As a player, Karl the punk may have Invented the defensive “flop”-the nasty habit of falling down whenever an opponent got within breathing space. hoping to draw a foul. But as the current NBA standings indicate-Karl’s Seattle SuperSonics leading the Pacific division of the National Basketball Association with the best record in the league-the deadend kid, 42. has learned to perform one continuous, stunningly upscale flip-flop. In the nearly two and a half seasons he’s spent resurrecting himself in the Pacific Northwest, the Sonics have a 142-76 record, second only to the three-peat champion Jordanian Bulls.
While Phil Jackson has shown he can coach the Bulls without Jordan, and while Lenny Wilkens has reinvigorated his new team, the Atlanta Hawks, no coach continues to surprise the NBA more than Karl. This is because the former North Carolina college player hasn’t merely returned to the pinnacle of his profession. He’s basically come back from the dead: two ultimate failures in the bigs where his win-loss record (at Cleveland and Golden State) bottomed out at 119-176; two stints coaching the Albany Patroons in the minor-league Continental Basketball Association. and two other separate assignments directing Real Madrid, which by the standards of American ball is really minor.
Karl had busted out of the NBA in ‘88 with a rep is a wild, confrontational jerk. But Bob Whitsitt, the president and general manager of the young, gifted and slack SuperSonics, remembered that in 1984-85, Karl, at 33 the youngest coach in the league, rallied the Cleveland Cavaliers from a 2-19 record at the beginning of the season to the playoffs at the end: that in ‘87 be led Golden State to that team’s best record in five years; that in ‘91 he coached Albany to the best record (50-6) in the history of pro basketball.
“I related to George,” says Whitsitt, who had become president of the Sonics at 30, a wunderkind himself. “As you grow, you have to get smarter. Obviously, he had passion, he loved the game. He was practically blackballed from the league. But then he went down and kept working. I looked at it as him going back to graduate school.”
“I know I’m not well liked in the league,” Karl says. “I used to think: screw perceptions. The thing is, right or wrong, in this business you’re only what you’re perceived to be.” It took Karl those two NBA dismissals, however, to figure out that grown-up pros didn’t exactly relate to control-freakdom, that if you were going to be an obnoxious boor, you’d better win and win huge, see. e.g., Indiana’s Bob (don’t call me Bobby) Knight.
“We’d heard the horror stories about George,” says Seattle co-captain Nate McMillan, “and we didn’t think we needed some tough guy. But just like players, coaches sometimes get unfair labels. All he asks is you go out and play. lie was [he first coach to let me shoot!"-I think I’m still demanding,” says Karl, “but when I came to Seattle I had learned to make the g e less structured, to give players their freedom, to allow the whole experience simply to be fun.”
Karl knew enough to build the team around the all-star monster child forward, 6-foot-10 Sean Kemp, and the brash guard, Gary Payton, whose trash-talking surely reminded him of. . . “Sure, Coach says all the time I’m a young him,” says Payton. “He lets me talk the way I want to at him. If that means cussing. that’s OK. He says he used to wear the long hair, he rebelled, he wanted to be difficult. Obviously, that’s why he likes me.”
As for Kemp, on Karl’s first road trip with the Sonics, the star missed the team plane. An Indiana schoolboy prodigy who never played college ball-yet has been The Franchise practically since the day he showed up on the shores of Lake Washington Kemp still should be able to set an alarm clock, the coach figured he expelled him from the starting lineup for the rest of the season. Last year, failing to put out, Kemp was benched again the last eight games of the sea son leading to the playoffs.
“Superstars blackmail coaches in this league all the time,” Karl says. “I learned from Dean Smith [his legendary mentor at Carolina]: Be myself. Do it the right way.’ With Sean, with this team, I’ve done it (he right way.”
And Kemp says he’s with the program. “Without George in Seattle, I wouldn’t have made the all-star team,” says Kemp. “He’s taught me to study player tendencies, matchups, the whole game. He’s taken me to another level. I’m more Curious about basketball now.” As Seattle heads for the stretch, all of pro basketball is curious to see if George Karl can make the last leap: from Real Madrid to the real thing, the NBA title.
