, tears running down his face. Only one person in the room could really understand how Jordan felt—Kerr, whose father had been murdered twelve years before.

  “It was Father’s Day,” Kerr said. “So that made it especially poignant, I’m sure for Michael and I know for me. Father’s Day is still a little bit tough for me every year. Michael’s dad had been by his side for every other great moment in his basketball career, so I have no doubt that’s what he was feeling that night—his absence. I can certainly relate to that feeling.”

  Every championship was special, but the game Kerr remembers most wasn’t an NBA game—not even the one in ’97 when he made the clinching shot.

  “There’s only one game in my basketball career that I still think about all the time, and that’s our Final Four game against Oklahoma,” he said. “I still remember it like yesterday. My first couple of shots that night felt good coming out of my hand, and they both rimmed out. Then the next one was way off, and I just never found my rhythm after that. I wanted to win that game and win the national championship so much, and I probably was trying too hard. You see it happen every year with guys in the tournament. That’s the beauty of it and the pain of it—one and done and if you don’t get it done you are done. It hurts.

  “It still hurts today. Honestly, I’d give back three of my NBA championship rings right now to have that one NCAA title. But that’s not how it works.”

  Kerr is a natural at television: he understands the game, he’s articulate, and he has a good sense of humor. In a way, he’s the perfect partner on TNT for Marv Albert, whose off-the-wall sense of humor can make the most humorless analyst appear funny. With Kerr, Albert doesn’t have to work to get his partner to spar with him. Of course, in 2011 Kerr also did the NCAA Tournament, working with Albert but also with Jim Nantz and Clark Kellogg during the Final Four.

  Even though CBS’s telecasts tend to be quite rigid and formal—because that’s the way the NCAA wants them—Kerr lightened things up with his presence.

  “I like doing it. I especially like now having a chance to do college games,” he said. “I still love the college game, and next year my son [Nic] will be playing college ball himself [at the University of San Diego], so it’s a perfect fit.”

  Does Nic have his dad’s shooting touch? “He does—that’s the good news. The bad news is he also has my quickness.”

  Kerr spent three seasons running the Phoenix Suns before returning to TV a year ago, in large part because the travel got to be too difficult. His wife, Margot, and their three children stayed in San Diego, and Steve rented a place in Phoenix. “I actually got home a lot,” he said. “There were nights I’d leave our office at five, get to a Southwest flight at six, be home [with the time change] by dinnertime, and then get up early the next morning and go back to work. Not the easiest commute, but I had it down.”

  Someday he might return to the NBA or even to college coaching. The youngest of his three kids, Matthew, is now thirteen. “Once they’re all out, I could see getting into coaching or going back to the front office,” he said. “But we’ll see. Maybe Margot and I will just travel and I’ll keep doing the TV. It’s certainly an easier lifestyle.”

  The chances are, whatever he decides to do, Kerr will be successful. He’s already beaten the odds his whole life anyway.

  And maybe, one day, someone will make that movie. I’m certainly available.

  WHEN I SAT DOWN to make the list of people I wanted to track down for this book, there was one person on it I had never interviewed or, for that matter, ever met.

  Michal Pivonka.

  It was Pivonka whose mother I had been interviewing in Kladno when the Czechoslovakian KGB had shown up at the front door. The last I had seen
of her, the men from the KGB had been “taking her back to her job” as we all left her apartment following their lengthy interrogation of me that day.

  I had checked with the Capitals after getting home and had been told that Pivonka had not reported any problems with his family back home. I had read stories subsequently in which Pivonka had talked about his parents and sister visiting him after he had gotten settled in the United States. So as far as I knew, Magdalena Pivonka had not been subjected to any further interrogation after I had left. Pivonka went on to a solid career in Washington, playing on very good teams, although he was injured during the playoffs the one year (1998) that the Caps made the Stanley Cup Finals.

