Steve Kerr had nothing left to prove. But at a crossroads in his career, facing down the pains of his past convinced him he had everything left to play for.
NBAGolden State WarriorsStephen Curry
Full story
STEVE KERR WALKED into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire with a secret. Win or lose, he'd decided to retire as head coach of the Golden State Warriors. It was a Tuesday morning in mid-April, the day before the team's first postseason play-in game in Los Angeles. When this season ended, his 12-year run with the Golden State Warriors would end, too. In the airy hotel restaurant behind the concierge desk, Kerr gave his name and room number, 516 -- "Johnny Bench Joe Montana" -- and a hostess showed us to a table by the window. He looked around and lowered his voice.
"I think it's over," he said, almost mouthing the words. His sweatsuit separated him from the businessmen eating breakfast in suits and ties nearby. He put the odds at 95 percent. In the last few days he'd grown more certain. The waiter took his order, the California Breakfast. Normally he's cheerful as a sunrise but this morning he seemed melancholy. He was tired at the end of a disappointing season and mourning the fraying connections. A great basketball team stands on a shared feeling more than strategy or scouting. The team lives as long as the feeling lives and when it's gone, not only is it impossible to recapture, it's hard to even remember.
The waiter brought Kerr's eggs. Sitting in yet another hotel breakfast room at the end of yet another long season, he sifted through memories. Like the night Klay Thompson scored 37 points in a quarter, his teammates delirious at the sight of it, Steph Curry running up and down the sidelines as the crowd got louder and louder. "It felt like we were in the presence of God," Steve said, and when I asked why sometimes players reach a flow state, he said it was more than optimized mechanics.
"I think there's some mysterious spiritual thing."
LAST NIGHT HE DROVE from Beverly Hills to Draymond Green's house for a team dinner, a last supper of sorts, where a local pitmaster smoked brisket, lamb chops, pork shoulder and burnt ends. The ride took him past his old junior high school. His memory of those halls led him back to when he and his family lived in an actual house on a hill, with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and Los Angeles. He grew up bouncing between Pacific Palisades and Cairo as the family followed his father's career as an American expert on the complex history and politics of the world's tinderbox. In 1982, Malcolm Kerr became president of the American University of Beirut. Steve didn't think it sounded safe but felt too young and shy to say anything in the family meeting. His silence in that meeting combined with the quiet in the car as he headed toward the team barbecue. Years fell away. His childhood home burned in the Palisades Fire last year. Only memories remain.
Steve Kerr started contemplating the right time to step down the other side of the summit after the short-handed Warriors exited the playoffs last spring. "My wife and I have been talking about it a lot," he said in June. Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images Coming out of high school, no major college coach thought Kerr could play at the next level. Gonzaga brought him up for a tryout but their point guard, John Stockton, embarrassed him. The only two interested schools were Cal State Fullerton and Arizona, which at the time had a long history of mediocre basketball. First-year coach Lute Olson believed he could change the culture. Kerr chose Arizona. He struggled in practice and knew it. His teammates openly wondered how he'd earned a scholarship. Olson himself admitted later that he planned to recruit someone else to replace Kerr the following season. Steve was barely playing, averaging just under 6 points a game. Then his life broke in two.
On January 18, 1984, an Iranian-sponsored gunman from Hezbollah shot Malcolm Kerr in the head. As a high-profile figure, he had been targeted as part of efforts to drive Americans out of Lebanon. The four Kerr children were spread across the globe when it happened. Steve's mom couldn't get through from Beirut. Steve's sister, Susan Kerr van de Ven, told veteran sportswriter and Kerr biographer Scott Howard-Cooper that Steve was the only one of the Kerr children who was alone when the news came and "he was just a boy." A family friend, Vahe Simonian, finally reached him in his dorm room at Arizona.
The phone rang at 3 a.m. He answered in the dark.
"Your father has been shot," Simonian said.
Even 42 years later, Kerr tells the story in a kind of stilted monotone.
Steve asked if he was OK.
There was a long pause.
Finally Simonian spoke.
"Your father was a great man," he said.
