Getting to Us Read online

  The more critical test had occurred a few hours before, when he addressed his players as a group for the first time since the tape was released. His main concern was that they not pop off and say something that would make the situation worse. He wanted the team to speak with one voice—and that voice should be his. As he began to talk to them, he could sense that his players were distant. Their arms were crossed, their heads were down. They didn’t like that he was asking them essentially to stay quiet. For a moment, he saw himself through their eyes, as if he were a member of the establishment trying to keep them down. And it pissed him off.

  This was one of those moments when a coach must rely upon his PEAK profile. Rivers’s players needed to trust that he would persist in doing what was right no matter what pressure, internal or external, came his way. They needed to believe he could empathize with how they were feeling. They needed to know that he wouldn’t say one thing to their faces and another to the public or to team executives. And they needed to accept that his lifetime of experience—as a player, a coach, and a broadcaster—instilled in him the knowledge to make the best decisions, not just for himself but for the group.

  So he seized the moment like he always did—with ruthlessly cold bluntness. “All right, you motherfuckers,” he said. “My name is Glenn Rivers. I’m from Maywood, Illinois, and I’m black. Okay? So any of you motherfuckers here think you’re more offended than me, you can kiss my fucking ass.” Then he pointed to J. J. Redick, a white shooting guard. “And if you guys think J.J. is not as offended as you, then you’re fucking wrong, too. So I don’t know what we’re gonna do, but I do know one thing—it has to be one voice. I’m asking you to let me be your voice. Tell me what you want me to say, and I’ll say it. But the target has to be on Donald Sterling. We cannot say something that makes the story about us.”

  The next few days were a blur. Shortly before tipoff of their next game, the Clippers’ players took off their warm-ups and left them in a pile at midcourt. NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling for life. The Clippers lost the series in seven games, but they played hard and for each other. They carried themselves like professionals and stuck to the script. They didn’t win the series against Golden State, but they had pivoted and moved forward under the most difficult of circumstances. Much of that could be traced to their leader. Even in the worst of turmoil, Rivers had kept them at Us.

  * * *

  • • •

  The ensuing years in L.A. have not been easy. Even with a new owner, the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the Clippers remain one of the most star-crossed franchises in sports. During his first two years, the team had reached the Western Conference semifinals, but in 2016 they lost both Paul and Griffin to injury in game four of their first-round series against Portland and were eliminated. They lost in the first round again in 2017 to Utah, thanks partly to a toe injury that Blake Griffin sustained in the third game, which sidelined him for the remainder of the series. Of course, the worst misfortune of all was playing in the same conference as the Golden State Warriors, who have become a juggernaut of historic proportions, first winning an NBA-record 73 regular season games in 2015–16, and then claiming their second NBA championship in three years after signing former Oklahoma City Thunder superstar Kevin Durant.

  Rivers, meanwhile, made a special kind of history on January 16, 2015, when he became the first NBA head coach to coach his son in a game. All of Doc and Kris’s kids were college athletes, but Austin was the most successful—largely because he was the most driven. He was also entirely self-motivated. Doc lived in Boston for most of Austin’s upbringing, and even when he made it to Austin’s high school or AAU games, he didn’t say much. He wanted Austin to love the game authentically, not because he was trying to please an overbearing father.

  Likewise, Austin rarely went with his mom and siblings to visit his father in Boston. He preferred to stay back in Orlando and practice. “I didn’t really grow up with my pops. I grew up with my mom,” Austin says. “He was there when I needed him, but he didn’t show his emotions too much. No matter what happened, his answer was, ‘We gotta move on.’ If I broke up with a girlfriend or I had a bad game, it was, ‘We gotta move on.’”

