THURSDAY, MAY 26 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 D3
of that same freeing vantage
point to his players. “There is
such great value in going for it
and putting yourself in the
moment and not fearing the
repercussion of the miss or the
loss,” he has said.
Kerr’s parents taught him the
value of developed reason by
exemplifying it themselves. He
found a way to pursue that
philosophy even in the face of an
event that destroyed reason,
through a career that has been all
about self-mastering fears,
insecurities and angers. But it’s
tested over and over again,
whenever a gun goes off.
A gunshot wrecks all self-
control, all curiosity in outcomes
— including that of the shooter —
with the most fearful
repercussion. A bullet in the air
renders everyone and everything
impotent against it and
vulnerable to its collateral
chaotic ricochet. Kerr was 18
when he felt that fatal
abbreviation; his father was
murdered in Lebanon in 1984. He
is now 56. “I’m tired — I’m so
tired of getting up here and
offering condolences to the
devastated families that are out
there,” Kerr said Tuesday night.
“I’m tired of the — excuse me, I’m,
I’m sorry, I’m so — I’m so tired of
the moments of silence. Enough.”
Somehow, Kerr goes on.
Whatever you think of his
political stance, he is worth
attending to, closely, for his
testimony on the subject and for
his attempt to wrest some control
and reason from the most
annihilating event.myself and could pretend that I
wasn’t bothered. It took me quite
a long time for that.”
Today, when Kerr is asked to
give advice to parents of athletes,
he replies: “Keep your mouth
shut. Just shut up.”
It was a lesson Kerr never
forgot. “Coaching isn’t
controlling,” he has said.
Obedience is merely a grudging,
forced, external result. It’s a
mistake poor coaches or
overinvolved sports parents often
make but one that great coaches
don’t. “My goal by the end of the
year is to just sit there and do
nothing,” he remarked shortly
after his first championship with
the Warriors. “And that means it
works. Because that’s what a
coach’s job is. It’s not to pull
strings and call every play and
direct traffic. It’s to say, ‘This is
your team.’ ”
Those looking for the source of
Kerr’s extraordinary success in
coaching — on the verge of
making a sixth NBA Finals in
eight years with the Warriors —
naturally go to his basketball
mentors, to Lute Olson, to Phil
Jackson, to Gregg Popovich, and
no question he took a little from
each. But the real seed of it was
perhaps planted much, much
earlier by the scholar-father who
embedded that first clue, the
power of thoughtful self-
possession, the ability to compete
with a sense of inquisitiveness
rather than insistence or
recrimination.
Kerr’s great strength, his
riveting signature as head coach
of the Warriors, is his conveyanceANDY LYONS/GETTY IMAGES
Jaylen Brown scored 25 points as Boston moved within one win of
a berth in the NBA Finals with a Game 5 victory Wednesday night.“And a teacher,” he said,
swallowing heavily, almost
choking on the word.
Malcolm Kerr was a teacher, a
worldly professor of political
science at UCLA who loved to
compete yet prided himself on
his reason and broad perspective.
Kerr’s mother, Ann Kerr-Adams,
also was a scholar, who now
heads the Fulbright scholar-
enrichment program at UCLA.
There were times when their
hyper-reactive, ball-addicted son
baffled them. “They might’ve
looked at my obsession with
basketball with a little bit of,
what’s the word? I don’t know if
condescension is the right word;
that’s the wrong word.
Puzzlement ,” Kerr said in that
phone conversation. “Like,
‘What’s the deal?’ ”
Great teachers don’t seek to
control their students. They seek
to foster self-command in them.
Kerr’s parents were more
interested in that than in curbing
a disposition that regularly
embarrassed them in public. “I
was a disaster as a kid with my
temper because I was so
competitive,” he confessed. One
Easter when he was about 7, Kerr
lost the annual egg hunt, failing
to find the golden egg hidden in a
garden. He dissolved into arenews your respect for the
healing resolution he has found
for himself in the game.
If Kerr has one quality above
all others, it’s a sure perception of
context, that basketball is not the
most serious endeavor but a
balm. In a phone conversation a
couple of years ago during the
pandemic shutdown, I asked him
a simple question: Why is
basketball important? He
laughed. “I’m not sure that it is,”
he said. His pregame demeanor is
usually so relaxed that his face
practically won’t hold a face
mask; it keeps slipping down.