Kerr ran downstairs in the dorm, hysterical, pounding on the door of two teammates. Then he went and sat alone outside on the curb.
"On Speedway Boulevard," he said, remembering the cold concrete and the empty street.
He told me he started walking. He told me he hasn't slowed down since. Around town, as word of what happened spread, players and coaches rushed to his side. Basketball didn't matter, but the basketball team did. Olson told Kerr to step away, to take as much time and space as he needed. The team's next game, at home against rival Arizona State, was two days later. Steve said he wanted to play. That playing was the only time he wasn't thinking about his dad. Olson told Steve he didn't need to come out for the pregame moment of silence. Steve said he wanted to be with his team. He stood in the line and wiped his eyes. The game began. He didn't start but with 12:58 left in the first half, Olson subbed him in. Kerr hit a 25-footer. Swish. He hit a 15-footer. Swish. He made a third. The public address announcer stretched out his name, bellowing, "Steeeeeve Kerrrrr."
Kerr began to understand and cherish the power of team after his father, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated in 1984 when Steve was at Arizona. David E. Klutho /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images The crowd shouted back like a revival call and response. "Steeeeeve Kerrrrr!" Arizona State called a timeout and an Arizona manager named Todd Walsh told me later that the roof lifted off the McKale Center. Kerr sat on the bench and Walsh tried to hand him a towel or his warmup top. Kerr shook him off. Walsh took his spot behind the huddle, looking into the stands, where the front row of fans stood almost on top of the team. He looked into their faces and saw tears. He heard them cheer, a building roar, manic and hungry to heal. Kerr finished with a career-high 12 points and got a standing ovation when Olson took him out with 1:39 left. Walsh said he felt like the arena formed "a cocoon" around Steve.
You can draw a line that night. On one side, the son -- the boy -- the life interrupted. On the other, the player, the teammate, the man safe inside the simplicity of a season. Now, he thought it might be time to leave the cocoon behind. The Warriors had a meeting in 10 minutes, on the mezzanine level of the hotel, and then maybe only one more game. The waiter brought the check. Kerr shook his head. "What we had is gone," he said, "but we're trying to hang on to it. I don't know if anybody really knows if it exists anymore."
HE FIRST TALKED about retirement last June, after the 2025 season. The Warriors had been beaten in the second round of the playoffs, after Curry went down with an injury. Kerr had been down to Mexico on his annual surfing trip and in a few weeks, his coaches would meet for the preseason kickoff retreat. We met for lunch at a little café in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. He ordered a peppermint tea. The waiter slipped across the quiet floor towards the counter.
"My wife and I have been talking about it a lot," Kerr said. "I have a year left on my contract."
Maybe one more season. Maybe two. When Steph Curry and Draymond Green leave, the franchise deserves a clean start, he said. Maybe he should have walked away already. "We are one injury from completely falling apart," he said as the waiter returned to take our order.
Kerr loves the game and its history. He's an obsessive sports fan and has been watching the last acts of sporting lives for the past 40 years. It's often ugly. The final years of Lute Olson's life were not the victory lap they should have been. Kerr doesn't want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire. His friends used to grill him about MJ.
"Why doesn't he go out on top?"
"Because he can't," Kerr told them.
For the past few years, Kerr has watched his mentor, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, struggle through this same decision. Pop once called Steve to tell him he'd finally decided to retire. Steve congratulated him on a Hall of Fame career. A week later Pop signed an extension with San Antonio. Popovich finally officially quit six weeks before our lunch, six months after a stroke diminished him physically. People who loved him had to show him the door, as gently as possible. That hurt Steve. He respects Popovich so much. He loved playing for him and coaching with him. He once told Gregg he was the finest man he'd ever known and thanked him for all he'd done for him. Pop smiled and said his feet were made of clay like everyone else's. Steve didn't believe it then. Now he does.
"I realized he couldn't do it," Kerr said. "He couldn't walk away."
I asked how he'd avoided the trap. He laughed.
"I'm sitting here wondering," he said.
He laughed at himself again.
