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Wright Thompson
Multiple Authors
STEVE KERR WALKED into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire with a secret. Win or lose, he’d decided to retire as head coach of the Golden State Warriors. It was a Tuesday morning in mid-April, the day before the team’s first postseason play-in game in Los Angeles. When this season ended, his 12-year run with the Golden State Warriors would end, too. In the airy hotel restaurant behind the concierge desk, Kerr gave his name and room number, 516 — “Johnny Bench Joe Montana” — and a hostess showed us to a table by the window. He looked around and lowered his voice.
“I think it’s over,” he said, almost mouthing the words. His sweatsuit separated him from the businessmen eating breakfast in suits and ties nearby. He put the odds at 95 percent. In the last few days he’d grown more certain. The waiter took his order, the California Breakfast. Normally he’s cheerful as a sunrise but this morning he seemed melancholy. He was tired at the end of a disappointing season and mourning the fraying connections. A great basketball team stands on a shared feeling more than strategy or scouting. The team lives as long as the feeling lives and when it’s gone, not only is it impossible to recapture, it’s hard to even remember.
The waiter brought Kerr’s eggs. Sitting in yet another hotel breakfast room at the end of yet another long season, he sifted through memories. Like the night Klay Thompson scored 37 points in a quarter, his teammates delirious at the sight of it, Steph Curry running up and down the sidelines as the crowd got louder and louder. “It felt like we were in the presence of God,” Steve said, and when I asked why sometimes players reach a flow state, he said it was more than optimized mechanics.
“I think there’s some mysterious spiritual thing.”
LAST NIGHT HE DROVE from Beverly Hills to Draymond Green’s house for a team dinner, a last supper of sorts, where a local pitmaster smoked brisket, lamb chops, pork shoulder and burnt ends. The ride took him past his old junior high school. His memory of those halls led him back to when he and his family lived in an actual house on a hill, with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and Los Angeles. He grew up bouncing between Pacific Palisades and Cairo as the family followed his father’s career as an American expert on the complex history and politics of the world’s tinderbox. In 1982, Malcolm Kerr became president of the American University of Beirut. Steve didn’t think it sounded safe but felt too young and shy to say anything in the family meeting. His silence in that meeting combined with the quiet in the car as he headed toward the team barbecue. Years fell away. His childhood home burned in the Palisades Fire last year. Only memories remain.
Coming out of high school, no major college coach thought Kerr could play at the next level. Gonzaga brought him up for a tryout but their point guard, John Stockton, embarrassed him. The only two interested schools were Cal State Fullerton and Arizona, which at the time had a long history of mediocre basketball. First-year coach Lute Olson believed he could change the culture. Kerr chose Arizona. He struggled in practice and knew it. His teammates openly wondered how he’d earned a scholarship. Olson himself admitted later that he planned to recruit someone else to replace Kerr the following season. Steve was barely playing, averaging just under 6 points a game. Then his life broke in two.
On January 18, 1984, an Iranian-sponsored gunman from Hezbollah shot Malcolm Kerr in the head. As a high-profile figure, he had been targeted as part of efforts to drive Americans out of Lebanon. The four Kerr children were spread across the globe when it happened. Steve’s mom couldn’t get through from Beirut. Steve’s sister, Susan Kerr van de Ven, told veteran sportswriter and Kerr biographer Scott Howard-Cooper that Steve was the only one of the Kerr children who was alone when the news came and “he was just a boy.” A family friend, Vahe Simonian, finally reached him in his dorm room at Arizona.
The phone rang at 3 a.m. He answered in the dark.
“Your father has been shot,” Simonian said.
Even 42 years later, Kerr tells the story in a kind of stilted monotone.
Steve asked if he was OK.
There was a long pause.
Finally Simonian spoke.
“Your father was a great man,” he said.
Kerr ran downstairs in the dorm, hysterical, pounding on the door of two teammates. Then he went and sat alone outside on the curb.
“On Speedway Boulevard,” he said, remembering the cold concrete and the empty street.
He told me he started walking. He told me he hasn’t slowed down since. Around town, as word of what happened spread, players and coaches rushed to his side. Basketball didn’t matter, but the basketball team did. Olson told Kerr to step away, to take as much time and space as he needed. The team’s next game, at home against rival Arizona State, was two days later. Steve said he wanted to play. That playing was the only time he wasn’t thinking about his dad. Olson told Steve he didn’t need to come out for the pregame moment of silence. Steve said he wanted to be with his team. He stood in the line and wiped his eyes. The game began. He didn’t start but with 12:58 left in the first half, Olson subbed him in. Kerr hit a 25-footer. Swish. He hit a 15-footer. Swish. He made a third. The public address announcer stretched out his name, bellowing, “Steeeeeve Kerrrrr.”
The crowd shouted back like a revival call and response. “Steeeeeve Kerrrrr!” Arizona State called a timeout and an Arizona manager named Todd Walsh told me later that the roof lifted off the McKale Center. Kerr sat on the bench and Walsh tried to hand him a towel or his warmup top. Kerr shook him off. Walsh took his spot behind the huddle, looking into the stands, where the front row of fans stood almost on top of the team. He looked into their faces and saw tears. He heard them cheer, a building roar, manic and hungry to heal. Kerr finished with a career-high 12 points and got a standing ovation when Olson took him out with 1:39 left. Walsh said he felt like the arena formed “a cocoon” around Steve.
You can draw a line that night. On one side, the son — the boy — the life interrupted. On the other, the player, the teammate, the man safe inside the simplicity of a season. Now, he thought it might be time to leave the cocoon behind. The Warriors had a meeting in 10 minutes, on the mezzanine level of the hotel, and then maybe only one more game. The waiter brought the check. Kerr shook his head. “What we had is gone,” he said, “but we’re trying to hang on to it. I don’t know if anybody really knows if it exists anymore.”
HE FIRST TALKED about retirement last June, after the 2025 season. The Warriors had been beaten in the second round of the playoffs, after Curry went down with an injury. Kerr had been down to Mexico on his annual surfing trip and in a few weeks, his coaches would meet for the preseason kickoff retreat. We met for lunch at a little café in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. He ordered a peppermint tea. The waiter slipped across the quiet floor towards the counter.
“My wife and I have been talking about it a lot,” Kerr said. “I have a year left on my contract.”
Maybe one more season. Maybe two. When Steph Curry and Draymond Green leave, the franchise deserves a clean start, he said. Maybe he should have walked away already. “We are one injury from completely falling apart,” he said as the waiter returned to take our order.
Kerr loves the game and its history. He’s an obsessive sports fan and has been watching the last acts of sporting lives for the past 40 years. It’s often ugly. The final years of Lute Olson’s life were not the victory lap they should have been. Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire. His friends used to grill him about MJ.
“Why doesn’t he go out on top?”
“Because he can’t,” Kerr told them.
For the past few years, Kerr has watched his mentor, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, struggle through this same decision. Pop once called Steve to tell him he’d finally decided to retire. Steve congratulated him on a Hall of Fame career. A week later Pop signed an extension with San Antonio. Popovich finally officially quit six weeks before our lunch, six months after a stroke diminished him physically. People who loved him had to show him the door, as gently as possible. That hurt Steve. He respects Popovich so much. He loved playing for him and coaching with him. He once told Gregg he was the finest man he’d ever known and thanked him for all he’d done for him. Pop smiled and said his feet were made of clay like everyone else’s. Steve didn’t believe it then. Now he does.
“I realized he couldn’t do it,” Kerr said. “He couldn’t walk away.”
I asked how he’d avoided the trap. He laughed.
“I’m sitting here wondering,” he said.
He laughed at himself again.
“How am I gonna feel exactly a year from now? Maybe two years from now? Because the job itself is so addictive. … You wanna trust yourself but also be suspicious of your own motives. You don’t want to walk away too early but you don’t want to walk away too late. And you worry about what your life is gonna feel like … .”
“What do you do the first morning?” I asked.
“Exactly. You ever see “The Hurt Locker”? You remember when the guy goes into the grocery store?”
The waiter stopped at our table. He called Kerr “Coach.”
“I’m gonna do the patty melt,” Steve said.
The waiter turned to me but before I could order, Steve caught his eye and switched to a fried chicken sandwich.
“I changed my mind,” he said.
TWO MONTHS LATER, just before the start of this season, he started a new therapy program for his back. He called the severity of the pain over the past 12 years his “deep, dark secret.” The worst part of his chronic condition was the pressure building behind his eyes. The migraines could level him. He’d always been casual about his body, he realizes now, taking his physical life for granted. When he retired from playing, he threw himself into a steady diet of golf, mixing in surfing and playing volleyball and basketball with his kids. He played a lot of tennis on hard courts. He ignored the pain in his knees and back.
“That’s my own hubris,” he said.
The toughest battle of his life started during Game 5 of his first NBA Finals as a head coach in 2015. He tweaked his back standing up on the bench. He ignored it, coached through the pain, feeling invincible. They won the title in six games over the Cleveland Cavaliers, his sixth title after winning five as a player, and in the weeks following the championship he played golf and beach volleyball. His back continued to hurt. A doctor offered a surgical solution that he said would have him rehabbed and ready for the start of training camp. After the operation, Kerr felt better for about 10 days then got hit by a strange headache, similar to migraines he’d suffered since around 13. Neck pain followed. Some doctors suspected the surgeon had accidentally nicked the protective membrane around Kerr’s spine which caused a leak of fluid. To this day the cause of his pain remains a mystery. He was “in agony,” as he said later, and in just his second year of a dream job, took a leave of absence. He spent many of his days in his family’s second house in San Diego, away from his team, barely able to get out of bed. The Warriors kept rolling without him while his wife, Margot, lived on the internet searching for new treatments for leaking spinal fluid.
