The Soul of Basketball by Ian Thomsen

Author:Ian Thomsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Popovich, who had final say over basketball decisions in San Antonio, was by no means a typical NBA coach or team president. An Indianan from Merrillville, a suburb of Chicago, he was a 1970 graduate of the Air Force Academy, where he played point guard while aspiring to become a Cold War spy. He majored in Soviet studies and learned to speak Russian, and his five-year military commitment led him on tours of Eastern Europe and Russia with an Armed Forces Sports basketball team. Maybe he spied for his country during those trips, and maybe he didn’t. In either case he wouldn’t say. Spies rarely do.

For six years he was an assistant coach at Air Force, and then in 1979 became head basketball coach at Pomona-Pitzer Athletics, a joint program between Pomona College and Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where his first team went 2-22. He spent seven years there, living with his wife and children in the dorm and eating in the cafeteria for one school year. Two years after he had won the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference with a record of 16-12, Spurs head coach Larry Brown hired him as an assistant. His success over the next two decades enabled him to buy a vineyard in Oregon, and the drudgery of long road trips was offset by the expensive staff dinners he looked forward to planning (and paying for) in North America’s best restaurants. While visiting Paris in 2007 to attend the wedding of Tony Parker and the American actress Eva Longoria, he dined with his former player Sean Elliott at the acclaimed restaurant Le Taillevent, where Popovich spent more than $5,000 on a 1959 bottle of Château d’Yquem, a sweet dessert wine.

Much like Commissioner David Stern, Popovich was drawn to the points of view he had discovered in his travels throughout the larger basketball world. “I wanted foreign players badly,” he said.

Popovich already had one in Duncan. In spite of his U.S. citizenship, Duncan tended to think of himself as an international player, because he viewed the game and its business differently than the typical American star. He was the last of the top NBA draft choices to attend four years of college, remaining at Wake Forest even though he would have been the number one pick after his junior year. His mother died of breast cancer when he was 13, and one of her last wishes had been that he and his two sisters graduate from college.

Duncan grew up as a swimmer on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and in 1989 Hurricane Hugo destroyed the only Olympic-sized swimming pool on the island. Duncan preferred not to swim in the ocean, out of respect for the sharks, and so in the ninth grade he began to play basketball. As Popovich saw it, Duncan’s isolation from the AAU system sheltered him from viewing himself as a millionaire-to-be. “He never imagined success in the basketball world,” Popovich said. “He was never coddled and never picked and

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