"How am I gonna feel exactly a year from now? Maybe two years from now? Because the job itself is so addictive.... You wanna trust yourself but also be suspicious of your own motives. You don't want to walk away too early but you don't want to walk away too late. And you worry about what your life is gonna feel like...."
"What do you do the first morning?" I asked.
"Exactly. You ever see "The Hurt Locker"? You remember when the guy goes into the grocery store?"
The waiter stopped at our table. He called Kerr "Coach."
"I'm gonna do the patty melt," Steve said.
The waiter turned to me but before I could order, Steve caught his eye and switched to a fried chicken sandwich.
"I changed my mind," he said.
Kerr won five NBA titles as a player. In 1997, he took a pass from Michael Jordan and made the shot to seal the championship for the Bulls. Manny Millan/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images TWO MONTHS LATER, just before the start of this season, he started a new therapy program for his back. He called the severity of the pain over the past 12 years his "deep, dark secret." The worst part of his chronic condition was the pressure building behind his eyes. The migraines could level him. He'd always been casual about his body, he realizes now, taking his physical life for granted. When he retired from playing, he threw himself into a steady diet of golf, mixing in surfing and playing volleyball and basketball with his kids. He played a lot of tennis on hard courts. He ignored the pain in his knees and back.
"That's my own hubris," he said.
The toughest battle of his life started during Game 5 of his first NBA Finals as a head coach in 2015. He tweaked his back standing up on the bench. He ignored it, coached through the pain, feeling invincible. They won the title in six games over the Cleveland Cavaliers, his sixth title after winning five as a player, and in the weeks following the championship he played golf and beach volleyball. His back continued to hurt. A doctor offered a surgical solution that he said would have him rehabbed and ready for the start of training camp. After the operation, Kerr felt better for about 10 days then got hit by a strange headache, similar to migraines he'd suffered since around 13. Neck pain followed. Some doctors suspected the surgeon had accidentally nicked the protective membrane around Kerr's spine which caused a leak of fluid. To this day the cause of his pain remains a mystery. He was "in agony," as he said later, and in just his second year of a dream job, took a leave of absence. He spent many of his days in his family's second house in San Diego, away from his team, barely able to get out of bed. The Warriors kept rolling without him while his wife, Margot, lived on the internet searching for new treatments for leaking spinal fluid.
He went to every doctor imaginable, a search for relief that would continue for a decade, flying up to Mayo, or down to Duke, or even to England for stem-cell therapy not approved in the United States. Nothing worked. In January of 2016 he returned to the team, leading the Warriors to an NBA-record 73 regular-season wins and taking them back to the finals, where they lost to the Cavaliers after being up three games to one. He made his health mostly off-limits in interviews.
One day his phone buzzed. It was Tiger Woods, who'd gotten his number from a mutual friend. Woods knew a lot about chronic pain.
"Did he have advice that worked?" I asked.
"No," Kerr said, "but we commiserated!"
The pressure in his head, right behind his eyes, mimicked the symptoms of papilledema. Oftentimes it felt like a huge vise cranking down on his temples. He got a full neuro workup from an expert at UC San Francisco, which came back totally normal. Three different ophthalmologists found no evidence of anything. It made him feel like he was going crazy.
He kept his pain private, wanting some piece of his increasingly public life to remain his alone. Privacy became a critical part of retaining his humanity, he said. After a lifetime in a supporting role, he finally understood what his more famous and successful teammates and coaches had dealt with during their prime. The Warriors won back-to-back titles over Cleveland in 2017 and 2018, his seventh and eighth. Three in four years. Two contrasting feelings were playing themselves out in him through that run, shaping him. He can see it now in hindsight. The act of coaching, which meant connecting deeply to the interior lives of his players, and allowing them to connect with him, was breaking open cracks in the walls he'd put up between himself and his traumatic memories. At the same time, his deteriorating physical life was stealing from him the movement and grind through which he'd most effectively managed that trauma over the years.
"I have a sense of humility about me," he said, "but it didn't translate to how I treated my body and myself. I'm paying for it now. I went to the Giants game the other day. I've gotten to know the manager Bob Melvin really well. He showed me the batting cages."
