Helping at practice

Harking back to his days as the manager of his high school basketball team, Ballmer sometimes attends Clippers practices and retrieves basketballs for the players during drills.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Doc Rivers, the Clippers’ coach, said. “The guy’s worth $24 billion. I have to think if I had $24 billion I probably would be different. I hope not, but I probably would be. He’s the most normal $24 billion guy I know.”

At Microsoft, Ballmer was known as a charismatic speaker, the P.T. Barnum of the techie set.

During one company meeting at Safeco Field, he saw an employee snapping a picture with an iPhone from Apple, a competitor. He confiscated it and playfully pretended to stomp on it in a scene caught on the baseball park’s giant video screen.

In front of a roomful of people, Ballmer is at his communicative best: funny, engaging, expressive. In a sit-down interview in January, Ballmer rocked back and forth in his chair with his arms held stiffly at his sides as he answered questions.

Ballmer refused to make his wife, Connie, or their three sons available to be interviewed. He also declared his youngest son’s high school basketball games offlimits to a reporter.

“Sports is the easiest thing for me to bond with the kids over,” he said. “Academically, I probably grind them a little more.”

After games, Ballmer said, there is what he described as “the debrief,” a sacrosanct part of the drive home. He said: “I’ll ask, Where do you want to start? Are we going to start with the team’s performance, or your performance? Offense or defense? Then we go through the team, we go through him, every kid, how we think he did.”

Ballmer added, “The debrief of the game in our family is always as important as the game itself.”

With the Clippers, Ballmer took a more hands-off approach.

“He’ll say, ‘Is it all right to come in and say hi?’ ” Rivers said. “And I say: ‘You’re the owner. You can barge in.’ And I mean that. I tell him all the time, he made an incredible commitment. I want him to enjoy it. I want him to come and do whatever he wants. I want to hear his opinion. He’s smarter than me.”

Rivers said he had first crossed paths with Ballmer in 2008, during the SuperSonics’ last season in Seattle. Ballmer, a SuperSonics season-ticket holder, had seats next to the visitors’ bench.

When Boston came to town, Rivers, then the coach of the Celtics, said he turned to Ballmer and said, “Hey, you need to buy this team and keep it here.”

“Only if you coach the team,” said Ballmer, Rivers recalled.

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Rivers said. “That was our introduction to each other.”

Ballmerdid notremember the meeting. He clapped gleefully as the story was relayed to him.

“Doc doesn’t make things up,” he said. “That’s not his style.”