Sports: Larry in Winter

LARRY BROWN IS hard to find on City Line, amid the typical pre-work rush crush: In they go at Delancey Street Bagels, through the double doors, heads upright, shoulders square, moving purposefully to the counter, where, in seemingly one motion, they cup, pour, stir, pay and exit, as though it’s a layup line before a game in the NBA Finals.

There he is — alone, seated at a wobbly table for two, huddled over a newspaper, one hand gripping a recycled cup, looking too reposeful and park-bench for the surrounding chaos. You’d never pick him out as a Hall of Fame coach. Behind him, out a window, there’s a strip-mall parking lot lined with trees with naked limbs and blinking holiday lights, slowed a bit by the season’s first killer cold. Larry Brown, ex-Sixers coach, ex-a-lot-of-places coach, is entering the second winter of his life without a team.

He drinks his coffee, and reads the paper, and then he talks. Brown, ridiculously fit for 67 and ever dashing, even in his Nike basketball attire, came back to Philly in 2006 because his wife and two young children are planted here, because Sixers owner Ed Snider and the since-fired Billy King gave him a murkily defined job as hoop consigliere after his last coaching gig, in New York, ended in disaster. And don’t get him wrong, he’s been counting his blessings — appreciating how, for the first time maybe ever, he’s made friends outside of basketball, the parents of the kids’ friends and the neighbors and such; how he got to experience a traditional Thanksgiving, without being on the road or rushing back from practice; how he doesn’t get riddled with profanity because he preached to a player about an ill-timed shot. But there’s something mournful, something that’s been lost, in all these good things, and you know what’s coming —

“I miss it terribly,” Brown says. He says it more than once this day, the first time he’s spoken at length publicly in almost a year. “I still want to coach. I still have a passion for it. When I go to practice, I still see things. I’m not ready for the end.”

It’s why, after he rides with wife Shelly to take the kids to school, he wanders to practice, some practice, that of a pal or protégé, often at Villanova, where he is headed on this day, and he can’t thank ’Cats coach Jay Wright enough for the lifeline.

It’s ironic, how much Brown needs the connection, because he might be best known — apart from being a great coach, a basketball genius — for leaving teams, for getting out, for moving on. Over the past 35 years, he’d get wooed to a new team, turn it around, and then leave — Brown once quit on three different teams within 50 months, surely a record. He was like a serial dater — there was always a different, or better, opportunity out there. From the Carolinas to Denver to Los Angeles to North Jersey to Lawrence, Kansas, to San Antonio to Indianapolis to Philadelphia to Detroit to New York City.