I think somewhere inside me there’s a vagabond that wants to get out on the road,” says Johnny “Red” Kerr, who has been traveling with basketball teams since he was a player in a Chicago high school.
Kerr was the first coach of the Chicago Bulls, in 1966 and 1967. Before that he played high school and college basketball, then 12 years of professional basketball, with the Syracuse Nationals (which later became the Philadelphia 76ers) and the Baltimore Bullets (now the Washington Bullets). After the Bulls, Kerr, 62, coached Phoenix before becoming a radio and then a TV announcer for the Bulls, starting in 1974.
“I can remember going to Tilden Tech High School in Chicago on a streetcar and to the University of Illinois by train,” he says of his earliest traveling experiences. When he first broke into professional basketball, he says, “We took trains most of the places. That was very difficult because when I played in Syracuse, one of the closest places we went to was New York City, and that was six and a half hours on the train. When we would travel on these trains overnight it was tough. Most of us were over 6 feet tall. I’m 6-foot-9, and when you try to get yourself in a sleeper it’s very difficult.
“Then in the ’60s, when we did start to charter, it would be DC-3 planes, which held about 22 people. That wasn’t very comfortable for tall people, either.”
At first the Bulls, their coaches and the media covering the games traveled on regularly scheduled airline flights, Kerr says, and then five or six years ago they started taking charter flights, a very convenient way to travel that has advantages even before the passengers get to the plane.
“The nicest part of charter travel,” Kerr says, “is not having to go through the terminals. We just go out to a certain area, park our cars and get on a bus that takes us over to the plane. When all the players get there we just close the door and get ready to leave. We don’t have to wait for any other passengers. The years that Michael Jordan was with us, going through the terminals was pretty hectic.”
Kerr says the inside of the charter planes are very luxurious and the flights are comfortable, with everyone-usually about 25 people-sitting wherever they want. “The coaches normally sit up toward the front of the plane, the players in the middle and the media toward the back of the plane. But we get up and walk through the plane as much as we like and get a cup of coffee or a soft drink whenever we like. We each have our own television. Sometimes the coaches will put on a game of the team we’re going to play next, or there will be videos we can watch, or movies.
“Usually the coaches are talking about basketball. A lot of the players play cards. We in the media are voracious book readers; we like to get in the back and get into our books. But, of course, we can talk if we want to. It’s different from traveling on the commercial flights because it’s so informal.”
Kerr notes that the flights are a little quieter when the team has lost than when they’ve won, but, he says, “there are so many games that you play in the NBA that even if you lose one, you’re going home to another one or you’re going on the road to another one and you’ve got to be thinking about the next game.”
Kerr says sometimes they leave Chicago the night before a game, go to the game, play the game and then leave right after. “Those single trips are very easy to do,” he says, “carrying maybe a hang-up bag with the shirt and suit and things you’re going to wear for the game. But when you start to go on the West Coast trips that are 10 or 11 days, that’s when you really have to pack the luggage. I have to take my little iron with me to smooth the wrinkles out.
“But we never have to worry about losing the luggage. That’s the neat thing. Our luggage gets on the plane with us so we always know where it is.”
In the past, though, when he has traveled by commercial carrier, Kerr has had the same problems with his bags that everyone encounters. “We’ve had the luggage end up in different cities. Then we don’t have clothes to wear to the game and we have to wear the clothes that maybe we’ve been wearing. And you’re going along, you’re in one city and the luggage is catching up behind you. They never get it to where you are. Then you try to get them to send it ahead of you so it will be waiting for you when you get to the next city.”
Kerr says he has never lost anything permanently, but he has gone through plenty of luggage because “it takes a beating. We were constantly getting new suitcases because of the treatment it would get sometimes.”
During the regular season, the Bulls play 41 away games, though two of those are in Milwaukee and they travel there by chartered bus (Kerr drives up there in his van). Playoff games add to that number; when the Bulls won their championships, Kerr notes, there were more than 100 games, counting pre-season and post-season.
Kerr also travels during the off-season because “I’ve got a company called Kerr Financial Services downtown, which is insurance and investments, and when I’m home I normally travel to my office by train. I take the Burlington Northern from my home in Riverside down to the office. So when I’m not flying I’m on the train.”
Still, Kerr says, he doesn’t get burned out on all the travel during the basketball season because he enjoys what he’s doing so much.
“I’ve got one of the great jobs,” he says. “To be able to go down to a basketball game and sit there and watch these exciting players and somebody pays me to talk about it. I think that’s kind of neat. And over the years, I’ve got friends in different towns that we go to so I get a chance to visit with them. It doesn’t get boring.”
Kerr says if he weren’t working this job he’d probably be relieved not to have to travel so much-for about two weeks. “Then I’d start saying, ‘Oh, Lord, I’ve got to get out of here.’ It’s hard to believe that I ever would stop traveling. I’m so used to the constant activity. There have been times I’ve had breakfast, lunch and dinner in three different states during the same day.”
Kerr has no fear of flying, though he says when he was a player he did have some fears. “But now I feel that what’s going to happen is going to happen,” he says. “I just don’t think about that.”
Kerr and his wife, Betsy, take vacations to Europe by plane and visit various locations in the Midwest by car. He says he loves to fish and he tows his boat around to fishing spots. “It’s a different sort of traveling,” he says. “When my wife and I travel it’s to see the sights and tour a little bit. It doesn’t count. It’s business that tires you out.”
Despite having to deal with the pressure of constant travel on the job, Kerr says his toughest travel experience was driving a van in Ireland and Scotland for three weeks on a vacation. “Driving on the wrong side of the road-for me-was the most difficult experience I can remember. Sometimes I wanted to get over on the right side of the road, forgetting that that was the fast lane.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get too old to travel,” Kerr adds.
He loves to visit Phoenix because he has several friends there, and Orlando because the fishing is good and he has friends there, too. “That’s the ideal vacation,” he says. “Put the sign out: `Gone fishing.’ “
