SAN FRANCISCO — Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr walked into the interview room at Chase Center on Friday afternoon wearing a black T-shirt featuring a picture of Gregg Popovich.
“Pop’s gonna kill me for wearing this shirt,” Kerr said before the Warriors played the Houston Rockets in Game 6. “He’d call me a hapless rube.”
Kerr had mixed emotions Friday as he reflected on the enormous influence that Popovich, the league’s all-time winningest coach, had on his life and career. Popovich officially retired as the San Antonio Spurs’ coach after a 29-year run that included five world championships and induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Popovich, 76, stepped away from being an active coach after he suffered a stroke at the team’s arena in November. He had another medical incident last month.
Popovich will become the Spurs’ president of basketball operations, and former Stanford guard Mitch Johnson, a Spurs assistant who filled in for Popovich, will become San Antonio’s full-time head coach.
Kerr won two NBA championships as a player under Popovich in San Antonio.
“Pop is one of the most important people in my life for many, many reasons, and most of them go way beyond basketball,” said Kerr, who visited Popovich three weeks ago when the Warriors were in San Antonio. “But it’s a sad day. It’s also an encouraging day, because this is a natural transition for him, organizationally, to move into his next role.
“I think it also gives him the space and time he needs to recover from the health issues.”
Popovich’s career coaching record was 1,422-869, and his 170 playoff games with the Spurs are the most by any coach with any team and the third-most overall behind Phil Jackson (229) and Pat Riley (171).
Kerr credited Popovich and Jackson, another of his former coaches, with helping to revolutionize the position from a dictatorship to one more based on collaboration.
“Those two guys, in my mind, helped create the current culture that we’re in, for coaching and team building, where it’s so much based on human values, human connection, and then a fierce competitive desire to go with that,” Kerr said. “That’s what we’re all searching for, and I think Pop sort of helped create that vibe around the league and in other sports, too.”
Kerr was coached by Popovich in San Antonio for three-plus seasons, first from 1999-2001, and again in Kerr’s final season as a player in 2002-03 when he won his second NBA title with the team.
But the two would develop a close friendship beyond basketball, with Popovich’s willingness to speak up on social issues profoundly impacting Kerr’s desire to do the same with his sizeable platform, particularly regarding racial inequality and gun control.
“I was 100% inspired by Pop to have the courage to speak out and take the hits that you’re going to take if you do,” Kerr said. “I knew how much he loved his country, and I knew how much his Air Force experience meant to him. And I think that conviction combined with, say, the shenanigans of this century politically — all the B.S. kind of started right around that time, the turn of the century — where between social media and buffoonery politically, we just got into this current era we’re in, where everybody’s screaming at each other.
“So I think he already had the conviction, but he saw what was happening, and he wanted to make sure he spoke out.”
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“He probably was one of the first coaches in the modern generation to really speak out on politics and social injustices,” Kerr said of Popovich.
Kerr added that former legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith helped break down racial barriers in the South, “refusing to take his team to certain places to play or stay or eat.”
“I think Pop is kind of in that Dean Smith mode of seeing the bigger picture beyond sports, and those are the coaches who really stand out to me. I immediately think of (Jackson) in that regard, just the guys who recognize the importance of sports and yet relative unimportance, and find that balance and that perspective, and then make an impact societally, and that’s where Pop is.”
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