A Hall of Famer in Exile: Larry Brown’s Italian Adventure
Brown’s renowned wanderlust carried him to 15 coaching jobs in a five-decade career. His latest post is in Italy, and, so far, it hasn’t been easy.
by Andrew Keh
The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2018
TURIN, Italy — Larry Brown has always been something of an enigma. But rarely has he been so misunderstood.
Brown, the Hall of Fame basketball coach, moved to Turin months ago, but he still hasn’t been able to get on the same page as his cleaning lady. The clerks at the grocery store across the street from his apartment giggle when he tries to ask for help. Brown, you see, knows only a few words in Italian, including the ones for shrimp and tuna. He has been eating a lot of tuna.
Now 78, Brown, a former coach of the Knicks, the Nets and more than a dozen other college and pro teams, relocated to Turin over the summer after agreeing to coach Fiat Torino, in Italy’s Lega Basket Serie A. But even basketball itself has proved to be less than a universal language.
“For sure, Coach is a legend, and for sure, he is a genius,” Giuseppe Poeta, the team’s captain, said. “But it is also true that here, basketball is totally different.”
Until now, Brown’s notorious wanderlust — 15 teams in five decades — had at least confined him to the continental United States. But opportunities there ran dry after he was implicated in an academic fraud scandal at Southern Methodist University. In an interview, he raised the specter of ageism as one factor keeping him out of the N.B.A. even in an assistant coaching role. But since he is still very much addicted to the game, still most at home in a gymnasium and still compulsively eager to teach, he headed overseas rather than pick a fight.
In many ways, though, he feels no different than countless septuagenarians: sure, he’s had a few health issues, and of course he doesn’t move like he used to, but he still insists he can contribute to the profession to which he had dedicated his life. His problem is he just can’t convince the right people to think the way he does.
So he has come to Italy, preaching his gospel of “playing the right way” to a new set of variably receptive young ears.
“I want to share what I know and what I’ve been taught,” Brown said. “But I also want to keep growing and learning.”
The project, so far, has been complicated. The team has been in disarray for a few years, employing three head coaches last season alone. Torino remarkably brought in 12 new players this season — and then a remarkable number of them got hurt.
Brown has been dealing with health issues of his own. He has had five surgeries this year (he asked that the specifics remain private), one of which left a long scar running down the left side of his neck. Since joining the team in June, he has returned to the United States twice for operations, missing a chunk of training camp and another stretch of games in October.
The issues, he said, were manageable; his time away from the players has been harder to accept. With no clear idea yet of how to play together in Brown’s system, the team has fallen to a 2-4 record in Italy’s domestic league and 0-6 in the EuroCup, a continental championship.
“If you looked at our team now, I think you’d probably say this is terrible to watch,” Brown said. “They’re just a bunch of guys running around.”
The team — largely composed of American imports with varying degrees of N.B.A. experience or aspirations — had only seven players available in a loss at home last week to Skyliners Frankfurt. One of those players was hurt midway through the game, and then Brown benched another for talking back to him, which meant Torino played most of the fourth quarter with the remaining five.
At a news conference afterward, Brown plopped into his chair and breathed an exasperated sigh into the microphone. With reporters looking on, he picked up a large, pink bottle of sparkling water: “Two guys — and I’m going to mention names — they couldn’t guard this,” he said.
Carlos Delfino, an Argentine-Italian small forward who was asked to join the team as a veteran voice and locker room advocate, laughed about how little Brown’s blunt style had changed since 2003, when he drafted Delfino to play for the Detroit Pistons, despite how much they both have aged.
“I was really young, and he was really old,” said Delfino, 36, who spent almost a decade in the N.B.A. “Now I’m old, and he’s really, really old.”
Delfino said he spent most of his rookie N.B.A. season angry with Brown for being so hard on him. But after they went their separate ways, Brown continued offering Delfino honest, constructive criticism season after season, and Delfino came to realize that it had never been personal, that Brown was merely obsessed with making players better.
Sometimes young players get angry, Delfino said, “and I’m like, ‘Look, he’s that way.’”
If Brown can rub some of the young Torino players the wrong way, he can also leave them in awe, especially when he name-drops from a list of personal connections as deep as a phone book. (He uses the term “kid” to refer to anyone, even a middle-aged adult.) The players periodically ask for stories about Allen Iverson and Rasheed Wallace, and Brown is happy to oblige.
“He’s a man that has a lot of energy,” Poeta said. “I think he can be alive until 150. He’s been through a lot. He’s seen a world war! As a human being, he’s such an experienced and great grandpa with a lot of stories to tell you.”
His stockpile of stories is growing.
The locker rooms here, to Brown’s amusement, fall considerably short of the plush standards of the N.B.A. Early in the season, he walked into a bathroom in one arena and promptly walked back out when he realized the only toilet had no seat.
He described a flight to Germany in which he was less than sure he would make it safely onto the ground at the other end. “On a long flight, I’m a two-Valium guy,” he said. “On a short flight, it’s one. We had this prop plane, and I was ready to take the whole bottle.”
It all reminds him of what Michael Jordan once told him about his stint playing baseball.
“He said the most fun he had was the bus rides going between minor league games with the team, stopping at a rest area, getting chips or whatever,” Brown said. “And I’m experiencing that now.”
For all the fun he’s having, Brown also is miffed that no one has offered him an N.B.A. job, even as an assistant. He suggested there was some ageism at play; friends of his wondered whether younger head coaches in the league might feel threatened with him on the bench. Brown scoffs at this, rattling off names of assistants like Tex Winter, Johnny Bach and Pete Carril, who all coached into their 80s.
“They didn’t get dumber when they got older,” Brown said.
Brown doesn’t dwell on his exile too much. He stays up in the middle of the night to watch N.B.A. games. He watches N.F.L. games, too, at a local sports bar, though he gets banished to a small side room whenever other patrons want to watch soccer. He goes to a local barber, an Fiat Torino fan who refuses to take his money.
And every morning, he luxuriates in the smell of fresh bread drifting from the traditional bakery beneath his apartment. It is an evocative scent, he said; when he was a young child, sometime after his father died, his family moved into an apartment above a bakery where his mother worked.
He would love to be closer now to his own family, and to his children and grandchildren. But Brown also wants to give the fans here something to cheer, and his inability to do so in his first few months has left him stricken with guilt.
The owners of the team took a chance bringing him here, he said, and several of the players gave up opportunities to make more money elsewhere to play for him. So he plans to keep pushing forward, to make things work. He has wisdom left to share, with whoever will take it.
“You want to reward the people that are trusting you,” he said. “That’s been the biggest issue: not being able to give them what’s been expected of me.”
Andrew Keh is an international correspondent, covering sports from Berlin. He has previously covered Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. and has reported from the World Cup and the Olympics. @andrewkeh
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