Knees, elbows, laugh lines. Steve Kerr is all angles as he ambles into a Deerfield deli, where the staff and the patrons clap him on the back as if he were a small-town prep captain walking through The Malt Shoppe the morning after the big game.
It is so tempting to caricature him. Kerr has been tediously compared to every fair-haired, chuck-chinned pop icon of the postwar era, from Dennis the Menace to Richie Cunningham. Gym rat. Boy next door. A dollar for each of those references and Kerr could afford to buy an NBA franchise.
The flip side is that nine years into his NBA career, people continue to search for a streak of clay in Kerr’s feet, a wart that might make him more quirky, less predictable. He plugs along, ignoring them, teaching his own course in simple geometry.
The shapes that define Kerr’s life are easy to discern. There is the circle he draws around his family, the curve of an embrace. And there is the angle made by his body as it pikes inward, then pops back to vertical like a sprung bow as he releases his perimeter shot.
Kerr’s practiced arc has earned him nine seasons and a championship ring–more than he ever expected, more than anyone ever thought possible for him. He regards his longevity with amused detachment, sometimes repeating a slight variation of the old draft-day aphorism: I can’t believe I’m here. Sometimes it hits him in practice and makes him laugh out loud.
“It’s tough not to be happy when you have a job in the NBA,” he said.
Kerr is the league’s all-time leader in three-point percentage (.475). He is employed by the Chicago Bulls because he hits the open shot, not because he is unfailingly genuine, generous, patient and funny, or because his hair, a shock of freshly threshed wheat, has the texture everyone wants to scuff.
But those qualities have helped him maintain his half-acre.
“Steve is a real person in a job in which you can develop unreal aspects or aspirations,” Bulls coach Phil Jackson said.
“He’s low-key. He doesn’t draw attention to himself. His ego is under control. He’s been able to be a consistent person in the midst of all this that we do, and he contributes a great deal to the personality of this team.”
Kerr has played in every regular-season and playoff game for the Bulls over the last four seasons without a single start–356 consecutive games off the bench. The number says something about acceptance, controlled competitiveness, making the most of one gossamer skill.
If the Bulls played Monopoly instead of basketball, Kerr would be selected as The Banker. Jackson calls him “the purse man.” Kerr organized the team pools for the NCAA tournament and the Masters. He holds the bets. He is the player rep. He moves comfortably among people with wildly divergent personalities and backgrounds.
It only makes sense. In a world of people vying to acquire hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, who better to trust than the guy with the bungalow on Baltic Avenue?
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The Kerrs are a one-car family. The car is a chronically cluttered ’89 Acura with an odometer climbing toward 80,000 miles. Steve takes walks with his kids, 4-year-old Nicholas and 2-year-old Madeleine, around their Lake Forest neighborhood and dances with them to Motown classics.
Kerr will not allow his wife to hang any photos or plaques or other acknowledgments of his occupation on the walls of their home. He rarely does card shows or signs autographs for money. He has returned from an afternoon at the golf course and told her, his voice rising with indignation, that he saw, with his own eyes, someone nudging a ball to a more advantageous lie. He can’t believe people actually cheat out there.
“I know, it’s sickening,” said Margot Kerr, who grew up in suburban New York. “Sometimes I look at him and say, `There’s got to be something wrong with you.’ “
She doesn’t really mean it. She likes him the way he is.
Margot and Steve met on a blind date as sophomores at the University of Arizona. It was Act II of Kerr’s life, a hiatus after the year of unbelievable drama and trauma that preceded it.
Kerr once called his formative years “impenetrable,” referring to their protected, somewhat idyllic quality. The grandson of Presbyterian missionaries, the son of educators, the younger sibling of two holders of doctorates, Kerr grew up as the most athletically inclined member of a family that tried to integrate the physical and the intellectual as they lived and traveled on three continents.
At 6, his perseverance was already “a remarkable sight,” his mother, Ann, wrote in her memoir. “Standing with his back to the board, he held a ball in his arms at knee height and with a big jump, hurled it over his head in a backwards motion.”
Kerr eventually learned to face the basket, and he learned that he didn’t care to lose in epic driveway battles with his father and older brother. Steve would run inside and throw himself belly-first on the floor, enraged, when he didn’t live up to his own expectations.
The Kerrs played tennis and tossed Frisbees on the beach in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades. They had season tickets to UCLA football and basketball games and made frequent trips to Dodger Stadium, where Kerr once pitched in a high school all-star game against Bret Saberhagen.
Unrecruited until the summer after his senior year, Kerr finally got a scholarship offer from Arizona. It was a rope bridge extended by Lute Olson despite the initial skepticism of his wife, who turned to the coach while watching Kerr play a pickup game at Palisades High and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Kerr’s father, a respected Middle East scholar, had taken his dream job: president of the American University of Beirut. That August, Steve’s trip from the Mideast to Tucson was delayed by shelling at the Beirut airport. Kerr eventually left by hired car, taking an eight-hour trip through Syria and Jordan. A year later, on the same route, the same driver who had ferried him was killed by a sniper.
In January 1984, Malcolm Kerr was assassinated by Muslim extremists. Steve’s life quickly devolved into unwelcome notoriety. Reporters knocked at his dorm room door, inquiring about his most intimate thoughts. At a game against Arizona State, a boorish contingent of fans taunted Kerr with shouts of “PLO.”
Then and now, Kerr would rather dwell on what has gone right in his life, not what went horribly and irrevocably wrong. But the events spawned a sympathetic mythology that crept up his sides like ivy. Over the years, he has sometimes tried to brush the vines away. “I’m not the angel everybody thinks I am,” he told a student reporter in 1988, the year he took the Wildcats to the Final Four.
