Up until a few years back, I used to love to go hunting too. My favorite kind was deer hunting. We used to go all the time. But I’ve lost my taste for it. Right before I had back surgery, I was deer hunting right behind my house in French Lick. We have some really nice woods back there, and I was up in this tree, sitting there, holding my bow. I had used guns in the past, but at this point I was really enjoying hunting with the bow and arrow. It was almost dark, but all of a sudden I see some deer running down the hillside. I couldn’t get a shot at them. Then I saw a ten-pointer, a real nice buck. I was getting ready to line him up, and all of a sudden I heard something, so I sat there, real still. The next thing you know, this deer walks out and stops right underneath my tree. I know it must have smelled something. That deer turns its head and is looking straight up at me. I released the bow, and I put the arrow in there, and I got myself ready to shoot, but that deer was still looking up at me. It looked almost human. It kept staring at me, standing there nice and still, and I said, “Well, that’s the end of that.” I put my bow away and I put my arrow away, and finally that deer just walked off. That was it for me. It changed my hunting habits forever. I haven’t been hunting for deer ever since.
The summer before I talked to the Pacers about their coaching job, my friend Rex got into wine making. He’d make all different kinds of wine. He had rhubarb plants right in his front yard, so he’d make batches of rhubarb wine, and dandelion wine. I got into it a little bit, and I really enjoyed it. I made up a couple of bottles that didn’t come out half bad, but once I took the coaching job, that was that. I don’t really have time for anything like that these days.
There was one good thing about all the time I had on my hands during those years I was retired: I got to spend more time with Mom. Within two or three years after I retired, things had really quieted down. Dinah and I could come and go as we pleased without too much of a commotion. We spent a lot of time in French Lick, which is how I could tell something wasn’t quite right with Mom.
I’d ask her, “Mom, is everything okay?” and she’d say, “Oh, I’m fine, Larry.” But after a while you could tell she wasn’t feeling quite right. She got real tired, and seemed to have lost some of her strength. That went on for a long time, until finally she went up to Indianapolis to have some tests done. Dinah and I went up there to pick her up at the hospital, and the doctor wasn’t around. I said to Mom, “When is he coming?” and she said, “Well, he told us we could leave. I’m all done with the tests. Let’s go home and I’ll call him tomorrow.” I wanted to see the doctor, but Mom was anxious to get going, so we drove home. The doctor called me the next morning and said, “Larry, I’m sure you want me to tell you everything, so why don’t you get the family together?” That’s when I knew it was bad. I said, “Why don’t you just tell me, and I’ll pass along the information?” He said, “Your mother has probably got a year to live. She’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease, and she’ll have six good months, and then she’ll start going downhill real fast.” I didn’t say a word. Next, the doctor started explaining to me that they needed to put a tube in Mom’s stomach so they could feed her. The doctor was real nice, and he said, “I know it’s going to be hard to tell her. Would you like me to come down there? I could talk to her. I could explain it.” But I said, “No, I’ll tell her,” because I knew I wouldn’t want that kind of news from a stranger.
I knew next to nothing about Lou Gehrig’s disease until Mom got it. The medical term for it is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and it’s a fatal disease with no known cause and no cure. Lou Gehrig, a star baseball player for the Yankees, died from it, so they renamed it after him. It’s really a horrible disease. It’s a slow, degenerative illness that attacks the nerve cells in the brain and the spine, and eventually the muscles become paralyzed.
When I hung up with the doctor, I went in to see Mom. I said, “Let me tell you what the doctor said.” She said, “Oh yeah, okay.” I looked at her and I said, “Do you want me to lie to you, or do you want me to tell the truth?” Typical Mom. She said, “Well, Larry, I think I’ll take the truth.” I told her what the doctor had said. She sat there for a minute, then said, “Well, looks like I’m going to have fun for the next six months.” I explained the whole thing and told her she could tell the rest of the family whenever she was ready. She was getting weaker and weaker every day. We could all see that. She was losing all her muscle definition. I stayed for a while, but when I was getting ready to leave she said, “Can you bring some of those weights over here for me?” I said, “Mom, it ain’t gonna help.” But I brought them to her anyway.