"Hey, you wanna step in?" Melvin asked.
Kerr moaned in mock agony as he remembered it, sitting at a café near the commercial fishing marina in San Francisco, groaning and twisting in his chair like he'd been hit with a baseball bat.
"Yes, yes, yes! I could go out to center field to shag flies... I just miss the act of movement and flow and that zen you feel."
He'd been in pain for 11 years now. On some level he'd given up on relief. Then this offseason, while on vacation in France, he listened to a podcast with psychotherapist and back pain expert Nicole Sachs. She talked about her work with NBA star Michael Porter Jr., who like Steve has had three back surgeries. That got Kerr's attention and reminded him of a book he'd read by Alan Gordon, called "The Way Out." Several years ago, he'd made significant progress on his pain with Gordon. Both Gordon and Sachs expanded on the work of Dr. John Sarno, who believed that chronic pain like Kerr's came from unresolved, buried trauma, and the pain was the mind's way of crying out for help. It's called tension myositis syndrome, in which emotional stress causes physical responses. Kerr had discovered Sarno a decade ago and had corresponded with Gordon a few years back. Now, listening to Sachs' podcast, the ideas had come back and had somehow hit him differently. His personality type of a sensitive perfectionist fit the mold of a TMS sufferer, and when he read Sachs' book -- it opened with a C.S. Lewis quote: "It is easier to say my tooth is aching than to say my heart is broken." -- he believed the treatment might work for him.
After an introduction from Porter, Sachs and Kerr started speaking directly. She gave him homework and on the eve of the season he started her program. The treatment involved setting a timer for 20 minutes every morning and then journaling, about trauma, about anger, shame and hatred. When the timer ran out, Kerr followed Sachs' instructions and erased whatever he'd written and then would sit still and take a breath and begin a meditation, alone in the quiet of his emptying mind for no less than 10 minutes. Then he would stand, and breathe it out and go to coach his team.
Kerr remembers Klay Thompson's 37-point quarter in 2015 not just as a record but also as an example of team connectivity. "It felt like we were in the presence of God," he said. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Act 2: The 82 KERR CALLED A MEETING with his staff when the 2025-26 season schedule was released, feeling the obstacles between the Warriors and a playoff berth. The two most important voices in the room belonged to the travel guy and the performance guy, who needed to figure out how to move an aging team around the country, night after night, with a chance to win.
Kerr circled the opening 17 games, including 13 on the road and five back-to-backs. They played three games in the first four days of the season.
"That's a pretty rough start," someone in the room said.
They won the first two games. The third game was in Portland. One of his preseason fears had been that the Warriors dynasty would be eulogized one injury report and one exhausted aging star at a time. That would come terrifyingly true in that third game. "We got destroyed," Kerr said a few weeks later. "I think we turned it over 25 times. I regretted not resting all our stars that night."
The league won't let him rest Curry and Jimmy Butler if the game is on national television. If a player has made an All-Star team or an All-NBA team in the previous three years, they must be injured to sit out. Designated stars, they're called.
"This is the first year that Draymond is not a designated star," he said.
"Is he happy about that or a little pissed?" I asked.
"He might be a little pissed," he said with a smile.
Kerr wanted something from this season, even if he couldn't quite articulate it in the beginning. He sensed Steph and Dray wanted it, too. They all missed what Steph calls "meaningful basketball." They have these memories of the championship seasons that can be accessed only by experiencing them anew, as if the feeling itself unlocks some mental vault, and when their careers end, those feelings will slowly move out of reach. At the same time, those memories are themselves the enemy of this last act, which requires redefined goals, the reward structure shifting from external to internal. Everything in Steve's life was pushing him inward. They weren't chasing titles, only the feeling of saddling up one last time together, wanting most of all to feel justified when the ride is done. This was Steve's 30th start to a new season but it was different than all the others, which made every step forward uncertain and new.