  By the time Austin reached his senior season at Winter Park High School, he was one of the top prospects in his class. He committed to Duke, where he was so good as a freshman that he was able to enter the NBA draft. The New Orleans Hornets selected him with the 10th pick, but it was not a happy situation for Austin. As a rookie, he was hobbled by hand and foot injuries, and the Hornets’ coach, Monty Williams, was quick to pull him from games if he took a few bad shots. After his second season ended, the Hornets signed two talented combo guards. His father did not mince words. “They’re writing you off,” Doc said.

  Midway through his third season in New Orleans, Austin thought the Hornets were getting close to trading him to the Celtics, of all places. Then he got word that the Clippers were a possibility. At first, he hated the idea. He had spent his life trying to escape his father’s shadow. His mind changed after his dad told him the Clippers needed to replace their backup point guard, Jordan Farmar, who had just been waived. Doc’s assistant, Sam Cassell, who had played fourteen years in the league as a point guard, was a fan of Austin’s and wanted him to come. The only promise Doc made to Austin was that he would have a chance to prove what he could do. “That’s all I needed to hear,” Austin said.

  The move drew plenty of backlash, not least because Austin was so unproven at that point. Even so, Kris was in favor of the idea. “My first thought was that no one is going to want Austin to be the best player he can be more than his dad,” she says. When Austin started playing, he heard lots of teasing from opposing players. Those barbs subsided as he started to improve, thanks largely to the belief that was instilled in him by his new head coach. “The biggest thing with him is that he’ll give a player an opportunity to show what he can do,” Austin says. “A lot of coaches will say you have to earn freedom. He gives you freedom from the start, and if you play well with it, then you keep it.”

  Toward the end of his second season in Los Angeles, Austin was asked for the umpteenth time what it was like to play for his father. His answer caught many by surprise. “He doesn’t really share his life outside of basketball with me,” Austin said. “He and I don’t know each other like that. We know each other as strictly basketball. A lot of people on the outside don’t understand that because people think we have a relationship like every other father and son. We just don’t. That’s because he’s been gone my whole life, and that’s fine.”

  Doc says he believes Austin doesn’t really feel that way, that he was just trying to defuse the awkwardness to reporters. Kris thinks otherwise. “Austin is not that manipulative. He says things off the cuff,” she says. When I ask Kris what her reaction was to that quote, she replies, “To be really frank, sadness. If Austin had said that about me, that would break my heart.”

  Austin earned the respect of his teammates during the final game of that 2016 playoff series against Portland, when he took a nasty elbow to the face, left the court to get eleven stitches, and then returned to finish with 21 points, eight assists, and six rebounds in the season-ending loss. In game three of the 2015 Western Conference semifinals against Houston, when Austin went on a scoring tear, Chris Paul went up to Doc, slapped him on the chest, and said, “This is one time when you can be a dad and not just a coach.” Doc was wearing a microphone and the exchange was aired on ESPN.

  It was the kind of feel-good moment that led millions to share it on the Internet. But it didn’t make Austin feel good. “Personally, I did not like that. I’m not into that lovey-dovey stuff, man,” he tells me. “Maybe twenty or thirty years from now, I will look back and feel like that was pretty special to play for my pops, but right now I don’t like that. I know Chris didn’t mean any harm by it, but it took away from what I was doing. Made me look like a little kid
out there. This is the playoffs, man. I don’t want that shit. I’m hooping out here just like you.”

  It’s a fair point. Austin put in a lot of hard, lonely hours to get himself to that point. He wanted the guys to respect him. He didn’t want a hug.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was a little too dark and overcast to see the Pacific Ocean on that cool spring evening, but I knew it was there. Doc Rivers led me to the backyard of his expansive house in the hills of West Hollywood. The dense, well-lit urban flatland blinked below. I joked that he was a long way from Maywood, Illinois. “Ain’t it the truth,” he said. Rivers loves that house, and yet he had spent much of his day off checking out properties in Malibu. Real estate had become a passion of his, and he figured three years living in the same place was long enough. He was ready for his next move.