He went to every doctor imaginable, a search for relief that would continue for a decade, flying up to Mayo, or down to Duke, or even to England for stem-cell therapy not approved in the United States. Nothing worked. In January of 2016 he returned to the team, leading the Warriors to an NBA-record 73 regular-season wins and taking them back to the finals, where they lost to the Cavaliers after being up three games to one. He made his health mostly off-limits in interviews.
One day his phone buzzed. It was Tiger Woods, who’d gotten his number from a mutual friend. Woods knew a lot about chronic pain.
“Did he have advice that worked?” I asked.
“No,” Kerr said, “but we commiserated!”
The pressure in his head, right behind his eyes, mimicked the symptoms of papilledema. Oftentimes it felt like a huge vise cranking down on his temples. He got a full neuro workup from an expert at UC San Francisco, which came back totally normal. Three different ophthalmologists found no evidence of anything. It made him feel like he was going crazy.
He kept his pain private, wanting some piece of his increasingly public life to remain his alone. Privacy became a critical part of retaining his humanity, he said. After a lifetime in a supporting role, he finally understood what his more famous and successful teammates and coaches had dealt with during their prime. The Warriors won back-to-back titles over Cleveland in 2017 and 2018, his seventh and eighth. Three in four years. Two contrasting feelings were playing themselves out in him through that run, shaping him. He can see it now in hindsight. The act of coaching, which meant connecting deeply to the interior lives of his players, and allowing them to connect with him, was breaking open cracks in the walls he’d put up between himself and his traumatic memories. At the same time, his deteriorating physical life was stealing from him the movement and grind through which he’d most effectively managed that trauma over the years.
“I have a sense of humility about me,” he said, “but it didn’t translate to how I treated my body and myself. I’m paying for it now. I went to the Giants game the other day. I’ve gotten to know the manager Bob Melvin really well. He showed me the batting cages.”
“Hey, you wanna step in?” Melvin asked.
Kerr moaned in mock agony as he remembered it, sitting at a café near the commercial fishing marina in San Francisco, groaning and twisting in his chair like he’d been hit with a baseball bat.
“Yes, yes, yes! I could go out to center field to shag flies … I just miss the act of movement and flow and that zen you feel.”
He’d been in pain for 11 years now. On some level he’d given up on relief. Then this offseason, while on vacation in France, he listened to a podcast with psychotherapist and back pain expert Nicole Sachs. She talked about her work with NBA star Michael Porter Jr., who like Steve has had three back surgeries. That got Kerr’s attention and reminded him of a book he’d read by Alan Gordon, called “The Way Out.” Several years ago, he’d made significant progress on his pain with Gordon. Both Gordon and Sachs expanded on the work of Dr. John Sarno, who believed that chronic pain like Kerr’s came from unresolved, buried trauma, and the pain was the mind’s way of crying out for help. It’s called tension myositis syndrome, in which emotional stress causes physical responses. Kerr had discovered Sarno a decade ago and had corresponded with Gordon a few years back. Now, listening to Sachs’ podcast, the ideas had come back and had somehow hit him differently. His personality type of a sensitive perfectionist fit the mold of a TMS sufferer, and when he read Sachs’ book — it opened with a C.S. Lewis quote: “It is easier to say my tooth is aching than to say my heart is broken.” — he believed the treatment might work for him.
After an introduction from Porter, Sachs and Kerr started speaking directly. She gave him homework and on the eve of the season he started her program. The treatment involved setting a timer for 20 minutes every morning and then journaling, about trauma, about anger, shame and hatred. When the timer ran out, Kerr followed Sachs’ instructions and erased whatever he’d written and then would sit still and take a breath and begin a meditation, alone in the quiet of his emptying mind for no less than 10 minutes. Then he would stand, and breathe it out and go to coach his team.
Act 2: The 82
KERR HAD CALLED a meeting with his staff when the 2025-26 season schedule was released, feeling the obstacles between the Warriors and a playoff berth. The two most important voices in the room belonged to the travel guy and the performance guy, who needed to figure out how to move an aging team around the country, night after night, with a chance to win.
Kerr circled the opening 17 games, including 13 on the road and five back-to-backs. They played three games in the first four days of the season.
“That’s a pretty rough start,” someone in the room said.
They won the first two games. The third game was in Portland. One of his preseason fears had been that the Warriors dynasty would be eulogized one injury report and one exhausted aging star at a time. That would come terrifyingly true in that third game. “We got destroyed,” Kerr said a few weeks later. “I think we turned it over 25 times. I regretted not resting all our stars that night.”
The league won’t let him rest Curry and Jimmy Butler if the game is on national television. If a player has made an All-Star team or an All-NBA team in the previous three years, they must be injured to sit out. Designated stars, they’re called.
“This is the first year that Draymond is not a designated star,” he said.
“Is he happy about that or a little pissed?” I asked.
“He might be a little pissed,” he said with a smile.
Kerr wanted something from this season, even if he couldn’t quite articulate it in the beginning. He sensed Steph and Dray wanted it, too. They all missed what Steph calls “meaningful basketball.” They have these memories of the championship seasons that can be accessed only by experiencing them anew, as if the feeling itself unlocks some mental vault, and when their careers end, those feelings will slowly move out of reach. At the same time, those memories are themselves the enemy of this last act, which requires redefined goals, the reward structure shifting from external to internal. Everything in Steve’s life was pushing him inward. They weren’t chasing titles, only the feeling of saddling up one last time together, wanting most of all to feel justified when the ride is done. This was Steve’s 30th start to a new season but it was different than all the others, which made every step forward uncertain and new.
He believed they would have won a second playoff series last year if Steph hadn’t gotten hurt against the Timberwolves. He believed they could win a playoff series or more if they found some shared reason to fight together this year, too. It was the fourth quarter for Golden State. Some of the most dramatic basketball stories ever told are about the rise and peak of the Warriors but this year would be about the fall, and the end, and how they responded, how they honored the past.
They waded together into the first 17.
KERR BELIEVED WITH his whole heart that there was honor in not chasing rings but something more primal, to prove to themselves that they never lost their fighting spirit. He took the podium early in the season and got a question about their recalibrated goals. The Warriors were not the 2017 world-beaters any longer, he said.
“We are … ” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he searched for the words.
” … a fading dynasty.”
A few days later he walked with his dog, Lulu, and his daughter’s dog, Mabel, through the redwood grove in the Presidio. Both dogs are English cream retrievers. Mabel rolled around in a patch of mud. Steve laughed hard. We passed through green shafts of light, cool beneath the towering canopies. The air smelled like eucalyptus. It felt prehistoric. We wound down several switchbacks and the whole bay emerged sparkling blue, with the red spans of the Golden Gate Bridge high above.
“I said, ‘We’re a fading dynasty,'” he said. “There is beauty in the struggle, fans enjoying us trying to fight until the last breath.”
He stopped and wheeled around, like the crack of a fallen branch had loosed something in him. His body language changed, a switch flipped. Clawing to the eighth seed could offer its own rewards, he thought.
His voice rose.
“There’s such honor in that!”
He looked out at the bay and the ocean beyond, at the beautiful reach of it. At the light flashing and dancing on the water. At the currents and patterns forming and disappearing. Like karesansui, the Japanese art of arcing sand designs, a season has an ephemeral beauty, part intention and part surrender, something cherished and then lost.
“This is what it’s all about,” he said.
His voice rose again.
“You compete. Until the last breath!”
Kerr had gotten a call from someone on the team’s business side. They wanted him to stop calling the team a fading dynasty. Season ticket renewals were going out. They were looking to strike a rosier note. He agreed to stop but he thought they were letting an opportunity pass, that he could sell this idea to the team, especially Steph and Draymond, who would feel most alive in the struggle. That he could sell this idea to himself.
“How are we gonna finish this?” he asked.
Lulu tugged at the leash.
KERR LET ME into the entrance hall of his home overlooking the bridge. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, with a big light-spangled den, and an open white kitchen and a dining room with a framed art photograph of Muhammad Ali. Margot Kerr grinned when she saw my Taylor Swift Eras Tour hoodie. Steve told me a story. Three years ago, to entertain himself in his press conferences, Steve worked phrases from Swift’s song “All Too Well” into his interview answers, smoothly enough that nobody noticed. For instance, to get the first line of the song, he took the podium after beating the Rockets in March of 2023 and said, “I walked through the door of the locker room at halftime.” Over a long season he got most of the lyrics done, crossing them off as he went. His son Matthew later edited them into a video for their family group chat, so that Kerr appeared to have recited the whole song.
“She ended up seeing it through a mutual friend,” he said.
“Wait, is this real?” Taylor asked.
She thought it was creative and funny.
“Can I put it on social media?” she asked.
Kerr asked her team to please keep it private, even though he’d pulled the stunt in public night after night. He is both the most accessible coach in the league and the most unknowable. Joe Lacob, the Warriors’ owner, said he knows Kerr’s tendencies after 12 years but not his interior monologue. Steve’s public reputation (and his own self-image) comes with an expectation that he comment regularly . . . on his team, his players and the league . . . on politics, gun violence prevention, immigration policy, the Middle East and President Donald Trump. But he also lives below the surface, only occasionally letting stories that matter to him slip.
He ran into Michael Jordan recently in the hall of a hotel. Literally rounded a corner and almost collided. The two old survivors of the last dance greeted each other with respect and love.
“Thank you,” Kerr said. “Everything that has happened in my career is because of playing with you.”
“You’ve earned it,” Jordan told him. “You’ve earned all of it.”
We walked around Kerr’s house, which is cozy and elegant. Noticeably absent was any sign of basketball, except for his home office, in family photos that happened around the game, and a copy of Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s Always This Year” in the vestibule.
