Carlesimos already have endured toughest tests
By Steve Kelley
Seattle Times staff columnist
ROD MAR / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Boston GM Danny Ainge, left, and Seattle coach P.J. Carlesimo share a laugh at the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas.
LAS VEGAS — The San Antonio Spurs were preparing to leave for Dallas for the third game of their 2006 Western Conference semifinal playoff series, when Carolyn Carlesimo got the bad news from her biopsy tests.
She had Hodgkin's lymphoma and would have to endure the tedious ordeal of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The long-term prognosis was good, but the short-term experience would be exhausting and tortuous.
For her husband, P.J., then an assistant with the Spurs, these were the most difficult and draining days in another long, challenging NBA season. Now, suddenly, his wife's illness was changing his perspective on the series and on his values.
Instead of preparing a game plan to beat the Mavericks, he and Carolyn were listening to strategies to beat cancer. And, while Carolyn prepared for chemo, P.J. agonized over his choices.
Should he leave the team at this most crucial time of the season? Take care of the kids and Carolyn? Or should he continue to do his job, work through all of the worry and hurt that comes with the news that a spouse has cancer and keep coaching.
"Pop [Spurs coach Gregg Popovich] would say to me, 'What are you doing at practice? Go home and take care of your wife. Deal with that,' " Carlesimo said Sunday afternoon. "And Carolyn was saying to me, 'What are you doing at home? Go to practice.' "
Coaches are, by nature, control freaks. Most aren't comfortable with variables. They like their teams to run the plays that are called, play the defenses that are taught and believe in the philosophies they profess.
But this was something completely out of Carlesimo's control. He couldn't game plan for cancer. He couldn't out-work the problem. This was his wife's disease. It was her oncologist's case. All he could do was be there.
"It was a scare," Carlesimo said. "It wasn't like I could get that stuff figured out."
Carolyn's chemo was scheduled to begin the day after the seventh game of the Dallas series, which meant, if the Spurs beat the Mavericks, they would be preparing for another Western Conference finals.
"She told me I had to coach," Carlesimo said.
The Spurs, however, lost the seventh game to Dallas and the decisions were made for them. Carlesimo was able to be with his wife for every round of chemo.
"Sure it changes you. Sure it gives you some perspective," Carlesimo said. "I mean that's the real world, not what we coaches do for a living. That stuff is real life. It makes you think about your core values. I think one thing it taught me was not to take myself too seriously."Carolyn Carlesimo's program of radiation and chemotherapy was successful. A little more than a year removed from the diagnosis, she is healthy again. She is examined every three months, eventually that will expand to every six months and, after five years of negative tests, she will officially be declared cancer free.
This past weekend, she was in Paris for the wedding of Spurs point guard Tony Parker and Eva Longoria.
"We've really put the cancer away," Carlesimo said.
Now they begin a new phase of their lives, in a new city, in a much different set of difficult circumstances. Carlesimo is the new head coach of the Seattle Sonics, a franchise in limbo, waiting for a new arena and threatening to move.
It is a team that won a mere 31 games last season. Fixing it is a monumental challenge.
In the corner of a cafe in the Palms Hotel on Sunday, Carlesimo talked animatedly for two hours about the dramas and traumas, big and small, in his life. And about the future of his new team.
Some coaches talk in sound bites. Carlesimo talks in seven-course meals. Some coaches give you one-word answers. Carlesimo gives you Dostoyevsky. Some coaches answer in a straight line. Carlesimo meanders.
This is his first job as head coach since he was fired in 1999 by Golden State. He comes to Seattle with a reputation for being as tough and demanding as any coach in the game.
Carlesimo, 58, is a grinder and understands there will be times in the course of this next long season he will push players too hard, too far.
"Absolutely," he said. "No question I will. But I think I'd be making a big mistake if I came in here walking on egg shells. [General manager] Sam Presti and [owner] Clay Bennett hired me to coach. If I don't push guys and don't get on 'em, then I'm not doing a good job. I'm not doing what I should be doing.
"I'm sure there's going to be a night when I yank somebody out of a game, or there's going to be a day at practice where I go too far. That's going to happen.
"I hope I've learned and changed and I am better since Golden State. But there's also a part of me that, deep down inside is saying, 'Hey, I ain't that different.' I don't think this is going to be dramatically different than the way I've done things before. There's going to be some rough spots for sure, but I can't be scared of the rough spots."
This is the 10th anniversary of Carlesimo's roughest spot — the incident with Latrell Sprewell. At a practice on Dec. 1, 1997, Golden State guard Sprewell felt he was pushed too hard and attacked his coach, putting a choke hold on Carlesimo. The NBA expelled Sprewell and he didn't play again until he was traded to New York in January 1999.
Fairly, or unfairly, that 10- to 15-second attack has become a signature moment in Carlesimo's career. It is remembered even more than his trip to the 1989 Final Four in Seattle with Seton Hall.
"I'm not going to be able to change that," he said. "We could win seven NBA championships and that's not going to change. It's always going to color people's perceptions of me. But not the basketball people's impressions. They know me better than that. And I can't dwell on what happened with Spree. That's time poorly spent."
The past five years he sat alongside Popovich and has been part of one of the league's most accomplished dynasties. Popovich's style is much like Carlesimo's and it has been almost validating for Carlesimo to see it work so well for so long in San Antonio.
"First of all, Pop doesn't think he invented the wheel," Carlesimo said. "Yet, at the same time, he knows how he wants to play and he insists that the players play that way. At this point now, he's got so much credibility when he talks to the players they listen, because they know he knows how to get a ring. If he tells them to stand on their head they'll say, 'I've never heard that before, but it must work.'
"He has a vision and he communicates very well with the players. Some times it's blunt and direct. Some days he does it with laughter and some positive stuff. But if it's going to take a 3 ½-hour film session, where they look at every mistake, then he'll do that."
This job with the Sonics could be Carlesimo's last stand. His last opportunity to get out from under the Sprewell curse. His last chance to prove he can win consistently in the NBA, to show he isn't only a good college coach, or a good NBA assistant.
"It may be, but I haven't thought about it in that way," he said. "In a sense I've thought about my legacy. I feel good with my college years, especially. The relationships I had with my players. I think I did all right by Wagner, by Seton Hall, by New Hampshire College.
"Yeah, I wish my NBA record [177-222] was a hell of a lot better than it is, but I do think I did a good job when I was in Portland [1994-97]. I don't think I was as bad at Golden State [1997-99] as it was perceived. But that's me spinning it my way. I think I can coach.
"I tell people, and I know they don't believe me, if I hadn't got one [head coaching opportunity], I think I could have stayed in San Antonio for a long time — at least until Pop retired. I wouldn't have felt like, 'Man it wasn't fair that I never got another job.' I don't think I'm owed a job."
The hoop world will be watching Seattle this season, wanting to see if the San Antonio model can be duplicated in the Northwest.
And that world will be watching Carlesimo to see if he can be patient with this new, painfully young, work in progress. That he has learned from his years with Pop.
Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or
skelley@seattletimes.comCopyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
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