Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  For the most part, Rivers enjoyed his time in San Antonio. That is, until the morning of June 29, 1997, when his house burned down. As the story goes, a couple of local kids had broken in to have a party. They started a bonfire, intentionally or not, but it had gone awry. It has never been firmly established that the boys acted out of hostility toward the mixed-race couple, but Doc and Kris believe they did. The Riverses were even more disheartened to learn that even though police believed they knew who the perpetrators were, they were not able to collect enough forensic evidence to bring charges against the juveniles.

  “It shook me to my core,” Kris says. “My first reaction was to flee. I wanted to leave San Antonio in the worst way. Glenn was an announcer, so he could fly where he needed to get to. But he was adamant. ‘We’re not doing that, we did nothing wrong, we’re gonna teach our kids that when something bad happens, you look it in the eye and move forward.’ Looking back, I’m very grateful that we did that. We ended up with another three great years in San Antonio.”

  As the Spurs struggled to win, speculation swirled that the team would fire its coach, Gregg Popovich, and replace him with Rivers. That caused some tension between the two men, though it would not last. By that time, Rivers knew he wanted to coach. At the end of his third year calling games for the Spurs, an opportunity arose to coach the Orlando Magic. So he picked up his family and moved them yet again.

  The Magic were in dire straits. They had just traded away their best player, Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway, leaving a depleted roster that included just two players who had been drafted. The first thing Rivers did was to make sure his players understood there would be no victims in that locker room. He spent the summer meeting with them individually and sending them one-page sheets by express mail that included a single quote or statement designed to inspire. Darrell Armstrong, a six-year veteran guard who had been undrafted coming out of Fayetteville State University, got one such overnight letter just a few weeks after Rivers took the job, even though Rivers only lived a fifteen-minute drive from Armstrong’s house.

  One of the smartest things Rivers did was heed the advice of the previous coach, Chuck Daly, that he should retain Daly’s personal assistant, Annemarie Loflin. To this day, Loflin works for Rivers with the Clippers under the title of chief of staff, basketball operations. She is his window into what is going on within the organization, providing him with information that is critical to a coach’s ability to empathize with his players.

  Three players who were on that first Magic team—Tariq Abdul-Wahad, Armen Gilliam, and Chris Gatling—came in with reputations as being problem children. Rivers learned right away how unfair that was. “Coaches need to learn that just because you don’t get along with someone, it does not make him a bad guy,” he says. He noticed that when he gathered his players for the Lord’s Prayer before taking the court, Abdul-Wahad stood to the side with an unhappy look on his face. When Rivers later asked him privately what was wrong, Abdul-Wahad said that he had felt ostracized because he was Muslim. So before the following game, Rivers invited his players to stand in a circle, hold hands, and quietly pray to the God of their choice. It is a ritual he continues to this day.

  Rivers was a force of nature during that first season in Orlando. His players bought into his vision and played their asses off for him. The team earned the label “Heart and Hustle” and somehow clawed its way to a .500 record, barely missing the playoffs. No team Rivers ever coached got to Us better than his first one. As a result, he was named the NBA’s Coach of the Year.

  Alas, the Magic were never able to build on that early momentum. The team had developed an undrafted power forward named Ben Wallace into a ferocious rebounder, but then it inexplicably traded him to the Detroit Pistons, where he blossomed into a four-time All-Star and won an NBA title. The Magic appeared to land a huge free agent coup when it signed forward Grant Hill to a seven-year, $93 million contract in the summer of 2000. But Hill’s career quickly went awry due to a serious ankle injury that never quite healed. Despite such setbacks, Rivers managed to squeak the Magic into the playoffs for the next two years. Each time, they were eliminated in the first round, which is what typically happens to the No. 8 seed when matched against the best team in the conference.