After winning three titles with the Bulls, and two more with the Spurs, he decamped to San Diego when he retired as a player in 2003. He surfed the breaks along the coast. Once a year he and buddies went down to a remote beach in Mexico, an endless summer of a retirement, and they camped and surfed and drank beer and laughed. “I was not introspective,” he told me. “I was just loving my life: Played in the NBA, did some broadcasting, raising my kids. To be honest with you, I had never really stopped and thought what are my values? What do I stand for?”
It wasn’t that he didn’t have an interior life, just that he hid it. His parents worried from a young age about his “dark mood swings,” according to Scott Howard-Cooper’s book, and tried to help him learn to harness, manage and ultimately subsume his temper. His mother says she is proudest of how he’s successfully done that, prouder than she is of his nine rings. When he’s mad at you, he rarely raises his voice. People only know because he squints his eyes, almost involuntarily, just a little. That’s Steve Kerr throwing a drink in your face. He told me once he’s kind to everyone else but cruel to himself. His three siblings live intellectual lives — his mom jokes that she has two Ph.D.s, one MBA and an NBA — while he has always tried to skip like a rock along the surface of life. His siblings processed their father’s death in deeply introspective ways. His sister, Susan, whose Ph.D. is from Harvard, wrote a beautiful book about the intellectual journey of grief. His brother Andrew went into clandestine intelligence, where once he came across a top-secret document with details surrounding his father’s murder, and instead of telling his family what he’d learned, he honored his oath and said nothing. Steve’s siblings’ lives were all shaped unalterably by their father’s assassination, as was his life. But while his sister wrote a book, he kept playing, and later coaching, a game. Even now he almost never invokes Malcolm Kerr in public. I visited his sister one afternoon in Cambridge, England, where she has lived for decades. We sat in a country pub. Everyone else beneath the low ceiling watched rugby on television. We talked about their past. The four Kerr siblings, who communicate regularly on a text thread, are close. I asked what about her brother Steve remained a mystery. She considered the question for a long time. “What he’s thinking,” she said finally.
EVEN BARACK OBAMA knew the biggest problem Kerr would face in the first month of the season: what to do about forward Jonathan Kuminga. During the summer Kerr went to Aspen to speak at a conference. Columnist Thomas Friedman invited him to a small dinner party. Kerr arrived and went out onto the deck for cocktail hour overlooking the mountains. Then Obama arrived, security in tow. He made a line for Kerr.
“Coach!” he said, and almost before Kerr could respond, he asked, “What’s gonna happen with Kuminga?”
Obama, like all fans of the Warriors and the NBA, was really asking about the two timelines, which had been the team’s plan to kick-start a new dynasty. Let’s go back to the beginning. The Warriors had built their team around Steph Curry. Everyone else, even future Hall of Famers like Green, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, existed to maximize his talent. Kerr designed the offense around Curry, demanding that the team pass the ball 300 times a game. When the ball moved the Warriors turned psychedelic, the basketball version of the old Messi Barcelona teams. But when the ball got stuck, and the intricate ballet sputtered, the Warriors turned mediocre quickly. Picking players for that kind of troupe required precision and the confidence to not just grab the sexiest stats on the market. Former Golden State GM Bob Myers did this masterfully. Kerr, who’d played with Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan, understood better than most people in the game that a player like Curry is a comet not a replaceable asset. “It’s why people compare basketball to jazz,” he said. “That’s what Steph does. When he goes on a riff, we feed him. This is what is possible with Steph Curry and Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan and all the greats. You have to enhance the greats. They are capable of winning the game for you. This is Phil’s thing. Phil said I don’t run the triangle for Scottie and Michael. I run it for the rest of you guys.”
Then the Warriors didn’t make the playoffs in 2020 and 2021. Everyone inside the team wondered if the end had come. Curry and Green were in their early 30s, when NBA careers tend to decline, and so management wanted a way to compete with the veterans while also preparing for life without them — the second timeline. The team drafted Jordan Poole out of Michigan in 2019, then James Wiseman out of Memphis in 2020, then Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga in 2021. These were raw but talented players — if they could learn to play alongside Steph.
Curry willed the team to a fourth title in 2022 but everything got tangled. The dynasty lived, but so did its replacement. They’d jumped the gun. The team felt suddenly like an untenable mixture of past and future, which threatened the present by grinding the tiki-taka to a halt. Slowly the players chosen during the two timelines era faded away. Poole left the team after Green punched him at practice. Wiseman, who never jelled with the Warriors, got traded.
The last two remaining pieces of the two timelines were Moody, a solid role player, and Kuminga, who had never quite learned how to play the high-speed acrobatic style the Warriors built around Curry. 2022 was Kuminga’s rookie year. He averaged 9 points a game and the Warriors won that fourth title. But there were fissures. On the court in the last few seasons Kuminga often disrupted the team’s rhythm when he was out of position, a half-step late, a half-count behind. Off the court, he found a family in the locker room. The team, especially Draymond, adored him. Kerr found him kind and thoughtful. He just struggled with the Warriors’ style of basketball. This year Kerr would have to figure out what to do with Kuminga on the court while Lacob and general manager Mike Dunleavy figured out what to do with him before the trade deadline. A lot of the team’s internal tension (mild for a typical pro sports franchise), whether about Kuminga or style of play or front office moves, felt rooted in everyone’s collective angst over the end of the dynasty. It had died once already, then been revived in 2022, so in a subtle but real way it was both alive and dead. That duality was always the subtext of any news emerging from the team’s inner circle.
The Warriors left town for a six-game road trip, the back third of that brutal opening stretch. They’d lost four of six. Kerr blamed himself for not finding the right lineup. After a preseason injury to Moody, rotations were strained and spacing was glitching. Kuminga had played great the first two games of the season but over time was too often caught out of position and a step behind. After the sixth loss Kerr cut Kuminga’s minutes in half. That night Curry scored 46. The next game Kuminga didn’t play at all and Curry scored 49. Kerr remembered with longing the ease of his first season with the team, when he’d do yoga on home game days, then eat a bacon and avocado sandwich from Summer Kitchen in Berkeley, then take a nap, then go beat the dog s— out of every team who had the misfortune of rolling into town. Now he called his wife from the road as he navigated the fragile locker room. “This is the most confusing time I’ve ever had in my eleven and a half years,” he told her. “I’ve never had anything like this.”
THEY WENT 8-6 in the first 14 games, hovering above .500. Kerr seemed buoyed. For all the difficulty, he loved the struggle, and the idea that at its best the team could commit itself to something shared, something that elevated the Warriors and echoed moments of their past. One night after a road win, as we sat in a restaurant the Warriors had rented, he looked around at his team.
“It’s not just the basketball,” he said.
All the players ate sushi and cooked wagyu beef on hot rocks, ordering expensive bottles of wine, the sound of laughter filling the room.
“It’s … this,” he said with a sweep of his arm.
He finds comfort in the 82. How in Chicago every year he goes to a show at Second City, how they like Miami but not Orlando, how the freight elevator in Madison Square Garden often smells like circus animals.
We bonded over the memory trick we both use to remember hotel room numbers moving night to night across the country.
Tonight he’s in 1824 in the New Orleans Four Seasons.
“Peyton Manning Kobe Bryant,” he said.
I was in 2225 at the JW Marriott.
“Emmitt Smith Rocket Ismail,” I said.
The Warriors won that night in New Orleans, their third in a row. Kerr looked at the box score as he took his seat on the front row of the bus. Twenty-one turnovers. He sipped a bottle of Modelo. We rode down Poydras back to the Four Seasons and he ran up to his room to change. His suitcase lay open on the floor. When he gets home, he does all his laundry, which Margot folds, which he carries upstairs. He likes a routine. Every morning, Margot says, he makes the bed.
A bottle of tequila sat untouched in his suite. He gets one in every city, which for years he has given as a reward to the young coach who did a successful scouting report for a road win. We walked across the street, past the autograph hounds, and joined the team at Nobu inside a casino. He and I ordered cold Asahi beers. Team assistant Nikola Milojevic walked past. Nikola is the son of beloved Warriors coach Dejan Milojevic, who died at 46 after a dramatic heart attack at a team dinner just like this one. Kerr invited Nikola to join us and for the next few hours, the young man leaned across the table, rapt, as Kerr told stories about life in the food chain.
“When was your last year with the Bulls?” Nikola asked.
“1998.”
“The Last Dance?” Nikola asked.
Kerr nodded. He remembered Game 6. The stricken silence of the Utah crowd during the trophy ceremony, the stale smell of champagne on the ride from the Delta Center to the airport. They boarded the plane, music blasting.
Nikola grinned.
“The plane ride was so much fun,” Kerr said. “The sense of relief when you go through two months of playoffs and you win, it’s so incredible.”
Kerr recommended a book to Nikola called “The Inner Game of Tennis,” which is a metaphysical self-help guide that divides all competitors into two people, the one who does things, and the one who offers non-stop negative commentary on them.
“That book saved my career,” Kerr said, as more sushi arrived. “I was so in my own head the whole time. I was so mean to myself. So harsh. I read it pretty much every season. I’d go back to it. I realized we are all two people. We are Self One and Self Two. There’s our body and our mind. What we all try to do, in life and in sports, is combine the two. To find the rhythm of life.”
The author, a coach, told his tennis students to pretend they were the best player in the world. Kerr decided to try that, too.
“I pretended to be Jeff Hornacek,” he said.
He looked across the table at Nikola.
“I don’t know if that name rings a bell,” he said. “He was an All-Star.”
“I know the name,” Nikola said.
“He was built just like me,” Kerr said. “He’s my size but he was way better than me. He was free and aggressive and loose and confident and I pretended to be him and I had the best practice of my life.”
Soon it was midnight in New Orleans.
“What time is the flight?” Kerr asked.
