Posted Super Bowl Sunday night, February 4, 2018.
San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich with future Hall of Famer if he ever retires shooting guard Manu Ginobli in an undated photo by David Banks/Associate Press, via Bleacher Report.
What’s a picture of a basketball coach and one of his star players doing here on the holiest of holy football nights, you ask? I’ll tell ya…
One, you really want a picture of Bill Belichick up there?
Two, the Washington Post’s star reporter David Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer Prize for about the only mainstream reporting that treated Donald Trump like the fraud and crook and conman that he is, did an AMA---Ask Me Anything, but you knew that.---on reddit and one of the anythings he was asked was who he was rooting for in the Super Bowl. His answer:
Ugh, I hate both of those teams. This is the worst sports-journalism week of the year, when talented sportswriters have to write human-interest stories about Bill Belichick. I've been watching the food network on the treadmill in the mornings, which at that hour is informercials for walk-in tubs.
To which one of the commentators left this capper:
Don't you have to be human to have human interest stories written about you?
Oliver Mannion called my attention to this, figuring I’d get a kick out of it. “Sounds like something you’d say,” he opined with a straight face. He meant Fahrenthold’s remark about this being the worst week for sports journalism. Kid knows his old man. He’s had to hear me rant his whole life. Who knew he actually listened?
As it happens, I don’t dislike Belichick all that much. I don’t think he’s evil incarnate, at any rate. I’m rooting for the Eagles for Mrs M’s sake but if they weren’t in it, I might very well be rooting for the Patriots. I rooted for them against Seattle and against Carolina. I can’t remember if I rooted for them against the Rams, but I might have. If I did, it would have been on the grounds that there was no such team as the St Louis Rams. Even so, I have no interest in reading any human interest stories about Belichick. And not because I think he’s inhuman but because I think he has no life outside of football. This is pure prejudice and a good human interest story might make me see him as more…um…interesting. So there we are. In order for me to be interested in reading about him I’d have to have read something that convinced me he was interesting to read about. It’s the Catch-22 of sports journalism fandom.
But coincidentally the other night I was watching the Spurs play the Rockets and there was a short segment during a timeout in which the announcers compared Belichick and Gregg Popovich.
I was only half paying attention---I have a bad habit of reading while I’m watching sports, so I miss a lot---and I’m not sure what the comparison was meant to show. It seemed to be mostly a matter of both coaches having taken circuitous routes to the top of their professions. There were numbers involved but like most numbers that get thrown around during sports broadcasts they seemed to be used to make banal points sound instructive, the point here being “They’ve won a lot of championships.”
But that and Fahernthold’s AMA reminded me I’ve had this human interest story about Popovich bookmarked since last February, and this seems as good a time as any to finally blog it. It’s from the Washington Post: Gregg Popovich has found the opponent of his life: President Trump. I don't need to read a human interest story about Pop to tell me he's human and interesting. I've known both about him and liked him for it since Tim Duncan was a pup. But what struck me as most interesting and human about him in this particular story wasn't his antipathy to Donald Trump. I admire him and am grateful to him for that. But, nope, it's his needing a designated arguer---someone he can verbally spar with over anything that's on his mind---to help keep him on an even keel.
Gregg Popovich called his old basketball coach from the Air Force Academy in late January and asked what Hank Egan, a friend and mentor of nearly 50 years, was up to.
Nothing? Then Popovich had a deal for him. Leave the late January chill of Colorado Springs, hop a plane and spend the week in sunny San Antonio, where Popovich — arguably the NBA’s best coach but definitely its most complex figure — coached the Spurs. Airline tickets, a hotel room and two good seats for Egan and his wife at AT&T Center — “Pop,” as he’s known, would take care of it all.
Egan agreed, but because this was Popovich he knew the package wouldn’t exactly be free. The 68-year-old Spurs coach isn’t just a five-time NBA champion and the architect of a franchise that is a model of consistency. He is also one of the most cerebral figures in professional sports, and one who has emerged as a forceful and unrelenting critic of President Trump and his administration’s more controversial policies.
More than just a high-profile sports figure with a megaphone, Popovich — previously best known off the court as a professional grouch — has revealed the inner workings of a curious, nuanced mind with a series of opinions noteworthy for their thoughtfulness...
When Egan’s phone rang a few weeks ago, he heard the urgent voice of a man he’d first known as a walk-on player at the Air Force Academy. Back then, Popovich, a striking combination of military man and Vietnam-era free spirit, spoke two Eastern European languages, majored in Soviet studies and drove a yellow Corvette. In his mind, he was going to become a real-life James Bond. But when that pursuit lacked the Sean Connery glamour he expected, Popovich returned home to master a complicated and diverse game — and to find his voice in an uncertain world.
Now here he is, and eight days after Trump was sworn in, Popovich called his former coach and invited him to San Antonio. Egan might not open his billfold for a week, but he knew Pop was bunched up and in the mood to argue; Egan, a wisecracking centrist from Brooklyn, was a reliable sparring partner.
“He’s on a mission to educate me,” the 79-year-old retired coach said by phone late in his week with Popovich.
Follow the link to read Kent Babb's whole article.
Seconded.
I'm a Warriors fan, so I don't hold a brief for Popovich, but this from Bloomberg is also worth reading: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-10/the-five-pillars-of-gregg-popovich
Posted by: Lknobel | Monday, February 05, 2018 at 12:52 PM