  I never introduced myself to him—in part because I only occasionally covered hockey, in part because the rare occasions when I did it was during postseason, when the locker rooms were a little too crowded to just wander up to someone and say, “Gee, I hope I didn’t get your mom in trouble with the Czech KGB back in 1986.” Now though, I figured, was as good a time as any to try and find out what, if anything, had happened.

  I tracked him down with the help of then Caps PR director Nate Ewell. Pivonka still kept in some touch with his old team even though he had moved to Saddlebrook, Florida, after retiring. His two teenage daughters were talented tennis players and his ten-year-old son was a hockey player. I sent an e-mail first, telling Pivonka who I was and about my encounter with his mother, how gracious she had been, how guilty I’d felt all these years that I had never talked to him about the incident.

  He wrote back quickly. He knew who I was because he is a big golf fan. His mother had never mentioned a problem with the Czech secret police. She had died, he said, three years earlier. Cancer. I hadn’t seen Magdalena Pivonka in twenty-four years and had known her for about three hours. Somehow though, I felt a sense of loss when I read those words.

  A few days later, Pivonka and I talked. He told me the story about his defection.

  “It took a while to get everything organized,” he said. “The Caps drafted me in 1984. David Poile was the general manager and Jack Button was the scouting director. The go-between in those days was a guy name Jiri Crha—he was a goalie who had defected to Toronto in, I think, 1979. He’d been at the end of his career and he kind of became an agent for players behind the Iron Curtain after he stopped playing. He would come and see our teams play and he would ask me if I was interested in going to play in the NHL.

  “I was interested, although I didn’t know all that much about the league. Nothing was really on TV or the newspapers about it. I knew who Wayne Gretzky was and that the Oilers were the team. That was pretty much it. But there had been other guys who had gone over there. I was certainly intrigued by it all.”

  Finally, in the spring of 1986, Pivonka decided he was ready to go. A plan was hatched—one he didn’t tell his parents about because he knew they would not be at all happy about the idea of him leaving home, perhaps for good.

  “The plan was for Renata [then his girlfriend, now his wife] and me to go to Yugoslavia on vacation,” he said. “Yugoslavia wasn’t quite as strict as Czechoslovakia, and, of course, we weren’t nearly as strict as the Soviet Union. I remember when we traveled there to play in junior tournaments, we’d say to one another, ‘God, it would be awful to live here.’ It was all relative, I guess.

  “Renata and I were told that after we got to this resort in Yugoslavia we were to wait until we were contacted by a guide. He was Canadian, I remember that, a guy who did these things more for the adventure than anything else. I think to us, that’s what it all was—an adventure. We were a couple of twenty-year-old kids, we didn’t know any better. When we left, my thought was we might go through with it if the guide contacted us. I wasn’t completely sure until the last minute if we were going to do it.”

  The guide contacted them on a Saturday. It was go or no-go then. A decision had to be made. Michal and Renata decided to go for it. They got a little more than they bargained for when they met their guide the next morning.

  “He walked us to the edge of the woods. There was a clearing of about three hundred yards from there to the border, and there was a guard tower right there on the border. He wanted us to be there right at noon because that’s when the guards changed and there would be a couple of minutes when no one was really paying that much attention—one group leaving, the other one just arriving.

  “He told me to bring a camera and wear it around my neck. If we got caught, we’d just say we were tourists—which we were—and that we got lost and didn’t realize we were that close to the border. He also told us there was a chance they wouldn’t ask questions if they saw us heading in the direction of the border and that they might just shoot us.”

  Just as noon struck, Michal and Renata walked into the clearing and, casually as possible, walked in the direction of the border—hearts pounding, to say the least. No one stopped them. When they cleared the border and reached the woods on the other side, Jack Button was waiting for them.

  “We had to go to Rome from there to get visas,” Pivonka said. “Jack told us to be sure to tell the people at the embassy that we were defecting for political reasons, not so I could play hockey. That was not considered a legitimate reason to ask for political asylum.”

