Furious George

  DEDICATION

  For my three coaches: Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge, and my father,

  Joseph Karl.

  And for my three children: Kelci, Coby, and Kaci.

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 PASSION PLAY

  CHAPTER 2 FUN, WITH ANGER

  CHAPTER 3 FERNANDO

  CHAPTER 4 GEORGE KARL HAS LOST IT!

  CHAPTER 5 SWITCH EVERYTHING

  CHAPTER 6 HOW TO BEAT MICHAEL JORDAN

  CHAPTER 7 FIRED, HIRED, FIRED

  CHAPTER 8 WE’RE NUMBER 6

  CHAPTER 9 NOTHING TO DO BUT ME

  CHAPTER 10 NOW ENTERING THE GAME FOR THE LAKERS

  CHAPTER 11 PLEASE REMIT $470,000

  CHAPTER 12 BIG BROTHER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTO SECTION

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  George needs to keep his mouth shut, first and foremost.

  —KENYON MARTIN, DENVER NUGGETS FORWARD (2004-2011)

  I kicked a ball at a referee once. Kicked it hard.

  It was a cold night in a hot gym in January 1991. It was the last three minutes of a CBA game in Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, New York. We were playing the Oklahoma City Cavalry—remember them? Neither do I. Anyway—although we were up by about 20, I saw a serious problem, but the louder I yelled about it, the more I was ignored.

  I’ve gotten a lot of techs in this situation, when at the end of a blowout, the refs just want the thing over with, so they stop calling anything. “Reffing the scoreboard,” I call it. That annoys me a lot, because when I played in the NBA, “garbage time” was my time. For a bench player like me, here at last was a chance to show the coach how good I was. So while the arena emptied, I’d concentrate all my effort and skill into my two or three minutes on the floor. It made me mad as hell to get hacked but have the foul ignored because the refs didn’t want to delay their postgame beer.

  This wasn’t one of those, not exactly. But a number of things were bothering me—and I snapped.

  We missed a shot, OKC got the rebound, and our Ben McDonald hustled back to play defense. Their Alvin Heggs got the ball, and took it toward the rim from half-court with all the subtlety and finesse of a bull running downhill. Ben had two full seconds to stand in the paint and brace for the impact. Bam! Both players hit the floor.

  “Blocking,” said Monty McCutchen, now an NBA game official. “Two shots.”

  What! I ran out on the court to put my face very close to Monty’s while I told him that he’d just made the worst f’ing call I’d ever seen, but he interrupted my tirade, by putting one index finger on top of the other.

  “Technical foul, Coach Karl.”

  I kept going. “This is crap,” I said, “and not fair to players I’m demanding to play hard and they’re not getting just calls from refs who aren’t paying attention and—” McCutchen interrupted again.

  “Turn around and shut up,” he said.

  I didn’t do either.

  While still screaming at Monty, I noticed the ball rolling very slowly toward us, and, without consciously deciding to do it, I tore into that orange Spalding Model 74 with a soccer-style kick, and I nailed it. Whomp. The ball flew over Monty’s head and 12 rows deep in the upper deck. Our crowd cheered. I got my second technical foul and was ejected.

  “It was forty-six-yard field goal, right up the middle,” said Charley Rosen, the opposing coach, having fun with the writers afterward. “But it’s easy to kick indoors. I want to see him do it with someone rushing and a little wind.” Ha-ha.

  At our practice the next morning, the coach of the local Arena Football League team showed up to offer me a job as a placekicker. Ha-ha again.

  Okay, I know my goalie kick was childish, but it provided an instant of relief, it made my point, the fine wasn’t too bad, and I didn’t get suspended. As I mentioned, a few things had caused my temporary insanity: mail-it-in officiating; the sudden absence of Mario Elie and Vince Askew, our two best players, who’d left for the NBA (Mario) and a pro team in Italy (Vince); and an early, inconvenient tip-off in order to accommodate a college game later in the evening. That’s the way it was in the minor league Continental Basketball Association, the home of the ten-hour bus ride.