  Rivers’s methods of communication, taught to him by his beat-cop dad, did not always go over well. He knows he can be blunt to a fault, as well as impatient when it comes to idle chatter. Sometimes, when Kris is telling him a lengthy story, he will draw a circle in the air with his index finger, as if to say, “Get to the point.” While riding the team plane, he almost came to blows with Horace Grant, a 6´10˝, 245-pound power forward. He was particularly harsh on the Magic’s young superstar, Tracy McGrady, who had been drafted straight out of high school. “I pushed the shit out of Tracy,” Doc says. “Tracy was good at basketball. My job was to make him great at it. In the end, it probably cost me my job because he didn’t like being corrected.”

  The losing took a toll. Rivers lost sleep and developed ulcers. His tenure collapsed in a hurry when the Magic began the 2003–04 season by dropping 10 of their first 11 games. Rivers was fired on November 18, 2003. He was relatively sanguine when he broke the news to Kris. Of course he was disappointed, but he knew it was coming, understood why it happened, recognized it was part of the profession, and believed that he would coach again. He also heard from his dad, who always called when something bad happened. It was not a long conversation. “Getting fired doesn’t mean you’re a bad coach,” he told his son. “Getting fired just means you got fired. If you want to believe you’re a bad coach, that’s on you.”

  Three days later, Rivers signed a contract with ABC Sports to serve as a color analyst on NBA games alongside Al Michaels. He got to work the NBA Finals and could have been an elite broadcaster for the rest of his life. But there was never a doubt he wanted to coach again, and though he thought he might bide his time behind the mic for a couple of years, he changed his mind when the general manager of the Boston Celtics, Danny Ainge, asked Rivers if he would like to interview for their vacancy. Rivers left such a good impression on the team’s owners that they canceled their other interviews and instructed Ainge to make the hire.

  Basketball-wise, the decision to go to Boston was easy. On the home front, however, things were more complicated. Kris and Doc now had four children—their youngest, Austin, was born in 1992, and Spencer was born three years later—and the oldest two were in high school. Kris and Doc did not want to uproot them again, so they made the difficult decision that when Doc went to Boston, the family would stay behind in Orlando. It wasn’t going to be easy, but in the end, he didn’t have much choice. A job awaited. He had to keep moving.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like many coaches, Rivers has often sought the company of coaches in other sports to enhance his knowledge. When he was in Orlando, he spent time with Jon Gruden, who at the time was the coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Rivers was fascinated by how a pro football team is organized, with the head coach delegating huge responsibilities to his offensive and defensive coordinators. He recalls walking with Gruden into a defensive meeting, only to hear the players razzing the head coach, who specialized in offense, that he was only there to impress his guest. “My belief is we coach wrong in basketball,” Rivers says. “In football, the head coach doesn’t have to be the voice on everything.”

  Rivers assembled his staff in Boston accordingly. Getting through to the players, however, would be a tougher challenge. That started with the franchise’s cornerstone, small forward Paul Pierce, who was entering his seventh season in the NBA with little to show for it. Soon after he took over, Rivers met with Pierce and addressed the situation with his usual bluntness. “Do you think you’re a great shooter?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Pierce replied with confidence.

  “Then why are your percentages so awful?”

  It was a fair qu
estion given that Pierce was coming off a season in which he had made a career-low 40.2 percent from the field. The year before, he had made a career-low 41.6 percent. As Rivers saw it, the answer was simple: Either Pierce wasn’t a great shooter or he was taking bad shots. So he encouraged Pierce to move better without the ball, and to learn how to pass up good shots so he could get better ones. Pierce, however, insisted on holding on to the ball and jacking it up like he always did. Rivers started to pull him late in games, which led to some unpleasant exchanges on the court. Finally, it boiled over in the locker room. “Let’s get one thing straight,” Rivers told Pierce in front of the entire team after a loss. “I am not fucking changing.”

  Pierce laughed when I recounted this story. If he didn’t recall this specific confrontation, it’s because there were so many of them. “I probably said to him, ‘I’m not changing, either.’ We’re both pretty hardheaded.” He added, “Doc has a unique ability to get guys to buy into what he’s teaching every day. He played in the NBA, so he understands players better than a lot of other coaches who didn’t have the chance to do that. He understands how to come at you tough, how to back off a little bit. He understands when you’re tired, when you’re emotionally there and when you’re not.”

