Motta Presides Over a Youth Movement in Sacramento

Dick Motta dismembered his first basketball team in a one-horse town called Grace, Idaho.

Motta moved with a heavy hand in Grace. He learned that five members of the Grace High School basketball team had been drinking. He was their coach and they were his players, but they had betrayed his trust by breaking the rules. He kicked them off the team.

“The town hated me for it,” Motta said. “People put chicken heads and whiskey bottles in front of my house. I had to go to the neighboring town, Soda, to get a haircut, because that’s all the barber in Grace wanted to talk about.”

More than 30 years have passed since Motta used radical surgery to repair the problem in Grace. The coach didn’t look back. In the last three decades, he has made a remarkable ascent to the peak of basketball success.

He won high school and college championships in Idaho and Utah. He won an NBA title in Washington. He built the Dallas Mavericks from scratch. And on Jan. 4 he was hired as the Sacramento Kings’ savior.

Now beginning his first full season with the Kings, Motta is the winningest active coach in professional basketball with 824 victories.

He also is the NBA’s losingest active coach, a proud man who has walked off the court second-best 788 times.

Though losing has become a way of life for Motta, he has not become accustomed to it. He dislikes keeping company with people who shrug off defeat.

Each time his team loses, he searches the eyes of his players. He listens to their voices. If they seem indifferent or cavalier, he makes a note. If they get accustomed to losing, he falls back on the solution he embraced in Grace. He tries to kick them off the team.

If consistency were the key to winning, Motta’s NBA record would be 1,612-0. Motta has changed little since he left Grace. He still lives for practice sessions. The plays he shouts during games are the same--”automatics,” he calls them--maneuvers that swirl around his forwards and send the big men racing inside or outside or curling around the key.

“Yes, it’s all basically the same,” Motta said. “It works.”

Motta is a devout believer in himself and his system. When his players follow his rules, victory is ordained. The coach can compensate for inferior talent as long as the talent listens and believes. The 824 victories testify to that.

And the 788 losses? They testify to something else--maybe a memory lapse by a point guard or a center who can’t follow directions. But never the system. And rarely the coach.

Since 1953, when Motta bought two suits, piled into a used Chevy and began coaching at Grace Junior High School, his unshakable belief in himself has allowed him to survive a profession laden with arrogance, selfishness, greed and brutal competition.

Motta’s belief in himself has left him vulnerable. When he felt his confidence challenged and sensed the wolves closing in, he ducked away from the battle if he couldn’t kick the wolves off the team.

Soon after taking over the Kings, he began wearing the championship ring he won with the Washington Bullets in 1978. He said he wanted to show his players that winning could provide jewels.

One of those players, Danny Ainge, smirked and said, “If he wants to know about winning championships, he should talk to me. He’s won only one. I’ve got two of those rings.”

Four months later, Ainge, the former Boston Celtic, was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Motta quit jobs with the Chicago Bulls and Washington Bullets when the clubs began to sputter. When the Dallas Mavericks refused to let him get rid of Mark Aguirre, a player who didn’t follow the rules, Motta retired to the cabin he keeps in Fish Haven, Idaho, on the shore of Bear Lake.

He abandoned retirement when the Kings dangled the promise of autonomy above his head. Down and out and cursed by miserable luck, the Kings gave Motta a final chance to show that his system worked. At 59, Dick Motta still had something to prove.

“He has absolute confidence in what he’s doing,” Orlando Magic president Pat Williams said. “If people don’t agree, he figures it’s him against the world.”

Williams, who has known Motta since the late 1960s, when he was Motta’s boss as general manager of the Bulls, added, “He’s always looking for a battle to fight, a windmill to chase. He’ll be that way until the day he dies.”

Nothing surprises me,” Motta will say when asked if something caught him off guard. In some circles, Motta’s immunity from surprise would be regarded with suspicion. Some psychologists would argue that a person who can’t be surprised is either dead, prescient or blind to life’s wonders.

Motta’s refusal to be surprised reflects 37 years in the game. He has seen much in his time but contends that nothing has matched a feat he witnessed in 1959. That year, two seasons after kicking off the five inebriated players, he coached Grace to the Idaho state championship.

“We lived a life that week,” he said.

Grace is a fly-speck of a town, considered a rural backwater by sophisticates in Pocatello. Organized in the traditional Mormon grid common to communities in southern Idaho and Utah, Grace is a beautiful and harsh place, where life revolves around the harvest and the Latter-day Saints temple.

Grace was an ideal launching pad for Motta. The son of an Italian immigrant who toiled on a truck farm in Midvale, Utah, Motta learned to respect hard work, self-sufficiency and the unsympathetic laws of nature that farmers must endure.