“8:45,” Nikola replied.
“Too early!” Kerr said.
On the way out of the restaurant, he smiled and spoke to Steph, who was decanting a bottle of red wine. Madonna played in the background. He headed back to Peyton Manning Kobe Bryant. He thought about the day Kobe’s helicopter crashed. An assistant coach, Jarron Collins, came to him during practice with an “ashen look on his face.”
“Kobe died,” Collins said.
Word spread and the team just dropped to the floor. Even now Kerr can picture it. Everyone sat on the court with their own thoughts. Nobody spoke. Kerr didn’t say anything. Neither did Steph. Eventually practice just ended. Everyone slipped away.
Now the flight to Orlando was looming. 8:45. They’d face the Magic and then fly to Miami immediately after the game, for another back-to-back, then a flight across the sleeping country, landing at 3 a.m., with another game the following night.
“This is the NBA,” he said, in a voice that suggested he couldn’t imagine his life without it. He told Nikola one more story that Luke Walton told him. On the last day of Hall of Fame center Bill Walton’s life, he’d been asleep for eight hours in the bed where he would later die when he suddenly woke up and looked over at the black television screen in the room.
“Why isn’t the game on?” he asked.
That yearning connects Steve Kerr and Draymond Green and Steph Curry, and Bill Russell and Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant and Bill Walton. Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, Lute Olson, James Naismith. Quitting basketball isn’t retiring from a job. It’s going into exile, willingly, leaving behind a world that keeps on going without you.
“How do you walk away from this?” Kerr asked and he walked toward the lobby elevators.
They flew to Florida the next morning, grinding through the schedule, sitting on the edge of the playoff bubble. In Orlando Kerr stayed in Juan Toscano-Anderson Jim McMahon. In Miami he stayed in Vlad Guerrero Kenny Stabler. In Denver, Charlie Hough Mike Trout. In Houston, Pete Rose O.J. Simpson. In Chicago Pete Rose O.J. Simpson again. Gravity worked on his team. One night Curry, Green and Butler were all injured and unavailable. The Warriors were blown out. Kerr struggled to sleep after a loss or two. One night before a game, his back went out while he was putting on his pants.
HE WOKE UP every morning, home and away, and set a timer on his phone for 20 minutes. Then he took out his laptop and journaled. He wrote about the pain he carried about his father’s death, and the anger still burning inside at the people who killed him. This was new for him. His college teammate and current assistant Bruce “Q” Fraser told a beat writer once that he did not recall a single conversation with Steve about Malcolm. Despite being written about regularly for most of his adult life, there’s no story where Kerr really bares his grief about his dad. Other days he’d write about his inability to show himself compassion, or about relationships that hurt him, people who disappointed him, or about the current situation with the Warriors. Sometimes, Sachs told him, just write about minor annoyances; it didn’t need to be as dramatic as an assassinated father.
Twenty minutes, every morning. Routine mattered as much as substance.
Delete the entry. Letting go mattered as much as spelling things out.
Meditate for 10. Stillness mattered as much as action.
Now go coach the team. Seeing it through maybe mattered more than anything.
Sachs told him to delete the entries because he could be loose and confident and know nobody would read them, and because there was a washing clean in it, a release.
His back pain began at the same time he started to coach. Taking the Warriors job, at the pace the game and the 82 demanded, forced him to bridge the gap between his body and mind, to open the first thin lines of communication.
In the beginning he learned how to be a head coach. He understood tactics but needed his own philosophy, not a cribbed mix of Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. As part of his preparation he got his agent to connect him with Pete Carroll in Seattle. Carroll agreed to host Steve for a few days. Kerr watched practice and took notes, listened to all the meetings, then ended each day with a debrief. On the third or fourth day, Carroll asked him a simple question.
“How are you gonna coach your team?” Carroll said.
“What offense are we gonna run?”
“That stuff doesn’t matter,” Carroll said.
“What do you mean?”
So Carroll told him his theory of coaching. His main job was to decide what emotions he wanted his players to feel every day and then foster an environment that created those emotions. What’s practice gonna feel like? What’s the vibe?
Carroll told Kerr his own origin story.
He’d been fired from the Jets. He knew everything about football and nothing about coaching. So he took a huge step down the ladder and got a job as a position coach with the 49ers, mostly so he could be close to the retired legend Bill Walsh, who kept an office in the Niners facility. Carroll spent hours with Walsh and learned that coaching was about values. Were you paranoid like Belichick? Or stern like Landry? Carroll turned Walsh’s question on Kerr.
“It’s a HUGE question,” Kerr said, “and I was not introspective.”
Carroll told him to come back the next day with 10 values and they’d edit down to three or four. Kerr worked on his list, delving into the caverns of his heart, mining places he’d long ago sealed. He returned the next day with a list of 10 and left Seattle with four things he felt defined him. Each of them flowed from different people in his life. He chose joy, which came from his family, and mindfulness, which came from Phil. Competitiveness came from himself, and from Pop, and empathy came from his father, whose writings are full of attempts to walk in another man’s shoes.
Joy, mindfulness, competitiveness and empathy would define his team for the next 12 years. It started immediately. He met with all his players in person, going to Australia to visit Andrew Bogut, and playing golf at Pebble Beach with Steph Curry, a meeting in which he first laid out how he wanted the team to play, the joyful, electric ball movement. He asked everyone to name a person they trusted. Then Kerr reached out to those individuals, too. Draymond Green said Tom Izzo so Steve cold-called him. “Nobody does that,” Izzo told me one morning. “Nobody has ever done that to me before. Boy is that unique.”
Kerr’s back pain started at the end of that first season, and continued in waves through treatment after treatment in the years since. Now, he could feel it receding, the pressure behind his eyes almost going away. The emotional awakening left him raw, and he remained uncertain in his own future with the team, but his daily journaling and meditation brought comfort. Down in Rancho Santa Fe, he even played golf after not swinging a club for a year.
STEVE SAT DOWN at his computer and typed out a letter to Draymond Green. Green had been in a spiral. Draymond’s plus-minus stats in one stretch were -17, -10, -12, -10, -6, -5, -9. The team performed better when he wasn’t on the court, after a decade of being the Warriors’ emotional center. To prove to himself, and the team, that he mattered, he forced things on offense. He missed three straight games in December and on the night of his return in Portland, he committed eight turnovers. That’s when Kerr wrote the letter.
He told Dray how much he meant to him. He talked about the turnovers, how the Warriors were 9-2 when they turned the ball over less than their opponents, and 3-11 when they turned it over more. He talked about aging, about how all great players adapted at the end of their career. Magic Johnson learned how to shoot threes, he wrote, and Steph Curry got stronger, and Michael Jordan learned to dominate the low post. Your superpower, he told Green, is your brain and your defensive instincts. He told him he loved him. Most of all, he told him he understood him. Kerr and Green fought because they were wired so similarly, with lots of internal rage that Steve had learned how to outwardly control better than Dray. “He’s so passionate,” Kerr said once as we walked through the Presidio. “He’s so loyal. He’s such a winner. But he’s complex.”
Four years ago, coming off a championship, Draymond punched Jordan Poole at practice and destroyed the team’s season. Kerr understood this situation better than anyone else in basketball. He’d famously been punched by Michael Jordan in 1995, ending up with a black eye. The next day Kerr told Poole that how he responded would follow him for the rest of his life.
“This happened to me,” Steve told him.
Then the video leaked. Poole was humiliated. Their title defense that year ended before it began. The following season Green choked Rudy Gobert, and the league suspended Green. Kerr sensed a man in crisis. He went to Dray’s house in Los Angeles. They had an emotional meeting. Kerr told him to protect his storybook career by not destroying himself at the end.
“You’re walking on the edge,” he told him. “Don’t go down this path of anger.”
That was two years ago.
“I’ve been very proud of him,” Kerr said. “But at least once every season you can just see the rage building.”
Green said nothing about the letter. He turned the ball over five times in the next game against Phoenix. He screamed at the team’s replay coordinator for not challenging a play, yelled at the coaches, yelled at no one in particular about the team’s substitution patterns. His rage kept building. Kerr didn’t know what to say and felt once again his self-worth tied to the team winning, and on his ability to reach the complex star, as he’d seen Phil Jackson do on so many tense nights. Kerr called Izzo for advice. “We both love Draymond for his passion, his energy and his loyalty,” Kerr said. “He is really struggling to figure this out because the only way he was able to become who he is was by convincing himself that he’s a star. He is struggling to adapt to his new surroundings, and so are we.”
The expected eruption arrived the same night he told me that. Green got ejected for arguing a call. Two nights later, he turned the ball over, and Kerr called timeout. Green thought Kerr wanted to yell at him about the turnover and he spent most of the timeout talking to the referee, as the team tried to drag him back to the huddle.
“Draymond!” Kerr yelled. “Draymond!”
That pissed off Green.
“Stop yelling my f—ing name!” he screamed back.
Kerr yelled back.
“Get in the huddle!”
“Stop yelling my f—ing name!”
“Stop yelling at the f—ing ref!”
“You’re mad at me because I got a turnover!”
They started screaming at each other. Draymond stormed off the court. Afterwards Kerr and Dunleavy talked, deciding not to suspend Green, but instead to meet with him the next day. Green came in and Kerr apologized for escalating the confrontation. His job, he told Green, was to remain calm.
“I was wrong,” he said.
They talked for an hour and the temperature cooled, and by the end, Green apologized, too. Kerr kept the team together, managing ego, insecurity and reality, in what might end up being his best and most overlooked coaching job. This season took all his prodigious emotional intelligence. Kerr accepted blame in the media for the altercation, in a move that felt equal parts empathy for Draymond and tactical decision for the team. The question of how Kerr felt or what he actually thought about what went down was somewhere below the surface. Kerr felt a run coming. His message was simple. The schedule had eased up, they were healthy, playing dangerous. The team got to Toronto and he checked into Johnny Unitas Babe Ruth.
