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Larry Brown can’t stop coaching. Why the Hall of Fame coach won’t leave the bench, even if he has to go to Italy to do it
Larry Brown was set to take a group of college players to Italy this summer when he became ill at the last moment. He had taken this same team to Madrid the year before but now needed a substitute, so he called Jim Todd, a former NBA assistant, to take over. Todd, a longtime friend, couldn’t say no, nixing a Cape Cod vacation to come instead to New York.
Brown promised autonomy, that he would relinquish control of the USA East Coast team and the practices he was supposed to helm and let Todd run it his way. Todd suggested a shooting drill, which elicited a few supportive “yeah’s” from Brown. When they got to campus at Columbia University, where the team trained and lived before leaving, Brown remained in charge. Todd never doubted he would be. That drill was never run.
In his 78th summer on this earth, Brown spent a few days on an Ivy League campus, coaching a squad of collegians for a tournament that will never notch a footnote on his Hall of Fame resume. He spent his days with those players, eating with them at Chipotle, and staying with them on the same floor of Wallach Hall, sharing the communal bathrooms. Being one of the best basketball coaches ever has its perks — he was granted a single room, not a double.
If it’s surprising to hear that Brown would find himself there, a world away from the glamour of one of the nine NBA jobs he once held, it’s not to the people who spent that part of August with him.
“It’s what drives him,” Guy Rancourt, who runs the East Coast All-Stars, said. “It’s his passion. It’s what makes him happy.”
Rancourt was with Brown last summer in Madrid, where they went for long morning walks as the coach shared his wisdom, strolling from Hotel Puerto del Sol to one attraction or another. Rancourt, the Western Connecticut State head coach, cherished listening to Brown talk and laughed as he bemoaned drills gone awry as heretical to the sport.
Todd is still amazed at Brown’s penchant for knowing the movements of all 10 players on the court at once or the energy he still has to lord over a 6 a.m. practice. Brown’s desire to coach seems as powerful now as it did 20 years ago.
“He’s a basketball junkie,” Todd said. “At any level he’s happy to be coaching the game of basketball. He’s a perfectionist.”
For the last 40 years, Brown has been one of basketball’s most interesting characters. Persnickety — occasionally to a fault. One of the game’s best teachers and winners, and a wanderer. He is the only coach to win NCAA and NBA titles, but has yet to leave a college program without sanctions in his wake. He spent two years in Detroit, won a championship and took them to the NBA Finals the next year, then left for the Knicks after a postseason dripping with rumors he was already lining up his next team.
“Larry has done the same thing since I’ve known him,” Donnie Walsh said. “He’s going to come. He’s going to make your team better immediately — much better than you think he will. Then he’s going to kind of get a wanderlust, I’ll call it. And then by a third or fourth year he’s probably looking to go somewhere else.”
And, he adds, “I think Larry leaves more than people ask him to.”
Brown is an inveterate coach. It is the only job he has ever wanted, he says, and what he continues to chase. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and hoped to become a three-sport coach in high school before a legendary career got in the way. Despite decades of success, Brown continues to coach, as if idling is an existential threat.
At 78, he took his latest job, in Italy, where he coaches Auxilium Torino — the furthest he has gone to fulfill himself. No position is too obscure.
It would be simple enough to stop now, when the NBA and college basketball no longer seem to want to find a place on the bench for him. Perhaps that is a viewpoint biased by his age, one that doesn’t recognize that his infatuation will not cede ground to time. Or maybe it’s our ignorance about devotion and how a lack of opportunity does not mean a lack of desire.
“I don’t know,” Brown said this summer. “I look in the mirror, I know that inside I don’t feel that way. If you look at who I’ve coached and who I coached for and I played for and who coached with me, I got too much to share. I love being around coaches and players and being in the gym and I just want to share what I know. I want to teach.”
Brown has worked with coaching titans over his lifetime and played for them too. His wealth of knowledge, he says, was culled from his time with Hank Iba and Frank McGuire and Dean Smith and, well, the list is long. Brown’s reputation is as strong as the coaches he drew wisdom from. Now, he wants to pass it on. In his mind, he is a vessel for all the information he has soaked up from the game, ready to teach the next generation.