As much as she hated to fly, Mom got on a plane during those next six months and came down to Naples to see the kids. She did a lot of traveling around in the car, catching up with old friends. She did what she said she was going to do—she had fun.
Mom got the feeding tube, and she didn’t like it at all, but she knew she had to have it. She was a guinea pig, really. She’d go up to Indianapolis every three weeks or so, and they’d have all these doctors in there, testing her, and asking her a ton of questions. She loved it. She really thought she was helping somebody else out. But then it got to where she couldn’t talk anymore, and that was the end of that.
That was the worst part. It was murder on her, not to be able to talk. She could hear fine, and her mind was as clear as a bell, but she couldn’t speak to us. All the muscles around her throat were gone.
It ended up going pretty much the way the doctor said. She got around some in those first six months, but she went downhill real fast. She just got so weak. She was wasting away to nothing, and it was really hard to watch. My sister Linda was with her all the time, and Dinah was with her a lot too. Poor Mom. She did the best she could, but there’s no way to beat this thing.
The thing that bothered me the most was when I had to go to training camp with the Celtics that October. It was M. L.’s first year as coach, 1996, and we were headed down to Tennessee for about a week. I left on a Sunday, and I went over to see Mom before I went, and I knew it would be the last time I would see her alive. I didn’t say much. Just kissed her goodbye. She died Monday night, so I had to go right back. The whole family was there. It didn’t seem real at first. I knew she was going, but I guess I was figuring it would be more like a week, not just a couple of days. The thing that I wonder about, the part that must have been so hard for her, was that her mind was clear right down to the end. You wish she didn’t have to suffer like that.
I think about Mom a lot when I walk into Market Square Arena and everyone is screaming and clapping and shouting, because she would have been right there with them. She followed basketball pretty closely. We had a satellite dish in West Baden, so she could watch anything she wanted. She was a big Isiah Thomas fan, and liked to watch all the Pistons games. My friend Tom Hill always said Mom was the best coach all of us kids ever had, because she was the first one to teach us discipline and hard work. Looking back, she really was amazing. I don’t know how she kept track of all of us and kept us all out of trouble, but she did.
Before Mom died, she’d look after the house for us when we weren’t there. Whenever we’d come home, she’d be flying out the front door, running to greet us. My kids really loved Mom. She was real good with them. I know they are young, but I really think they will remember her. I miss Mom every single day of my life.
On Team Dynamics
I
’ve said over and over no coach should stay in one place longer than three years. You stay longer than that and you get stale. The players don’t listen as closely. So after my three years is up with Indiana, I will step down as coach. People have asked me if I’d go to another city and do this again, but I can’t see it happening. I don’t know. Maybe it could—it’s just that I’ve got the best group of guys in Indiana. If I had one or two guys who didn’t care about winning, it wouldn’t make it worthwhile for me. I’m just lucky I have this collection of players who really want it. Too often these days it seems the NBA has a group of guys with too much going on. That’s what people don’t realize. If one guy is off, it can affect the whole team. When I was with the Celtics, the guy that I could never figure out was Tiny Archibald. He was a terrific player, but from one practice to the next you never knew what you were going to get from him in terms of his personality. When Tiny was in a really good mood, we’d all say, “Hey, let’s live it up! Tiny is happy today.” And when he wasn’t, we just tried to get through that practice and get out of there.
Everybody has their own way of figuring out these athletes. I just rely on my gut. Danny Ainge has this guy he hired for his Phoenix team that can look at your facial expressions and your brainwaves and tell you what kind of person you are. It’s this formula that determines if you have leadership potential or not. Danny is really into it, and he was telling me all about it last spring. I’m sitting there listening and thinking, “This guy has lost his mind.” I was laughing my butt off. He said, “Larry, you are an intense, high-personality guy, a lot of serial killers have the same profile as you.” I said, “Yeah, Danny, I ought to kill you for saying that.”
When I first came in, we had this psychiatrist that had been with the team since Jack Ramsay was the coach in 1988. Jack Ramsay wanted him to administer this test to his players. He wanted to know who was a leader. But I’m thinking to myself, “After one month with these guys I’m going to know every one of them. We’re wasting our money on this guy.” I’ve always said you find out more about a player when things are going bad than when things are going good. Anybody can keep it together when you’re winning every night.
