Steve Kerr: 2015-2016 NBA Coach of the Year

Sept. 27, 1965: Stephen Douglas Kerr is born to Malcolm and Ann Kerr.

1983: Kerr graduates from Palisades Charter High School in Pacific Palisades, California. He commits to Arizona after a handful of programs pursue him as a walk-on.

Jan. 18, 1984: Malcolm Kerr, president of American University in Beirut, is shot and killed outside his office.

Fall 1984: Kerr is named a regular starter as a UA sophomore, and — during the 1984-85 season — averages 10 points per game. Arizona finishes 21-10 and makes the NCAA Tournament.

1985-86: Kerr, now an established star, averages 15 points per game as a junior. Arizona wins the Pac-10 regular season title.

Summer 1986: Kerr suffers a career-threatening right knee injury while playing in the World Championship semifinals against Brazil. Tucson doctors repair his knee weeks later, but his senior season is lost.

1987-88: Kerr returns, averages 15.7 points per game — and hits 57.3 percent of his 3-point attempts — as the Wildcats advance to their first-ever Final Four.

June 28, 1988: The Suns select Kerr in the second round of the NBA Draft.

Sept. 5, 1989: The Suns trade Kerr, who averaged 2.1 points per game as a rookie, to the Cavaliers.

Sept. 15, 1990: Kerr marries Margot Brennan, a Salpointe Catholic High School and UA product.

Dec. 2, 1992: The Cavs trade Kerr to the Magic midseason for a draft pick; Cleveland eventually uses the selection to take Arizona’s Reggie Geary.

Sept. 29, 1993: Kerr signs a free-agent contract with the Chicago Bulls.

1995-96: The Bulls post a 72-10 regular-season record, the best in the history of the NBA, and Michael Jordan — with Kerr playing a reserve role — wins his first NBA championship.

June 13, 1997: Kerr drains a 3-pointer with 6 seconds remaining to lift the Bulls to an NBA Finals-clinching win over the Jazz. He would win a third ring in 1998.

Jan. 21, 1999: Kerr is traded to the Spurs, where he wins his fourth title.

June 15, 2003: Kerr, back with the Spurs after a stint with the Blazers, wins his fifth NBA championship. He retires shortly after.

June 6, 2007: Kerr, now a television analyst, is named general manager of the Suns. He lasts three years.

May 15, 2014: Kerr is named coach of the Golden State Warriors following four years on television. He has no coaching experience.

June 16, 2015: The Warriors defeat the Cavs 105-97 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals to win a championship.

Oct. 1, 2015: Kerr announces he is taking a leave of absence as he recovers from two offseason back surgeries. Luke Walton, another UA product, replaces him.

Jan. 22: Kerr returns to the team.

April 13: The Warriors beat the Grizzlies 125-104 for their 73rd win, breaking the Bulls’ record.

April 26: Kerr is named NBA Coach of the Year.

Star columnist Greg Hansen wrote about Steve Kerr on May 16, 2014, two days after he was named Golden State’s head coach. 

On my birthday in 1986, I sat on a bus from Málaga, Spain, to the Rock of Gibraltar. Steve Kerr sat across the aisle. Pretty good birthday, huh?

He told me he did not like it when the newspapers, or anybody, called him “Opie,” a term of affection that had gotten a bit out of hand in Tucson.

Nor did he enjoy being called an “overachiever.”

“I prefer to think I’m an achiever,” he said.

That was Kerr’s version of clearing the air. Treat me like a grown up. Move on.

Kerr was one of four guards in Lute Olson’s Team USA rotation at the 1986 world championships, sharing time with Kenny Smith, “Muggsy” Bogues and Tommy Amaker.

It was often suggested that Kerr made the team only because Olson was the coach; it was a stretch to think Kerr would ever play a minute in the NBA.

On the bus ride that day, Kerr told me he hoped to be an athletic director some day, and that’s what he studied — sports management — in his final year at Arizona. It wasn’t just idle talk either; he spent time working in the school’s sports information department, doing such menial work as entering football rosters into a computer database.