  Rivers might refer to himself as ruthlessly cold, but there are very few people around the NBA who would describe him that way. He has long been a media favorite because he is so approachable, congenial, and fair. In many ways, he is still his father’s son, the guy who cracks on everyone at the family gathering, keeping everything light and infusing the room with joy. I will never forget the time I took my oldest son to meet Rivers the night the Celtics eliminated Cleveland in game six of the 2010 Eastern Conference semifinals, in what turned out to be LeBron James’s last game during his first stint in Cleveland. After it was over, Rivers’s assistant, Armond Hill, brought us back to the coaches’ locker room to say hello. It was a big night for the Celtics and he had a lot going on, but when Rivers saw us enter, he jumped up from his chair, walked over to where we were standing, shook our hands, and chatted us up like we were the most important people in the world. We hung out for about fifteen minutes, then he knelt down to take a picture with my son. He couldn’t have been nicer.

  After we left, my son remarked how impressed he was that I was such good friends with the Celtics’ coach. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was the first time we had ever met.

  On the night that I visited Rivers at his house, there was only a week remaining in the 2016–17 regular season, and he was understandably weary. It had been a rough few months, with a variety of injuries and other bad luck threatening the fortunes of this hapless, snakebitten franchise. There was also the reality that even at their absolute healthiest and most efficient, the Clippers were still bound to end up with everyone else in the Western Conference—which is to say, miles behind the Golden State Warriors.

  “I’m only fifty-five. I’m not ready to retire or anything, but sometimes I wish I had a year off,” Rivers said as he relaxed on his living room couch. “I’ve started eighteen straight training camps. [Spurs coach Gregg] Popovich is the only other one that’s had that. But I still love it. I even love the hard years. I can tell you this has been a hard year. We’ve had so many injuries, so much bad stuff that happened. Sometimes I feel like the players just expect it now. You know what I mean? So my job is to try to get them out of that. I don’t know if I will or not, but that’s my job.”

  Bad luck aside, Rivers is doing his job as well as ever. With each passing year, he possesses greater knowledge and evinces deeper empathy. Unlike a lot of coaches, he does not do any conditioning work in practice. He figures if these guys are in the NBA, they’re supposed to show up in shape. Nor does he tell them how much extra shooting work they need to put in. Rivers was self-aware in bailing on the Celtics when they were going into rebuilding mode. He does not have the patience for that anymore. But give him a locker room filled with veteran players who deeply, truly want to win, and he will coach his ass off.

  “He’s a player’s coach in the best way,” Austin says. “He has a good balance where he gives players a lot of freedom, he gives them responsibility, he’s a good guy, but at the same time you better not get it twisted. People know not to fuck with him. They may be stars, but he is running the team.”

  Rivers is always on the lookout for opportunities to impose his won’t-go-left persistence. He told me the story of a recent practice when he was practicing late-shot-clock plays with his starters, and he sensed they were being too timid. “I said to Chris [Paul], ‘I know what shot you’re going to take. You’re gonna try to get to the elbow and fade away. So go get your fucking shot.’” To drive home the point, he informed the second unit what play the starters were running beforehand, and then he instructed the starters not to change a thing. “That’s what happens in the playoffs,” he said. “The other team knows what you’re running. You still gotta run it.”

  He remains confident in the knowledge he brings to each practice and game. “I mean, I played for thirteen years and I’ve coached for eighteen. I gotta know something.”

  Getting older means experiencing more moments of joy as well as sadness. His mother died on June 19, 2015, after a long battle with dementia. Her funeral took place six days later, which happened to be the same day as the NBA draft. Rivers buried his mom with his family and then flew to L.A. to be in the Clippers’ war room. The move to Los Angeles has also had a predictable effect. A few years ago, Rivers took a course on Transcendental Meditation, and now he tries to give himself twenty-minute sessions once or twice a day to refresh his mind and even his keel. “I don’t really go to church anymore—I think I’ve had enough church in my lifetime—but I’m definitely a spiritual person,” he said. “I’m not into the Zen thing, but I do believe there’s a spirit you have to have. I’m a seeker of knowledge. I believe in the basketball gods.”

