Really Cool Article About Hubie You all Might Enjoy

Teacher Brown
At 70, former high school coach takes 'em to class

By Geoff Calkins
Contact
April 16, 2004

The clowns behind the bench had defeated the old man, and they took pleasure in rubbing it in.

It is not easy to defeat Hubie Brown, at basketball or at trash-talk.

He's a Jersey guy, see? Jersey guys can rip. On the road, Brown can be as vicious as he needs to be in defense of his team.

This game, in Atlanta, in an empty gym, he had routed the dozen or so Atlanta fans behind the bench who had spent most of the game baiting him.

"When I was coaching here, there were things to cheer about," Brown told them. "We wouldn't be wasting time doing this. Just look up at the banners. You'll see."

They looked up at the banners. Banners the Hawks won when Brown coached the team.

Hmmmpf.

The geezer had a point, you know?

But then the Hawks took the lead. Atlanta's Travis Hanson stepped to the line with a chance to seal the win. The dozen or so fans started a sing-song chant.

"You just lost to the Haaaawks, you just lost to the Haaaawks."

At which point, Hanson missed one of two shots. Shane Battier threw the ball to James Posey, who heaved in a 34-footer to send it into double overtime.

Griz win! Griz win!

"The fans didn't say anything after that," said Brendan Brown, Hubie's son and a Grizzlies assistant. "I mean, they saw it. What could they possibly say?"

Which goes double for this season, actually.

What can anyone possibly say?

Besides "I'll have what he's having?"

Hubie Brown, 70, has transformed a basketball team. He took the utterly inept Grizzlies and turned them into the playoff-bound Grizzlies.

In the process, he may have saved a franchise, too.

This city bet $250 million that an NBA team could succeed here. That bet is looking better because of Brown, because of the unselfish team he created and the unprecedented wins he wrought.

He didn't do it by adding a new superstar, either. He did it by teaching the guys on the roster how to get better.

Imagine that, eh? In the NBA, where stars run the show, where street cred and bling bling were supposed to have squeezed out actual teaching long ago.

But here comes this old guy with a slight stoop and gray hair and a raspy voice and these quaint ideas about winning and defense and sharing the ball and, damn if it didn't actually work!

The Grizzlies are going to the playoffs. The FedExForum has a shot. The NBA has a model of success that involves something other than capitulation to a superstar's whim.

All because of Brown.

All because of this Yoda with a whistle, this Socrates of hoops.

"How do you explain it?" said Jerry West, the Grizzlies president of basketball operations. "He's a teacher and he always has been.

"This team needed a teacher. This team need Hubie Brown.

"He was the right man at the right time for the right job."

Hubie, in his own words, Part 1: "At Fair Lawn High School a basketball player hadn't gotten a college scholarship in 22 years. Why? Because it was the No. 1 wrestling school in the state. And the No. 1 track team. And the No. 1 swimming team. They were loaded with winter sports. So basketball was a low priority. Well, the first year I'm the coach we start three sophomores. Does this sound familiar at all? At the end of our third year, we were competing for the championship. All five starters - the three kids who started as sophomores and the two who came in behind them - got Division 1 scholarships."

Growing up, he did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a baseball player.

Of course, most kids in Elizabeth, N.J., wanted to be baseball players. Brown was born in 1933. You wanted to be a Yankee or a Dodger. That's just how it was.

Brown was the only child of Anna and Charlie Brown. That's right, Charlie Brown, and save the jokes, please. Have some imagination. Have some respect. Three decades after his father died, Brown cannot speak of him without a catch in his voice.

"My father's the greatest man I ever met in my life," Brown said. "Everybody knew him. He knew everybody. When he died, my mother was shocked. There was a line at the funeral parlor. I can see it right now. I call it the long gray line."

Charlie Brown worked in the Jersey shipyards for 19 years. When World War II ended, he was - the way his son describes it - "put out on the street."

"So he got a job at Singer Sewing Machine, where we lived," Brown said. "And it was a good job. And then they reopened the shipyards. And he and 3,000 foremen went back and within a month they were back on the street and they couldn't get a job.

"I watched him - we didn't have any money, OK? Seven months, he couldn't get a job. It was different times then. So he became the janitor of my high school for four years and he never missed a game."

This is the undergirding truth of Brown's life, it defines him to this day.

