Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Doc Rivers

  “YOU CAN GET A GREAT SPEECH FROM A THERAPIST.”

  He didn’t want a hug. His house had just collapsed in a heap. Everything he had was gone. The pets had been trapped inside and were presumed dead. The police told him it was arson. Racially motivated, maybe. He was shocked and angry, but he was already in game mode. He needed to find a new place to live, get his kids enrolled in school, start dealing with the insurance companies. What did his father always tell him? There will be no victims in this house. His house may have been gone and there was no doubt he had been victimized, but there was nothing he could do to change that now. The only thing he could do was keep moving.

  On that morning after the worst night of his life, Glenn “Doc” Rivers stood on the street outside what used to be his house. The fire had shocked his peaceful, well-appointed neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas. As he stood there with the wheels turning in his mind, an older woman from the neighborhood walked up to him with tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Without asking, she hugged him. He appreciated the gesture, but it was an unwelcome interruption. “I was too shocked to be hugging anybody,” Rivers told me. “I was just thinking about all the shit I had to do.”

  He didn’t want to be rude, so he hugged the lady back, sort of. Then he sat down on the curb and began filling out insurance forms, the ruins of what used to be his house still smoldering behind him.

  This was in June 1997. Rivers had been playing in a charity golf tournament in Seattle that morning when he got the news that his house was on fire. He flew home just in time to see it collapse. Fortunately, his wife and four kids were vacationing with his in-laws in Milwaukee, so they never saw a thing. He was determined to get the mess cleared before they returned. He didn’t want his children to see their home reduced to charred ruins. By the time they got there the next day, a stone slab was all that remained.

  Looking back at that awful day, Rivers is not so sure he was in the healthiest frame of mind. His ability to keep moving when bad things happen has long been one of his greatest strengths. But as is so often the case when it comes to the human character, his greatest strength can also be his biggest flaw. “There are times when I’m ruthlessly cold,” he says. “That was one of those times when I wish I could have a do-over. My wife needed to see me more emotional about the fire, but I was more emotional about getting our life back.”

  Still, Rivers knows full well that life, and basketball, can come at you fast. His ability to recover from adversity, coupled with the empathy and knowledge he accrued during a thirteen-year NBA playing career, have enabled him to become one of the most venerated head coaches in the NBA. There is a great deal of friction generated inside an NBA locker room, and if those sparks are not properly managed, they can set even the most talented teams ablaze. During his stints with the Orlando Magic, Boston Celtics (where he won the 2008 NBA title), and Los Angeles Clippers, Rivers has proven to be uniquely deft at managing egos, routinely calling upon his PEAK profile to build winning cultures and foment a common agenda. By minimizing his emotions, even to the point of being ruthlessly cold, he teaches his players how to be persistent. By calling upon his experiences as a player, he empathizes with their frustrations and fears, feels their aches, their pains, their tired legs. By showing them how comfortable he is in his own skin, he convinces them to sacrifice their individual glory for the greater good. By proving that he has expert knowledge, he gets them to trust his instructions and his vision, which he tends to impart with a theatrical flourish.

  It is through this balance between coldness and empathy that Doc Rivers gets his teams to Us. When critical moments arise, he doesn’t play the victim and doesn’t want a hug. He’d rather pivot and get moving, trusting that his players will follow.

  * * *

  • • •

  He couldn’t go left. Thirteen years as an NBA point guard—the one position on the floor where ball handling is paramount—and his left hand was basically useless. The players knew it, the fans knew it, the media knew it, the coaches knew it. And still he persisted.

  One night, right before tipoff of a game in Milwaukee, one of the opposing players shouted at him, “You’re not going right tonight!” Rivers smiled, shrugged, and replied, “Well, I’m not going left.”

  He was not necessarily the most talented guy on the court. Just the most determined. That had been true ever since he started playing as a grade schooler on the courts at Tenth Avenue and Washington Boulevard in Maywood, Illinois, a downtrodden suburb twelve miles west of downtown Chicago. During the summertime, Glenn and his older brother would play until the lights went out at 10 p.m. He never thought of it as “working on his game.” He just thought he was playing.

  The rules on a basketball court were clear enough, but life could be confusing outside the lines. Glenn was in the second grade when his neighborhood was overrun by race riots in the late 1960s. The violence got so bad that the police had to patrol the streets so the black students could walk on one side to school while the white kids walked on the other. Glenn remembers bottles flying back and forth. It was an unsettling time.

  But then something amazing happened. In 1969, when Rivers was eight years old, the Proviso East High School basketball team, which included his uncle, Jim Brewer, reached the Illinois semifinals. The whole community went “downstate” to Champaign to watch them play. The following year, Proviso won the title. One white kid was in the starting lineup; his sister dated a black player. For all the tumult on the streets, Glenn noticed that once the folks were inside the gym, everyone cheered for the Pirates. That left a profound impression. “It was like the team unified the town and the school again,” he says. “That showed me the power of sports.”