That night the Warriors controlled the whole game then lost it in the waning minutes, letting it go to overtime, where the Raptors won. The buses went straight to the airport for a flight to New York. Kerr opened a Grolsch and watched the film. Kerr blamed their age, and himself. Maybe all coaching jobs had expiration dates, he thought to himself. There’s a book he loves by soccer coach Carlo Ancelotti. He thought about it on the plane. Sometimes, Ancelotti wrote, a team just runs its course, and it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way it goes. The glory-in-the-fight energy had curdled to exhaustion, or even to a sense of futility.
“I think things have run out here,” he texted from the flight. “It’s just time to move on. For me and for them. I’m probably being too emotional after yet another close loss, but it’s probably true. … We will commiserate and drink beer and watch the game on our computers and complain about all the dumb plays we made.”
WE TOOK LULU for a walk not long afterwards. The other dog owners smiled as she bounded like a toddler through the redwood trees. I asked him if he’d gotten any better about his internal reaction to losses like the one in Toronto. He said I needed to ask Margot. Eventually we got back to his house. There was a book called “The California Surf Project” in his den. Light poured into the wide windows. French doors opened onto a skinny balcony.
Margot and I talked about how his family handles his political life, the moments he speaks out against gun violence and extremist politics. One afternoon he and I walked out of a restaurant on College Avenue in Berkeley and a table of elderly people stopped him, not to talk hoops, but to thank him for not being scared to speak.
Margot doesn’t want him to talk about Trump.
There’s little to be gained.
His mother doesn’t want him to talk about Israel and Gaza.
She knows what can be lost.
Steve went downstairs to wash the dog in the bathtub. Margot and I talked about how he feels a moral obligation to speak his mind. It’s a way he pays private tribute to his father. Whenever he talks about gun violence prevention, or Trump, or decency, he is saying, “I am Malcolm Kerr’s son.”
He came back up, clean dog in tow, laughing. Margot smiled. They met as sophomores at Arizona, and in the light of their living room, still look like it.
I told him I forgot what I was supposed to ask Margot. He thought for a moment.
“How I was when I lost?” he asked.
“Could you tell if he won or lost when he walked through the door?” I said.
She laughed.
“Oh, I would know the result,” she said.
“You’re better now,” she said.
“I’m way better now,” he said. “But you can probably still tell.”
She laughed again.
“Oh, 100 percent.”
She complimented him on getting home the other night.
“You didn’t seem that bummed after the Clippers game,” she said. “But you were tired.”
“I was exhausted, and I’d been kicked out, so I’d already emoted!”
They both laughed together.
The team had just been down to Los Angeles, still incredibly hovering around .500, and Kerr went early to accept an award named in honor of Rabbi Leonard Beerman, who’d been a friend of Malcolm Kerr’s. They used to meet for barbecues at the Kerr house in Pacific Palisades, a Yiddish-speaking religious leader, and an Arabic-speaking secular leader, connected by their shared belief in nonviolence. His mom introduced him at the ceremony. The next night she came to the game against the Clippers. She never misses the Warriors in Los Angeles; the Lakers invited her to always park her Honda in the tunnel next to the players’ Rolls-Royces and McLarens and it makes Steve smile to see her pulling out into traffic, always with a car full of Fulbright Scholars from UCLA, right behind LeBron.
That night the officials missed an obvious goaltend, which they admitted later, and Kerr flipped out. Just lost it. He screamed at the referees, who ejected him as his assistants held him back. Snoop Dogg was on the television broadcast crew when Kerr went into his fit and the rapper crowed about the coach’s intensity, talking about how Steve had gone “Inglewooooood” on the refs. With six minutes left, Kerr sat in the visitors locker room and cracked a Pliny the Elder. He texted a photo of the beer bottle, with the game on television in the background, to the family group thread.
“Did you get your money’s worth?” his son-in-law asked.
“I’ll tell you if we win or not,” he replied.
His mom came and found him after the game. She was appalled at his behavior.
He hung his head.
“You won the peace award last night and then treated the official the way you did!” she said.
She wasn’t joking. Maybe 10 percent joking, he’d say later. She called him Stephen.
“Were you going to hit him?” she asked.
“Mom!” he said. “I’ve never hit anybody in my life.”
“But all those coaches were holding you back!”
Bad weather settled over the field at LAX and delayed their flight. When the skies cleared enough to get off the ground, the plane didn’t work. The mechanics worked on that but Kerr didn’t walk into his house until 5 a.m. Two days later we stood in his vestibule laughing about his mom thinking he wanted to hurt the officials so badly his coaches had to physically restrain him.
“That part is definitely performative,” he said, “but it’s coming from a place of actual rage.”
“You’re home for a while now?” Margot asked.
“Eight straight games,” he said.
THEY STARTED WINNING. For a month, between mid-December and mid-January, the Warriors had one of the highest winning percentages in the league. Kerr started to believe maybe they could make a real playoff run. They were competitive; his journaling and meditation made him empathetic towards himself; he lived in the moment, full of gratitude, and the practice facility vibrated with joy. After one game during that run, Kerr read the box score beneath the arena. Draymond had seven assists and one turnover. They’re almost unbeatable when he does that. Kerr grabbed some meals in the locker room and headed to the elevator from the floor level to his office.
“This is my friend,” he said. The elevator operator, Eula, smiled.
Then she did her best Snoop voice.
“Inglewoooooood!” she called.
He laughed.
“That’s funny!” he said. “You saw it!”
“So funny!” she said.
“Five people sent it to me,” he said.
“Great game!” she said.
“Thank you!” he said, and we walked through the basketball operations area into his office. A big window overlooked the practice court. His four values were written in black on the dry-erase board on the wall. A cooler filled with ice sat nearby. He fished through the Stellas, Pacificos and Modelos to find a Kona Longboard. We sat down and his assistant Khalid Robinson joined us. “We got Caribbean bowls,” Kerr said, “one is shrimp, one is chicken. I’m willing to do either one.”
He told us his daughter had been at the game tonight with her husband.
“My favorite thing is when my granddaughters are here after the game.”
He pointed at a door on the far side of the practice court. That’s the playroom. After every game, the players showered and did their media and came to collect their families. The kids sprinted out of those doors, leaping into their father’s arms, grabbing balls from the rack, starting a web of pickup games, with families, friends, players and coaches.
“Some nights we have 20 kids out there,” he said. He took a sip of his cold beer, opened the food container and sighed. His team celebrated somewhere down below, feeling dangerous again.
“Oh, man … ,” he said with a long, satisfied exhale.
HE GUSHED ABOUT his players. All of them. He lavished praise on Jimmy Butler. He talked with real love about Draymond, who pushed them to victory tonight. He pointed to a photograph of Steph in Paris, to Khalid’s left. Both Kerr and Robinson were on that Team USA staff. Steve was the head coach. Steph hadn’t shot well in the first few games of the 2024 Olympics. At an optional practice before the semifinal, he was one of only a handful of players to show up.
“Steph had one of the most impressive workouts I’ve ever seen,” Kerr said. “He would take a shot then not shoot the ball and work on footwork for 15 minutes, then take another 15 shots. He repeated it for the next hour and a half.”
He hit nine threes in the semifinal victory over Serbia, and eight more in the gold medal win over France. But it’s the practice Kerr remembered. A craftsman at work, like John McPhee’s birchbark canoe maker. Sitting in his office we talked about McPhee, and his book on Bill Bradley. That title hit hard for Kerr. A sense of where you are.
“The biggest thing that athletes miss when they retire is the structure and routine,” he said, “a higher purpose and a process to reach that.”
HE THOUGHT A LOT about that evening, and that feeling, when things fell apart in the coming weeks. Jimmy Butler tore his ACL on January 19 and the winning streak ended the next night. But while it lasted everything felt new, which is to say it felt old. On February 4, the team finally traded Kuminga to the Atlanta Hawks. In between the Warriors landed in Minneapolis. He checked into Bernard King Ozzie Smith. Then he saw the news. A nurse named Alex Pretti had been killed by federal agents. The NBA postponed the game and Kerr gathered the team in a hotel ballroom. He spoke to the team from the heart about his fear for the country, and how he felt the suffering of the families, and the community, involved. He urged everyone not to give in to cynicism.
Then he thought about what he’d say at his next media availability. When Renee Good had been killed, he called it murder, and brought a lot of public criticism, on himself, which he thought was fair, and on the franchise, which he regretted.
He went with assistant Khalid Robinson to George Floyd Square, which was only a few blocks from where Good had died. Later Kerr called me to talk through what he might say. He did something I’d never heard him do. He invoked his father.
“While I’m in Minnesota I am not gonna go up there and say no comment,” he told me, but “I owe it to my family to not stoke any fires that lead to some nutjob shooting me.”
He tried out lines.
“My father was killed by extremists,” he said, imagining the press conference.
He wanted to say that he understood exactly how the Good and Pretti families felt, and that extremism was wrong, in any form, wielded by any ideology. He recalled what he and his family had experienced in the years since 1984 and said he could not let this moment pass without a call for Americans to step away from the edge.
We cannot devolve into extremism, he said.
I know how that story ends, he said.
I could hear his voice catch between lines.
“I’m crying right now,” he said.
A little while later, he was at a table in the media room at Target Center in downtown Minneapolis. The text he’d settled on was personal loss.
“Those families will never get their family members back,” he told the reporters in the room. “When all the unrest settles down, whenever that is, those family members won’t be returning home, and that’s devastating.”
He didn’t mention his father. He didn’t have to.