“For a long time, I really wanted an article about the rebellious side of me,” Kerr said. He considered his words and smiled. “I guess there’s not really that big of a rebellious side of me, but just a different angle. I got so tired of that same old boring article.”
Nonetheless, Kerr’s former Cavaliers teammate Danny Ferry said he thinks Kerr is at ease with himself.
“Steve will have a beer, he’ll tell a joke,” Ferry said. “But his family–that’s the heart of Steve. He’s a very deeply rooted person who’s not going to change much no matter what happens to him, good or bad. Seeing him do well gives me confidence in myself.”
Margot Kerr puts her husband’s priorities succinctly.
“Steve takes his job very seriously, but he doesn’t take himself seriously,” she said.
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Long-range shooting is a fickle art. It is the most fragile ticket to the NBA, a stash of frequent-flyer miles in constant danger of expiring.
Kerr has stayed on the plane. He developed his own workout, an hour and a half of game-situation shots with a buddy, and has adhered to it since he was a teenager. But there is no substitute for playing time, and at first that was a hard commodity to come by.
The Phoenix Suns, broken by a drug scandal, picked Kerr in the second round in 1988 for a quick shot of feel-good adrenaline. He played sparingly and spent much of the season on the injured list with a phantom ailment.
Kerr began to refine his game the next season after being traded to the good-guy, guard-heavy Cavs. He and Ferry spent a lot of time doing late-night shooting drills and trying to reassure each other when they fell out of the playing rotation. Kerr would frequently lie awake until 3 a.m. on game nights, running replays in his head, wondering if he might have to find another way to make a living.
After a disastrous half-season in Orlando, Kerr signed with the Bulls as a free agent. He knew the Bulls’ offense was suited to his talents and that he could slide right into the slot formerly occupied by John Paxson. Phil Jackson, who had been following him since his college days, was similarly optimistic.
“We wondered whether he could be an NBA guard,” Jackson said. “He was slight. His knee had been damaged. But we could see that he was a leader who knew how to play the game and had good ideas. We kept track of where he was.
“Good things happen when Steve is on the floor. He got a little time here, and an 8-minute run suddenly became a 10-minute run over the course of a game. He made B.J. Armstrong expendable for us.”
Kerr said the established routine of his role with the Bulls has helped him tame his biggest fear: that his one world-class skill would suddenly desert him.
“I know exactly when I’m going into every game,” he said. “I know I’m going to play about 20 to 25 minutes. Some guys play 10 minutes one night, don’t play at all the next night, then start the third night. That’s very difficult. I dealt with that in Cleveland.”
Jud Buechler, who played with Kerr at Arizona, can see the difference, but still thinks Kerr is too hard on himself.
“If he’s not shooting the ball well, he feels like he’s not doing anything,” Buechler said. “But I know from the coaching staff and the rest of the guys that he does so much more than that.
“He knows our offense better than anybody, how it works, how to get us into it, and that’s real important. It’s like having (Bulls assistant and offensive guru) Tex Winter out there on the floor. And when he’s healthy and he’s moving, he can defend anybody.”
Almost anybody. After an April 7 game against the Philadelphia 76ers in which Allen Iverson scored some of his 44 points on Kerr’s watch, a reporter asked Kerr’s opinion of the rookie’s performance.
“I thought I did a great job shutting him down,” Kerr said, his eyes glinting.
“Steve’s gotten to understand himself more in Chicago,” Ferry said. “Through the years of experience and maturing, he’s learned to take a little lighter approach.”
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Kerr’s NBA epitaph may well be a recurring line lifted out of the Bulls’ media guide: “Played off the bench in all 82 games.”
He laughs his contagious, slightly froggy laugh. “I’m proud of that,” he said. “Believe me, I don’t care if I don’t ever start a game here.”
The only person who might disagree is Kerr’s son, who is dying to hear Dad’s name announced amid the smoke and hyperbole of the United Center pregame ritual.
“He always plugs me into the starting lineup at home in his games,” Kerr said. “Last week we were playing one of the imaginary games we play all the time. He pretends he’s me, and he also does commentary: `Kerr scores and he’s got 58 points!’ I told him, `Nicholas, I’d never get 58 points.’ And he said, `You do in my games, Dad.’ “
Kerr leaned back in his chair and beamed. “My heart was like this,” he said, thumping his hand rapidly on his chest.
Losing his father, Kerr said, has probably altered his own approach to parenting.
“I’m pretty smothering,” he said. “I spend all my free time with my kids. It’s OK now. They’re 4 and 2, so they like it. When they’re about 13, I think they’re going to feel a little too smothered, so I’ll have to back off.
“My father was very affectionate, constantly spending time with us. I think I would have been that kind of father anyway, but I can’t help but think, every day, that you just never know. It could be gone in a second. We’re all so vulnerable. You really have to appreciate every single second.”
Kerr has one year left on his contract and, taking nothing for granted, he has already looked beyond the NBA. Once he thought Europe might be the only place he could play pro ball. He and Margot have discussed winding up his career overseas as a way to expose their children to a different culture. Kerr, who once resisted living abroad, now thinks those years helped him hold his own in the melting pot of an NBA locker room.
“I’ve been lucky because throughout high school, college and the NBA, I’ve lived in this sort of utopian society where you’ve got black and white playing together and enjoying themselves and being financially secure, and as a result the relationships are all kind of pure,” Kerr said. “To me, race becomes less of an issue in the NBA because everybody’s successful.”
In the off-season, while others flee the summer heat, the Kerrs return to Tucson. They own a little two-bedroom house a few blocks from the Arizona campus, the basketball arena and the chapel where they were married. They can walk to September football games, and on weekday afternoons they can hear the marching band practicing.
How corny is that? Plenty. But corn starts from a kernel. On Kerr’s half-acre, it’s a kernel of truth.