  He was lucky to have both parents at home, which was not the case with many of his friends. His dad, Grady, was a beat cop. Sometimes he would take Glenn and his brother, Grady Jr., with him on the night shift. That’s when the bad guys came out. When their dad took his boys with him to the station, Grady Sr. would point to the holding pen and warn them, “If you ever get thrown in there, don’t think I’m gonna get you out.” Talk about ruthlessly cold.

  In those days, Glenn had a bad habit of getting in fights in school and mouthing off to his teachers. He’ll never forget the day his dad came down to school, walked into Glenn’s classroom, took off his belt, and whupped Glenn right in front of his friends. Then there was the night when Grady heard that the little record shop he owned in town had been robbed. He took his wife and two boys to the store to see what was going on. When Glenn’s mom found the burglar hiding in a closet, Grady dragged the offender out and proceeded to beat the living shit out of him. He threw the guy out of the store and told the cops not to arrest him. He wanted the poor fellow to spread the word that the owner of the Night Time Record Shop was not to be fucked with.

  But Grady was tender too, in his own way. He didn’t give out hugs and compliments, but when he was down at the barbershop, Glenn could hear him bragging about his boys. Grady was the loudest guy at family get-togethers, cracking jokes and keeping everyone laughing. He was also highly educated. He was an avid reader who did the crossword puzzles every morning. That was his way of teaching his sons that knowledge was important.

  Grady gave great advice—“Trust everyone, but cut the cards”—and coached Glenn’s baseball teams when he was young. He would leave his police car near the field so if he got called on the scanner, he could hop in, flip on his police lights, and take off. Grady made sure every kid played, but he still managed the team to four consecutive Little League championships. “He was disciplined, but he was also a lot of fun,” Rivers recalls. “And you believed that he believed in you. To me, that was his gift.”

  Glenn’s mother, Bettye, was an optimistic, devout Baptist who had a Bible verse for every occasion, but she could be tough, too. If one of her boys said he was too injured to play ball, she sent him right back out th
ere. She had the early shift at a local assembly line, so she would get up at 4:30 a.m. and make the boys breakfast. After Glenn and Grady Jr. ate, they would go back to bed until their father came home from the night beat.

  For all the discipline being enforced, the Rivers house was an empathetic one as well. The door was always open to the neighborhood kids. Glenn and Grady Jr. never quite knew who was coming to dinner, but when they came, they were welcome to sit and eat, to pray and play ball. It was not uncommon for Grady and Bettye to take in a boy or two for weeks at a time. One of them, a boy named Casso, lived with the Riverses for several years. “My brother saw at an early age that it’s okay to help people,” Grady Jr. says.

  It was evident from the start that Glenn was a basketball prodigy, but he still needed an occasional lesson in persistence. When he was in sixth grade, he attended a high school basketball camp where every other kid was white. When one of the other campers called him a nigger, Glenn got into a nasty fight and was sent home. The camp directors were fine with him coming back the next day, but Glenn didn’t want to go. His pops was having none of it. “I paid. You’re going,” Grady said. “There will be no victims in this house.” Glenn returned to the camp, and at the end of the week he was named Most Valuable Player.

  He grew into an elite player at Proviso East, where as a senior he was named a McDonald’s All-American. He had his pick of colleges and eventually chose Marquette, partly because he had become familiar with the coaching staff while attending a couple of summer basketball camps there. On the first day of the first camp he attended, Rivers showed up wearing a Dr. J T-shirt. Rick Majerus, a portly, Falstaffian assistant, started calling him “Doc.” The nickname stuck. When he began his freshman season at Marquette, he was listed on the roster as Glenn “Doc” Rivers. As the years went on, the nickname would come to supersede his given name, but his close friends and family back in Maywood would always call him Glenn.

  * * *

  • • •

  They met during a study hall his freshman year at Marquette. She was working two jobs so she could pay for her education, so she wasn’t exactly dolled up that day. “You’d look good if you washed your hair,” he said by way of introduction. Only later did Kris Campion discover that the boy who had insulted her was a much-ballyhooed basketball player. They soon became good friends. She dated one of his teammates for a while, but he traveled abroad during the summer before Glenn’s junior season. While the boyfriend was away, Glenn and Kris fell in love. That made for some bad blood in the locker room that year, but Glenn couldn’t resist. She was cool, she was smart, she was cute, she was fun, she was understanding, she was supportive, she was his best friend.

  She was also white.

  Her parents were immediately accepting of the situation. They were ultra-progressive, having participated in peace marches in Milwaukee during the 1960s. Rivers’s family, however, was wary. “It was difficult for our family, to be honest with you. We never had anybody in our family go out with a white girl,” Grady Jr. says. “Once we met Kris and her family, though, we let it all go. They were such great people, it really changed the way I viewed things. It helped me see that you can’t coat everybody with one brush.”