In Italy, he has found a way to fulfill that itch. He left behind his family — he has four kids, including two at SMU — and that has caused some loneliness. He missed part of training camp, still recovering from an illness that troubled him during the summer, which was a difficult way to start with a new team. Finding a practice court has been tough at times. But Torino is another outlet for Brown to keep coaching.
“I love being here,” he says.
Later, he adds: “The reason I want to continue so badly to do this is, one, I never worked a day in my life and, two, because of the people that I played for or coached… You’d think you like to share some of that stuff with young people.”
It took two years for Brown to land his latest job, his first in Europe. He resigned from SMU in 2016, reportedly over a contract dispute and after already serving an NCAA suspension, and looked for another. He flirted with coaching the East Hampton High School basketball team but couldn’t commit enough time. He asked to coach Emmanuel Mudiay’s AAU team. He says he interviewed with a German team. Brown talked about a reality show with David Kahn, the former Timberwolves general manager, that would take him to inner-city schools and spend a week working with parents and coaches and players, but that didn’t pan out.
His name was floated about when Penny Hardaway took over as Memphis coach, perhaps as an assistant or wise man on the bench and Brown says that was “a possibility” but didn’t want to say anymore.
“I didn’t understand it,” he said. “I still don’t understand it. Maybe my age is a factor.”
When he was still a college coach, he would attend AAU events and find that he had many of the young coaches as players when he was in the NBA. Now, they have teams and he doesn’t.
Brown has heard a few theories about why he can’t land another job in the NBA or in college. Gregg Popovich, a friend, told him he might intimidate other coaches. Brown finds that unfathomable.
No coach, Walsh says, wants to have a possible successor, or even a threat, sitting next to him on the bench, but that’s not the primary reason.
“I think because of his age,” Walsh, a longtime NBA exec and now Pacers consultant, said. “I think teams are now if you look around the league, the teams that are good and settled, like Golden State and Houston now, they’re not looking for coaches, but the teams that are trying to get there are for the most part starting a lot of young players. I think the fact that Larry is an older guy that may work against him, that certainly works against players now. Age is a big factor in the league. But that’s the only reason I can think. There will be somebody who figures out that maybe with young players it’d be good to have an older guy who knows how to develop them.”
Brown hears this and it bemuses him. That his age could somehow be something more than a positive. That he is old, rather than sagacious. He thinks of Pete Carril and Tex Winter and how he could play a similar role. He no longer needs to be the head coach, he assures, but that being the helpful voice would be fulfilling enough.
“I can’t believe when you get older you get dumber,” he said. “I think most people, when they see my energy they don’t think about my age. it should be all what you can bring to the game… It doesn’t seem to me like a real logic thing. I think it’s even more important to have older coaches and older teaches around.”
What may bother Brown more is the lack of loyalty. That has been a driving motivator for him during his career. Not to a particular team of course — there are countless stories of Brown looking for the exits at one of his many stops, by now it is part of his lore — but to people and institutions.
Dean Smith instilled it in him. Long after Brown left North Carolina, Smith called on him for favors and he listened. When Smith called Brown during the 1977 NBA Draft and told him to pick Tom LaGarde, a Tar Heel, despite him failing a physical, Brown resisted, then took him anyway despite players he preferred still on the board. LaGarde failed his physical when he got to Denver.
Smith and Brown went golfing that summer and Brown asked him why he wanted him to draft a hobbled player. “I knew you’d be alright, Larry,” Smith told him. And Brown was, so he kept putting Smith’s best interests ahead of his own. He drafted Sean Higgins over Scott Williams with the last pick of the 1990 Draft because Smith called and told him that if Brown took Williams, he’d never play, but if he didn’t, he could pick his destination from around the league.
Brown recruited Billy King as the Kansas coach, then hired him in Indiana, and when he got to Philadelphia, with team control, he called King again and gave him two options to follow: assistant coach or front office. King became the GM and brought Brown back as an advisor in 2006.
