ARIZONA’S STEVE KERR : Through It All, He Managed to Keep His Cool

It was a sad scene. Steve Kerr, who has endured so much, without a trace of bitterness or self pity, could not escape the taunts of a small group of Arizona State fans that stood chanting: “PLO, PLO. Where’s your dad?”

It was four years ago that Kerr’s father, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated by terrorists as he arrived at his office at the American University in Beirut, where he was the school’s president.

Since then his son has become a symbol of class and courage, not to mention an excellent basketball player. The Feb. 27 performance by those fans was difficult for Kerr to bear. “People like that are the scum of the earth,” he said. “To say the least, it fired me up.”

So, as he always has done, Kerr responded with deeds, not words: He hit six straight three-point shots in the first half and had 20 points for the University of Arizona by halftime. (Arizona won, 101-73.)

But that is the way Steve Kerr is--knock him down, and he gets up. It isn’t that nothing bothers him, it’s just that nothing is going to defeat him.

Steve Kerr’s story reads like a movie script. But send this script to Hollywood, and they’ll laugh you right off the lot. You can hear the guy now: “Pal, it’s got to be believable to sell these days. This one will never fly.”

He’s absolutely correct, of course. Except here’s the catch: the story’s true. The whole thing.

“To me, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal,” Kerr said. “I guess that’s because I lived it. For a long time, people looked at me as a victim. I think now they look at me as a person. I prefer it that way. I really don’t think of myself as being all that different than other guys.”

Kerr is different. He graduated from Arizona in December but is finishing his fifth year of basketball because he sat out last season after surgery to repair the knee he tore up in Spain in July 1986.

Kerr is different for many reasons but would rather not, to use one of his favorite phrases, “make a big deal of it.” He is different not only because of his father, not only because of his reconstructed knee, but because of his attitude.

Certainly, his background is a major reason for this, but the bottom line on Kerr is that he has done what is almost impossible: taken a step back, looked at the image that has become Steve Kerr, and laughed.

“Sometimes I read the stuff (other) people read about me,” said Kerr, “and I say, ‘That’s supposed to be me?’ People act as if I’ve never done anything wrong or said anything bad or given anyone a hard time. They act as if they would be amazed to find out that I drink beer. And if I read one more time that I’m Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, I think I’ll throw up.”

It may have been discomfort--or boredom--with his oh-so-perfect image that caused Kerr to pull the stunt he pulled on Dec. 30.

The Wildcats just had gotten their toughest win of the season, against Duke, 91-85, and Kerr had spent more than an hour doing postgame interviews. Remember, he is The Media Darling on a team that is the nation’s Media Darling. Finally, he was dragged to the phone to do a postgame radio show.

His coach, Lute Olson, the only man in Tucson who may have an image comparable to Kerr’s, was doing interviews when Kerr took the phone. Near the end of the conversation, looking for an ending, the interviewer said, “Steve, have you and the guys made any resolutions for New Year’s?”

Kerr, who loves to shock people, answered quickly. “Absolutely,” he said. “We’ve all decided we really have to work in the coming year to help Coach Olson overcome his heroin problem. It’s really starting to get the guys down.”

Kerr may have sent half of Tucson into shock with his joke. Olson is so clean he squeaks.

“Right after I said it, I felt bad about it,” Kerr said. “I mean, I probably went too far with that one. For about two days I couldn’t look Coach Olson in the eye, because I thought he might be mad at me. But then his wife mentioned it to me and said they all thought it was pretty funny, so I guess it was okay. Of course, all the guys say if it had been anyone else but me, they would have been in trouble.”

Olson doesn’t deny any of this. “Steve has the kind of sense of humor that makes it tough to get mad at him,” he said. “You know when he pulls something or says something that he’s just having fun. I guess because I’ve been around him so long and we’ve been through so much together, it’s hard for me to get mad at him.”

