Sports: Larry in Winter

Recalls equipment manager Scotty Rego: “Coach walked by and saw it bundled up, inside out, like a kid would leave it, and said, ‘Aw, c’mon, man, we can’t leave it there like that.’ He had me go find a hanger and he hung up the suit, pressing out the wrinkles with his hand.”

In the end, according to Billy King, who deftly played Brown’s conduit to the players, translating the coach’s messages, “Larry helped make Allen, and Allen made Larry a better coach, and I made sure they didn’t kill each other.”

Is it any wonder that Brown says if he were to write his memoirs, the title would be I’ve Been Motherfucked 1,200 Times? Because, he says, he coached Allen Iverson for 600 games, took him out of a game two times, and both times, Iverson called him a motherfucker 600 times.

YET WHAT HAS dogged Brown is not so much dustups with players like Iverson or Marbury as abandoning those he really does get close to.

Brown had a player on the New Jersey Nets once, Buck Williams, who idolized him. Williams bought a house near Brown, dressed like Brown, drove a Mercedes because Brown did, which earned Williams a nickname among his teammates: Buck Brown. But in 1983, Williams’s second year, Brown got a late-season call from Kansas, recruiting him to leave the pros to coach college, and Brown quit New Jersey just before the playoffs. Buck Williams was devastated. “It was like Jesus Christ was leading you to the Promised Land,” he told Sports Illustrated, “and all of a sudden you looked around the desert and he was gone.”

There are a lot of stories like that. It’s as if Brown doesn’t understand the power of the connections he craves. He seems mystified as to why an owner like Bill Davidson of the Pistons would be so flummoxed by Brown’s contact with the Cavaliers while the Pistons were making a playoff run. In fact, Brown denies that the flirtation with Cleveland amounted to anything. “I knew those guys [with the Cavaliers], and they asked my advice,” he says. “I told them I’d do whatever I could to help them, and it got totally out of whack.”

“He was always like a little tornado,” Donnie Walsh, a longtime friend and Pacers CEO, once told SI. “He never calculated, he never saw the effects his mistakes had on people.”

Herein lies the curse of Larry Brown. He was never a carpetbagger selling potions, because what he sold, however high-maintenance he was, worked. Undeniably, he can resurrect a team, college or pro, though he’s always winking at the next job, like when he flirted with the University of North Carolina, his alma mater, while he was here in Philly.