In 1998, Brown promised Larry Hughes, a talented guard out of Saint Louis University, that the Sixers would take him if he was there with the eighth pick that June. With the seventh pick on the clock, Paul Pierce was the highest player on Philadelphia’s board, and a staff-wide vote reiterated that Brown should take Pierce, to stick to their rule of following the board. But Brown had promised Hughes, so Pierce dropped to the Celtics and went on to have a Hall of Fame career.
Brown doesn’t speculate on how close he’s come to a job lately. He thinks of all the friends who have chosen to help him instead. But he can’t ignore all the people he’s helped during his life and how it hasn’t helped him now. It’s disheartening, he says, to not have a chance to coach in the NBA now because of that.
“That’s how coach (Smith) thought and that’s how I was taught,” Brown said. “That’s why it’s kind of tough when you think you’ve kind of helped people and they don’t have the same kind of loyalty that you thought you were taught. That’s why it’s tough when you are in a position as a coach or a head of a franchise to help people that have somewhere along the line helped you or need your help.”
Once Brown took the Torino job, his phone started buzzing again. He took the job because he missed coaching. They had shown interest over the last two years but it never quite worked out. This June, it did.
Brown has never enjoyed the games as much as the run-up to it. He loves practice, loves teaching, loves working with players. It’s why he can’t just stop and retreat to the Hamptons, and maybe write that book some have asked him to and acquiesce to a quiet life.
Four years ago, after the Spurs won their most recent NBA title, he and Popovich started discussing life after basketball. Popovich, Brown says, talked about retiring, but Brown beat back at the idea, that there was still more to do, and this was no time to make decisions.
“He said ‘Screw you Larry. I got other things I can do,’” Brown said, quoting Popovich. “‘You’re like Bear Bryant, if you don’t do it you won’t be able to live.’”
Popovich went back to coaching but Brown nudged that thought into the back of his mind. Bear Bryant coached for 46 years and died a month after he retired from Alabama. Brown may not think of his job existentially but his friends don’t know anything else he’d rather do.
“I hope that’s not my M.O. I don’t feel I’m ready to stop,” Brown said. “I love to play golf and I love to read but that ain’t going to satisfy me. I love being around my kids but that’s not going to satisfy me. I can’t see not doing something.”
Larry Brown was set to take a group of college players to Italy this summer when he became ill at the last moment. He had taken this same team to Madrid the year before but now needed a substitute, so he called Jim Todd, a former NBA assistant, to take over. Todd, a longtime friend, couldn’t say no, nixing a Cape Cod vacation to come instead to New York.
Brown promised autonomy, that he would relinquish control of the USA East Coast team and the practices he was supposed to helm and let Todd run it his way. Todd suggested a shooting drill, which elicited a few supportive “yeah’s” from Brown. When they got to campus at Columbia University, where the team trained and lived before leaving, Brown remained in charge. Todd never doubted he would be. That drill was never run.
In his 78th summer on this earth, Brown spent a few days on an Ivy League campus, coaching a squad of collegians for a tournament that will never notch a footnote on his Hall of Fame resume. He spent his days with those players, eating with them at Chipotle, and staying with them on the same floor of Wallach Hall, sharing the communal bathrooms. Being one of the best basketball coaches ever has its perks — he was granted a single room, not a double.
If it’s surprising to hear that Brown would find himself there, a world away from the glamour of one of the nine NBA jobs he once held, it’s not to the people who spent that part of August with him.
“It’s what drives him,” Guy Rancourt, who runs the East Coast All-Stars, said. “It’s his passion. It’s what makes him happy.”
Rancourt was with Brown last summer in Madrid, where they went for long morning walks as the coach shared his wisdom, strolling from Hotel Puerto del Sol to one attraction or another. Rancourt, the Western Connecticut State head coach, cherished listening to Brown talk and laughed as he bemoaned drills gone awry as heretical to the sport.
Todd is still amazed at Brown’s penchant for knowing the movements of all 10 players on the court at once or the energy he still has to lord over a 6 a.m. practice. Brown’s desire to coach seems as powerful now as it did 20 years ago.
“He’s a basketball junkie,” Todd said. “At any level he’s happy to be coaching the game of basketball. He’s a perfectionist.”