He believed they would have won a second playoff series last year if Steph hadn't gotten hurt against the Timberwolves. He believed they could win a playoff series or more if they found some shared reason to fight together this year, too. It was the fourth quarter for Golden State. Some of the most dramatic basketball stories ever told are about the rise and peak of the Warriors but this year would be about the fall, and the end, and how they responded, how they honored the past.
They waded together into the first 17.
KERR BELIEVED WITH his whole heart that there was honor in not chasing rings but something more primal, to prove to themselves that they never lost their fighting spirit. He took the podium early in the season and got a question about their recalibrated goals. The Warriors were not the 2017 world-beaters any longer, he said.
"We are... " he said, shrugging his shoulders as he searched for the words.
"... a fading dynasty."
A few days later he walked with his dog, Lulu, and his daughter's dog, Mabel, through the redwood grove in the Presidio. Both dogs are English cream retrievers. Mabel rolled around in a patch of mud. Steve laughed hard. We passed through green shafts of light, cool beneath the towering canopies. The air smelled like eucalyptus. It felt prehistoric. We wound down several switchbacks and the whole bay emerged sparkling blue, with the red spans of the Golden Gate Bridge high above.
"I said, 'We're a fading dynasty,'" he said. "There is beauty in the struggle, fans enjoying us trying to fight until the last breath."
He stopped and wheeled around, like the crack of a fallen branch had loosed something in him. His body language changed, a switch flipped. Clawing to the eighth seed could offer its own rewards, he thought.
His voice rose.
"There's such honor in that!"
He looked out at the bay and the ocean beyond, at the beautiful reach of it. At the light flashing and dancing on the water. At the currents and patterns forming and disappearing. Like karesansui, the Japanese art of arcing sand designs, a season has an ephemeral beauty, part intention and part surrender, something cherished and then lost.
"This is what it's all about," he said.
His voice rose again.
"You compete. Until the last breath!"
Kerr had gotten a call from someone on the team's business side. They wanted him to stop calling the team a fading dynasty. Season ticket renewals were going out. They were looking to strike a rosier note. He agreed to stop but he thought they were letting an opportunity pass, that he could sell this idea to the team, especially Steph and Draymond, who would feel most alive in the struggle. That he could sell this idea to himself.
"How are we gonna finish this?" he asked.
Lulu tugged at the leash.
Back pain has been a near-constant and excruciating companion for Kerr through much of his 12 seasons as Golden State's coach. Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images KERR LET ME into the entrance hall of his home overlooking the bridge. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, with a big light-spangled den, and an open white kitchen and a dining room with a framed art photograph of Muhammad Ali. Margot Kerr grinned when she saw my Taylor Swift Eras Tour hoodie. Steve told me a story. Three years ago, to entertain himself in his press conferences, Steve worked phrases from Swift's song "All Too Well" into his interview answers, smoothly enough that nobody noticed. For instance, to get the first line of the song, he took the podium after beating the Rockets in March of 2023 and said, "I walked through the door of the locker room at halftime." Over a long season he got most of the lyrics done, crossing them off as he went. His son Matthew later edited them into a video for their family group chat, so that Kerr appeared to have recited the whole song.
"She ended up seeing it through a mutual friend," he said.
"Wait, is this real?" Taylor asked.
She thought it was creative and funny.
"Can I put it on social media?" she asked.
Kerr asked her team to please keep it private, even though he'd pulled the stunt in public night after night. He is both the most accessible coach in the league and the most unknowable. Joe Lacob, the Warriors' owner, said he knows Kerr's tendencies after 12 years but not his interior monologue. Steve's public reputation (and his own self-image) comes with an expectation that he comment regularly... on his team, his players and the league... on politics, gun violence prevention, immigration policy, the Middle East and President Donald Trump. But he also lives below the surface, only occasionally letting stories that matter to him slip.
He ran into Michael Jordan recently in the hall of a hotel. Literally rounded a corner and almost collided. The two old survivors of the last dance greeted each other with respect and love.
"Thank you," Kerr said. "Everything that has happened in my career is because of playing with you."
"You've earned it," Jordan told him. "You've earned all of it."
