Tag: basketball

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Jerry Sloan, legendary NBA coach, still battling dementia (blog version)

Sloan in 1969 publicity photo from Chicago Bulls

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.

Oliver shooting form  John Archibald on defense. \TRISH CRAIN photo.

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.

Here’s an excerpt from Aaron Falk writer at Salt Lake City Tribune:

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.

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The Time I Juked an NBA Player (Hoop Dream Memories Pt. 1)

Yesterday, Saturday Nov. 4, 2017, I was playing in my weekly Old Man Hoops game and I did a wrap-around-the-back fake pass on the  way to a left-handed layup attempt. That’s right attempt. I blew the layup.

Million dollar move, 10-cent finish as they used to tell me on the playground.

My basketball buddies, however, are used to seeing my wrap-arounds, and my elbow passes, and my nutmeg dribbles through the defender’s legs.

Showing these ‘trick’ plays too many times, as I certainly have, diminishes the surprise factor and thus the play’s effectiveness. My percentage effectiveness is about 50/50 and that may be way generous to myself.

In real coached basketball if you did a move like an elbow pass and it flies off into the bleachers, the coach would give you some bench time for sure.

But in the relatively uncoached version of Old Man Hoops, of which I am the oldest player at 57, I’ve got the senior citizen greenlight card that allows me 100 percent interest free validation for anything I do, stupid or not. Of course the ‘playground’ consequences of failing to complete a trick play or two means your teammates may quit throwing you the ball.

Winner Mike’sMadness to raise money forthe Lew Body Dementia Associationn was  UAB’s team. Average height was, oh, 6’8”. Me out front in  the middle (the short guy) am  6 feet tall so you can see that height estimate was no exaggeration. My team never played UAB though, guess they heard about my wraparound.

But back to yesterday’s around the back wrap. I can’t even remember who was guarding the play, a fast break, whether it was James the doctor or Owens the DJ or Justin who works with me at Alabama Media Group. (Or Dan or Dennis or or Rodney), I can’t even remember who was on the other team sometimes.

But anyway I wrapped it around the back, which makes the ball invisible to the defender for a nanosecond. The hope is to make the defender think you are throwing a  behind-the-back pass and force the defender to commit to another player who is hopefully streaking down the  court beside you (hopefully 2 teammates, one on each side for options.)

Anyway, as I have said, I cleared some space with the fake, put it up with my left off the backboard, but it bounced off the front of the rim, no score. 

A play that was very forgettable.

But it led to me  today to thinking about another play long ago that I still remember in vivid detail.  Probably because it replays in my head all of the time.

It was the time I juked Chris Gatling, a former NBA player who was in the league for more than a decade.

The first round pick in 1991 of the Golden State Warriors, he averaged about 10 points and 5 boards over his career. One year in Dallas he was 19 and 8.

So I’m living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working in Oakland. The date is fuzzy but probably 2004-ish. I was working at the Oakland Tribune, which as a benefit helped subsidize a membership to Club One Fitness. It was a really nice gym a short two blocks away from work. I saw Danny Glover there a few times and Billy Joe Armstrong with Green Day. But not on the basketball court.

There was a game every noon hour during the week. Occasionally you would see current and former Golden State Warriors players like Jason Richardson, Chris Mullin, Adonal Foyle or Chris Gatling. Most like Mullin and Richardson were working on shooting or other drills. Others like Foyle and Gatling would come play in the pickup games, which were at times very high level from my perspective.

Foyle was a Colgate graduate and an NBA center, whom I talked to several times. He was intelligent and fun to play with as he would do all  the things his Warriors coach would never let him do, like shoot three-pointers and dribble the length of the floor. Always laughing it up. In reality he could have just stood under the rim and dunked the whole time.

Gatling on the other hand was kind of aloof, didn’t talk much.  I remembered him from when he played as the guy who had a steel plate in his  head, apparently from a childhood accident.

OK, that’s a lot of build-up for a play that happened more than a decade ago and lasted all of 3 seconds.

I do have to say here that I was in my mid to late 40’s and probably in the best basketball shape of my life as I played full-court basketball outside and inside about 3 or 4 times a week. I also could shoot fairly well which made up for other deficiencies and got me into games I didn’t have any business being in.

Anyway I got in a game and Gatling was playing on the other team. I had the ball on a fast break, a teammate of mine filling the lane on the right but no one is on the left. Gatling, somehow, had beaten us down court and was basically waiting for us, looking to swat whatever ‘weak ass shit’ I was going to throw up. (That’s what he looked like he was thinking anyway, I’m not sure he actually verbalized those words. He didn’t have to.)

Did I mention that he was 6’ 10” tall?

I was dribbling with my left, watching my teammate to the right out of the corner of my eye.

I turned my head to look at my teammate while simultaneously picking the ball up and going around my back. Gatling bit and committed to the guy he thought I was throwing a behind-the-back pass to. That split second the ball goes behind your back, the defender is confused. Where is the ball? Did he just throw it to his teammate behind his back?

So still with my head turned to look at the guy I was using as a decoy, I kept the ball. It went from left hand, around the back to my right hand which touched it to my left hand for a lefty lay-up. Gatling’s ball swatting arms never really got close.

Some of the small crowd of ballers waiting for next game fell out laughing and whooping. I snuck a peek at Gatling jogging back down to the other end. He seemed unperturbed as was his demeanor, thankfully.

Did I mention he was 6’10”?

And that was it, one of my hoops dream memories. I will post more  here from time to time.

And Chris Gatling, if you ever read this, get in contact. We could re-create the move at the next Mike’s Madness event to raise money for Lewy body dementia, which I have. I’ll even let you swat it into the cheap seats.

Below, see Steph Curry mimic my move.