He is blue collar. He is unyielding. He doesn't care about the size of your house or the size of your deal. He cares whether you show up. Every day. And work hard. Every day.

Brown carried this ethic from Jersey to Niagara University, then to two high school jobs, then to William & Mary, Duke and the Milwaukee Bucks.

In 1974, a year after his father died, Brown was hired to coach the Kentucky Colonels in the ABA. His first game was in Freedom Hall. Brown asked for an extra seat behind the bench.

He left it empty, for his dad.

Hubie, in his own words, Part 2: "Bernard King, we traded for him the day before we opened up in '83. Now, if you know him at all, this guy's a killer. I have my meeting with Bernard. I said, 'We're happy to have you here. Now, the way we play, I'm going to play you 32 minutes and then play Ernie Grunfield 16.' He goes, 'No, I play 36 minutes.' I said, 'Not here, here you're going to play 32 minutes.' He said, 'No, I play 36 minutes. Or maybe 38.' I said 'No, here you're going to play 32 minutes. But here's the difference. I'm going to get you the same amount of shots as in 36 minutes.' And he looks at me and he said, 'Can I believe you?' I said, 'Yep, you can believe me.' He said, 'What happens at playoff time?' I said, 'You play 38 minutes and Ernie plays 10.' He goes, 'OK' and he shakes my hand."

Eric Hasseltine, who does radio and TV work for the Grizzlies, recently asked Brown the standard question about how he manages to relate to today's players. Maybe Brown had heard it once too much this year. In the gentlest possible way, he snapped.

"First, I'm insulted by the question," he said. "I don't think I've ever had a problem, ever, from high school to college to the NBA. I just do what we've always done, from the work ethic to the discipline to everything. We haven't changed."

This is hard to believe, of course. Haven't changed? In these ever-changing times?

And then you read "Loose Balls," the definitive book about the ABA.

Here's Hubie on his philosophy at Kentucky: "I felt the key to coaching in pro ball was to keep 10 guys happy instead of eight. For a player to be happy, he needs minutes. Most teams only used eight players a game, but if you use 10 guys, then you only have two guys on the end of the bench. But the key to winning is 10 guys. If you're going to play 10, then you have to use pressure defense. So I told the guys that we were going to use 10 players and that meant 10 guys would be contributing to a championship."

Hmmm.

Sound familiar, anyone?

Brown is doing in Memphis what he did in Kentucky, what he did in Atlanta, what he did in New York.

He won a title with the Colonels. He was wildly successful his first four years in Atlanta. Ted Turner even thought about asking him to manage the Braves. Brown's an old baseball guy, remember?

And then, after his fifth year, Brown was canned.

"It was devastating," he said. "I was 48, I was successful and I was out on the street. You would like to think that what we created in Atlanta would not have ended that way. You would like to believe that apple pie, vanilla ice cream, Chevrolet and the American flag always win. But they don't always win, see? It doesn't work that way."

The Knicks job quickly followed. After leading New York to the playoffs two years in a row, Brown had two dreadful, injury-riddled seasons and was fired at the start of the next.

Which is when a remarkable thing happened. Brown was born anew as a TV star.

It's hard to imagine, really. The guy has so much in his mind about basketball, it tends to spill out in paragraphs without end. But he knew the game, he could break it down better than anyone, and isn't that what a color man does?

So Brown was hired to be the lead NBA guy on Turner Broadcasting. He was flat-out great.

He was John Madden without the sound effects, Tim McCarver without the bluster.

In 2000, Brown was inducted into the Broadcasters Wing of the Hall of Fame.

As for his coaching career, it was over, finished, done.

"Did I think he would go back?" said Brendan Brown. "Never, never, never.

"I guess there was one time, eight or nine years ago when I thought it was realistic. But after that, he liked his life too much. I didn't see any way."

Hubie in his own words, Part 3: "My wife, Claire, and I were talking after the Atlanta game. We stayed up until 2 a.m. talking about a lot of stuff. I said, 'Isn't it funny, after all these years, on every coaching trip, Dean Smith would always come up to me and say, 'Hubie, you've got to come back one more time. It's not fair how it ended.' And I'd say, 'Dean, I've got the greatest job in my life.' But who knew Turner would get a new guy at the top? So when the phone call from the Grizzlies came, it came just at the right time. The perfect time. When you get into the Hall of Fame as a broadcaster, I think you're doing OK. But the new group said, 'What can a 69-year-old guy with gray hair, how can he relate to the new generation that is watching the NBA?' They call it demographics."

