{"id":718499,"date":"2026-04-26T10:48:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T10:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/718499\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T10:48:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T10:48:32","slug":"has-steve-kerr-had-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/718499\/","title":{"rendered":"Has Steve Kerr Had Enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plainspokenness is an endangered attribute in pro sports. Players and coaches have become maddeningly mealy-mouthed, striving to avoid upsetting agents, sponsors, owners, fans, thin-skinned politicians, and whoever else might object. Not so with the Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who has publicly dubbed<\/a> Donald Trump a \u201cblowhard\u201d who uses \u201cracist, misogynist\u201d words and is \u201cill-suited\u201d to be President. (Trump, for his part, has called<\/a> Kerr a \u201cscared\u201d \u201clittle boy.\u201d) Kerr\u2019s success is as rare as his candor. \u201cI\u2019m the luckiest guy in the N.B.A.\u2019s history,\u201d he said<\/a> last weekend, as his twelfth coaching season came to a close, earlier than desired, during the play-in round. Kerr has won nine N.B.A. championships\u2014more than any franchise but the Lakers and the Celtics\u2014and counted Michael Jordan<\/a>, Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Gregg Popovich, Steph Curry<\/a>, Kevin Durant<\/a>, and Jimmy Butler among his coaches, teammates, and players. Not a bad group of co-workers.<\/p>\n

Butler\u2019s A.C.L. tear, back in January, effectively doomed Kerr\u2019s already slim chances of winning a tenth title with a graying core of star players. Ten rings would put him just three behind Phil Jackson, who was Kerr\u2019s coach on the nineties Chicago Bulls team that became the N.B.A.\u2019s first truly global brand. It was easy to miss Kerr back then\u2014a slim six-foot-three guard coming off the bench, good for a couple of threes, no dunks. Then he hit the game-winner with six seconds left to seal the Bulls\u2019 fifth title, in 1997, and made a daring little joke<\/a> at Jordan\u2019s expense during the subsequent victory parade. \u201cPhil told Michael, he said, \u2018Michael, I want you to take the last shot,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Kerr began. \u201cMichael said, \u2018You know, Phil, I don\u2019t feel real comfortable in these situations. So, maybe we ought to go in another direction. Why don\u2019t we go to Steve?\u2019 So I thought to myself, Well, guess I\u2019ve got to bail Michael out again.\u201d Jordan, famous for taking things personally, just chuckled.<\/p>\n

I met Kerr a few days ago at his modest office in the Chase Center, where the Warriors play, in San Francisco. He had just finished conducting his annual exit interviews with players, staff, and management, following the season\u2019s end. A small wooden placard on his desk read \u201cWINNING IS GOOD\u201d\u2014a joking riff, he explained, on the line from \u201cAnimal House\u201d that \u201cknowledge is good.\u201d The office\u2019s whiteboard walls, frequently covered in a granddaughter\u2019s doodling, noted Kerr\u2019s \u201ccore values\u201d: \u201cCOMPETITIVENESS, JOY, MINDFULNESS, COMPASSION.\u201d There were also a few roller bags, about which Kerr\u2014whose contract just expired, and whose future with the organization is an open question\u2014only said, \u201cIt\u2019s a long story.\u201d Over the course of two hours, we discussed his hopes for next year, his complicated relationship with Draymond Green, the potential benefits of eliminating the three-point shot, and whether he might give politics a try. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t typically sleep in the childhood bedroom of my interview subjects, but your mom, Ann, was kind enough to host me in yours, in L.A., in 2018, when I wrote a piece<\/a> about her for the magazine. Now in her nineties, Ann is the director of the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program in Southern California, a lover of Middle Eastern culture, a morning swimmer, a rope swinger, a memoirist<\/a>, and, as she says, the mother of \u201ctwo Ph.D.s, an M.B.A., & an N.B.A.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Laughs.] That\u2019s her line.<\/p>\n

I was saddened to learn that the house where I stayed, and where you grew up, burned in the Palisades Fire<\/a>. What was your childhood like there?<\/p>\n

Man, what a place to grow up: Pacific Palisades. My dad was a professor of Middle East politics and got the job at U.C.L.A., and we lived in a couple of other houses before my parents found that house. It\u2019s got a panoramic view: Los Angeles all the way up to Malibu and the ocean. It\u2019s amazing. Today there\u2019s no way a professor at U.C.L.A. could afford it. A very different time economically, different time politically.<\/p>\n

Ann mentioned coming home from a weekend away, during your teen-age years, to find that her potted plants smelled like beer.<\/p>\n

That would have been when I was in high school. And, yeah, I may or may not have authorized a party for all my friends and forty or so extra people.<\/p>\n

The family also spent time in Cairo and Beirut, where you were born.<\/p>\n

Mostly in the Palisades with intermittent sabbaticals from my dad. We spent time in, let\u2019s see: a year in Aix-en-Provence, in the South of France, when I was in kindergarten; three years in Cairo. Then back to L.A. When I returned to Cairo, for ninth and tenth grade, my dad was doing research and writing a book and teaching at the American University in Cairo.<\/p>\n

Was there a basketball culture in Cairo then?<\/p>\n

I went to an American prep school called Cairo American College. I still have great friends from there. For ninth and tenth grades, I played on the school team. Every year we would fly to Greece, to Athens, to play in the tournament against other schools in the region. That was the highlight. This would have been, like, 1979, 1980. If there was a basketball gym in the entire country of Egypt, we never found it. So our games were played on dirt courts. Basketball was not really popular in Cairo, but these sporting clubs would field men\u2019s teams and we usually were playing against players a lot older than us. And bigger. But we had the advantage because we all grew up playing basketball. The inverse was true in soccer. The American kids would take on the Egyptian kids at our school and we would just get absolutely destroyed.<\/p>\n

You learned how to shoot in the wind, I guess?<\/p>\n

The wind and the pebbles that were on the dirt courts. Later on, I had to deal with the gaps in the floor at the Boston Garden.<\/p>\n

Your dad, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated by the Islamic Jihad Organization, a wing of Hezbollah, in 1984, in Beirut, where he was the president of the American University of Beirut. He loved the Arab world and attempted to foster cross-cultural respect and understanding. I\u2019m curious what qualities and interests you inherited from him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Plainspokenness is an endangered attribute in pro sports. Players and coaches have become maddeningly mealy-mouthed, striving to avoid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3771],"tags":[7,920,919,329,3824,164,185,935,16932,6,932,863],"class_list":{"0":"post-718499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-bulls","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-bulls","10":"tag-chicago","11":"tag-chicago-bulls","12":"tag-chicagobulls","13":"tag-golden-state-warriors","14":"tag-lebron-james","15":"tag-michael-jordan","16":"tag-n-b-a-national-basketball-association","17":"tag-nba","18":"tag-steph-curry","19":"tag-steve-kerr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116470618776971011","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}