Once a ‘Bad Boy,’ Detroit Shock’s Rick Mahorn Becomes a Father Figure
Rick Mahorn with his Detroit Shock players during the first round of the playoffs.
He was named the team’s coach in June.
Credit -- Allen Einstein/NBAE via Getty Images
By Karen Crouse
Sept. 25, 2009
Rick Mahorn grabbed a padded chair in the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden and lifted it with such force that he cracked a plastic light cover and lacerated a ceiling panel. It was halftime of his fifth game as coach of the Detroit Shock, and Mahorn was so mad at his players’ lackluster effort against the Liberty, he could not see straight.
“I started yelling and I felt dizzy, like I was about to clock out,” he recalled this week. Mahorn’s tirade stunned his players, who knew him as a father figure, not the “bad boy” who amassed more than $11,000 in playing fines during the Detroit Pistons’ 1988-89 championship season.
“His eyes were all big, and then he started sweating,” forward Cheryl Ford said. “We thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
Mahorn’s Manhattan meltdown proved instructive. The players learned how much Mahorn cares about the game, and Mahorn discovered how much his players care about him. When he finished his tongue-lashing, he sent them back out to the court only to have someone in the traveling party return to the locker room, at the players’ behest, to make sure Mahorn was O.K.
The Shock is 19-11 since that loss and can advance to its fourth consecutive W.N.B.A. finals with a victory Saturday at Indiana in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals.
“We’re a functional dysfunctional team, and I’m not saying that in a bad sense,” Mahorn said Monday morning in his office at the Palace at Auburn Hills. “We don’t take anything personal. If someone has a gripe or a grievance, O.K., we’ll listen, then we move onward and upward.”
It was Mahorn’s 51st birthday, and he was punching the keyboards of two laptop computers while listening to Motown music that was loud enough to knock the sleep from his eyes. The video coordinator, Paige Jackson, stuck her head in to let Mahorn know the players had chipped in to buy him a lemon cake with lemon icing. He dismissed her with a few coarse comments that made her laugh.
When Mahorn is cracking jokes, you can see a space between his front teeth but no discernible gender gap. He uses the same profane language with everyone. The team manager responded with a few crude comments of her own, smiled and walked away. Mahorn called her back, and turning serious, pointed to one of the computers and said, “What’s the password?”
Mahorn initially was not keen on coaching women, assuming it would be like refereeing a season-long catfight.
“It’s a tough knock,” said Mahorn, who turned down Bill Laimbeer, a former Pistons teammate who was then the coach, more than once before finally agreeing in 2005 to coach the Shock’s frontcourt players.
He was promoted in June, three games — and two losses — into the season when Laimbeer stepped down to chase an N.B.A. job. (He found one as a Minnesota Timberwolves assistant.)
Now, Mahorn said, he sometimes sits back and watches the veteran guard Deanna Nolan, “and I start laughing that I’m getting an opportunity to coach a player that gifted.”
Nolan, a wiry 30-year-old who grew up in Flint, Mich., less than an hour up I-75 from Auburn Hills, was being taped at the Palace before practice Tuesday when the 6-foot-10 Mahorn burst into the training room. “Congratulations,” he told her, extending his hand. “You’ve been named second team all-W.N.B.A.” He showered her with one of his profane terms of endearment. Nolan beamed.
“When he jokes with you, it’s always in some kind of sarcastic manner with a little bit of profanity thrown in,” Nolan said, adding, “That’s his way of getting his point across.”
When Mahorn is serious, his players can tell by the tone of his voice. “When he gets a little bass behind it, he means business,” Ford said.
Mahorn’s voice was deep when he said of Nolan, who averaged 23.5 points and 4.0 assists in the regular season, “She hasn’t gotten the respect that I think she should get.”
Do any Shock players? After practice, they slip into their cars in jerseys drenched in sweat and drive down the hill to the Palace to shower because the locker room at the Pistons’ practice facility is off limits. The Shock’s no-frills existence makes it “more fulfilling” when they succeed, said Mahorn, who was the coach of the Rockford Lightning in the Continental Basketball Association, a men’s professional development league, in 1999 and 2000, then an assistant with the Atlanta Hawks from 2000 to 2002.
Mahorn has learned professional athletes are professional athletes, no matter their gender. They are essentially the same, except “women are more detailed,” he said.
“When you draw up a play, they’ll go out and execute that play to the nth detail,” he said. “As a coach, it’s very rewarding.”
Growing up with two older sisters and raising four daughters with his wife, Donyale, gave Mahorn, a father of six, an understanding of women that cannot be forced or faked. Describing his promotion, Mahorn said, “Bill left, and then I inherited 11 more daughters.”
One of those daughters is Ford, the biological child of Karl Malone, an N.B.A. contemporary of Mahorn’s. Working with the low-post players, Mahorn developed a close rapport with Ford, who is finally rounding into form after having knee surgery in the off-season.
“I used to go tell him everything,” Ford said of Mahorn, “because he was easy to talk to and I knew I could trust him.” By her own admission, she has never had that kind of relationship with Malone.
“But now I feel like it can’t be the way it used to be because he’s the head coach,” said Ford, who is averaging 6.8 points in the playoffs. “He says his door’s always open, but I feel like I have to pick and choose what I choose to tell him because he’s the highest authority. I hold a lot in now.”
Mahorn does, too, although he seems as open as the door to his office. He has a quip for everyone he meets and he addresses every employee at the Palace by name (and has a nickname for most).
On Mahorn’s birthday, Sept. 21, five women from the cleaning crew came into his office during their morning break to sing “Happy Birthday.” And they weren’t the first. Two security men stationed at the loading dock had already been by to serenade Mahorn, who exchanged good-natured insults with everyone even though on this day his heart was not really into it.
His mother, Alice, whom he adored, died in 1993 when she was 57, and the nearer he gets to that age, the more acutely Mahorn feels his mortality.
“Everybody loved my mom, and Rick’s a lot like her,” his sister Pam said by telephone. “Since she died, he kind of holds his feelings in a little bit.”
Mahorn’s other sister, Audrey, died at 45 seven years ago; last week, her 28-year-old son died of a heart attack. Mahorn traveled to his hometown, Hartford, for his nephew’s funeral, returning home the day before the Shock’s first playoff game.
When he felt his blood pressure rising during his halftime rant in New York, Mahorn was scared. He told himself, I’m not going to do that anymore.
There’s too much more Mahorn wants to give back to the game and his players to waste a single breath.
“I try to have a smile,” he said, “and just keep on going.”
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 26, 2009, Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: From Bad Boy to Father Figure.
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