When I looked at our roster, I knew we had some really, really good players, but no one guy who could carry us on his back night after night. Those guys, like Jordan, are rare. So for much of the early part of the year, my guys pooled from each other. That’s how they managed, by feeding off one another. Like Chris Mullin. Guys were really happy for him. He had come from Golden State, where everything had fallen apart, so our guys wanted him to succeed. They would really try to get him the ball. Same thing with Reggie, or Rik, if he was feeling it. They are just so unselfish. That’s how they do things. As far as leading them, I told them, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll handle all the bull. This team should just focus on playing basketball. If you guys want me to lead you, I’ll lead you. I can’t score any baskets, but I’ll have you prepared to score those baskets.”
My biggest concern about our guys coming in is who would emerge as a true leader for us. I asked Donnie, “Who is the leader on this team?” He said, “You’ve got guys who think they are leaders, but they really aren’t.” After a couple of months it became obvious to me that our leader was Mark Jackson. He wasn’t the most talented guy on our team, but guys responded to him.
What Mark did was get these guys in the right frame of mind. He was the one who earned their respect. When he was in a huddle and he said, “Look, we’ve got five minutes left, and we’re down by four points, let’s shut them down,” you could see their eyes getting bigger. That was all they needed to hear, sometimes, to get them all fired up.
People think it’s an easy thing to be a leader. It’s not. You have to earn the respect of your teammates. You have to be willing to challenge them as well as support them. And you have to prove you are willing to do whatever it takes. I can remember Cedric Maxwell saying once, “You can always tell when Larry’s back is hurting, because the first thing he’ll do at the beginning of the game is dive for a loose ball. He might not get to it, but he’ll pop his back, he’ll feel better, and he’ll take care of any ideas that he’s not ready to go.” Max was right. Anytime I went down for a loose ball, and a mess of guys ended up diving for it, our team always got fired up by that. Hey, I got fired up by it. And that helped me forget about my injuries. Think about it. If I came out and it was obvious I was having a problem because I wasn’t moving well, and favoring that back, then the guys would be saying, “Ah, Larry’s hurting tonight. We’re going to have a tough time.”
You take a guy on our team like Rik Smits. You never really used to see Rik dive for loose balls. But last year I saw him flying all over the court. These guys bought into the fact that that kind of effort would win games for us. The one thing I have to say about these guys is that they truly know I believe in them, so they listen. We’d be down a few points, and we’d have a time-out and I’d say, “Look guys, don’t get frustrated. We’ve got plenty of time left out there, let’s use it to our advantage. We’re not out of this game. We’re gonna win this game.” I’d say it real calm, like I knew what I was talking about, and they’d go out there and come back, and we’d win the game, and they’d be in the locker room afterward saying, “Man! We really can do this!”
I think that happened with Mark Jackson more than any of the other guys. He understood right away what I was trying to do with the team. Here was a player whose career had taken so many twists and turns, and I think he saw a coach that was willing to let him be whatever he wanted to be, as long as he put in the work and the effort.
Mark Jackson reminds me of Dennis Johnson. It’s the way he gets the ball and knows what’s going on all the time, and won’t hesitate to step up and nail the big shot, even if he’s missed the last ten in a row. Mark works for everything he gets. He reminds me a little of myself, in that way. He keeps plugging and plugging. Look at how his career has gone. He was Rookie of the Year in New York, then that all went bad, and for a while he was a guy people didn’t respect that much. But then he comes to Indiana, and he is the key guy. All you have to do is look at what happened to the team when they traded him the season before I got there. They lost all their chemistry. I can understand why Larry Brown did it. He thought Travis Best could start at point guard. But Travis is the perfect backup. Anyhow, it’s been a long road for Mark Jackson, and I was so happy for him we had the success we did last season. The truth is, he saved our butt. He’s the one who, if we lost a big game or something, would get everyone together and give them a talk. It really helped the younger guys. They definitely reacted to it.