A week after Team USA’s visit to Gibraltar, Kerr dribbled to the basket with 4:07 remaining in a rousing semifinal victory over favored Brazil. He collapsed, grabbing his right knee, rolling on the ground.

The team doctor, Tim Taft of the University of North Carolina, told me: “To most athletes performing at such high competition levels, an injury like this is career-ending. He will never have 100 percent strength in that knee again.

“But of course, I can’t predict the future.”

I stood in the lobby of a downtown Madrid hotel the next morning, watching as Kerr’s wheelchair was loaded into the back of a van and he was escorted to the airport.

Olson’s wife, Bobbi, embraced him. There were tears everywhere.

I quoted Kerr as saying “Career-ending. Can you believe it? Those are the words that are ringing in my mind.”

Now, two days after Kerr was named head coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, you can say that tearing up his knee at the Madrid Sports Palace on July 17, 1986, was the luckiest break of his life.

Serendipity? Yes. Serendipity.

Because Kerr missed what would’ve been his senior season at Arizona, 1986-87, he was a fifth-year senior when the Wildcats became No. 1 for the first time in school history, finishing 35-3, reaching the Final Four.

It was the right place at the right time.

Had Kerr not been injured in Spain, he might be Arizona’s athletic director today.

By the time the ‘87-88 season began, Kerr had grown out of his “Opie” days and become a man. He established his own identity, setting the NCAA record for three-point shooting (57.3 percent) and created a value to NBA teams that went beyond being a smart guy and team leader, to one who could shoot well enough to be considered a prospect.

The Phoenix Suns picked him with the 50th overall selection in the 1988 draft.

No one confused him with an overachiever again. He played in 910 NBA games and won five championships. He fought with Michael Jordan. He became general manager of the Phoenix Suns. He evolved into one of the top TV analysts in both the NCAA and NBA.

How’s that for an achiever?

At 48, Kerr begins his coaching career at the highest level of basketball. It is inevitable that critics will say he is a) too nice b) too soft and c) too inexperienced to be successful at Golden State, but those who have underestimated him have always been wrong.

He is, if anything, a tough guy.

One week before he was to enroll as an Arizona freshman, August 1983, Kerr arrived at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon, for his flight to Tucson. His father, Malcolm Kerr, was the president of American University of Beirut. Kerr had never been to Tucson. He did not take a recruiting visit here.

A Druze rocket exploded at the airport. Then another. Then two more.

The Druze, members of an Islamic sect, terrorized Beirut; the airport was closed.

For the next two days, at great risk, Kerr was taken to a Marine base where he hoped to catch a flight to Cairo. Both times he was sent home because it was judged too dangerous.

Finally, in a plan devised by his father, Kerr was driven past Druze outposts through Syria to Jordan. It took 10 hours. He reached Egypt and arrived in Tucson a day before classes began.

Five months later, his father was assassinated in Beirut.

His son, a rock, goes on and on and on.

Steve Kerr played 15 seasons in the NBA, hitting 726 three-pointers. None was bigger than the shot he hit in Game 6 of the 1997 NBA Finals. Here is Greg Hansen’s June 15, 1997 column:

On Friday night in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, game tied, six seconds to play, Steve Kerr took a pass from Michael Jordan and had an open 18-footer.

It was the chance of a lifetime.

Thousands of basketball players come and go and never find themselves in precisely the right moment at precisely the right time.

All that was left was to stand up to the pressure.

Steve Kerr had played more than 12,000 minutes in the NBA — roughly 720,000 seconds. In an instant, without warning, the 720,001st second of his NBA career would be the ultimate confluence of opportunity and reward.

The Shot would be his to take.

After a lifetime spent introducing himself to pressure, Steve Kerr didn’t hesitate.

Real pressure

This is pressure: In August 1983, Kerr was at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon, preparing to fly to Tucson to register for his freshman year in college.

He was traveling alone, embarking on the grandest experience of his life, sight unseen. Kerr had never been to Tucson, never had time to take a campus visit after Lute Olson offered him a scholarship in late July of ’83.

Hell, Olson didn’t publicly announce Kerr’s addition to the UA squad until Aug. 29 of that year, 12 days after school had been in session.