TWO MONTHS LATER Kerr sat on the team bus, front row left side aisle, like always, pulling away from another arena after another loss. We were in Atlanta, which happened to be the team where Kuminga had landed. Steve answered a lot of pregame questions about the trade, wishing him a long, successful career, but the real issue bothering him was the derailed season. Butler’s ACL took him out for the year. Steph had missed 21 games with a right knee injury. Draymond was playing hurt.
We’d all sat in the coaches’ locker room nursing a beer for a while after the game. Curry had come along on the road trip for a planned limited scrimmage tomorrow morning, with the young players as opponents, before a full scrimmage the next day in Dallas. Lots of people urged Curry to shut down for the season, but they didn’t understand how he valued every remaining minute of “meaningful basketball,” and so he’d burn himself up to return for the play-in games. The Warriors were at worst the 10th seed. These were slogging limbo days of March. Kerr and Terry Stotts and Bruce “Q” Fraser, his top assistants, sat around waiting on the bus. Steve cracked a cold Peroni.
They were playing six games in nine days but Steph had rejoined the team and if tomorrow’s scrimmage went well, he’d scrimmage in Dallas on the off day and then they could get him back in the lineup. In the past week, he’d been telling the team to hang on, that “reinforcements were coming,” and tried to make the players understand that the season had been brutal at times but that didn’t mean they didn’t have a future. He’d brought in Austin Hatch, the former college basketball player who survived two different plane crashes, to talk to the players in Detroit about resilience.
“Keep moving,” Hatch told the Warriors.
Kerr loved this time of year. Even this year. Six games, nine days, everyone hurt, planes landing at 3 in the morning, get to the arena exhausted and dig deep. To fight. “It’s not a championship,” he said, sipping the Peroni, “I’m not saying that it is, but there’s something really beautiful about it. We’re just not going to quit.”
On the bus he watched an NCAA tournament game on his phone. High Point played Arkansas. He thought about his own NCAA nightmare, when he helped lead Arizona to the 1988 Final Four and then played the worst game of his life in a semifinal loss to Oklahoma. It was dark on the bus as we traveled through the quiet midnight of Atlanta.
“It’s still a game that haunts me,” he said.
He paused, talking to himself now.
“It forever will.”
He inhaled.
“I will never watch it.”
He seemed distant.
“Never.”
Another pause.
“I can’t.”
One last silence.
“I choked,” he said.
Act 3: Hello. Goodbye.
FOUR DAYS LATER he decided that the time had come to face down whatever waited for him outside the protective world of a basketball season. On a walk with Lulu through the Presidio, he called me. The wind blew against his phone. They played the Nets at home in a few hours. He’d been talking to Margot and they both agreed this should be his last season with the Warriors. He felt so grateful. He was the luckiest coach in the history of the NBA, he said, because he’d lucked into 12 years of Steph Curry. All he wanted was a classy end. If he burned the place down on the way out, then everything he said he was about was a lie. He wondered how he should announce it. He wanted to tell Lacob and Dunleavy privately, and Steph and Draymond privately, but he didn’t want it to leak and for anyone to feel disrespected. He described a vision he had of walking into the locker room after the season and telling the team. That felt badass, he told me. Maybe he should invite all four of the major stakeholders to his house.
He had time to think about it. He felt at peace, he said, but then he started talking about the things he loved about the game, and about his values, about being on the road with the team. He talked about how much he loved the 4:30 coaches meeting he had this afternoon. “I’m going to miss it terribly,” he said.
HE SOON EXPERIENCED other conflicting emotions, too. Margot wanted him to keep coaching, because she saw how it fulfilled him, and because if he stayed, their son Nick would remain local, which meant that Nick’s two kids would continue to live a mile away. Margot wanted her grandbabies close.
“It’s a little scary walking away from something I love,” he said.
The last 12 seasons had led him into and out of a hole. He’d emerged, either reborn or self-actualized, into the light. He worried that without the job, all the gains he’d made might disappear. What if he just reverted to the man he was before Golden State, before basketball? What if he lost what he’d found?
“Coaching has unlocked the best version of myself,” he told me in March. “I have to constantly be evolving, thinking, growing. I have to work on myself, learning how to be kinder and gentler to myself the same way I am with others. And I’ve had to learn to fight this very human instinct that I’m not good enough. Like most people, I’m insecure. I want to be great but I don’t really know if I am or not, but I’ve learned the value of just being really kind and competitive at the same time. I’ve lived this charmed existence, an amazing life, a blessed, fortunate one, but I’ve also been through some s— with my dad’s death and my own health the last decade. I think I’m scared that I will lose that daily engagement and purpose that not only feeds my soul, but helps me deal with my literal chronic daily pain. If I knew I could retire and go do the physical stuff that I love, it would be a lot easier. But I can’t do a lot of that stuff anymore. So I’m scared of being at home without the constant engagement and friendships that coaching brings me!”
He hovered between living with his decision and changing his mind. He went on walks with Lulu, going to get his usual Honey Baked sandwich at Golden Gate Deli, eating it at one of the outdoor tables. He thought about his dad. He thought about his family. He thought about his job, whether to keep it.
“Conflicted,” he texted from the deli.
“What’s Lulu think?” I asked.
“She sees both sides,” he replied.
Most people never get a dream job. What kind of person walks away from theirs? That’s what he asked himself. He knew he’d get another basketball job — his agent fielded numerous opportunities — but he wouldn’t be coaching Steph Curry and the Warriors. Once you left that behind, you could never come back. But staying too long was toxic, too.
He called one afternoon to say he’d grown more conflicted. It felt like he couldn’t imagine his life on the other side, and so his only data points were the things he didn’t want. He’d found himself in this job, and this city, where he’d been celebrated, and even beloved, for his principled liberal political stands — a city they now called home. He and Margot won’t ever sell their house.
He asked if I’d seen the Eagles documentary. There’s a scene he loves about the night the band finally crumbled, on stage in Long Beach, on a tour aptly named “The Long Run,” with Don Felder and Glenn Frey threatening to beat each other up on stage, during the show. Kerr has seen great teams reach the same state. The Warriors felt close to it. Last night they’d lost by 23 points in Denver, gotten smacked around, and then boarded the flight back home. Splintering is so easy, and happens to all great teams, but he’d always felt great internal pride that their bond had bent but never broken.
“Are we the Eagles on stage?” he said. “Are we all sick of each other?”
He laughed one morning when he woke up and remembered a dream from the night before. Pete Carroll had appeared to him and given him an expensive bottle of red wine.
CURRY RETURNED TO the team with four regular-season games to go. He scored 29 points and the Warriors almost beat the Rockets, and the arena rocked and shook like the glory years, like the night Klay scored 37 in a quarter. The old days. The next morning Kerr and Margot went for a long walk.
“How can I ever leave Steph Curry?” he asked her.
I watched competition do something to him. Focus him, sharpen his edges, almost literally. His face looked different. His eyes looked different. If you ever wonder why some coaches reel off titles and others come close again and again, it’s something that exists in a place beyond strategy and vocabulary. The conventional wisdom is that coaches are born competitive and it’s true, but Steve Kerr is a different person in competition. He’s altered by it. Heightened. Honed. It’s why Michael Jordan respected him, I think. He looked at this undersized, moderately athletic white guy and saw himself. It’s what Steph and Dray understand about him, too. And what he understands about them.
“One last punch to throw!” he said in the days before a play-in game against the Los Angeles Clippers. “It’s on!”
He wanted this fight. A whole season boiled down to one game. He started saying “it’s on” to everyone he encountered. The team took over the Beverly Wilshire as base camp. The coaches love a restaurant a few blocks away called Honor Bar. They all always order the crispy chicken sandwich, after assistant coach Jacob Rubin discovered it during a road trip to L.A.
Steve’s mom came over to meet for lunch at the hotel. She hugged him when he made a joke about being the dumbest of his siblings, looking up at him with a smile that said she didn’t buy his self-deprecation for a second. She’s 91 and planning on rebuilding her house, Steve’s boyhood home, after the fires. The next morning he met Nick for breakfast. They laughed and told stories about Nick going on road trips with the Spurs as a kid. I asked them both for their first concerts.
“The Police,” Kerr said, in a small auditorium in Cairo.
Nick looked stunned that his dad had such a cool answer. Steve said Sting threw a water bottle into the crowd after the last song and Steve caught it and threw it back.
Nick smirked a bit at his own utterly uncool answer.
“The Backstreet Boys,” he said. “Alamodome.”
He pointed at his dad.
“He took me,” he said.
They talked about the coming game.
“We just have no momentum,” Steve said. “We haven’t played in a meaningful game in three months.”
“Can you raise your intensity from a one to a 10?” Nick said.
“Steph, Dray and Al can,” Steve said.
KERR WATCHED THE digital clock on the wall count down the minutes until tipoff. Eighty-four, eighty-three … He sat alone with his thoughts in the coach’s room in the Intuit Dome. One game remained, with the opportunity to play another. On the court, Steph Curry’s agent, Jeff Austin, stood near the baseline with his wife as Steph went through his usual pregame shooting routine. Curry looked off. Old and in the way. The teams took the court. The arena shook with the howling intro from “Welcome to the Jungle.”
The Clippers took control. Draymond Green barked at the referees. He missed a three. Steph missed a long two, then another. Kerr called a timeout down 12-2. The Warriors clawed back with a 10-2 run. Then Curry grabbed his leg and limped to the sideline and disappeared into the locker room. The Clippers sprinted to a nine-point lead. Curry returned with his leg wrapped and again the Warriors fought back, even taking a lead. But the Clippers took control again. Draymond got a technical. The Los Angeles lead stretched to eight, then 10, and it went like this for the rest of the game. The aging Warriors had enough talent, and heart, to mount furious assault after assault, only to be repelled. Following one sloppy turnover, Kerr wheeled around and threw his hands on his head in disgust. These men had been kings of the NBA once but all that felt so long ago. The Warriors would cut it to two and then the Clippers would extend it back to 10. Draymond grabbed his knee and limped to the bench.
