Chansky’s Notebook: The Game Of His Life

Larry Brown is serious about coaching high school basketball.

The Hall of Fame coach, the only man to win NBA and NCAA championships and the winner of nearly 1800 total games in his 45-year career on the bench, may do the one thing he always wanted to do. Coach high school in a mostly empty gym.

Brown, who played for and coached under Dean Smith at UNC, had much the same philosophy of his mentor. Teaching kids the right way to play basketball. As the money increased and the pressure made winning paramount, Brown always fashioned himself as a teacher more than a coach. And now, at 76, he may get his first wish.

Brown left three college programs on probation for breaking or ignoring NCAA rules that he thought were ridiculous. He always said that if a kid needed help in his personal life, whether clothes at UCLA, a plane ticket home at Kansas or a grade to stay eligible at SMU, Brown either made it happen or turned his head.

Now a wealthy retiree, Brown has talked to officials at East Hampton High school on Long Island, where Brown owns a home and where the basketball coach quit suddenly over the summer. He certainly doesn’t need the money and doesn’t want the recognition, but he can’t get the game out of his life. So Brown may go back to teaching basketball at the base level, something he said has been missing from the sport for years, since kids have worried more about dunking and shooting the three than learning fundamentals.

Of course, if Brown does it he won’t be anonymous. It will become a national story with sportswriters and sportscasters reporting on the novelty act of perhaps the best pure basketball coach on the planet ending his career where he began it, on a high school court. He has to choose between coaching 16 to 18 year olds instead of serving as a consultant to the dozens of college and pro coaches who want him to observe and help their programs. Brown will still find time to do some of that, but my guess is Larry Brown will wind up coaching in a half-empty high school gym.

And, somewhere, Dean Smith will be watching and smiling.

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