The voice is smooth as cloth, and
his posture is habitually
lounging. So, when Kerr began
his news conference before
Game 4 of the NBA Western
Conference finals against the
Dallas Mavericks with the skin
around his mouth stretched tight
and his hands one minute
smacking the table and the next
rubbing at his forehead, it
demanded attention.
“Any basketball questions
don’t matter,” he began. “Since we
left shoot-around, 14 children
were killed 400 miles from here.”
Then he paused and stared down
at the table.
JENKINS FROM D1
SALLY JENKINS
After mass shooting, Kerr
is a voice for the voiceless
professional basketballBY TIM REYNOLDSmiami — The Boston Celtics know
the formula. They believe their de-
fense, as has been the case time and
again in these playoffs, will even-
tually wear down teams.
Hard to argue.
Jaylen Brown scored 25 points,
Jayson Tatum added 22, and the
Celtics are now one win from the
NBA Finals. They ran away after
halftime to beat the Miami Heat,
93-80, on Wednesday night and
take a 3-2 lead in the Eastern Con-
ference finals.
“I think the mental stress and
strain we put on some teams with
our defense has worked and car-
ried us through the playoffs at
times,” Celtics Coach Ime Udoka
said.
Al Horford had 16 points and
Derrick White added 14 for the
Celtics. Tatum finished with 12 re-
bounds and nine assists.
Bam Adebayo scored 18 points
and grabbed 10 rebounds for the
Heat, which shot 32 percent from
the field in the game — after shoot-
ing 33 percent in Boston’s 20-pointwin in Game 4. Gabe Vincent add-
ed 15 and Jimmy Butler had 13 for
Miami.
The Heat was 7 for 45 from three-
point range. It played without an
injured Tyler Herro (groin), and
several Miami players were ques-
tionable entering the day with a
variety of ailments.
“We are not going to make any
kind of deflection or any kind of
excuse,” Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra
said. “Boston beat us tonight. And
let’s be clear about that. There’s
guys that are far from 100 percent
on both sides.”
Game 6 is Friday night in Bos-
ton, where a pair of trophies bear-ing the names of Celtics legends
will be waiting. The Bob Cousy
trophy goes to the East champs, the
Larry Bird trophy to the East finals
MVP, and the Celtics are one win
from hoisting them.
“We’ve got an opportunity to do
something with this group that’s
special,” Brown said. “Let’s not take
that for granted.”
Boston outscored Miami 32-16
in the third quarter. The margin
was only 11 at that point — but
Boston opened the fourth quarter
with a 14-2 spurt.NBA PLAYOFFS
Boston upends Miami, returns home with 3-2 lead
CELTICS 93,
HEAT 80Parkland] and spending time in
that community and just the
shock that it was happening, so
real in our neighborhood really,
in our community.
“But it just continues to
happen. I know everybody is
saying that there needs to be a
call to action, and I think what
this is forcing people to do is
just to figure it out, including
myself,” Spoelstra continued.
“We don’t have the answers, but
we want to be heard to be able
to force change to the people
that can actually make the
change.”
Most sane people want this
same change because we have
fears and concerns over
protecting the next school. But
we also want life to go back to
normal because our minds can’t
easily process the horror of
fourth graders having to duck
and hide under plastic desks to
save their lives. And so we look
for familiar habits we love,
distractions from our pain.
Certainly, the majority of people
inside the sold-out arena
Wednesday night mourned over
the lives lost. But that didn’t
stop them from showing up to
cheer for grown people wearing
matching outfits and playing a
child’s game.
However, some in sports —
such as Steve Kerr on Tuesday
night, such as Wade after the
Parkland shooting — found that
whiplash almost too much to
tolerate.
“What started going through
my mind was: ‘How do I dare
come here and act like I know
what you guys have been going
through?’ ” Wade said of his visit
to students at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas less than a
month after the shooting. “How
narcissistic of me to think that I
can come here and make a
difference because I’m good at
my sport?”
“Sadness and disbelief,” Wade
tweeted Tuesday, when the
familiar scenes repeated
themselves in Texas. He later
added another tweet about the
updated body count. He did not
mention Herro’s absence in
Game 5.that day, was buried in a
Dwyane Wade jersey.