A moment later he returned to the court. The air inside the arena changed. The Warriors reached back and found their former selves, just for a night. The next morning I’d run into Draymond getting into his baby blue Bentley outside the Four Seasons and tell him how they’d stopped time. He got this beatific look on his face, humble, genuine and ecstatic, and he nodded and grinned. He got it. They all felt it. With under six minutes, Al Horford, who’d struggled all night, hit a three. Then he hit another from the corner, cutting the lead to three. He hit still another from the opposite corner. A few possessions later, he hit a final three from the left wing, giving the Warriors the lead. The Clippers scored to tie the game at 117 with two minutes left.
Steph Curry played the pick-and-roll game with Draymond, like they’ve done for more than a decade, letting an off-balance three launch into the air. It went in, and he landed in the front row, emerging from the fans pounding his chest, the Warriors now up three. Down on the other end, Draymond muscled Kawhi Leonard, and as an inbounds pass lobbed in the air towards Leonard, Green swatted it away with his right hand. The Warriors scored and soon the clock hit zeros. The team came running, laughing, screaming, into the locker room.
“For one night, we’re us,” Kerr said. “We are champions again.”
He returned to the coaches’ locker room with the rest of the staff. He grabbed an ice-cold Corona from a cooler and popped the top, collapsing into a chair. A clamshell takeout container rested on his lap and he joked about how the NBA didn’t have postgame food when he played. They made plans for tomorrow. Kerr asked Khalid to go see whether Steph and Dray wanted to meet when the team landed in Phoenix. They said they did. Right away. Across the room, someone cracked that the chicken sandwiches earlier today had brought them this victory.
“The win started at Honor Bar,” someone said.
“Started at Honor Bar,” Kerr said.
“You’re welcome!” Jacob Rubin crowed.
An assistant with a stat sheet said they’d led for only four minutes and six seconds. Everyone laughed and tried to stay in the moment. Steve looked over at me and spoke quietly, almost a whisper.
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
Kerr told his staff it was one of the best wins he’d ever been a part of in his career. It felt joyous yet fragile. The losses stay with you forever but the wins disappear almost immediately. Nick Kerr tipped his beer at me from across the room.
Steve opened his phone to find dozens of text messages.
He read the one from Margot first.
“You’re not leaving,” it said.
WE MISSED THE early bus back to the hotel and sat around waiting for the late one. Kerr went through his phone some more. He read a text message quoting Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night. Steve smiled and told a story about his dad. He and his brother John loved the Dodgers and four or five times a year their dad took them to sit in the left-field bleachers. Malcolm brought along a jug of lemonade and tuna salad sandwiches. You could bring your own food back then. He also brought a copy of The New Yorker so he could read while the boys tried, and always failed, to catch a ball during batting practice. This went on for years and they just never got close. One game, Steve and John asked Malcolm if they could go get a Dodger Dog. They scurried beneath the bleachers. They returned to find their dad holding his New Yorker in one hand and a baseball in another.
“Where’d you get the ball!?” they asked.
He told them he’d heard an excited murmur spread through the crowd and looked up just in time to see a home run ball off the bat of Bob Watson bounce three rows ahead and roll right beneath his seat. Steve smiled at the memory, his crow’s feet accentuated, eight years older than his father was when he died.
WE LANDED IN PHOENIX and checked into the Biltmore. Steve was Elway Ozzie Smith Jack Lambert. I was in Willie McGee John Elway. Kerr read a history book by the pool. He took a nap. Q took a nap. Terry took a nap. Khalid took a nap. Nick worked out. They all felt confident. That night the coaches went to dinner at Pizzeria Bianco. Fellow diners eyed the enemy team walking through the loud, dim room. We sat three across at a long table in the corner. We ordered course after course and laughed and told stories. They served skewers of baked cheese wrapped in prosciutto. We ordered two plates of those. The chef who runs the place, Chris Bianco, is Steve’s old friend. They met in the draft room of the Phoenix Suns after Kerr had been hired as a consultant. Bianco brought lunch that day, stacks of pizza boxes. He delivered them personally, wearing an apron, with flour on his cheeks. Around him the war room hummed. With each name on the board, all the basketball ops guys got to vote by raising their hands. After one player’s name was announced, Bianco raised his hand. Kerr, who’d retired the year before, had never been in a draft room before. He leaned towards the guy next to him and nodded at Bianco.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“The pizza guy,” the executive said.
“The pizza guy gets a vote?!” Kerr asked.
“You haven’t tried the pizza,” the executive shot back.
We all laughed. They talked about the team. Steph told them today that his body was a 4 but his mind was a 10. In between the four salads, one pasta and three pizzas, the conversation turned to basketball strategy. They sounded confident. A serious debate began about sitting Draymond, Steph and Al for Game 1 of the first-round series against the Thunder. That gave them the best chance of winning. Kerr said they’d get fined. Q argued that it was a great coaching move. Kerr said they’d get fined, and that, yes, it was what they needed to do. They asked Nick about the real estate market in San Francisco for friends his age. Dessert arrived. Then either Q or Terry quietly said the unsayable. The thing they’d all been thinking. They have number 30 on their team. They can play with anyone. Kerr nodded. The table fell silent.
We headed back to the Biltmore. Kerr walked across the closely clipped grass lawn to his room by the pool. It’s a bungalow. Art deco cool. He thought about how much he’d miss dinner with his coaches someday. These nightly conversations wound through every part of their lives, from the games to their children, and now grandchildren, talking s— to each other, and getting to do this every day for months on end, like grown-up summer camp. Alpine Camp For Overgrown Boys. He could be kind and generous. He could be snarky although he always seemed to be a little sheepish about it. He’s a good man, which is an old-fashioned thing to say, and to be. A part of him often seems genuinely stunned at his good fortune. When he’s had a beer or two, he will talk romantically about how he loves the 2022 title best because, “it was Steph’s masterpiece.”
He views his time at the Warriors as a witness, just as he bore witness to Tim Duncan’s Spurs and Michael Jordan’s Bulls. But his modesty hides one of the great résumés in the game. I got an ESPN Research packet on him that put him in statistical context, mentioning him alongside a tiny group of comparable coaches. Him, Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, Phil Jackson, Pat Riley, K.C. Jones and Tommy Heinsohn. Basically the Lakers, the Celtics, the Bulls and Steve. “Sometimes I wonder how many of those guys feel like I do — that this was all a matter of good fortune combined with being well prepared, but that a thousand other people could have done the same thing if the right circumstances had converged,” he said. “Or did they think they were the s—?”
He thought about Riley, who hangs on year after year. There’s a line Riley said to me once that Kerr thinks is hilarious. Riley sat on a Miami Beach barstool and asked, with a grin, “Do you know the biggest lie ever told?” Then he paused, before delivering the punchline: “That Pat Riley is gonna retire to Malibu.”
On the night before the Suns game, Kerr answered Riley’s question: “That Steve Kerr is gonna retire and do a little TV and some speaking engagements and go to his granddaughter’s games.” Earlier that day he had found himself thinking about how the best part of basketball was engaging your inner child, who then gets to go on a quest — “ON A QUEST!” — with all of his friends. It’s like the Goonies, except it’s a job. “I was 90 percent gone before yesterday’s game,” he said. “But tomorrow’s game could swing things the other way.”
KERR WALKED FROM the visitors’ locker room towards the Suns home court with Q and Terry. The sound of muffled pregame hype echoed through the concrete. Steve looked at his coaches and quoted a line from the movie “Titanic.” Near the end the band played as the ship slipped beneath the surface and one member of the band saluted his musicians in arms.
“Gentlemen, it’s been a privilege,” Kerr said.
They went down early, fought back five or six times, but in the end were too old, too sloppy and too tired. In the final seconds Kerr told Draymond to foul so he could take him and Steph out of the game and share a moment with them. Only Green hit Devin Booker a little too hard and both players got ejected. Kerr grabbed him and Steph and told them he didn’t know what the future held but he loved them both. Then Dray walked off the court to thunderous boos, egging the crowd to get louder, and went back to the locker room and cracked a cold Red Stripe. The team followed a minute later, Kerr with his head down, Steph stopping to talk to the team owner, who told him they’d get together soon.
Kerr fielded three or four questions about his job status and he dodged them as best he could, but the nostalgia and melancholy running through his answers hinted at the private uncertainty he’d been feeling for weeks. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, and he didn’t know if it would be his decision. On the 20-minute bus ride back to the Biltmore he thought about the future. He walked from the bus to the small lobby bar, where he joined Q and Terry. They talked about how Wednesday night against the Clippers had salvaged the season, at least how they’d remember it. They turned nostalgic, counting their years in professional basketball. Terry counted 23 years, then realized he’d forgotten about seven. Kerr ribbed him. You forgot seven seasons!? He counted his own years, 15 as a player, 3 as an executive, 12 as a coach.
“What a life we’ve led,” Steve said, raising a glass.
In the corner of a deserted hotel lobby, set apart from the wild pool bar scene outside, a mighty energy flickered on life support, about to go dark. The melody from the Dire Straits song “Brothers in Arms” kept filtering through my mind. Q and Terry said that the end of the dynasty didn’t mean the end of Kerr’s coaching life. There was work to be done here, important work, helping the young players find their way out of the valley of the kings. Terry told Steve that he’d reached a crossroads in his life. Steve looked away. They’d had hundreds of these nights and the idea that this might be the last one hung heavy in the warm dry air.
