Jack’s Blog

Robert Parish was selected as one of the 50 greatest players of all-time.  Does that make him qualified to be an NBA coach?  To my knowledge there’s never been a definitive study done comparing skill as a player to that of a coach.  However, history tells us that while being a great player doesn’t preclude someone from having a similar career on the bench, it’s a rare superstar who becomes a successful coach.

Parish is upset at his former teammates, claiming they didn’t reach out to him the past few years.  Independent of former players shunning him or teams turning their backs on him (mainly his club, the Celtics), his story boils down to the fact that a) he’s broke, b) he’s not broke but doesn’t have as much money as he needs or c) he simply just doesn’t have as much money as he wants.

The story of his plight always returns to his money woes.  He’s auctioned off his championship rings, his Hall-of-Fame ring and his 50 greatest player ring, items most people would never part with.  Although he was employed by the team he played for, Parish claimed the $80,000 a year job the Celtics were paying him wasn’t enough.  He said he was in the market for an NBA assistant or head coaching position - one that paid six or seven figures.  Right there, he lost sympathy from most of us common folk.  Personally, prior to my retirement, I had seven figure jobs from as far back as 1977.  Of course, two of those figures were after the decimal point.

The reason Parish says he ought to be hired is because he was such a highly skilled player himself; that he could really help a team.  Parish is experiencing the same cold shoulder as a couple other former superstars - Kareem Adbul Jabbar and Rick Barry.  Each of these guys shared a characteristic other than being one of, if not the best, at their position.  All were standoffish.  And that’s being extremely kind.

What Robert Parish, as well as others like him, needs to learn is summed up in a line I heard many years ago from Hubie Brown:

“You’ve got to learn how to say hello before it’s time to say goodbye.”

With this being the “information age,” not only are results of contests reported to fans around the world, but anything else of interest, intrigue or embarrassment to anyone involved is “news of note.”  Any kind of illegal (those involving drugs and weapons ranking the highest) or immoral (extramarital affairs being the spiciest) acts diminish the aura of the revered high profile athlete or coach (or owner for that matter).  As my late mentor, John Savage, was fond of saying, whatever falls under the realm of “Strengthen the weak by weakening the strong” (see 4/30/07 blog) makes the average guy’s day.  He gets to think, “Maybe I don’t have all he (or she) does, but I’m a better person because I don’t conduct myself in such a reprehensible manner.”  More and more doctors are seeing patients for throwing out their shoulders patting themselves on the back. 

What a professional player or coach does during his or her own time, as long as it has nothing to do with their performance and isn’t in disregard of the law, ought to be their own business, e.g. what happens behind closed doors should be personal.  One trait, however, that I feel differently about regarding what professionals in athletic arena do is in the way they treat others with whom they work.

It’s widely known that a great many of highly skilled people in the world of professional athletics are, when it comes to dealing with their peers or those they coach (or who coach them), less than decent (using the lowest common denominator) people to be around.  Many of their behavioral shortcomings have been chronicled. 

As far as players go, Ty Cobb is probably as despicable human being who ever played a professional sport, his fortune lying in the fact that he played well before the internet.  Bobby Layne wasn’t a joy to have to deal with as a teammate but, once again, the real story isn’t known because he was a pre-internet athlete as well.  It could very well be that his guys loved him, respected him and longed for his antics during games, … or not.

Two basketball players who make the short list of people who never, as Hubie Brown once lectured, “learned how to say hello until it was time to say goodbye,” were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Rick Barry (see second blog from 6/10/08).  A baseball player seemingly heading in this same direction is Barry Bonds.

As one might expect, coaches fall into this category, too.  They must lead a group and, often, the dictatorial method is the one that’s chosen.  In fact, the quote, “My way or the highway” is believed to have come from a coach.  In days gone by, this was much more common and, probably, much more effective. 

I’ve said on numerous occasions that when I was growing up, if I ever went home and told my father the coach yelled at me, my father would most likely have hit me - for upsetting the coach.  Nowadays, if that scenario occurred, the father’s first move would be to reach for the phone and call his lawyer.  Authority figures were put on a pedestal in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.  Today, it’s about an individual’s rights.  Imagine a player describing (and laughing about it) his coach’s style as “He treats us all the same - like dogs,” as was said about the legendary Vince Lombardi.