His parents, still living, provided formidable genes: an old-country Italian Catholic father and a strong-willed Mormon mother, simple yet highly disciplined people. The Motta home didn’t have a telephone or hot running water. Messages were delivered via the neighborhood grocery store.

“When the grocer came over, we knew somebody had died,” Motta said.

Today, Motta is plainly his parents’ son. He calls himself a “half-Mormon” and expresses admiration for the religion’s historical work ethic and family support system while sipping sweet cocktails in hotel lounges after work.

Motta needed only a few seasons of back-breaking work on the family vegetable farm to decide he wanted an indoor career. He loved sports--not to mention the hot showers and clean towels enjoyed by athletes--and decided as a teenager to become a coach.

Coaching--not playing--would be Motta’s ticket to the basketball world, because he couldn’t play the game. He tried out with predictable determination but never survived the final cut after his junior year in high school.

“The coach kicked all the seniors off,” Motta said, reflecting on his own fate. “He wanted to start over again with juniors.”

The inability to play was a burden that Motta would carry for years, according to Phil Johnson, the former Kings coach who now works as an assistant with the Utah Jazz.

Johnson was a seventh-grader at Grace Junior High when Motta arrived. He played for Motta at Grace High School when the coach returned from two years of Air Force service. Johnson eventually became Motta’s assistant at Weber State and with the Chicago Bulls.

“He had an inferiority complex because he never played the game,” Johnson said. “It took him a long time to overcome that. He looked at it like some kind of handicap.”

Homer Williams wasn’t concerned about handicaps when he gave Motta his first job. As Grace’s school principal, Williams needed a coach to replace Monte Nyman, who was leaving on his Mormon mission.

Nyman was Motta’s friend. He knew Motta was eager to quit the farm and enter coaching. Motta was fresh from Utah State University when Nyman introduced him to Williams. The principal said Motta could start at once.

“Dick was a winner from the start,” Williams, now 81, said. “He was the most intense coach I ever had. Even then, Dick was his own man. I never had to do anything for him, except stay out of his way.”

Motta settled into his life’s occupation in Grace. He met his wife, Janice, and started a family. He weathered storms that strike when high school coaches kick stars off small-town teams, and he won the state title.

By 1959 Motta was ready to test his skills at a higher level. He had tentatively accepted a job at a high school in Utah when he was offered a job at Weber Junior College. Motta knew Weber intended to become a four-year school. He took the job when Janice promised him a future of regret if he allowed the opportunity to pass.

“I told Homer I wanted a $1,000 raise,” Motta said. “I was making $4,000 a year then. I knew they couldn’t pay it, so I left.”

Weber College was good to Motta, and Motta was good to Weber College. As promised, the school became a four-year institution. Motta encouraged the booster club. He became an adept recruiter and polished his coaching skills, winning three conference titles in the six seasons.

Among his disciples was Johnson, who transferred to Weber from Utah State. While playing under Motta at Grace, Johnson had decided to follow in the coach’s footsteps.

“Dick took to me early, because he saw a lot of himself in me,” Johnson said. “It was a way of life to be involved with his teams. He was very strict. I didn’t break any training rules in those days.”

By 1968, the basketball program at Weber State was producing victories like an assembly line. Weber routinely defeated bigger schools with better players.

Stories about Motta’s success spread. One day, the coach received a visit from Dick Klein, owner of the Chicago Bulls, an NBA expansion team.

Klein had heard about Motta from a young Bulls executive named Jerry Colangelo, who sat in the bleachers and watched Motta coach a game in Idaho.

“He was very organized,” recalled Colangelo, now president of the Phoenix Suns. “Dick Motta was one of the most competitive people I’d ever seen.”

Motta talked to Klein, but he wasn’t interested in the NBA. He had never attended a pro game. A memo from Weber State’s athletic director changed his mind and turned his life upside down.

“I had brought some of our kids to an amusement park, and the athletic director told me it might be a violation of NCAA rules,” Motta said. “He wanted the kids to have receipts. I said, ‘How can they get receipts from a roller coaster?’

“A few days later, I got a memo from him. I hated memos. It said we had been in violation of the rules. At that instant, the phone rang and it was Dick Klein, asking me to coach the Bulls. I wadded up the memo and threw it over my shoulder and said, ‘If that memo hits the trash can, I’ll take the job.’

“It bounced off a chair, a desk and the wall before it went in. I called my wife and told her to sell the house.”

Motta didn’t take Chicago by storm. The Bulls sold 38 season tickets in 1968, his first season. People called the coach “Dick Weber from Motta State.”

But Motta was blessed. He had talented players who accepted his system. Guard Jerry Sloan was arguably the league’s toughest defender and a man around whom to build a team.