They told stories until last call. Everyone hugged and said goodnight. The plane left at noon. Steve headed back to his bungalow. On the way he ran into Nick. A group of the junior staff hung out, like the last night of college, wondering what the future held for them. Steve joined them and lit a cigar, smoke curling out into the dark desert air. They all saw the 65-foot water slide at the resort towering over them and vowed to wake up early and go down it together. The next morning they all did, Steve laughing as he accelerated around a turn.
Tomorrow.
EIGHT DAYS LATER Kerr walked through eucalyptus-scented air on a jogging path by the towering grove of redwood trees. Lulu tugged on her leash and sniffed and playfully circled other dogs on laps through the Presidio. Most of the owners clocked Kerr but nobody bothered him or acknowledged that he’d been dominating the Bay Area news cycle for a week. Enough sun peeked through the blanket of fog and clouds that people rushed outside to parks all around the city. Two heavyset dudes in matching track suits sat side by side like mafia bosses surveying their kingdom, eating spicy Cheetos, drinking cans of soda, while reggaeton bumped insistently on their portable speaker. A group took a circus class. People juggled. A man tightrope-walked between trees. A forest nymph in 15th century looking leather boots and Henry VIII style cloak threw a tennis ball to her dog. A dad pushed a stroller. Little groups lounged on blankets with novels and six-packs of beer. A dead ringer for bluegrass virtuoso Billy Strings took a nap beneath a blue baseball cap. Kerr smiled and talked dogspeak to Lulu, rubbing her around the neck and haunches.
A couple walked past us, young and fit, and saw Steve.
“Big fan!” the man said with a smile.
Kerr smiled back and nodded brightly. The couple kept going but maybe 25 or 30 yards past us, the man turned and shouted something. We couldn’t make out the words through the wind and the singing birds and the low hum of the city. He wanted to tell Steve something, his intended meaning made clear by his gestures. He folded his hands into a prayer pose and dipped them in supplication.
Please don’t go.
As we hiked, Kerr talked about his future. He could do TV. Lots of NBA teams expressed interest to his agent, including offers to be a franchise president. He could enter what he jokingly called his Riley Era. That felt like a pathway to reinvention. A team in France wanted him to come coach. Maybe he and Margot could build an expat bohemian life in Paris.
The Golden Gate Deli sat at the end of the road. When he walked in the guy at the whirring meat slicer knew his order. Honey Baked, is the sandwich’s name on the menu. Kerr comes here all the time, enough to be on a first-name basis with the Middle Eastern owners. They were delighted one day when Steve told them he’d been born in Beirut and spoke a little Arabic. For some reason he remembers the phrases he learned in language lab in Cairo. Where is Hussein? Over there in the yellow car. He grabbed chips and an iced tea and the man carefully made, wrapped and delivered Steve’s sandwich.
We found a red metal picnic table outside and he talked through his week since the loss to Phoenix. Kerr had been busy. He’d played golf twice. He made his first eagle in maybe 15 years, rolling in a 40-foot putt in front of his son, everyone whooping and hollering like he’d won the U.S. Open, and he birdied a par-3 after sticking his tee shot to a foot or two. On Monday he and Margot attended a charity dinner run by a local chef and on Tuesday they got to meet a cookbook author she liked. He’d given a speech in Napa at the same event as George W. Bush and the CEO of Walmart, staying over Thursday night. That morning Lulu had eyed his suitcase suspiciously as if to say: I thought when the season ended you stayed home.
On Friday he’d driven down to Atherton to meet with Steph Curry at his house to get his star guard’s opinion. He and Steph truly admire each other. They couldn’t meet until after Steph attended a parent-teacher conference. Curry could request a trade to a better team but would never make his kids change schools or disrupt their lives any more than his strange job has already disrupted them. These were family men making family decisions, rooted in loyalty to their families, and to the Warriors, which had come to feel like the same thing. A team mimics a family in so many ways, except that results and money come before unconditional love, which is why so many teams end in heartbreak and recrimination. The emotional collapse is built into the rise.
Kerr had a meeting the day after tomorrow with Lacob and Dunleavy.
Nobody knew what the result of the meeting would be.
He finished his sandwich and chips. We walked back to his house. In his kitchen he poured a glass of filtered water. A signed copy of Nicole Sachs’ book sat on the kitchen island beneath his computer, which is where he watches film. Margot read in the living room overlooking the water. Steve got some food for Lulu, who wagged her tail. He’d know more in two days. Everyone needed to be honest with one another. I left his house and sat outside looking at the Golden Gate before calling a car. We’d spent a lot of time together the past year and I didn’t know what he wanted, only that even considering the end exposed every emotional nerve ending and left him raw. That night he watched some of the Knicks game and then went to eat dinner with Margot in a local tavern with no TV.
THEY MET IN Joe’s office and did the thing that dynasties never do. They spoke honestly and openly about the future, with one shared question: What honored the Warriors’ past while setting the franchise up for the best future? Kerr invoked Jürgen Klopp’s exit from Liverpool, where he worked intentionally and diligently to manage and grease the segue between him and Arne Slot. The next season, Slot’s first, Liverpool won the Premier League. Kerr and Lacob, who disagreed about a few things, shared a belief that what they’d built was sacred. In case anyone forgot the stakes, the four Larry O’Brien Trophies reflected the light in Lacob’s office. Steve offered to do whatever best served the team. Maybe that meant leaving, and he described what he needed to do better as a coach if he stayed. They agreed to meet again the following week. Margot really wanted him to keep coaching. He knew Steph wanted him back. His daughter, Maddy, a college volleyball star at Berkeley and now a lawyer, scolded him for focusing on the three things he didn’t like about the job instead of the hundred things he did like. Not everybody loves everything about their job, Dad, she said. The family gathered for a big dinner at the house and watched the episode of the HBO comedy “Rooster” that his younger son wrote. Everyone leapt off the couch in applause when the screen showed the name Matthew Kerr.
Steve really thought about his desire to not be one of those guys who overstayed his welcome while also wanting to run through the tape at the end of the race. He knew what he didn’t want but only through the mental trial of the past month’s conflict had he learned what he did want: He wanted his family, which had always meant a combination of blood family and competition family. He understood, one morning journal entry at a time, line by line, and more than ever that as a child of a family torn by tragedy, his strongest subconscious urge, and source of his greatest rewards, was always building and protecting a family.
For a day or so I watched him live with the real possibility that it all might be over. The feeling hit him harder than he expected. One afternoon he and I pulled away from the Chase Center, merging onto the lower level of the Bay Bridge, headed towards Oakland for a meeting with Berkeley students he mentors. We drove across the bay in mostly silence. He seemed melancholy. We drove down into the East Bay. He’d wanted to take me to Summer Kitchen, where he and Luke Walton ate lunch nearly every game day the first year of the run. The symbolism pleased him, to remember how it all began as they considered if they’d come to the end. He’d entered the ritual realm. But he accidentally parked a half-mile short. He fed the meter and then looked around, sheepish, and got back in the car. Once he could drive here in his sleep but he’d forgotten.
The next morning he and Mike met again. Joe wanted Steve back, if Steve wanted to return. He and Mike talked about how they’d unite, in a furious fight that reminded the league that even if the Warriors were no longer kings, they’d never lost their spirit. Nobody wanted their best shot. They’d kept faith with one another. Kerr said he was in, for his blood family, yes, but also for his own desire to keep the larger competition family intact. “How do we coach this team?” he said to Dunleavy. “How do we get our mojo back?”
They got fired up. Kerr called Steph and told him the news. A new energy, born of the new last dance, started its steady drumbeat. They all heard it. This was an energy, born of connection between Joe, Mike, Steve, Steph and Draymond, who went on the “Inside the NBA” studio set and repeated all the themes Kerr had written to him in his letter: They might not win a title, but they would fight, and make opponents pay dearly for a win, and play hard to set the team up for success when they’re all gone. Kerr rippled with excitement and laughed. His uncertain future without the game, without a team, had been pushed off a year or two. He laughed again.
“I’m just like Riley,” he said, shaking his head.
He sighed. Opportunities to be a team president just didn’t scratch his itch.
“I’m not a suit,” he said.
His voice dropped, like he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror.
“I want the whistle,” he confessed.
He went to a Giants-Padres game with five of his best friends from high school. They sat three rows behind the dugout and ate hot dogs and drank beer and told old stories. Steve felt so happy. During the game, his phone rang. He looked down. It was Joe Lacob. Kerr ducked behind the Giants dugout and took the call. They talked about their joy over the future. They planned. They talked about Steph Curry. They spoke like old friends who’d been through an ordeal together. Lacob felt good about the future, thinking back to how Kerr innovated when he took the job, figuring out not just which chess pieces to move but new ways to move them. “He is very smart,” he said. “The challenge now is that the chess pieces are different — literally different or older. Some good young pieces. I believe that he can figure out this new puzzle and win again at the highest level.”
Kerr went to his son Nick’s house to tell him the news. He didn’t tell him beforehand, so Nick had feared he’d be looking for an NBA job. But Steve said they were putting the band back together, retooling and making one more valiant playoff run. Or even two. Margot rejoiced at having the grandkids, and kids, so close. She ran errands to the Marin County Gap to get Maddy, newly pregnant, drawstring pants. The coming season felt like a time of growth and nurturing and love. Margot beamed the morning after Steve said yes.
That made him feel complete. He looked around Nick’s home. A photograph of Nick and Nick’s older daughter grinning in front of the Golden Gate Bridge caught his eye. He remembered when Nick was a toddler, how he always wanted a ball, obsessed even then. And now Steve saw his son’s younger daughter, Charlotte, take her very first steps, on the same day and just hours after he’d recommitted to his dream job. It all felt intertwined. Blood family, basketball family, family. A cocoon, like his old Arizona manager said. The little girl toddled all over the house and he looked around in wonder at the world he and basketball had made.