  Most of all, Rivers is finally learning that for all his strong-willed stoicism, there is only so much a coach can control. After getting ejected three times in the season’s first thirty-five games for yelling at referees, he scaled it back. “I thought, Man, what am I doing? That’s not me,” he said. “A lot of my guys are on the refs on every play, but I’m coaching better because I’m not worrying about that. At times I have to tell them, ‘All right, guys, it was a bad call. What do you want me to do? The call was made already. We gotta move on.’” There will be no victims in this house.

  When he feels the need to decompress, Rivers will drive to San Diego alone at night so he can wake up early and play golf at Torrey Pines. Or he will spend a day by himself at a spa in Newport Beach. He has even indulged in some occasional therapy, an idea he would never have entertained while he was playing. Sometimes during those sessions, his therapist will pass along a quote or a tidbit that Rivers will immediately type into his iPad so he can share it later with his team. “You can get a great speech from a therapist,” he said.

  “He spends so much of his life in the middle of this three-ring circus, he definitely has come to enjoy his quiet time,” Kris said. “That side of him evolved when he was in Boston. He had to be alone a lot.”

  Once in a while, Kris will tell her husband a piece of news she has heard about the boys who allegedly burned down their house in San Antonio. Doc doesn’t want to hear it. He has fantasized about accidentally running into them so he can give them a piece of his mind, but he has no desire to seek them out. He doesn’t see this attitude as an act of amazing grace. He just doesn’t want to pivot in that direction. As he put it, “Why would I waste one ounce of energy on bad people?”

  Energy is one thing that is not a problem for him. It was now past midnight, and though we had already talked for nearly three hours, Doc looked like he could have kept going for a while. He has always been a night owl. He likes to sit by himself on the couch and watch game video. Or maybe he will read a little and flip through the channels mindlessly until around two in the morning before turning in. He sets his alarm, but he almost always wakes up before it goes off. “I tell people I’m a sun god. The light gives me energy,” he said.

  As he walked me to the front door, he showed me a few things around the house, including a large limited-edition book about his hero, Muhammad Ali, on a coffee table. Finally, he slapped my back and sent me on my way.
As I heard the door close behind me, I pictured him going back to the couch, back to the solitude, back to the grind, and eventually back to bed. In a few hours, the sun would come up, and it would be time to get moving again.

  Brad Stevens

  “ALL THE GOOD ONES WANT TO BE COACHED.”

  Most every day that the Boston Celtics are scheduled to play a home game, their head coach, Brad Stevens, will take about fifteen minutes out of his game preparation to go into his basement and play a few games of Ms. Pac-Man. I say “most” because while Stevens is very much a child of routine, he is not anal about it. Nor is he superstitious. He just knows what works for him and what doesn’t, and on most days, what works is some time at that console. He likes to call it his “moment of mindfulness,” but there is a side benefit: It helps him get better at a game at which, in a rare moment of self-aggrandizement, he boasts, “I’m pretty good.”

  Stevens has always been old for his age and older than he looks. But don’t let the smooth taste fool you. He is intensely competitive, which is why by the time he turned forty, he had already spent six years as the head coach at Butler University, taking his little-engine-that-could to consecutive NCAA championship games, and was in his fourth season as the head coach of the Boston Celtics. Mention these achievements to him, and Stevens is quick to deflect, evincing the classic self-effacement of the midwestern Methodist. No one who knows him, however, would be surprised that he’s happy to point out his proficiency at a video game. That includes his eleven-year-old son, Brady, who once took a lead on his dad during a game of Ms. Pac-Man and started to let him know about it. After Brad dug in and vanquished his own progeny, his former player at Butler and current Celtics assistant Alex Barlow chided Brady for his premature celebration. “You should never have said anything to him,” Barlow said. “You knew he was going to come back at some point.”