After a poor first season, Motta’s Bulls reached the playoffs six times. Chicago fans took notice of the hard-working squad and began to fill Chicago Stadium.

Despite the club’s potential, the ownership was in disarray. Team personnel ran to the bank with their paychecks. The Bulls were sold in Motta’s second year.

“They offered to sell me the Bulls for $600,000,” Motta said. “It would have been a great investment, but I was broke. I was getting $20,000 a year. My players were getting $23,000.”

After eight seasons in Chicago, Motta decided to move. Sloan was ready to retire. The Bulls were slipping. In 1976 Motta accepted a job with Washington, an up-and-coming team looking for a coach to drive it to the top.

“Things were on the way down in Chicago,” Johnson said. “Dick knew when to get out. He knew Washington had Wes Unseld, just like Chicago had Sloan. Any time you have a guy like that, you have leadership. That’s half the battle, and he knew it.”

Motta, Unseld and the Bullets won the NBA championship in 1978. The talent base was shallow, carried on Unseld’s broad shoulders. One year before Unseld retired in 1981, Motta knew it was time to move again. He headed to Dallas, where the Mavericks had been created as an expansion franchise.

“I don’t know if I was fired or allowed to resign at Washington,” Motta said. “I was intrigued by the offer in Dallas.”

Motta started with nothing in Dallas. His strength was owner Donald Carter, a wealthy, teetotaling born-again Christian who preferred handshakes to written contracts, took the gospel seriously and wore a cowboy hat inside Reunion Arena.

Carter gave Motta the authority to build the Mavericks into a fundamentalist powerhouse, Texas-style. He drafted big men and taught them to work hard.

Motta made mistakes along the way. He drafted Dale Ellis in 1983 and three years later traded him to Seattle for Al Wood. Motta was convinced Ellis couldn’t succeed in the NBA. Ellis made the All-Star team in 1989.

Motta used the No. 1 pick in the 1981 draft on Aguirre. Before the draft, Carter spent several hours alone with Aguirre. Carter gave Aguirre his blessing.

Aguirre wasn’t Sloan or Unseld. He wasn’t Motta’s kind of player. Immensely talented, Aguirre had a star’s mentality. He believed the Mavericks should revolve around him. He didn’t believe in bleeding for Dick Motta. The coach wanted to kick him off the team.

Carter stopped Motta. He told the coach to work with the star, to understand Aguirre. Frustration blossomed.

When the Mavericks were embarrassed in the 1987 playoffs, eliminated by Seattle in four games, Motta was booed off the floor. To Motta, the message was clear: Aguirre had defeated him. Motta quit and headed to Fish Haven.

“He has mellowed, just like everyone mellows,” Kip Motta said. Now an assistant coach with Seattle, Kip Motta, 32, is a younger version of his father.

“His way of looking at things has never changed. It’s exactly the same as it’s always been. He doesn’t let things bother him that he can’t control. He always gives me this little speech, where he tells me not to chase the demons. When things are beyond his control, he just doesn’t bother with them.”

Things were almost beyond control in Sacramento when Motta replaced Jerry Reynolds. The players didn’t know what to think. They resented Motta’s heavy-handed tactics, shaking their heads when the coach junked their open-court attack and inserted his old half-court system from Grace.

“Last year was the worst basketball situation I’ve ever been in,” Motta said. “I mean ever.”

Several players marked time until summer, when Motta dismantled the team. He traded Pervis Ellison, Rodney McCray and Ainge. He allowed Harold Pressley and Vinny Del Nergo to move without compensation to Europe. He amassed four draft picks and vowed, “We’ll be better off with rookies. They’ll want to play here.”

“The thing about Dick is, he’s such a competitive person,” Atlanta Hawks coach Bob Weiss said. Weiss played for Motta in Chicago and coached for him in Dallas.

“I wasn’t surprised when those things happened in Sacramento. I would have been surprised if they hadn’t happened.”

Motta placed distance between himself and the final draft decisions, perhaps as a self-defense mechanism. He outlined his thoughts for Reynolds, the club’s personnel director, and headed to Fish Haven.

The draft selections were handled by Reynolds and scouts Scotty Stirling, Bill Berry and Jim Hadnot. Motta trusted their judgment.

The scouts did their homework. They found players suited for Motta’s style.

During training camp, the rookies injected Motta with renewed enthusiasm for competition. They carried him back to places like Grace and Weber State.

Standing at center court in the camp gym at Yuba College, Motta played the role he was born to play. He dared, threatened and coaxed the players into giving him their trust. He taught them the business of competition, ruling over them like a schoolmaster.

“Run the play,” he said one day in a calm voice. “Run it like we taught you. Make an old man happy for once in his life.”