That fits right in with the Kerr image. Kerr’s teammates will tell you they don’t worry about being late for practice as long as they beat Kerr out of the locker room.

That’s not to say that his teammates are above using the Kerr image when it benefits them. Recently freshman guard Matt Muehlebach confessed to Kerr that on occasion he has introduced himself to women in bars as Steve Kerr. As in, “The Steve Kerr.”

“Funny,” Kerr said laughing, “it never worked all that well for me.”

Kerr’s story begins in Beirut, not only because he was born there, but because his father was born there, met his wife there and, tragically, died there.

Malcolm Kerr met Ann Zwicker in Beirut when he was doing post-Princeton graduate work and she was on a junior year abroad from Occidental College. They were married in 1957 and eventually had four children: Susan, John, Steve and Andrew.

The Kerrs lived all over the world while their children were growing up: Beirut, Cairo, Oxford, the south of France, Tunisia and Los Angeles. From the beginning, Steve was the jock in the family.

“My first memories are of wanting to play ball,” he said. “I learned to read by reading the sports pages of the newspaper. Whenever we were in L.A., my dad would take me to Dodger games and UCLA basketball games all the time. He loved it almost as much as I did.”

Malcolm Kerr was on the UCLA faculty for 20 years, even when teaching abroad. For a while Steve Kerr was a UCLA ballboy. His first close-up heroes were college basketball players. He played all sports when he was young, although his temperament as a baseball pitcher unnerved his parents.

“He just didn’t handle losing or not doing well very well at all,” Ann Kerr said. “It was especially bad when he was pitching. Malcolm and I were actually sort of relieved when he started playing basketball all the time. You can’t afford to lose your temper every time something goes wrong in that sport. We were much more comfortable with that.”

By ninth grade, basketball was Kerr’s sport. The family was living in Cairo, and Kerr played for the American school team. They mostly played adult club teams, often on outdoor courts that had rocks in them. The games were rather crude, but Kerr was happy.

“People don’t understand what Cairo is like,” he said. “They think of Egypt and they think of pyramids and camels. Actually, for an American teen-ager Cairo is a great place. There are Americans all over, and there aren’tvery many rules you have to follow. I had a great time over there.”

He returned to Los Angeles for his sophomore year at Pacific Palisades High School, largely to play on a more competitive level. By his junior season his parents had come back, and Kerr was starting to attract some notice from college scouts because of his range as a shooter. During his senior season, when Malcolm Kerr returned to the Middle East, Ann Kerr stayed behind with Steve to help him manage the recruiting process.

There wasn’t much to manage. “The scouting services all had me listed as being too slow,” Kerr said. “Gonzaga was interested, and they had me up for a visit. Actually what they did was give me a tryout. I had to play against John Stockton (now with the Utah Jazz) for two hours. I didn’t do very well. When it was over, the coach, Jay Hillock, said to me, ‘It wouldn’t be a problem if you were a step slow, but you’re two steps slow.’ ”

Kerr was crushed. He graduated from high school not knowing where he would attend college. In the meantime, his father became president of the American University in Beirut.

At the time Malcolm Kerr was offered the job in 1983, there was concern within the family. Beirut was not what it had been in the 1950s. It was war-torn and dangerous. David Dodge, the man who preceded Kerr as president of AUB, had been kidnapped in 1982 and held hostage for a year.

“We all knew the risks involved,” Ann Kerr said. “But this was the job Malcolm had always dreamed of. There was never really any doubt about going.”

Steve Kerr remembers one family discussion on the matter. He didn’t say very much, because he was only 17 at the time. But, hauntingly, he can remember his brother John saying to his father, “I just don’t want mom to end up a widow.”

“I never really considered it happening,” Kerr said. “Obviously, I was kind of naive, but it’s the kind of thing where you think, ‘This can’t happen to me.’ This was just my dad’s job. I never thought about it any differently.”