We walked around Kerr's house, which is cozy and elegant. Noticeably absent was any sign of basketball, except for his home office, in family photos that happened around the game, and a copy of Hanif Abdurraqib's "There's Always This Year" in the vestibule.
After winning three titles with the Bulls, and two more with the Spurs, he decamped to San Diego when he retired as a player in 2003. He surfed the breaks along the coast. Once a year he and buddies went down to a remote beach in Mexico, an endless summer of a retirement, and they camped and surfed and drank beer and laughed. "I was not introspective," he told me. "I was just loving my life: Played in the NBA, did some broadcasting, raising my kids. To be honest with you, I had never really stopped and thought what are my values? What do I stand for?"
It wasn't that he didn't have an interior life, just that he hid it. His parents worried from a young age about his "dark mood swings," according to Scott Howard-Cooper's book, and tried to help him learn to harness, manage and ultimately subsume his temper. His mother says she is proudest of how he's successfully done that, prouder than she is of his nine rings. When he's mad at you, he rarely raises his voice. People only know because he squints his eyes, almost involuntarily, just a little. That's Steve Kerr throwing a drink in your face. He told me once he's kind to everyone else but cruel to himself. His three siblings live intellectual lives -- his mom jokes that she has two Ph.D.s, one MBA and an NBA -- while he has always tried to skip like a rock along the surface of life. His siblings processed their father's death in deeply introspective ways. His sister, Susan, whose Ph.D. is from Harvard, wrote a beautiful book about the intellectual journey of grief. His brother Andrew went into clandestine intelligence, where once he came across a top-secret document with details surrounding his father's murder, and instead of telling his family what he'd learned, he honored his oath and said nothing. Steve's siblings' lives were all shaped unalterably by their father's assassination, as was his life. But while his sister wrote a book, he kept playing, and later coaching, a game. Even now he almost never invokes Malcolm Kerr in public. I visited his sister one afternoon in Cambridge, England, where she has lived for decades. We sat in a country pub. Everyone else beneath the low ceiling watched rugby on television. We talked about their past. The four Kerr siblings, who communicate regularly on a text thread, are close. I asked what about her brother Steve remained a mystery. She considered the question for a long time. "What he's thinking," she said finally.
Kerr learned tricks and tactics from his former coaches, clockwise from top left, Lute Olson, Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson. But none of them left a blueprint for how to walk away from the game. Getty Images, Associated Press EVEN BARACK OBAMA knew the biggest problem Kerr would face in the first month of the season: what to do about forward Jonathan Kuminga. During the summer Kerr went to Aspen to speak at a conference. Columnist Thomas Friedman invited him to a small dinner party. Kerr arrived and went out onto the deck for cocktail hour overlooking the mountains. Then Obama arrived, security in tow. He made a line for Kerr.
"Coach!" he said, and almost before Kerr could respond, he asked, "What's gonna happen with Kuminga?"
Obama, like all fans of the Warriors and the NBA, was really asking about the two timelines, which had been the team's plan to kick-start a new dynasty. Let's go back to the beginning. The Warriors had built their team around Steph Curry. Everyone else, even future Hall of Famers like Green, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, existed to maximize his talent. Kerr designed the offense around Curry, demanding that the team pass the ball 300 times a game. When the ball moved the Warriors turned psychedelic, the basketball version of the old Messi Barcelona teams. But when the ball got stuck, and the intricate ballet sputtered, the Warriors turned mediocre quickly. Picking players for that kind of troupe required precision and the confidence to not just grab the sexiest stats on the market. Former Golden State GM Bob Myers did this masterfully. Kerr, who'd played with Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan, understood better than most people in the game that a player like Curry is a comet not a replaceable asset. "It's why people compare basketball to jazz," he said. "That's what Steph does. When he goes on a riff, we feed him. This is what is possible with Steph Curry and Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan and all the greats. You have to enhance the greats. They are capable of winning the game for you. This is Phil's thing. Phil said I don't run the triangle for Scottie and Michael. I run it for the rest of you guys."