  There was also something deeper and darker going on with me back then. Twenty-five years ago, I was in my third year of being blackballed from the NBA, and I was moving my family all over the map so I could pursue my career. And even though the team I was coaching in ’91 was in the midst of compiling the best record in the history of pro basketball, my phone wasn’t ringing. I had a lot to figure out, personally and professionally. I needed to harness my passion for the game, a passion that had me kicking balls.

  Obviously, I needed to evolve, to find a better way to get along in the world of games. But just as obviously, I needed to stay the same, because my emotional approach to coaching basketball worked. My teams won games. It was tricky. It’s still tricky.

  Maybe you’ve known someone like me, the maniac jock who’s got to finish first, and maybe takes it too far.

  At Penn Hills (Pennsylvania) High School, the University of North Carolina, and with the San Antonio Spurs, I dove for the ball, took charges, and started fights. I was still the same guy when I became a coach, and I gave up my body a second time.

  How well I learned to control myself is a matter of opinion. A writer asked Ron Adams to analyze me in 2001, ten years after my field goal. Ron, a very smart man, was then one of my Milwaukee Bucks assistant coaches. “He’s a little bizarre,” Ron said. “But that helps him. In every culture, a crazy guy gets respect because nobody’s quite sure what he’ll do next.”

  I can’t help it: I go after my team in practice and off the court. Nowadays I try to make my points gently, with happy sarcasm. “Hey, man,” I might say in a cheerful voice. “You really sucked last night.” But I haven’t always been so thoughtful. In my first two NBA jobs, at Cleveland and Golden State, I took some pride in treating everyone the same, in being unafraid to yell at the star as loudly as I yelled at the last guy on the bench. I got fired from both those jobs. Given another chance—eventually—I learned that some people have to be handled gently, while others are secure enough to hear the truth without sugarcoating.

  “JaVale,” I said to my center in Denver, “in another world, I think you and I would be hanging out. But in this one, you don’t play hard every night and you don’t work on your game and I can’t count on you.”

  Time will tell if JaVale McGee listened, but some players just can’t hear you. Money in the ears.

  What happens when you give a twenty-one-year-old $3 million or $4 million for his first job? He gets an entourage. He has less and less contact with people outside his group of helpers. He becomes less and less of a role model. And he thinks I can’t tell him what to do because he knows I’ve been told to play him twenty-five minutes a game.

  JaVale, by the way, was making about $11 million a year when we had our little talk.

  I’m not saying that insulated, immature players have too much self-esteem. I think they hardly have any at all. They’re fearful because they have so far to fall.

  As my detractors perceive it, I have two big weaknesses. The first rap against me, the former garbage-time point guard, is that I can’t coach a superstar. You may have read that I always fight with any player good enough for a Gatorade endorsement. True, over the years I’ve had some monumental public arguments with a handful of high scorers. But almost without exception, the All-Stars on my teams have had the best years of their careers when I coached them. I don’t mind some tension; te
nsion can be good. And the NBA coach who can’t manage a working relationship with his best players is not going to win enough games to last.

  Yet there’s always trouble when I have a player whose commitment is to his numbers or his money or his brand—and not to the team. Remind me to tell you about the time one of us kept the rest of us Nuggets waiting in a bus under an arena while he got a postgame massage. . . . When I call a guy like this on his selfish behavior, when his ego is threatened, he’s got to show that he controls me. A guaranteed contract much bigger than mine is his power.

  The other rap against me is that I talk too much.

  There’s a grain of truth in that, too. I’ve never been very good at hiding my frustrations or burying my opinions. Writers like me because I’m a good quote and clichés bore me (and them). This has led to trouble. When I coached in Spain, the more Spanish I learned, the less the club liked it. And I remember what the Milwaukee Bucks owner told me when he was firing me: “With all the media coverage we have, you’re too honest.” Senator Herb Kohl (D, Wisconsin) said, “Your openness has been used against you and against our organization.”

