so that trains headed to Quebec and Montreal could safely
pass through towns so remote they have numbers instead
of names. There’s peace up there. Brown still goes back to
the Moosehead Lake region every summer, which is where
he took his father whitewater rafting.
“We were coming down the river and we went down into the
wave, and then boom, flipped up,” Bob says, laughing. “And
I looked up, and there goes Brett. Fortunately I’m hanging
on for dear life, and I didn’t go in the river.”
Brett refers to Bob (who also has a thick Maine accent,
minus the Australian tinge) as the real coach of the family. It’s
surprising to many, but there’s a vibrant basketball culture in
Maine. Players who live in year-round island communities off
the coast take hour-and-a-half-long ferry rides and then travel
three hours by bus to play rival high schools. The winters are
brutal. Friday nights in the gym make them more bearable.
“Some of the small teams like Beals Island had seven boys
in the entire school in the ’50s,” says Bob, who’s a walking
encyclopedia of Maine basketball. “And when they played
for the state championship, I still remember that at least
three of the seven boys in the school had the last name Beal.”
Bob was a high school coach near Augusta when Brett was
born, and the family bounced from town to town for his jobs.
When Brett was in middle school, Bob coached in Rockland,
a fishing town on Penobscot Bay. The family regularly came
home to buckets of lobster, halibut and clams sitting on their
front porch, gifts from Bob’s players and their families. The
Browns moved to Portland when Brett was in eighth grade,
and in high school he played for his father. In Brett’s senior
year, the team went undefeated and won the state champion-
ship by 44 points. Both Browns vividly remember the mas-
sive parade the town threw for them when they came home.
“I’ve had a chance to see the world from different vision
lines, coaching overseas and in the NBA,” Brett says. “And
the starting point was Maine. It’s one of those things in the
light of day that still means something.”
Bob was an old-school coach, a disciplinarian, and Brett
used to frustrate his father by sprinting home from his girl-
friend’s house to be home by 10:59 for his
11 p.m. curfew. But the kid could play. Players
Bob coached in high school say that he used
to wheel out an old VHS player to show them
tape of Brett in high school and in college.
Brett has internalized his father’s sense of
structure.
“I like routines,” he says. “There is a hint
of rigidness in how I see the world. I think
everybody wants to know the truth, and I
think everybody down deep wants to be
coached. The great ones certainly do. And
you hope to have a level of accountability
that reflects your beliefs. Coaching adults
and fathers and multimillionaires is dif-
ferent from coaching the lobsterman’s son
from Maine. That’s just the way it is. I’ve
been raised in an environment where youopen directly onto the practice court. His
front wall is a window, with fancy shades
that he can draw so that he can see out, but
no one can see in. Brown helped architects
shape the facility at the same time he was
shaping the team. The team part was less
straightforward, but Brown went in with his
eyes open. He knew that executing Hinkie’s
vision would be his class-5 rapid.57SPORT S ILL US TR ATED- OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
BRETT BROWN