“It is tough. It’s very tough,”
Spoelstra said Wednesday night
about the feeling of shifting
from concerned citizen to a
coach concerned about
matchups. “My wife and I had
kind of a tough afternoon
reflecting on it last night for
those very reasons, and it does
feel like just yesterday that we
were going up there [touse that phrase without critics
weighing in and diminishing the
standard expression of
sympathy. He did so because
earlier that day a gunman had
killed 14 students, a teacher and
two coaches at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School
in Parkland, Fla. Then Spoelstra
went on to coach the game. The
players went on to perform. Fans
cheered as usual. Joaquin Oliver,
a Parkland student who dieddoubt by this time his mind had
shifted from feeling devastated
for the families to focusing on
how to stop all-NBA forward
Jayson Tatum. He has practice in
compartmentalizing. In being a
coach who has to diverge from
the script of basketball to
address terrible days in America.
Before a game in Philadelphia
on Feb. 14, 2018, Spoelstra
offered his “thoughts and
prayers” when it was still okay towould get the crowd excited
once more. Because, after all,
this was a playoff game.
Entertainment. A happy
distraction from the day’s bleak
news as the number of dead
children in Uvalde grew from
the initial count of 14 to 19.
Spoelstra spent much of the
start of the game with arms
crossed, pacing the sideline as
the teams toddled through a
low-scoring first quarter. Nofor us Americans to go on with
life as usual after a tragedy such
as Uvalde. We have become such
masters at moving on anytime a
gunman walks into a public
space and opens fire on innocent
and unarmed targets that we all
should be suffering from
whiplash. Once unfathomable,
now it’s just a Tuesday in Texas.
Or a Wednesday in Parkland,
Fla.
We pause and reflect or
protest and rage, directing our
indignation at legislators who
refuse to create meaningful laws
that would limit the
proliferation of guns in our
society. But mostly we mourn
and then move on. This cycle
may not be more obvious and
inevitable anywhere than in
sports, the great American
diversion.
Heat fans on their way to
Wednesday night’s game, some
of them heading north on
Biscayne Boulevard, may have
spotted the electronic floating
billboard that advised them:
“Hug your kids tight today. In
memory of the victims of
Uvalde, Texas.” At the same time,
those zooming south on
Interstate 95 may have noticed
the billboard advertising the
Miami Gun Show this weekend.
Once inside the building, just
as it had the previous night in
Dallas before Game 4 of the
Western Conference finals, the
atmosphere turned somber as
the public address announcer
asked fans “to join us in a
moment of silence.” The Heat
then took a further step by
projecting a black-and-white
image, urging fans to “Support
Common Sense Gun Laws”
along with a link to register to
vote.
Applause, from ticket buyers
who presumably live in a state
that does not require a permit to
purchase a firearm, filled the
room, but as always, the show
went on. The cheers grew louder
once the earsplitting bass line of
“Seven Nation Army” piped in.
The graphic eventually faded so
the rallying cry “Let’s Go Heat!”
BUCKNER FROM D1
CANDACE BUCKNER
Sports are the great American diversion, and we’re always having to move on
LYNNE SLADKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Miami Heat players pause for a moment of silence for those killed in Uvalde, Tex. “It just continues to happen,” Coach Erik Spoelstra said.Noticeably so. After the game, he
would simmer in the car ride on
the way home as his parents
listened with detached calm.
Silently. They would wait,
patiently, until he cooled off
before saying a word.
Later, after some of the heat
had gone out of him and he was
capable of listening, Malcolm
would explain that temper only
compounded his problems.
When opponents saw him
running too hot, they knew
where he was vulnerable. Kerr
gradually became aware that his
parents possessed that quality
called composure. Which was the
source of real command in any
contest. “I learned to at least
pretend like I was composed,” he
said. “Where I’d make a mistake
in a game and be furious withweeping, screeching tantrum. “I
completely broke down crying
and throwing a fit, and everybody
thought I was crazy,” he said.
“And I was. I couldn’t help it;
that’s just who I was.”
The Kerrs understood that
trying to constrain him would
not have worked — compression
only creates more combustion.
His temperament remained a
work in progress throughout his
adolescence, his competitive
intensity flaring obnoxiously. He
was an overwrought, sweat-
flushed striver who seethed over
every mistake. His parents dealt
with it by displaying their own
self-discipline. At Kerr’s games,
while all the other parents yelled
urgently at their kids from the
stands, they would sit quietly,
undemonstrative, all but still.SCOTT STRAZZANTE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the
devastated families that are out there,” Steve Kerr said Tuesday.Heat at Celtics
Friday, 8:30 p.m., ESPN