In 1983 Kerr played summer-league basketball in Los Angeles. His father was home for the summer, and they spent a good deal of time together. Malcolm Kerr once said that his greatest joy, next to being president of AUB, was watching Steve play basketball.

By July, Cal State Fullerton, looking for a shooter, was interested in Kerr. Then Lute Olson showed up. Olson had just taken the job at Arizona, taking over a team that was 4-24 the previous season. He was combing the Los Angeles playgrounds for underclass players to recruit when he spotted Kerr.

“He could really shoot the ball,” Olson said. “He wasn’t quick by any means, but we weren’t exactly a great team. We had a scholarship left. I was interested. I wanted to see him again. I had (assistant coach) Kenny Burmeister look at him, and he wasn’t sure. I even brought my wife to watch him play. She looked at me and said, ‘Lute, are you kidding?’ ” Olson didn’t know if she was serious or not.

In the meantime, Cal State Fullerton offered a scholarship. It was Kerr’s first offer.

“I really wanted to go to Arizona,” Kerr said. “I mean, I was in awe of the place. I think they were hoping to find someone better, so they kept holding off. I waited and waited. Fullerton was really pressing. Finally, I figured I wasn’t going to hear from Arizona, so I told Fullerton I’d come.”

The decision made, Kerr moped around the house for a couple of days. Olson finally called, and Kerr told him he was going to Fullerton. Olson wished him good luck and told him he was sorry he wasn’t going to attend Arizona. Kerr was baffled: Arizona had never offered him a scholarship.

“Somewhere our communication broke down,” Olson said recently. “I had the impression we had simply lost Steve to Fullerton. I didn’t realize he wanted to come here.”

Malcolm Kerr did. One day he sat his son down and asked him where he really wanted to go to college. “I told him, ‘Arizona,’ ” Steve Kerr said. “He said, ‘If that’s the case, let’s call Coach Olson and tell him that.’ ”

Olson remembers the phone call vividly. “He asked me if we wanted Steve at Arizona,” he said. “I told him we did. Then he said to me, ‘This is a very important question. Steve is torn up about having made a commitment to Fullerton. He doesn’t want to renege. But he really wants to go to Arizona.’

“I told Malcolm that this might sound self-serving, but that if a kid wanted to go to another school, I didn’t want him coming to my school and being unhappy. That didn’t do anyone any good.”

Malcolm Kerr pointed out to his son that Steve hadn’t signed anything, and that he was the one who had to live with his decision for four years. Steve Kerr told Olson on the phone that he would love to come to Arizona.

Then he went off on vacation with his family to Beirut. On the day he was supposed to leave Beirut, Ann Kerr took him to the airport. Sitting in the terminal, they listened as the shelling around the airport intensified.

Finally their driver told them there was no chance to get out of Beirut that day and drove them from the airport back to the safety of the United States Embassy.

Two days later the same driver took Kerr on a terrifying eight-hour car ride through Syria to Amman, Jordan. From there, Kerr flew to Tucson to start his college career.

Later Kerr learned that his driver had been killed by a sniper shortly after their ride through Syria.

Kerr’s first semester at Arizona was almost perfect. He loved the school, the warm weather and the basketball team. He was a little surprised when he found he could compete with the other players on the team during fall pickup games. “It made me wonder what kind of a team we were going to have,” he said.

The answer: not a very good one. Olson still remembers walking off the floor after his first practice and looking at his assistants who had migrated west with him from Iowa and saying, “My God, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

The Wildcats struggled. Kerr, though, was delighted when he quickly fit in as the first guard off the bench. Even though his defense and quickness were suspect, he gave the team a boost with his long-range shooting when he came in. Life could not have been much better.

Then, on Jan. 18, 1984, Kerr was awakened shortly after midnight by a telephone call in his dorm room. His brother’s nightmare had become a reality: Malcolm Kerr had been shot and killed by assassins outside his office in Beirut.

