Saluting Jerry Sloan -- The king of constancy

[RonnieBrewer (Ronnie Brewer)]

The king of constancy
Celebrating Sloan as he pursues a coaching milestone
Posted: Friday December 8, 2006 11:04AM;
by Jack McCallum

With one more victory, which could come Friday night in Minnesota, the Utah
Jazz's Jerry Sloan will become only the fifth NBA coach to reach 1,000 wins.
He won his first 94 games with the Chicago Bulls, the team for which he
played as a tough-minded defensive stopper, but no other coach in history,
with the exception of Boston's Red Auerbach, is so identified with a single
franchise. So as Sloan looks to join that elite club (Lenny Wilkens, Don
Nelson, Pat Riley and Larry Brown are the other members) we salute him in
this week's five-pack. Here are some of the many things you gotta love about
the NBA's king of constancy.

1. He embraced the challenge after Karl Malone and John Stockton left.

In 2002-03, when that remarkable duo was in its last season together in Utah,
I asked Sloan, "Boy, you must want to feel like getting out, too." He was 61
at that time and already a legend.

"Hell, no," Sloan snapped. "The opposite, in fact."

He went on to talk about how amped up he was to take on the challenge of
teaching again, of ingraining his possession offense into the heads of
players who hadn't been born when Stockton and Malone began running their
precision pick-and-rolls. And Sloan went about that task with the eagerness
of a first-year coach. After a few seasons of being cursed by injuries, he
now seems to have a team ready to once again challenge for a Western
Conference title.

2. He cleaned himself up.

Sloan was born a country boy and he lived much of his life like the
protagonist in a country song. He drank, he smoked, he stayed out late,
and all the time a loyal woman, Bobbye, his high-school sweetheart before
she became his wife, was home waiting for him. "We were married 38 years
and at least 12 of them were pretty good," Bobbye told me once, laughing.

After she contracted cancer -- Bobbye first felt a stabbing pain in her
breast on June 13, 1997, the day the Jazz were eliminated in Game 6 of their
first NBA Finals -- Sloan wised up. He stopped drinking and staying out and
their last years together were good ones, aside from her suffering, which
ended with her death in June 2004. By that time, they had a practiced ritual
-- before every game that she was in attendance, Sloan's eyes would find her
in the stands before tip-off and they would press two fingers to their lips
and hold those fingers aloft for a second or two.

Sloan never wanted his rehab story to become tabloid fodder -- he's as far
from being a publicity-seeker as any man I've ever met -- but, when asked, he
will credit Bobbye for making him happy, healthy and whole.

3. Stockton and Malone never lost respect for the man.

You spend as many seasons together (Stockton arrived in '84, Malone in '85
when Sloan was an assistant; he got the head job in '88) as these three spent
and relationships are hard to maintain, particularly in a profession that's
played out in the public eye. But the Mailman, who fought a couple of
contract battles in Utah and sometimes felt overlooked, and the steady
Stockton never had anything but good things to say about Sloan and, more
to the point, the way he coached.

When I was writing a story about Sloan several years ago, I remember saying
to Stockton: "With all your years in the league, I notice that you still look
over at the bench to get a play call from Jerry. That's unbelievable."

Stockton looked puzzled. "Why wouldn't I?" he said. "Jerry's the coach."

That says a lot about Stockton, of course, but it says as much about Sloan.

4. Sloan's contract "negotiations" are conducted with all the pomp and
   circumstance of a barroom gin rummy game.

He appears in owner Larry Miller's office, wearing his beloved John Deere hat
and maybe a flannel shirt, and Miller will throw out a figure. By longevity
and/or success, Sloan should be the highest-paid coach in the league, but he
never is. There's always one of those Brown or Phil Jackson deals out there,
and sometimes there are a couple of them. But Sloan makes, as he puts it, "a
good buck" (somewhere around $6 million), and he'll usually just say "Yep" to
what Miller suggests, and another contract will be in place.

5. You never hear him obsessing about championships.

When we talk about the great ones who never won a title -- Stockton and
Malone, Charles Barkley, Kevin Garnett, etc. -- we always leave out coaches,
and that means we leave out Sloan, who is as deserving as anyone. His Jazz
made two Finals, in '97 and '98, where he got Michael Jordan-ized both times,
but I never heard him talk much about it. He went on as if it never happened,
just coaching his team, getting ready for next year and spreading the gospel
of taking care of the ball.

"Teaching players to play the right way is what Jerry Sloan is all about,"
Stockton told me once. "I'm not sure you could ask anything more out of a
coach than that."



http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/jack_mccallum/
12/07/jerry.sloan/index.html

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