  The Celtics won 45 games his first season and lost in the first round of the playoffs. They failed to make the postseason the next two years, and once again there were rumblings that maybe Rivers wouldn’t make it. At one point during his third season, the Celtics lost 18 consecutive games. Meanwhile, he was dedicating every free hour to flying back and forth to Orlando to see his kids. He paid for the private air travel out of his own pocket.

  There were no ulcers this time, just a resolute persistence to keep moving forward. “Every day during that losing streak, he came in and he would never say anything negative to the players,” says Armond Hill, Rivers’s longtime assistant coach. “Even when the coaches were alone, he wouldn’t rip the players. He might get frustrated about what was happening, but he would always say, ‘We gotta make them better.’”

  The Celtics’ fortunes changed dramatically during the summer of 2007, when the team acquired two future Hall of Famers, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. Immediately, a franchise that had missed the playoffs two years in a row was being pegged for an NBA title—but only if Rivers could get them to Us.

  Having played alongside so many talented and ego-driven players—during those early years in Atlanta, for example—Rivers understood the pitfalls ahead. So he dipped back into his Pat Riley playbook and invited his three best players to meet him one morning by the Charles River. There was a crisp chill in the air, and Garnett, for one, was none too pleased. Pierce, however, had lived in Boston for a while, so he understood what was happening.

  As the four of them stood on the dock, a duck boat pulled up, and Rivers led them on board. The boat was similar to the one the Boston Red Sox rode for the championship parade celebrating their 2004 World Series triumph. Rivers played tour guide that morning, showing Garnett, Allen, and Pierce all the spots along the route they would pass after they won the title. But he cautioned that it would not be easy getting there. “Everybody is going to have to sacrifice,” he said. “It may be notoriety, it may be shots, it may be pats on the back. The media’s not going to be at your locker all the time. But you’ve got to trust me, and you’ve gotta let me coach you. Because if I can coach you three, I’ve got everybody else.”

  Two days after the regular season began, Rivers’s father died in Chicago. A lifelong smoker, Grady had been suffering from lung cancer for several years, yet he told no one, not even his wife, until he was near the end. Doc missed just one game to go to the funeral.

  Besides being eager to resume the work of getting to Us with his Big Three, he also faced the challenge of blending them with the team’s talented yet enigmatic second-year point guard, Rajon Rondo. Rondo was a gifted distributor, which was necessary because he couldn’t shoot a lick. He also had a tendency to pout when things didn’t go his way, and that especially created problems with Ray Allen. “Ray wanted to handle the ball more, and I didn’t think at that point in his career he should. I never gave in on that,” Rivers says.

  Rivers called out Rondo several times in front of the whole team, but he also thought Rondo was a borderline genius when it came to making instantaneous decisions. So he gave him a lot of decision-making responsibilities, especially when he drew up plays out of time outs, a Rivers specialty. Technical skills aside, Rivers’s greatest gift is as a visionary. “I’m a good speaker when I’m talking about the vision of the season, not necessarily an individual game,” he says. “I try to come up with things that connect our team to our journey and our goals.”

  That was never more evident than the night the Celtics lost a tough road game to the Los Angeles Lakers. Upon seeing how disconsolate the players were, Rivers asked each man to give him $100. Then he hid the wad of cash in the ceiling of the visitors’ locker room at Staples Center. “We’re coming back for this,” he said, which could only happen if the Celtics and the Lakers reached the NBA Finals.

  And that is exactly what happened. The Celtics steamrolled through the Eastern Conference playoffs, met the Lakers in the Finals (Rivers made good on his promise to grab that cash out of the ceiling), and clinched the title in the series’s sixth game at TD Garden in Boston. When the buzzer sounded, Rivers exulted on the court as his players doused him in Gatorade. He participated in the trophy ceremony and took a bunch of photos. Then he retreated into his office and sat for a while—exhausted, emotionally empty, perhaps a little bit shocked. His wife sat with him, as did his mother and brother. He left to do his postgame press conference and then came back and sat for another long while. When he was finally ready, he told Kris he wanted to go home.

