Ryan McNeill transcribed a good Q&A session with Nuggets coach George Karl over at HoopsAddict.com. Karl won his 900th game last night and took some time to reminisce with the media afterwards.
Reporter: Those first two places, Cleveland and Golden State, you didn’t make it through two seasons and then you had to wait to get to Seattle. What was that wait like?
George Karl: New Year’s Eve in the year I got the job in Seattle, I told my family I was going to college. I was done with the program. My family wasn’t happy in Spain, I was coaching in Real Madrid and I said I’d finish out the year and then I’d call Coach Majerus, Coach Williams and Coach Smith and get an assistant coaching job and learn the college game. I swear to God. Majerus and I at the time were thinking about going to UNLV and I was going to go with him as an associate head coach. About 10 days later a guy named Jerry Kraus who coached the Bulls, and was the director of player personnel, came over and I spent two days with him on Toni Kukoc, Arvydas Sabonis and all the other players from Europe who I thought could come over and be very good NBA players. Then Casey Jones was floundering in Seattle and their general manager, Bob Whitsitt, called, who I was not a friend of, I just knew Bob as a professional, and he asked me if I wanted to be an assistant coach. I was making more money, twice as much, maybe three times as much, in Madrid as they were offering me to be an assistant coach. I talked with my family and said, ‘hey, let’s go for it if Casey would call me and invite me to be an assistant coach.’ Casey refused. He didn’t know me and he didn’t want to change his staff. Another two weeks pass, they lose six out of seven or seven out of eight and they fire him. I don’t know if Whitsitt was impressed that I would come back for $100,000, a lot less money than I was making in Madrid, but he decided he would interview me for the head job. I’ve been told through the grapevine that it was Jerry Kraus’ recommendation to Whitsitt was the reason I got the job, that Jerry knew Whitsitt very well, and Whitsitt called him and asked who he would hire. Kraus I think told the story about how prepared I was and how I coached in Europe. Then I had to get out of my contract. That was crazy. I was begging Real Madrid to let me go.
An article by John Branch of The New York Times sheds light on the some of the struggles Karl has encountered throughout his career, including his family’s battle with cancer:
Basketball drove George and Coby apart. It has put them back together. The rebuilt relationship has been glued tighter by the fright of cancer, diagnosed in each of them.
“Now you see that he has separate lives, rather than one life wrapped around basketball,” Coby, 23, said in a telephone interview.
There is no resentment in his voice, but there is remorse in the words of his father. In his scrambling ascent of basketball’s coaching ladder, George moved his family at least two dozen times. His wife Cathy followed, toting their two children, Kelci, now 27, and Coby, everywhere from Seattle and Spain (twice), Montana and Albany (twice), and all the stops between. Even family getaways had a tired theme.
“I would choose to have a vacation at a basketball camp in Spain, and I thought that was cool,” said George, 55. “Truth of the matter is, people want to have a vacation with you. And subconsciously, and maybe even consciously, they resent that you’re doing it with basketball.”
George made his reputation with the Seattle SuperSonics, his third N.B.A. team, averaging 59 victories in seven seasons. Coby, a team ball boy, was often seen near his father, sometimes hugging him after big victories.
It served to put the difficult balancing act on public display. George and Cathy vividly remember the game in Seattle when the ball zipped out of bounds and hit Coby in the face. The boy cried, the crowd hushed and the father froze. Then he turned to his players and kept coaching.
Those kinds of memories “make me wince right now,” George said.
But Cathy and the family accepted his priorities. It was not held against him.
“We all understood that his job came first,” she said. “It was his passion.”