  It was from Italy that Pivonka called his parents. “At first they said, ‘Oh, you decided to go sightseeing there?’ And I said, ‘No. I’m not coming home.’ That was very hard. Then they had to go tell Renata’s parents. That was worse. I was the bad guy. I had lured their daughter to go with me and leave her family behind. There was some tension between the two families for a while.”

  It all worked out in the end, and the Pivonkas were allowed to visit the United States—especially after the communist governments fell in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. “The whole world changed then,” Pivonka said. “Renata and I were able to go home, and our families came over to see us a couple of times a year.”

  When I asked Pivonka if he was surprised his mother had never mentioned my visit, he laughed. “I’m sure at first she didn’t want to worry me,” he said. “There wasn’t all that much fallout when I left, although my dad got demoted from his job as a head [hockey] coach to an assistant. Plus, I’m pretty sure nothing did happen after you left. One thing I learned after I got here is that propaganda here was just about as bad as the propaganda about the U.S. was in Czechoslovakia. It wasn’t as bad over there as people here made it out to be.”

  Pivonka and I talked for a while, almost like old friends. He talked about coaching his son’s hockey team and about going out each year to watch the golf tournament when the PGA Tour came to Tampa.

  I told him what his mother had said that day in Kladno when she had picked up his sunglasses.

  He laughed. “I packed light,” he said. “I didn’t want to tip anyone off that I was leaving for a while. Not even my parents.”

  It all worked out in the end for everyone. I was glad to know that—even if it took me twenty-four years to finally find out for certain.

  22

  Tennis, We Hardly Knew Ya

  IN MARCH OF 1994, while in the midst of researching A Good Walk Spoiled, I veered off course for a couple of days to go to the Lipton Tennis Championships in Key Biscayne, Florida. I was there for two reasons: to see if I could get Pete Sampras to give me some time for my Tennis Magazine column and to see some of my friends in tennis. I would stay two days and then drive to Orlando for Arnold Palmer’s tournament at Bay Hill.

  At that point in my life, I was “keeping my hand” in the sport with the column in Tennis and occasional other assignments. Even though Hard Courts had often been frustrating to research, I always figured I would write another tennis book at some point if only because the first one had done well.

  Sampras was playing a second-round match early on Monday. After years of political battles, Butch Buchholz, the tournament’s founder, had finally gotten the stadium he had always wanted, and it was quite impressive. I drove to
Crandon Park that morning with Sally Jenkins, and she led me to the new press box. From there we watched Sampras play. When the match was over, I wanted to grab a cup of coffee, so I told Sally I’d find her in the interview room.

  When I got downstairs, I realized I had no idea where the interview room was located. I asked a security guard if he could point me in the right direction. “Oh sure,” he said. “It’s right down there, just past the locker room and around that corner.”

  I thanked him and started walking in that direction until he gently put his hand on my arm and said, “I’m sorry, you can’t go that way.”

  “But you just said…”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But you’ll have to walk around the other way. Media isn’t allowed in the locker room area.”

  Honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Now media wasn’t allowed to walk past the locker room much less go in the locker room. Welcome back to tennis.

  By then I had become completely spoiled by the easy access I had found in golf. The number of occasions when I had been told I couldn’t go somewhere during my time on the golf tour could be counted on one hand—with a couple of fingers to spare.

  There had been an incident in Los Angeles when the people in charge of security had tried to tell Larry Dorman of the New York Times and I that we couldn’t walk inside the ropes without a camera, even though we were wearing armbands that said, “media—inside the ropes access.” We had straightened it out thanks to Marty Caffey of the PGA Tour, but the security people had gone way out of their way to make life unpleasant for us the rest of the day.

  I had ended up telling the guy in charge that he and his men were a bunch of “brown-shirted Gestapo stormtroopers.” Apparently something got lost in the translation because he came into the media center later that day looking for me. I’d already left, so he found Caffey and complained that I had called him a cocksucker.