WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?
Restless coach itches for another hoops gig
BRYN MAWR, Pa. — Beyond handsome white gates and sweeping green lawns, a majestic stone colonial — more estate than house — sits atop a rise here. Attached to the three-car garage is a basketball hoop. How could there not be a basketball hoop? Look at who owns the home. Look at the nomadic narrative of the man’s life. Basketball is Larry Brown’s siren, and has been since the 1950s and he was a kid living over Hittleman’s Bakery in Long Beach, L.I., learning hard, asphalt lessons from Red Holzman and friends on the court of nearby Central School.
The siren may be calling Brown harder, more persistently, than ever before, right now, in his 15th month of being a Hall of Fame coach without a team.
“It’s been hard, oh man,” Brown says. “I’ve been active every day of my life, doing something I love. I don’t know if it’s an emptiness, (but) it’s a heck of an adjustment.”
He smiles faintly and talks about how great it has been to be more involved with his kids, L.J., 17, and Madison, 15, to be a regular in the car-pool circuit, but doesn’t quite convince himself, or his wife, Shelly, or Jay Wright, the coach of
Villanova, where Brown has been a fixture at practices and games the last two seasons.
“He needs to coach like he needs oxygen,” Wright says. “He needs to be part of something. It’s what drives him. He just loves it so much.”
Doug Moe, 73, goes back a halfcentury with Lawrence Harvey Brown, sharing Brooklyn roots and a North Carolina pedigree, and a bench with him in Carolina and Denver.
Moe still calls Brown by an abbreviated form of his middle name.
“Harv never could understand that as you get older you’re supposed to get out and enjoy life,” Moe says. “He still wants to torture himself. He’s one of those guys who wants to coach forever. I don’t think his passion for coaching has waned at all. I was hoping it might, but it just hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it ever will (because) he’s basically a basketball junkie.”
Larry Brown was born the year after the start of World War II. He was Dean Smith’s first point guard at Carolina, Bill Bradley’s roommate in the 1964 Olympics and the MVP of the first ABA All-star Game, a 5-9, 160-pound point guard before they called them that. Brown has coached more NBA/ABA teams (10) than any man ever to stroll a pro sideline, and remains the only coach to have won both an NCAA title (Kansas, 1988) and an NBA title (Detroit, 2004), and between the college and pros, is believed to have won more games (1,504) than any coach in history.
Along the way, Brown has become acclaimed as a basketball teacher with few peers, a man whose avowed knowledge of the game may be exceeded only by the restlessness of his soul, someone who specializes in striking turnarounds, stunning successes (how many NBA coaching jobs can surpass the one Brown did as the Pistons nearly swept the Shaquille O’neal/kobe Bryant Lakers in 2004?) and often tangled exits. He is quick to make friends and extend kindnesses and affect lives, and just as quick, it seems, to feel hurt or unappreciated, inclined to go off in search of a place where he is truly wanted — which might partly explain why he’s had a dozen jobs and three marriages.
Ten years after he unwittingly triggered Allen Iverson’s infamous video rant about practice, six years after he spent a miserable and dysfunctional 23-victory year with the Knicks, Larry Brown wants — needs? — to get back in the game.
College? Pro? Brown is open to anybody who might want him. He has fame and fortune, the Hall of Fame plaque and enough branches of his coaching tree, friends and protégés and former players, to fill a forest. John Calipari, former Kansas assistant and current Kentucky coach? R.C. Buford, former Kansas player and current Spurs GM? Mike Woodson, former Indiana assistant and current coach on 33rd St.? The branches are everywhere, and Brown almost gets choked up when he thinks about all the interconnections, lives who have touched his, and vice versa.
All that Larry Brown needs right now is a team.
“When I look in the mirror, I know I’m 71, but I have the same knowledge of the game and love of the game as ever,” Brown says. “My thirst for learning might never have been greater.
“I’ve got so much in my mind that I was taught and that I want to share, carrying on what I learned from Coach (Frank) Mcguire, Coach Smith, coach (John) Mclendon, Mr. (Henry) Iba. I want to be involved. I just want to be back in the game.”