The next couple of days are a blur in Kerr’s memory. He reached his mother several hours after the initial phone call and learned that she and his younger brother Andy were unharmed.

For the next two days the only escape from his grief came on the basketball court. When Olson asked him if he wanted to play two days after the tragedy, Kerr said absolutely.

“It was the only thing to do,” he said. “My dad had more to do with my being a basketball player and being at Arizona than anyone. He would have been very disappointed in me if I hadn’t played. What’s more, there was nothing I could do at that point. I knew my family was safe. I was going to the memorial service the next day. It just would not have made sense not to play.”

A moment of silence for Malcolm Kerr was planned before the tipoff. Initially, Olson planned to keep the team off the floor until it was over, but Kerr came to him and said he needed to be there. Olson decided the whole team should be there with him.

It is difficult to imagine the emotion of the evening. The opponent was Arizona State. Yet few people in McKale Center that night were really focused on basketball. The violence of the shooting that had taken place thousands of miles away was tangible to everyone as they stood in silence. Kerr broke down during the moment of silence, as did many others.

Eight minutes into the game, Olson sent him in as part of Arizona’s normal rotation. The first time Kerr touched the ball--18 seconds after coming in--he was open. Instinct took over. He shot from 20 feet. Swish. It is unlikely that a shot to win a national championship was as dramatic as that one.

“I’m not sure I can describe the feeling in the building that night,” Olson said. “All I know is I cried, and I certainly wasn’t alone.”

The legend of Steve Kerr was born that night. He scored 12 points--shooting 5 of 7from the field--and the Wildcats destroyed a superior Arizona State team, 71-49, for Arizona’s first Pac-10 victory under Olson.

Since that night Kerr has been Tucson’s adopted son. Now, whenever he scores a field goal and the PA announcer screeches, “Steeeeeeeve Kerrrrrr,” 13,000 people screech it right back. Kerr finds the adulation somewhat embarrassing. An outsider, exposed to it for the first time, will find it spine-tingling.

This is a story that still needs an ending.

Kerr became a starter as a sophomore, then moved to point guard as a junior and led a too-young team to the PAC-10 title. Olson had taken Arizona from the bottom of the league to the top in three years.

Kerr improved steadily, especially after moving to point guard. There, his ball-handling skills and his intelligence made up for his lack of quickness.

In the spring of ‘86, Kerr surprised a lot of people when he made the U.S. team for the world championships in Madrid. He became a starter and was enjoying himself immensely until the U.S. played Brazil in the semifinals.

The game was essentially over, the United States leading by 15 when Kerr drove into the lane. He faked, went up and came down wrong. His knee was shattered.

David Robinson, the center on that team, remembers the entire sequence. “When he came down,” Robinson said, “it was one of the most horrifying sounds I’ve ever heard. You knew it was bad right away. We won the game, but I’ve never seen a sadder locker room.”

Tim Taft, the team doctor, told Kerr the truth right away: he had torn ligaments. “He told me,” Kerr said, “that it’s often a career-ending injury.”

That diagnosis was quickly and melodramatically translated by papers in Arizona to mean that Kerr’s career was over. Kerr never believed that. He underwent reconstructive knee surgery and, late in the ’87 season, began working out again, fully intending to play this season as a fifth-year senior.

That is exactly what he has done, leading a now experienced Arizona team to 12 straight victories to start the season, a string that included victories over Michigan, Syracuse and Duke.

That landed the Wildcats at the top of the polls for the first time in school history. They are 28-2, ranked third, and with Kerr shooting close to 60% from the field, setting the league record with 93 three-point field goals and averaging an amazing one turnover per game, they clinched the Pac-10 title weeks ago.

If the script is done correctly, this story ends in Kansas City on the night of April 4. Arizona, trailing by one in the NCAA final, brings the ball down, works it around. The clock runs down. The ball goes to Kerr. He shoots from 20 feet and . . .

To learn the ending, you’ll just have to see the movie.