Kerr, GM have special bond
Family tragedy provided Myers new perspective
All those months had passed, with Steve Kerr telling Bob Myers day after day he just wasn’t ready to return to the court, and the response from the Golden State Warriors general manager to his ailing coach was always the same.
“Steve, do what’s best for you,” Myers would say to Kerr. “The Warriors are going to be fine. It’s a basketball game.”
Those words held true Friday, when Kerr coached for the first time in more than six months, and the fact that the Warriors beat the Indiana Pacers to improve to a league-best 40-4 had almost nothing to do with the meaning of it all. The part that mattered most, that had Myers smiling and inspired Kerr to call his general manager “an amazing human being” before tip-off, is he was happy and healthy again.
Kerr was back doing the work he loved, a job that moves him.
Just as Myers’ late brother-inlaw, Scott Dinsmore, used to say.
As Kerr made his way back from complications from back surgery, those kind, patient words from Myers had come from a place as special as it was sad. On Sept. 12, 2015, about the time Kerr was deciding if he’d be ready to take on the rigors of training camp while dealing with severe headaches and fatigue, Dinsmore, 33, was killed by falling boulders while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with his wife, Chelsea.
The love of her life, this passionate man whose talk imploring people to follow their dreams has approximately 2.6 million views and who founded a company — “Live Your Legend” — based on that principle, was a few feet away from her on the mountain when he was taken. Their backpacking adventure around the globe had a tragic end. She hiked back down the mountain alone.
Chelsea Dinsmore now lives in the Myers’ San Francisco home, with Bob, his wife, Kristen, and their two young daughters all trying to fill an unfillable void. As Myers searched for the right words to explain the devastation of it, the look of anguish on his face said more than enough.
But somewhere along the path, while Myers’ family grieved and Kerr wondered how he had gone from the NBA’s mountaintop in June to a lonely hike downward of his own, these men who had no relationship before becoming partners in May 2014 began to lean on each other.
“We would often say that this was the best year and worst year of our lives,” Myers, who joined the Warriors in April 2011, told USA TODAY Sports. “What he went through personally and what I went through in a family way, it’s a true statement. Only a few people knew about it, or know it, and so there was a very sad common bond that we both were able to talk about and empathize.
“I’m lucky to have a guy like that in my life, who I respect and trust. He spoke to my wife and family (after Dinsmore’s passing) and wrote an email to them afterwards that was one of the most beautiful emails I’ve ever seen. It meant a lot to me to do that to my wife’s family, so there’s a lot of layers here that go deeper than (a) coach- GM (relationship).”
Kerr, a five-time champion as a player who served as Phoenix Suns general manager and a TNT analyst before joining the Warriors, is no stranger to loss. His father, Malcolm Kerr, was the president of American University of Beirut when he was assassinated Jan. 18, 1984. Kerr, a star at the University of Arizona at the time, has spoken for years about the profound effect losing his father had on who he would later become.
But these past six months have been trying. Kerr’s return date kept moving. The symptoms kept coming. Those constant chats with Myers, though, helped keep his restless mind sane.
“Bob is an amazing human being; he really is,” Kerr said. “His support is just … incredible. There (are) no conditions to it. He’s going to support me and cares (for) me, and he feels that way about everybody on our team. Obviously we all want to win, but Bob is a person who has an understanding of humanity and people and family, and he knows all that stuff is way more important than winning a game.”
Said Myers, “(The NBA is) so results-oriented, and that’s OK, because it always will be and we signed up for that. But if you can somehow, within all of the chaos, understand that there’s going to be some really good days and some really hard days, have strong relationships and bonds, it makes it all that much better.”
Before the past few months, Myers said he never considered himself the empathetic type. He was known as affable, but truly understanding others’ trials, he said, was a weakness.
In this, however, there is strength. For them both.
“With these last two experiences, I have a profoundly different outlook on life, based on what he went through and what I’m going through with my wife and her parents,” Myers said. “It certainly changed me, because there are depths of emotion I hadn’t gone to (before). I viewed what (Kerr) was going through in a different light, too — as a person, as a friend.
“I always said, ‘Steve, do what’s best for you. The Warriors are going to be fine. It’s a basketball game. We’re going to be OK. How are you?’ That’s what you want to get to. Hopefully we go through this together a long time, but we’re not always going to be this good. We know it. And then when things are tougher and you face adversity, having that strong bond is very meaningful.”