Yet, there still exist Lombardi-like leaders in this era.  Bill Parcells and Nick Saban are two who come to mind.  There’s certainly no questioning each’s competence as coaches who win (big) and, undoubtedly there are former or current players of theirs who will publicly praise them for all they did to develop character and make them the men they are today.  There are (probably) significantly more (one of whom could be the offensive lineman from the Dolphins who broke down and cried after being on the receiving end of one of Saban’s tirades) who would speak only on a condition of anonimity if asked to comment on their feelings for their former coaches.  Imagine crying - and having it shown time and time again (thanks once more to the internet age) as a football player.  And Tom Hanks thought it was a sin for a player to cry in baseball - and a woman at that!

This type of behavior brings to mind an old movie which starred Billy Crystal, entitled Mr. Saturday Night.  In it, Crystal plays a stand up comic who is enormously successful, but a rotten SOB off the stage.  During a scene at the end of the move, his brother, who also wanted to be a comedian, but settled on being his brother’s manager, made a comment about something that wasn’t to his liking.  This set off the “star” who lit into his sibling with a monologue that went something like, “What, you have the nerve to complain?  Let me tell you something.  Whatever you are, you are because I made you.  You didn’t have the courage to do what I do and I felt sorry for you, so I let you hang around.  You owe me everything.  Whatever you have is because of me.” 

The brother subserviently listened to the put-down, and then turned to him and said (as I imagine all of the teammates or team members of the above-mentioned athletes/coaches might say):

“Yeah, but you could have been nicer.”

   ¼/p>

After Mike D’Antoni, Larry Brown, Rick Carlisle, Terry Porter and Scott Skiles got hired as NBA head coaches, there were grumblings about about the “good ol’ boy network” and how teams continue to hire “re-treads.”  On the filp side, Eric Spoelstra, Vinny Del Negro and Michael Curry just got selected to run their first ever ball club, hitting the financial lottery in the process, prompting many (probably the same complainers above) to point out that they have no experience.

Every time jobs open, there are certain names that pop up, yet these guys never seem to get the least bit of consideration, despite being (NBA) household names.  One is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, another is Rick Barry and a third who has recently joined the mix is Patrick Ewing.  Since NBA franchises would hire Hannibal Lechter to coach their teams if they thought he could produce a championship, it’s a wonder to many why these three icons, all of whom have expressed desire to lead a team, have been continually passed over.

In Ewing’s case, NBA insiders have told me on more than one occasion that Patrick’s off the court behavior has been as impossible to defend as he was when he got the ball three feet from the basket.  In fact, there was a time when the woman he was married to during his playing days with the Knicks was planning to write a tell-all book and, in fact, it was headed - or even was sent - to the publisher.  Although I don’t recall the book ever seeing the light of day, Ewing’s reputation has been well-known enough for teams to shy away from placing him in the uiltimate leadership position.

The other two pariahs, Jabbar and Barry, are a simple case of “people have long memories.”  Rick, as most of us remember, never committed a foul (according to him) and Kareem spurned what most people considered normal social behavior during his playing days, prefering to be more or less a reclusive - and not a particularly pleasant one at that.

When I was coaching in college, I heard Hubie Brown, who, I believe, at the time was an assistant coach for the Milwaukee Bucks give a lecture to a group of high school “all-stars.”  He spoke of a kid (by far the best player on the team), but someone who was intentionally uncoachable - and not only uncoachable, but someone who actually went out of his way to make the coach’s life miserable.  Near the end of his senior season, the college coaches weren’t coming around like the youngster was assured they would.  When he finally realized the error of his ways, his attitude turned 180 degrees, he apologized profusely to the coach and begged him for help.  However, the coach had had enough, the kid had been a pain in the butt the whole year.  Yet, now he decided, when it was convenient for him, to make up for a whole season’s (career’s) worth of misery he caused.   Right or wrong, the coach basically told him to get lost.  The title of Hubie’s speech was what Ewing, Jabbar and Barry needed to understand a long time ago:

“You need to learn how to say hello before it’s time to say goodbye.” Â