As Kerr was waiting to board his plane that day, a 122 mm Druse rocket exploded, rocking the Beirut airport. He was 18 years old, and he thought it could be his last few moments on Earth. … Several days later, pulling strings, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University, arranged for his son to fly out of a U.S. Marine base nicknamed “Sandbag City” where 1,200 Marines were encamped.

He would fly on a diplomatic jet through Cairo, Egypt. But just as Kerr arrived at the air base, the flight was scuttled.

Finally, three days after trying to leave Lebanon, Kerr agreed to a harrowing plan. It was decided that he would be driven, before dawn, by a friend of the family past Druse outposts, through Syria to Amman, Jordan. There he would catch a flight to Cairo and then to the United States.

The drive took 10 hours, requiring several stops at military checkpoints.

Kerr reached Tucson two days later.

His father would be dead, killed by assassins, 4½ months later.

Maybe that’s why taking a jump shot under duress, even an 18-footer with the NBA title at stake, doesn’t seem to rattle Steve Kerr.

The game of his life

In the 10 years since he returned to basketball, his right knee fully rebuilt, Kerr has bounced around some. He was traded by Phoenix to Cleveland, and by Cleveland to Orlando. He sat on the bench in long spells, stacked up behind some not-so-immortals such as Jimmie Oliver, Litterial Green and Chris Corchiani.

In his first seven years in the NBA his highest average was 3.2.

He was traded by Phoenix for Mark Buford.

Cleveland traded him for Amal McCaskill.

When he finally signed a free agent contract with the Bulls, in 1994, Jordan left the team to play baseball.

Kerr seemed, almost chronically, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Who could’ve known what was in store?

Who could’ve guessed that with six seconds left in the Game of His Life, world championship on the line, Michael Jordan would see him standing there. Open.

Nothing but net.

The Star’s Bruce Pascoe visited Steve Kerr on Jan. 22, the day he returned to the Warriors’ bench after missing the first half of the season following back surgery:

OAKLAND, Calif. — Steve Kerr’s back ached, then his head, and it all went on for months and months longer than he figured.

But there’s one thing the former UA star and Golden State Warriors coach made clear Friday when he returned to his head coaching seat for good: He never did lose that sense of humor.

Kerr joked that he returned so that he would force San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich to coach the Western Conference all-stars — since coaches aren’t allowed to coach the game in successive years — instead of being “on some beach with a mai tai in his hand.”

He said he never really knew what sitting out was all about. “Do you sit there and watch soap operas?” Kerr said. “I don’t know.”

Kerr also said he found it amusing that interim Warriors coach Luke Walton was being considered for the All-Star game “because they didn’t give him (credit for) any wins” and smiled broadly when asked what he might “steal” from his latest mentor.

After all, Kerr is famous for having played under Popovich, Phil Jackson and Lute Olson, crediting all of them for the knowledge that helped him build an NBA champion last season. But now he has Walton, too.

Walton, of course, is the former UA and NBA forward who led the Warriors to a 39-4 record while Kerr sat out the first half of the season with complications resulting from offseason back surgery.

“I want to be as laid-back as Luke,” Kerr said. “I thought I was laid-back. Luke is the picture of laid-back.”

Seriously, though, Kerr said Walton added some plays to the Warriors that helped, and used his combination of laid-back nature and basketball smarts to guide the team to a mind-blowing start.

“Luke was phenomenal,” Kerr said. “Obviously, he’s done a great job managing the team, in timeouts, and calling the right plays & Obviously, we’ve got great talent and character but we didn’t skip a beat. We actually got better.”

Kerr said he hoped to keep hanging on to Walton, even as he’s now positioned to be a permanent head coach somewhere soon.

Kerr said he initially expected to return two weeks ago but felt he wasn’t ready. But he then took a big step by accompanying the Warriors on their last road trip.

Kerr said it wasn’t one moment that convinced him he was ready, just a cumulative effect. And when he did return Friday, he said, it was almost like opening night.

“More than anything, I’m excited about the camaraderie and getting back with the group,” Kerr said. “I really missed the routine.”