Jay Wright has been around Brown as much as anyone in recent years, and is blown away both by Brown’s basketball acumen, and the way he carries himself, as if he were the fourth assistant just happy to help arrange the chairs. Brown has a knack for watching a practice and picking up on what Wright is trying to do, and suggesting what drills might help, and what players he might be underestimating. Several years ago, Wright was so down on swingman Dwayne Anderson, he told the kid straight out, “You might as well transfer because you are never going to play here.”
Brown studied Anderson in practice, saw his athleticism and effort and a desire to improve that Wright did not.
“Dwayne Anderson wound up being the captain of a Final Four team and one of my favorite players of all time,” Wright said. “And it was all because of Coach.”
Wright is no less struck by Brown’s vitality, and not just because Ann Brown, Larry’s mother, made it to 106 before she passed last summer. Brown’s memory, and agility of mind, border on the absurd. As he sits in his living room, wearing warmup pants, a long-sleeve gray shirt and University of Kansas sneakers, Brown tells you all about playing for the legendary Iba in the ’64 Games in Tokyo, and the subject of Bill Bradley’s senior thesis at Princeton (President Harry Truman’s lost elections).
“He moves, acts and talks like he’s 40. He has as much as energy, if not more, than I do,” Wright says.
After Brown got fired by Isiah Thomas and the Knicks, he turned down college jobs at Stanford and Colorado, opting instead to coach the Bobcats in Charlotte, where he had family and was in close proximity to Dean Smith. With Brown pulling off a rejuvenation similar to those he presided over with the Clippers and Nets, his Bobcats finished 44-38 in 2009-10, before the new owner, Michael Jordan, got rid of Raymond Felton and Tyson Chandler. After a 9-19 start in 2010-11, Brown was gone, sent packing by a fellow Tar Heel whom he was sure he had a special kinship with, and with whom he wanted to build a team and a culture.
“Michael said it was a mutual thing, but it wasn’t mutual at all; I was fired,” Brown says. “That was pretty devastating.”
Brown interviewed last summer for the Timberwolves job, and wants to believe that someone will value his body of work enough to look beyond his years and give him a chance to preach a basketball gospel that has always been built on hard, sound, unselfish team play. Brown misses the rush of competition, but misses the practices, the process, even more. It’s all about coming together, making sacrifices, forging a team out of disparate parts. In the meantime, Brown stays as connected as he can.
All season, when he wasn’t with Wright at Villanova, Brown would go on the road to see Calipari at Kentucky, or Bill Self at Kansas or Mark Turgeon at Maryland. He is in St. Louis with Kansas this weekend, at the invitation of Self, another former assistant. Another famous Carolinian, Roy Williams, is also there to root for.
“This is Larry’s favorite time of year,” Shelly Brown says. “He just loves it.”
Indeed, two of the schools where Brown made his mark, Kansas and North Carolina, face off Sunday for a berth in the Final Four.
Doug Moe likes to tell a story about the time he was coaching in San Antonio, and Brown was in Denver. It was early in the season. “His team is something like 9-1 and my team is 2-6 and I’m having to pump him up because he wasn’t happy at the time and wanted his team to play better basketball,” Moe says, laughing. “I always used to say, ‘Harv’s not happy unless he’s unhappy.’ ”
Larry Brown got his start coaching in the mid-1960s, handling the freshman team at Carolina and serving as Smith’s assistant. He called it “my dream job.” He called more than a few subsequent jobs that, too. But the dreams changed. Perfection was elusive, at least in real life. Brown talks about growing up reading Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton books, and how much he admired the principled, steady-going coach in the series, Henry Rockwell.
“I wanted to be like him — coach baseball, basketball and football and teach American history and get the summers off,” Brown says.
The Henry Rockwell life turned out not to be the route for Brown, who has a hoop over the garage and a siren in his psyche, calling him to coach basketball, something he does as well as anybody you will ever meet.
“You look back on your career and it’s easy to say I should’ve done this, I should’ve done that,” Brown says. “But I can tell you that there’s not one job I had that I didn’t give my heart and soul to.”
Brown gets up and offers his guest a beverage, a slight limp in his gait from his third set of artificial hips. He moves the side door of his stately home, the hoop over his right shoulder.
“I’ve been so fortunate to learn from the people I’ve learned from, to be around so many great people,” Brown says. “I have a desire to keep coaching and to share what I’ve been taught. I really believe I have something to offer, and that if somebody wants somebody who cares about the game, that an opportunity will present itself.”