COMMENTARY : Brown’s Restless Feet Are Itching Once Again

The most bizarre and the most completely understandable thing about the San Antonio Spurs is that ultimately--down deep where he lives with himself--their coach wants nothing to do with them. This is bizarre because the Spurs are simply the most exhilarating team to be around, a young and hungry collection of talent that could very well end up winning the NBA title. Now. This year. Just one season removed from winning 21 games.

And yet, this is completely understandable too, because the coach is Larry Brown. You know Larry Brown. He’s the man whose habit is unhappiness and whose feet always itch. The man who has never seen a job he didn’t somehow covet, who has made a career of winning and moving on and winning and moving on. He has, really, never stopped.

Back and forth he’s hopped over the last 18 years, from the pros to college to the pros to college back to the pros all over again. Now that he’s with the Spurs--a marvelous team that with Wednesday’s 132-122 win over Golden State has improved 29 games over last season -- his heart beats for something else again.

“I still believe it,” says Larry Brown. “I’m a college coach and that’s where I belong.”

Now, understand something. Brown isn’t saying he’s unhappy where he is. He likes his players, he likes his coaches, he likes the thought that this team could win it all. But last year wasn’t like this. Last year Brown saw things in the pro game that he didn’t like. It wasn’t just that the Spurs lost. Brown had never had a losing season before, hadn’t lost 61 games his entire five years at Kansas, in fact, but he had prepared himself to lose last year.

But what he hadn’t prepared himself for was the new breed of pro, the kind he never saw when he coached the Nets in 1983. The money has become so much bigger than it was, he says, and the players simply aren’t thinking about learning the game like they once did.

Teaching the game--that is what Larry Brown loves most. And the travel and the egos wouldn’t let him teach. He feuded publicly with guard Alvin Robertson. He felt sure owner Red McCombs would fire him.

“It was the worst,” he says. “Oh, man. The losing is something I expected; I thought I could deal with that. The thing that was so hard is that it was the first time I had a team that I didn’t think the guys felt I was helping them get better. I don’t think most of the guys really cared.

“But it’s not the players fault; it’s my fault. My job is to get the team prepared to play. I’m embarrassed by what happened last year and the fact that I was responsible for that. That could kill me.”

It didn’t kill him. But it made him wonder if he could do it anymore. He is being paid $700,000 a year. He’d had nine winning seasons as an NBA coach before last year, and none losing. But last year shook him.

“I didn’t know if I was ready to deal with that, if I had the ability to be a good pro coach,” he says. “I went through a lot of self-doubt last year.

“It was the worst. I am a ... I do believe I’m a college coach and better suited to that. I’m thrilled that I had a chance to stay because I really believed I was going to get fired. I think, to be honest, if I didn’t have the kind of contract I have, I’d have been gone. Bam.”

He wasn’t gone. Instead, the Spurs unloaded nearly everyone else; only Willie Anderson and Frank Brickowski remain from last year’s team. But Brown took something with him from the experience. “I realized,” he says, “what kind of guys I need to coach.”

Young. Teachable. Hungry. Selfless. Those are the kinds of guys he feels he has now. But last year, he missed three shootarounds and two practices because he was watching some NCAA games. This year, he says, he almost left on a day off to see UCLA play Kansas.

He has always wandered. Even when things were at their best -- in fact, almost always at the precise time when his life had just taken some new golden step -- Brown found reason to be dissatisfied and left.

He loved coaching at UCLA in the early ‘80s. He calls getting that job “the biggest thrill I ever had.” He took the Bruins to the Final Four in his first year there, stayed one more season and left. Doing that, he says, was the biggest mistake in his career.

But, when he had the chance to go back to UCLA -- this happened, of course, just days after his Kansas team had rolled to the NCAA championship in 1988, when he again had no reason to be unhappy where he was -- Brown made the mistake again. UCLA offered him the job. He said yes. But on the plane back to Lawrence, at the moment he had the opportunity to right that one wrong, Brown changed his mind.

“It came at a bad time,” he says. “We had just won the NCAA and I asked UCLA just to give me some time. They were so anxious just to get me signed. I told them, ‘Hey, I can’t go tell my team and go back for a parade and a banquet,’ and they just kept pushing me and pushing me . . . and I . . . I panicked.”

He is asked whether he can only be happy when he is unhappy. He says he’d rather be happy. He also admits he works better with things all askew. He knows what people say about him.

“People say, ‘Well, he always wants things to be perfect, that’s why he leaves and goes somewhere else,’ ” he says. “And I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting everything to be perfect. Maybe I should be realistic and realize that not everything is exactly the way you want it. I think I’m learning that. That’s another way last year helped me.”

It didn’t help enough.

His team is listening and winning. People are paying attention. Life is wonderful for Larry Brown right now.

Consider this a warning.