  I understand how I can bruise someone’s ego by being too blunt, but when a player gets in trouble off the court, why can’t we just say, “He got drunk last night and should take responsibility,” instead of enabling him as if he’s a victim? When I’ve got a player I’m not getting along with, management doesn’t want me to say why. We won’t let the world know he’s got a bad attitude, he doesn’t practice hard, and his teammates hate him. So we spin. And our game gets covered with layer after layer of PR, like too much frosting on a cheap cake. I’m not naive, but I think that by burying conflict, we’re hiding the most interesting part of our personality.

  Those two things—my insistence that even superstars must play basketball the right way, and my big mouth when they don’t—have led, I guess, to a couple of periods of unemployment. Intervals of not coaching allowed me two stints with ESPN.

  And that led to this book.

  I’d rather coach, of course, but I loved doing TV, loved having that platform. I like to talk, I know something about basketball, and I am opinionated, to put it mildly. Ex-coaches who do TV well—I’m thinking about Hubie Brown and Jeff Van Gundy—have tremendous influence.

  In an average ESPN night, I’d analyze a few games, evaluate potential draft picks, comment on a trade, and weigh in on the rumors always floating around the NBA. A voice in my ear would say, “Nice job, see you tomorrow.” It was usually about two or three in the morning when I limped out of there and into the snow of midwinter Connecticut. Someone would drive me the five hundred yards to the hotel.

  On those dark, icy nights it dawned on me: TV is limited. It’s a snapshot. I didn’t get enough time to make you understand what goes on inside the NBA. TV and the Internet have exploded the amount of superficial information about our game but not the knowledge. I need a book—this one—to explain what really happens.

  For example: I wasn’t able to explain that dealing with egos that are like ostrich eggs—big and fragile—is the hidden reality of what NBA coaches do. It’s even hidden from some owners—like the one in Denver—who don’t appreciate the importance and the time and hard work involved. Before coaches can even begin to teach basketball or practice being a team, we’ve got to take care of Player A, who feels disrespected by Player B. And Player C doesn’t think he’s being used right; he wants more plays run for him. Players D and E had a loud argument on the plane because E thinks D won’t pass him the damn ball. F is jealous of G’s contract—and on and on.

  For at least my last five years of coaching, the first ten minutes of every pregame or pre-practice coaches’ meeting have been about smoothing over internal conflicts and how to handle those eggshell egos. Then my assistants fan out for one-on-one talks. “Really need your focus in practice today, E,” they’ll say. “We’ve got two new plays and a different way to defend Westbrook. And we’re going to talk to D about how he distributes the ball.”

  Another example of insider stuff that TV can’t get to: When other NBA coaches get fired, I take advantage, if I can. I wait a couple of weeks, then reach out to them. We have dinner and drinks. “Yeah, your owner is a dumbass,” I’ll say, and I agree that the GM can’t build a sandwich much less an NBA team and the players are disloyal and the fans and the media in your city are idiots—whatever. Then I ask the money questions: How did you try to beat us? What are our weaknesses? Are we predictable out of a timeout or at the end of a game?

  Whether it was my getting fired, or them, Larry Brown, Don Nelson, Del Harris, and a couple of others have given me good intel about my teams and my tendencies.

  As you read this book, imagine I am on the next bar stool over and you’ve asked me what it’s really like inside pro basketball. You seem okay, you’re buying, and I want to say what I want to say. I don’t mind a reaction and I don’t mind pissing off twenty-nine teams: the only team I want to be happy is my own. So I’ll tell you my strategy for beating Michael Jordan. I’ll tell you why the Eastern Conference sucks. How, you may want to know, do I get a collection of individual stars to think and play like a team? (Sometimes I can’t.) What’s it like to coach a game? You might be curious about what it’s like to get fired—does the owner do it, or the GM, and do they give you a cardboard box and order you to empty out your desk? Do they call security to escort you to the door?