  Outsiders were far less tolerant. Glenn and Kris faced all kinds of harassment. One day, they arrived at her apartment and found the words “Nigger Lover” spray-painted on the sidewalk. On another occasion, they returned to her car and discovered her tires had been slashed. Her parents’ house in Milwaukee was spray-painted with epithets as well, and a few hate letters arrived in their mailbox. “I come from a family of blond-haired, blue-eyed people. I had never experienced anything like that,” Kris says. “One of Glenn’s strengths, and I think this carries over into coaching, is he doesn’t overreact. He’s pretty calm in uncomfortable situations. He just kept saying, ‘We have our family and friends. Who cares what strangers think?’”

  Rivers was angry, but he wouldn’t let the hate dissuade him. “That’s just how it is with him. Once he made up his mind he was gonna do something, nobody could stop him,” Grady Jr. says. It also helped that Marquette coach Hank Raymonds was in his corner. He called Rivers into his office one day and asked, “Do you love her?” When Rivers said yes, Raymonds told him, “Then to hell with everybody.”

  Rivers grew in many important ways during his time at Marquette. During his freshman year, one of his history professors returned a paper marked up with red ink. The information was correct, but Rivers’s grammar and spelling were awful. He resented this at first, believing he was being singled out because he was an athlete, but he persisted anyway, even agreeing to extra help at the professor’s home. He eventually got the paper right. “That changed me in a lot of ways,” he says. “It taught me that you can be very smart and not well educated.”

  Still, Rivers’s junior season was not a happy time. Though he had played well his first two seasons, his production fell off, which made the harassment he endured because of his white girlfriend even worse. The strife between him and Kris’s ex-boyfriend was also an ongoing issue. For the first time in his life, basketball was not fun. That led him to the foolish decision to enter the NBA draft before he was ready. He was shocked when he didn’t get selected in the first round, instead being plucked by the Atlanta Hawks with the seventh pick in round two. He cried that night and vowed to exact revenge on every point guard who was selected ahead of him.

  He arrived at the Hawks’ training camp seething with anger. At one point, he got into a fight with another guard, Wes Matthews, who had elbowed him in the mouth. He came to camp without a guaranteed roster spot, but he earned one through sheer determination. The Hawks had a bevy of talented scorers, including Dominique Wilkins, Dan Roundfield, and Eddie Johnson. Problem was, there was only one ball, and Rivers spent much of the games handling it. “I didn’t look to be a leader, but I became one,” he says. “I learned as a player that if you’re going to lead, you’re not going to make everybody happy. No can be a very positive word.”

  That was just one of many bits of knowledge that Rivers collected that he would later call upon as a coach. He learned a great deal about defense from Atlanta coach Mike Fratello. Rivers had always been taught that when going up against a superior athlete, the best tactic was to give him space so it would be harder for him to blow by. Fratello, on the other hand, wanted Rivers to crowd his man. It made it harder for his opponent to move anywhere.

  Doc and Kris were married on May 31, 1986, following his third season with the Hawks. He wore pink canvas basketball shoes to the wedding. He was at the peak of his abilities, having just played in the one and only All-Star Game of his career. While Doc settled into a steady career, their family tree grew. They had a son, Jeremiah, in 1987 and a daughter, Callie, in 1989. Glenn also spent some time doing work for Turner Broadcasting, which was based in Atlanta. He was a natural at calling games. Those repetitions enhanced his communication skills and gave him peace of mind knowing that he would have good options once his playing days were done.

  In 1991, Rivers was traded to the Los Angeles Clippers, where he played one season for Larry Brown. Rivers had never seen a coach who was so passionate and meticulous about practice. A year later, he was traded to the New York Knicks, which put him under the sway of the Knicks’ intense, exacting head coach, Pat Riley. Rivers was spellbound by Riley’s aura. When Riley preached the importance of conditioning, Rivers tried everything he could, including running with a parachute, to get his body into tip-top shape. Mostly, he remembers the way Riley was able to come up with so many stirring motivational speeches. “He was eighty-two for eighty-two,” Rivers says. Very few coaches in the history of sports have been better than Riley when it came to getting his team to Us. Rivers soaked it all in. “I learned from Riley that the key to coaching is to get a group of players to believe there’s one agenda, and that you have the same agenda as them,” he says. “If you can do that, your players are going to do wh
atever they can for you.”

  Eventually, Rivers could feel his usefulness in New York wearing out, and he started asking Riley to waive him. It took a few shouting matches, but eventually the coach acquiesced. Rivers was thirty-four years old when the Knicks released him a month into the 1994–95 season. When they shared an emotional goodbye, Riley said to his now-former player, “You’re gonna coach someday.”

  “No way,” Doc replied.

  “We’ll see,” Riley mumbled, and with that Rivers’s time as a Knick was done.

  * * *

  • • •

  After playing his last two years with the San Antonio Spurs, Rivers retired in 1996 at the age of thirty-five and took a job as a color analyst on the Spurs’ TV games. He liked the gig, enjoyed spending time with his kids, and fell in love with golf, but it was clear to Kris that he was not long for that profession. “He was bored out of his mind,” she says. “I knew he would end up coaching. He needed more grit in his life.”