  It wasn’t until later that Rivers realized he had never gone into the locker room. He didn’t get one drop of champagne on him. All that work, all that stress, all those hours spent figuring out a way to get to Us . . . the least he could have done was celebrate with his players and staff. Even his kids went in there and whooped it up.

  To this day, he is not sure why he didn’t go in there. But he regrets it deeply. “I should’ve enjoyed it more. I mean, every celebration you see, the coach is in the goddamn locker room,” he says. “It didn’t even cross my mind to go in there. I had a huge pride, it was awesome, but I also had the idea that, ‘Okay, we’ve done that now. It’s time to get the next one.’”

  He continues, “What makes winning special is that it’s hard. That’s what I realized in that moment. All those years I chased it and couldn’t get it. It should be hard. So many things have to go right for you to win a title. I had the ultimate high inside, but at the same time I’m thinking, Okay, we gotta win this motherfucker again. This is the best feeling in the world. So that was my version of elation.”

  The more he thinks about it, the more he guesses it might have something to do with his pops. He had never allowed himself to properly grieve when Grady died, because he dove so quickly and coldly back into the season. Doc shed a few tears that night, however, knowing how happy his dad would have been. Kris had mentioned that she wanted to make a big breakfast for everyone the following morning, so on the way home, Rivers stopped at the local grocery store. The cashier was shocked to see him there, just a couple hours after winning the NBA title, his collar still stained with red Gatorade.

  In the weeks that followed, Rivers realized how foolish he had been not to go into the locker room. In his mind, he started planning how he would celebrate the next time his team won an NBA title. He pictured renting out a big hotel ballroom, inviting everyone he knew, and throwing a party that nobody would forget. There would be lots of hugging, too. It was a lovely thought, but the party never happened.

  * * *

  • • •

  There was nothing in the coaches’ manual that told him what to do, but in many ways, Rivers had s
pent a lifetime preparing for the surreal moment.

  It happened during the playoffs, naturally. He had been sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco, going over video with his staff in preparation for the Los Angeles Clippers’ game against the Golden State Warriors. He had taken the Clippers job in 2013 after it became evident the Celtics were headed for a rebuild. Rivers had no interest in doing that, so he convinced Ainge to let him out of his contract and sign with the Clippers in exchange for a first-round draft pick. Now in his second season, he had a veteran team headed by point guard Chris Paul and power forward Blake Griffin. He believed his team could do some damage, maybe even contend for a title.

  The coaches’ meeting was interrupted by one of the Clippers’ media relations executives. He said something about a controversial videotape concerning the team’s longtime owner, Donald Sterling. Rivers brushed him off. A half hour later, the guy returned and said he was hearing bad things about the tape and maybe Rivers should come and hear it. Again, Rivers told him to handle it. Then, after the media exec heard what was actually on the tape that was about to be posted by TMZ, he barged back in and insisted that Rivers end the meeting immediately and listen.

  Rivers was disheartened to hear his team’s owner make disparaging, racist remarks that had been secretly recorded by his much younger girlfriend, but he was hardly shocked. He had never personally heard Sterling say something bigoted, but he knew the man’s reputation. Besides, given the way Rivers grew up, the specter of an old white guy secretly harboring racist stereotypes was hardly earth-shattering. Perhaps that’s why he so badly underestimated what was happening. “I totally miscalculated the scope of the story—like, I mean, completely,” he says.

  That changed when he saw the collection of satellite trucks parked outside their practice gym. When he walked inside, he was stunned at the size of the horde. It really hit him when he spotted Bob Schieffer, the venerated CBS News anchor. Rivers had to find a place to sit quietly by himself for about twenty minutes so he could gather his thoughts before addressing the media.