  From having coached a couple of thousand professional games and from having played 264 of them, I’ve been a part of the palace intrigues, the arguments, the despair, and the fun. I understand pretty well the psychology and atmosphere that produce winning. It’s subtle, and luck is involved. The media makes out that there’s this Grand Canyon between the genius coach who wins and the idiot coach who loses. It’s not that way.

  I guess I just want people to understand a little more about the game I’ve spent my life in.

  I’ve got another reason for getting things down on paper (or on your electronic device). I’m sixty-four, not exactly old, but I’ve considered my own mortality a lot because I’ve had cancer twice. I remember when I got the biopsy results in May 2005, in the Westin Hotel in San Antonio, just before my first playoff game with the Nuggets. A few years later, when I heard the words “squamous cell carcinoma” I felt a chill that went right to my bones. I thought I’d received a death sentence. In a way, cancer never goes away. I admit that I’m scared as shit every six months, when I get the results from another PET scan. And that gets to my other motivation for picking up a pen and looking back. If I make any money from this book, it’s going to my foundation, which helps cancer patients and their families navigate the ridiculously expensive, needlessly frightening, and stupidly complicated world of doctors, hospitals, and insurance: GeorgeKarlFoundation.org.

  So: sorry, Kenyon. I’m not keeping my mouth shut. Not now, not ever. I’ve written a book about my life in basketball. Not that I’ve finished my coaching career, but I have been around long enough to take a look back.

  Maybe I should have savored the wins more.

  Maybe I should have had Gary Payton guard Michael Jordan in the 1996 NBA Finals.

  For sure I should have given more time to my family.

  And maybe I should have made nice with one or two of the superstars who tormented me and one or two of the owners and GMs who fired me.

  I see now that I’ve evolved as a person and as a basketball coach as I’ve gone from job to job. But my goal—to win a championship—has never wavered.

  I haven’t done that—yet.

  A few years ago, after I almost died, my outlook changed. So did my diet and my beer intake and my weight. Basketball was my life. Now life is my life.

  But some things didn’t change. I continue to have a crazy desire to win—at anything. I still have a low tolerance for bullshit and hypocrisy, and I continue to raise my voice and point it out when I see it, because there’s a lot of b.s. out there.

  Basketball
has given my life structure and meaning and a reason to get out of bed. But I don’t want to make it sound too serious because, oh, my God, it’s been fun.

  So let’s get started. I read a few memoirs to prepare myself for this effort, and I’ve read a few reviews. The usual criticism of an autobiography is that they’re self-serving, too obviously written to even old scores, or that their main purpose is to get the last word in. Will that apply to this book?

  Hell yes. Might as well admit it.

  CHAPTER 1

  PASSION PLAY

  George was tougher than barbwire, with this pay-you-back right now kind of temper. I didn’t think he had the right temperament to be a coach.

  — RED MCCOMBS, CO-OWNER OF THE SAN ANTONIO SPURS

  When I put George in, he flat put the game on full speed. He turned the crowd on and turned the team on.

  — BOB BASS, SPURS HEAD COACH

  My coaching nemesis Phil Jackson burned incense and sage grass in his locker room. I burn brain cells.

  Phil sold his teams on offensive rhythm and flow. I made my bones as a defensive coach committed to disrupting rhythm and flow.

  Phil’s ideal team is all quickness and finesse; I want contact and collisions.

  Phil’s style is cerebral and aloof. I’m pretty much the opposite. I want passion.

  Most players understand the intensity I want and most of them like it, too. But not everyone is as fired up as I am. The season is long, the players are saving themselves, and the attack-first attitude I prefer is at odds with the coolness a lot of NBA players try to project. Relaxed, nothing-bothers-me body language may be a cultural ideal but it’s not my ideal. Cool is my enemy.

  But after forty years in pro basketball, I’ve cooled off and calmed down a little bit. Now I’m known as an offensive coach who can help a team find rhythm and flow.

  I’m not proud that in the past my passion crossed the line into anger. I used to think it was a good thing. It’s not. Anger from the coach creates fear in the player. But what I want him to feel is commitment.