For the last 40 years, Brown has been one of basketball’s most interesting characters. Persnickety — occasionally to a fault. One of the game’s best teachers and winners, and a wanderer. He is the only coach to win NCAA and NBA titles, but has yet to leave a college program without sanctions in his wake. He spent two years in Detroit, won a championship and took them to the NBA Finals the next year, then left for the Knicks after a postseason dripping with rumors he was already lining up his next team.
“Larry has done the same thing since I’ve known him,” Donnie Walsh said. “He’s going to come. He’s going to make your team better immediately — much better than you think he will. Then he’s going to kind of get a wanderlust, I’ll call it. And then by a third or fourth year he’s probably looking to go somewhere else.”
And, he adds, “I think Larry leaves more than people ask him to.”
Brown is an inveterate coach. It is the only job he has ever wanted, he says, and what he continues to chase. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and hoped to become a three-sport coach in high school before a legendary career got in the way. Despite decades of success, Brown continues to coach, as if idling is an existential threat.
At 78, he took his latest job, in Italy, where he coaches Auxilium Torino — the furthest he has gone to fulfill himself. No position is too obscure.
It would be simple enough to stop now, when the NBA and college basketball no longer seem to want to find a place on the bench for him. Perhaps that is a viewpoint biased by his age, one that doesn’t recognize that his infatuation will not cede ground to time. Or maybe it’s our ignorance about devotion and how a lack of opportunity does not mean a lack of desire.
“I don’t know,” Brown said this summer. “I look in the mirror, I know that inside I don’t feel that way. If you look at who I’ve coached and who I coached for and I played for and who coached with me, I got too much to share. I love being around coaches and players and being in the gym and I just want to share what I know. I want to teach.”
Brown has worked with coaching titans over his lifetime and played for them too. His wealth of knowledge, he says, was culled from his time with Hank Iba and Frank McGuire and Dean Smith and, well, the list is long. Brown’s reputation is as strong as the coaches he drew wisdom from. Now, he wants to pass it on. In his mind, he is a vessel for all the information he has soaked up from the game, ready to teach the next generation.
In Italy, he has found a way to fulfill that itch. He left behind his family — he has four kids, including two at SMU — and that has caused some loneliness. He missed part of training camp, still recovering from an illness that troubled him during the summer, which was a difficult way to start with a new team. Finding a practice court has been tough at times. But Torino is another outlet for Brown to keep coaching.
“I love being here,” he says.
Later, he adds: “The reason I want to continue so badly to do this is, one, I never worked a day in my life and, two, because of the people that I played for or coached… You’d think you like to share some of that stuff with young people.”
It took two years for Brown to land his latest job, his first in Europe. He resigned from SMU in 2016, reportedly over a contract dispute and after already serving an NCAA suspension, and looked for another. He flirted with coaching the East Hampton High School basketball team but couldn’t commit enough time. He asked to coach Emmanuel Mudiay’s AAU team. He says he interviewed with a German team. Brown talked about a reality show with David Kahn, the former Timberwolves general manager, that would take him to inner-city schools and spend a week working with parents and coaches and players, but that didn’t pan out.
His name was floated about when Penny Hardaway took over as Memphis coach, perhaps as an assistant or wise man on the bench and Brown says that was “a possibility” but didn’t want to say anymore.
“I didn’t understand it,” he said. “I still don’t understand it. Maybe my age is a factor.”
When he was still a college coach, he would attend AAU events and find that he had many of the young coaches as players when he was in the NBA. Now, they have teams and he doesn’t.
Brown has heard a few theories about why he can’t land another job in the NBA or in college. Gregg Popovich, a friend, told him he might intimidate other coaches. Brown finds that unfathomable.
No coach, Walsh says, wants to have a possible successor, or even a threat, sitting next to him on the bench, but that’s not the primary reason.
“I think because of his age,” Walsh, a longtime NBA exec and now Pacers consultant, said. “I think teams are now if you look around the league, the teams that are good and settled, like Golden State and Houston now, they’re not looking for coaches, but the teams that are trying to get there are for the most part starting a lot of young players. I think the fact that Larry is an older guy that may work against him, that certainly works against players now. Age is a big factor in the league. But that’s the only reason I can think. There will be somebody who figures out that maybe with young players it’d be good to have an older guy who knows how to develop them.”