There is some beautiful irony here, no?

Brown was bounced out of Turner because the suits didn't think he could relate to the street-wise kids who like the NBA. And now he's succeeding beyond anyone's dreams by relating to the street-wise kids who play in the NBA.

There were doubters, of course. There were the expected jokes.

Peter Vecsey, of the New York Post: "When I first heard Hubie Brown was coaching Memphis I figured it was the Tams."

Rick Morrissey, of the Chicago Tribune: "I give him a month before the lava starts to boil over."

It's been 17 months. That's not lava, those are wins.

The Grizzlies won 50 games. They'd never won more than 28 before.

In the season of LeBron and Carmelo, the Grizzlies have become the sweetest story in the NBA.

"It may be the best coaching job I've ever seen," West said. "I never worry about being out-coached. Never. He is the best thing that could have happened to this team."

Not to mention the broader NBA, which has been reminded of some important things: knowledge matters; substance has value; there's more to coaching than a snappy suit.

"He says to our guys that it's not the system, but it is the system," said Tony Barone, the Grizzlies assistant coach. "It's the system he's put in place based on these abstract thoughts of unselfishness, sharing the ball, playing the position and doing your job.

"All of this sounds hokey. All of this sounds like, 'Oh, gee, that sounds cool, that sounds like a high school coach.' But the reality of the situation is, that's what he's doing."

OK, but why does it work for Brown? And why hasn't it worked anywhere else?

"Because he is willing to try," Barone said. "Everyone says it but very few have tried it. Every team in the league is going to say we're playing together. Then you see what happens. One guy goes out and gets 38 shots."

Which is the other thing to notice here. Brown is unwavering, utterly true to the things he holds close.

Skeptics wondered whether Brown could relate to modern players. But the players understand that Brown is both genuine and fair.

He doesn't have favorites. He doesn't have a doghouse. If someone has a problem, he wants to know.

"The next time he's got a chance to talk, it's going down," said Lorenzen Wright. "No matter what happens, or who it is, it's getting taken care of the next day."

Jason Williams skipped out on the team for a day. Earl Watson popped off about playing time. Both players were given a chance to say their piece. Then they were back on board.

"If you don't hide from problems, there are no problems," said Brendan Brown. "It's kind of magical how it works."

Hubie in his own words, Part 4: "I have received letters from some of the biggest people in this city, very personal letters, telling me that we've had an impact here. I'm taken aback by that. Because, by the same token, this has been very satisfying for me. I'm a coffee and newspaper guy. And when I drink my coffee and read my newspapers in the morning, I feel good for what the players have done. And when they hit 50 - damn, that was a helluva day for me and my staff and the players and the city."

It is hard to fathom that it was not even two years ago that Brown took the call from West.

Remember the first press conference? Remember the practice? Remember the stunned looks?

"Basically, he told us it's either his way or the highway," said Stromile Swift, at the time. "I don't know how a lot of the players are going to accept him, so it's going to be interesting."

Brown lived in a hotel for six weeks. Now he has a place on Mud Island, a few doors down from his son.

He has turned 70 since he arrived. He has read a lot of books.

"You should see his library at home," said Brendan Brown. "You'll be amazed at the books. You go in and you're allowed to check them out. There's not a system, there are no cards involved. But you better bring them back."

Brown does not talk about his plans for next year. He'll re-evaluate when this year is done.

But he enjoys this place. He loves this team. As much as he's done for the Grizzlies, he understands what the Grizzlies have done for him.

A week ago, he gathered the team in a circle after practice. Nothing unusual about that. It's something Brown does every day, to give the players a chance to say whatever's on their minds.

This time, Brown had something to say. A one-sentence speech that had been in the making for 70 years.

"I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to do what I was supposed to be doing, " he said.

He looked at Jason Williams and Pau Gasol and the whole gang.

He looked at this group of players who, together, had done something fine and rare.

They had been willing to listen. He had been eager to teach.

Fifty wins later, they're off to the playoffs.

Do lessons come clearer than that?