Jerry Sloan never won a title either as a player or a coach but he is considered one of the top NBA coaches of all time.
The Salt Lake Tribune has a great profile of the 76-year-old man struggling with Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. As a basketball loving Lewy body patient myself, this story sent me looking for tissues.
So who is Sloan? Tribune says:
Sloan is an icon, a reminder of the franchise’s glory days when they made back-to-back trips to the NBA Finals in the late ’90s, back when Hall of Famers John Stockton and Karl Malone pick-and-rolled opponents to death seemingly every night.
I remember those Jazz teams well, often had or were close to having the best won-lost records in the league.
My own pick-up game with my Old Man Hoops League is waning but I’m still doing it. Sloan, though slowly losing brain function, is still going to Utah Jazz games. In fact it’s the centerpiece of his life.
Stockton and Malone pick and rolls should be required viewing for every aspiring basketball player. If I was a hoops coach, I’d put together a tape with dozens of Stockton-to-Malone P&R’s for my players.
We even use picks in our Old Man Basketball League. We are especially fond of the illegal picks that resemble downhill blocking in football. (Some of us have even called illegal picks. Ha. Funny.)
Seriously, a legal pick is simple and efficient and still works after all these years.
Our knowledge of Parkinson’s and its mean younger cousin, Lewy Body dementia, is limited. Our treatments don’t work all the time. There is no cure. Both Parkinson’s and Lewy are the result of excess proteins in the brain, but no one has figured out why the protein’s are there, smothering the brain cells.
As the Tribune article says, the disease strips your mind and your motor skills, but not overnight. There is time to exercise, be with loved ones, keep the mind active and hope your brain’s neurons are setting good picks. Jerry’s wife Tammy Sloan keeps Jerry’s schedule very busy with activities and social functions.
I used basketball to describe my situation earlier in a column for AL.com
Here’s part of what I wrote: There are cases in the scientific literature of people who upon autopsy were found to have brains that indicated Alzheimer’s disease yet during their lives they showed no symptoms. Researchers say their brains apparently found “work-arounds” to the plaques and tangles that are believed to be the root of Alzheimer’s.
So that has me hopeful and encouraging my neurons: Come on you lightning quick neurons, put the Stephen Curry crossover on those proteins and get to the hoop.
I’m still playing, but I can relate to what Sloan is feeling. I just found my glasses before writing this Sunday afternoon. They’ve been missing for a week and a day. (I’d love to joke and say they were on my head but, thankfully, I’m not that bad yet.)
If Sloan wants to play a little 3-on-3 for charity this summer, we might be able to arrange that. Or, maybe just one-on-one, Lewy Jerry against Lewy Mike. What am I saying? He’s 6’5” and was a smashmouth player for the Chicago Bulls before his long-term coaching stint in Salt Lake.
Before each game, Shawn Brown and his staff go over the list of VIPs and scan the crowd for people to highlight on the 24-foot-tall video board that hangs over the court at Vivint Smart Home Arena. It doesn’t matter who shows up, though. After four years of directing the Utah Jazz’s in-game video operations from the scorer’s table, Brown knows the man in Row 11 will get the loudest cheer.
“The reaction for him is bigger than any celebrity,” Brown says. “Everybody loves him.”
The crowd of 18,000-plus will erupt, maybe even stand in ovation. Tammy Sloan will tap her husband lightly. This, predictably, is his least favorite moment of the best part of his day.
“I always try to avoid that as much as possible,” Jerry Sloan says. “That’s not who I am, and that’s not what I’m about. I just love the great game of basketball. I’ve been involved with it my whole life. I enjoy that. I still enjoy the game.”
Friday morning started with a visit to, at least by Tammy Sloan’s estimation, the only man in Utah who hasn’t been following the Jazz’s first-round playoff series: her husband’s doctor. It has been just more than two years since Jerry Sloan revealed to the world that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia, diseases that have begun to strip the mind and motor skills of one of the greatest coaches in NBA history.