Brown hears this and it bemuses him. That his age could somehow be something more than a positive. That he is old, rather than sagacious. He thinks of Pete Carril and Tex Winter and how he could play a similar role. He no longer needs to be the head coach, he assures, but that being the helpful voice would be fulfilling enough.
“I can’t believe when you get older you get dumber,” he said. “I think most people, when they see my energy they don’t think about my age. it should be all what you can bring to the game… It doesn’t seem to me like a real logic thing. I think it’s even more important to have older coaches and older teaches around.”
What may bother Brown more is the lack of loyalty. That has been a driving motivator for him during his career. Not to a particular team of course — there are countless stories of Brown looking for the exits at one of his many stops, by now it is part of his lore — but to people and institutions.
Dean Smith instilled it in him. Long after Brown left North Carolina, Smith called on him for favors and he listened. When Smith called Brown during the 1977 NBA Draft and told him to pick Tom LaGarde, a Tar Heel, despite him failing a physical, Brown resisted, then took him anyway despite players he preferred still on the board. LaGarde failed his physical when he got to Denver.
Smith and Brown went golfing that summer and Brown asked him why he wanted him to draft a hobbled player. “I knew you’d be alright, Larry,” Smith told him. And Brown was, so he kept putting Smith’s best interests ahead of his own. He drafted Sean Higgins over Scott Williams with the last pick of the 1990 Draft because Smith called and told him that if Brown took Williams, he’d never play, but if he didn’t, he could pick his destination from around the league.
Brown recruited Billy King as the Kansas coach, then hired him in Indiana, and when he got to Philadelphia, with team control, he called King again and gave him two options to follow: assistant coach or front office. King became the GM and brought Brown back as an advisor in 2006.
In 1998, Brown promised Larry Hughes, a talented guard out of Saint Louis University, that the Sixers would take him if he was there with the eighth pick that June. With the seventh pick on the clock, Paul Pierce was the highest player on Philadelphia’s board, and a staff-wide vote reiterated that Brown should take Pierce, to stick to their rule of following the board. But Brown had promised Hughes, so Pierce dropped to the Celtics and went on to have a Hall of Fame career.
Brown doesn’t speculate on how close he’s come to a job lately. He thinks of all the friends who have chosen to help him instead. But he can’t ignore all the people he’s helped during his life and how it hasn’t helped him now. It’s disheartening, he says, to not have a chance to coach in the NBA now because of that.
“That’s how coach (Smith) thought and that’s how I was taught,” Brown said. “That’s why it’s kind of tough when you think you’ve kind of helped people and they don’t have the same kind of loyalty that you thought you were taught. That’s why it’s tough when you are in a position as a coach or a head of a franchise to help people that have somewhere along the line helped you or need your help.”
Once Brown took the Torino job, his phone started buzzing again. He took the job because he missed coaching. They had shown interest over the last two years but it never quite worked out. This June, it did.
Brown has never enjoyed the games as much as the run-up to it. He loves practice, loves teaching, loves working with players. It’s why he can’t just stop and retreat to the Hamptons, and maybe write that book some have asked him to and acquiesce to a quiet life.
Four years ago, after the Spurs won their most recent NBA title, he and Popovich started discussing life after basketball. Popovich, Brown says, talked about retiring, but Brown beat back at the idea, that there was still more to do, and this was no time to make decisions.
“He said ‘Screw you Larry. I got other things I can do,’” Brown said, quoting Popovich. “‘You’re like Bear Bryant, if you don’t do it you won’t be able to live.’”
Popovich went back to coaching but Brown nudged that thought into the back of his mind. Bear Bryant coached for 46 years and died a month after he retired from Alabama. Brown may not think of his job existentially but his friends don’t know anything else he’d rather do.
“I hope that’s not my M.O. I don’t feel I’m ready to stop,” Brown said. “I love to play golf and I love to read but that ain’t going to satisfy me. I love being around my kids but that’s not going to satisfy me. I can’t see not doing something.”
