Meeting Olson put Kerr on right path

When Steve Kerr was in high school, he was honored at a Southern California basketball banquet, a rare occasion for the sharpshooting but largely forgettable prep player. He attended with his mother.

The guest speaker was a tall, distinguished man whose intelligence and values shone through as he spoke to the audience about family and education and the values behind basketball.

“Now that,” Ann Kerr leaned over to tell her son, “is the kind of coach I would love for you to play for.”

Neither of them had an inkling at the time, but Kerr would, indeed, play for Lute Olson.

Olson, then coach at the University of Arizona, not only proved Ann Kerr’s instincts correct in that he helped shape the course of her thirdborn, but he also provided a home and comfort to Steve when unimaginable tragedy shook the Kerr family. No mother could have predicted that.

Olson died in August at age 85 but is never far from Kerr’s thoughts. On Tuesday, the Warriors head coach will honor Olson at the Game Changer awards. The annual event by Coaching Corps, a nonprofit that trains and supports youth coaches in underserved communities, will be held virtually this year.

“I suppose everyone has these serendipitous meetings with people who change their lives,” Kerr said, “but this happened to be a really dra

matic one. He completely changed the course of my entire life.”

Kerr registered Olson’s impressiveness at the banquet, but it wasn’t until a few months later that Olson noticed Kerr. Olson had left Iowa to take the Arizona job, a program in disarray that went 424 the season before he got there.

Olson needed bodies and scrambled to find them; at a summer league tournament he became intrigued by a shooter nailing outside shots. Kerr had only one other scholarship offer — from Cal State Fullerton — and was contemplating trying to walk on at UC Santa Barbara. But Olson told the 18yearold that he was interested.

“But he was off recruiting and there were no cell phones, and I didn’t hear from him, so I felt like I had to accept Fullerton,” Kerr said.

His father, Malcolm, asked him where he really wanted to go. And when Kerr said Arizona, Malcolm followed up to see whether Olson was really interested. He was, Kerr was offered a scholarship and had to make the awkward call to decline Fullerton.

Sure, his mother’s words about Olson resonated, but so did the allure of leaving Southern California, of playing in what was then the Pac10 Conference. His future, it seemed, was set.

“It was all kind of perfect,” Kerr said.

That summer, he went to Beirut with his family, where his father was teaching at the American University. At the end of the summer, Kerr was to fly back to the United States and begin college. Civil war was raging in Lebanon, the embassy in Beirut had recently been bombed, and when Kerr had to leave the airport was closed and his options for getting out of the country became a dangerous ordeal. He was driven through Syria to Jordan, where he finally caught a flight and headed to Tucson.

A few months later, weeks into his first college basketball season, Kerr was awakened in the middle of the night by a call from a family friend. His father had been assassinated in his office building.

The tragedy was worldwide news. An Arizona booster heard it on the radio late that night and called an assistant coach, who went to Kerr’s dorm room and took him to the Olsons’ house. The story has been oft told of how Kerr, suffering from shock and half a world away from any of his family, was cared for by Lute and his wife, Bobbi. He slept on their couch. They fed him. “I had only known him a couple of months,” Kerr said, “but he felt a responsibility to look after me.”

Kerr told The Chronicle last summer that he began regularly stopping by Olson’s office and even napping on his couch.

“He just kept everything as normal as possible and allowed me to play, practice and move on with my routine, which was important,” Kerr said. “You have to sort of fall into a routine when you suffer a loss like that. You’ve got to find a way to just get through the day.”

Kerr got through the days, and the months, and eventually the years, helping to turn Arizona into a postseason staple and becoming one of the most popular players in the program.

Along the way, Kerr said, Olson became a kind of father figure.

“He was definitely the most influential person in my life outside of my family,” Kerr said.

“They kind of adopted him,” said Margot Kerr, Steve Kerr’s wife, who had begun dating her future husband when they were sophomores. “The whole team kind of sheltered him.”

The Olsons created a family atmosphere that would last throughout Olson’s tenure at Arizona. Bobbi, who died of ovarian cancer in 2001, was instrumental in that structure.

“Pancake breakfasts, gatherings at their house,” Margot said. “None of the players were from Arizona, so it really became their family.”

Kerr has used those lessons learned from Olson to try to create a similar feeling on the Warriors. Though the NBA is vastly different from college, he has tried to replicate the same sensibility.

“In the NBA it has to be built differently, but the thinking is, ‘Can we build something special? Something that people love to be part of ? And how do we do that?’ ” Kerr said. “I recognized the power of what Lute built.”

It’s no coincidence that in building his team, Kerr has consistently relied on Arizona alumni, from former player Andre Iguodala to former assistant Luke Walton to assistant coach Bruce Fraser.

“Andre and I used to talk about how likeminded we were in the way we saw the game,” Kerr said. “The way he taught fundamentals. An emphasis on detail. If you play for Lute you understand the game at a level you maybe otherwise wouldn’t have. Maybe that sounds arrogant, but it comes from the detail we saw in Coach Olson, the things that became ingrained, watching the amazing foundation he built.”

Kerr, of course, went on to an amazing career and played for some of the top coaches in the game. But the bond with Olson remained, through his and Margot’s wedding, the births of their children, dinners on the road, Kerr’s introductory news conference with the Warriors. Olson followed his former player closely, and the coach whose program was nicknamed “Guard U” particularly loved Kerr’s dazzling backcourt of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.

A year ago, before the NBA shut down, the Warriors played a game in Phoenix. Kerr and Fraser used the trip as an opportunity to drive down to Tucson to see Olson, who was doing poorly after suffering a stroke.

“We had a feeling that might be the last time we would see him,” Kerr said.

A few months later, Olson died. But his influence remains forever.

University of Arizona Steve Kerr might have gone to Fullerton were it not for coach Lute Olson. Together they took Arizona from a doormat to powerhouse.