Then the Warriors didn't make the playoffs in 2020 and 2021. Everyone inside the team wondered if the end had come. Curry and Green were in their early 30s, when NBA careers tend to decline, and so management wanted a way to compete with the veterans while also preparing for life without them -- the second timeline. The team drafted Jordan Poole out of Michigan in 2019, then James Wiseman out of Memphis in 2020, then Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga in 2021. These were raw but talented players -- if they could learn to play alongside Steph.
Curry willed the team to a fourth title in 2022 but everything got tangled. The dynasty lived, but so did its replacement. They'd jumped the gun. The team felt suddenly like an untenable mixture of past and future, which threatened the present by grinding the tiki-taka to a halt. Slowly the players chosen during the two timelines era faded away. Poole left the team after Green punched him at practice. Wiseman, who never jelled with the Warriors, got traded.
The last two remaining pieces of the two timelines were Moody, a solid role player, and Kuminga, who had never quite learned how to play the high-speed acrobatic style the Warriors built around Curry. 2022 was Kuminga's rookie year. He averaged 9 points a game and the Warriors won that fourth title. But there were fissures. On the court in the last few seasons Kuminga often disrupted the team's rhythm when he was out of position, a half-step late, a half-count behind. Off the court, he found a family in the locker room. The team, especially Draymond, adored him. Kerr found him kind and thoughtful. He just struggled with the Warriors' style of basketball. This year Kerr would have to figure out what to do with Kuminga on the court while Lacob and general manager Mike Dunleavy figured out what to do with him before the trade deadline. A lot of the team's internal tension (mild for a typical pro sports franchise), whether about Kuminga or style of play or front office moves, felt rooted in everyone's collective angst over the end of the dynasty. It had died once already, then been revived in 2022, so in a subtle but real way it was both alive and dead. That duality was always the subtext of any news emerging from the team's inner circle.
The Warriors left town for a six-game road trip, the back third of that brutal opening stretch. They'd lost four of six. Kerr blamed himself for not finding the right lineup. After a preseason injury to Moody, rotations were strained and spacing was glitching. Kuminga had played great the first two games of the season but over time was too often caught out of position and a step behind. After the sixth loss Kerr cut Kuminga's minutes in half. That night Curry scored 46. The next game Kuminga didn't play at all and Curry scored 49. Kerr remembered with longing the ease of his first season with the team, when he'd do yoga on home game days, then eat a bacon and avocado sandwich from Summer Kitchen in Berkeley, then take a nap, then go beat the dog s--- out of every team who had the misfortune of rolling into town. Now he called his wife from the road as he navigated the fragile locker room. "This is the most confusing time I've ever had in my eleven and a half years," he told her. "I've never had anything like this."
Kerr rarely speaks about his father in public, but he recently shared a childhood memory that included a Dodger Dog, The New Yorker and a home run by Bob Watson. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images THEY WENT 8-6 in the first 14 games, hovering above.500. Kerr seemed buoyed. For all the difficulty, he loved the struggle, and the idea that at its best the team could commit itself to something shared, something that elevated the Warriors and echoed moments of their past. One night after a road win, as we sat in a restaurant the Warriors had rented, he looked around at his team.
"It's not just the basketball," he said.
All the players ate sushi and cooked wagyu beef on hot rocks, ordering expensive bottles of wine, the sound of laughter filling the room.
"It's... this," he said with a sweep of his arm.
He finds comfort in the 82. How in Chicago every year he goes to a show at Second City, how they like Miami but not Orlando, how the freight elevator in Madison Square Garden often smells like circus animals.
We bonded over the memory trick we both use to remember hotel room numbers moving night to night across the country.
Tonight he's in 1824 in the New Orleans Four Seasons.
"Peyton Manning Kobe Bryant," he said.
I was in 2225 at the JW Marriott.
"Emmitt Smith Rocket Ismail," I said.
The Warriors won that night in New Orleans, their third in a row. Kerr looked at the box score as he took his seat on the front row of the bus. Twenty-one turnovers. He sipped a bottle of Modelo. We rode down Poydras back to the Four Seasons and he ran up to his room to change. His suitcase lay open on the floor. When he gets home, he does all his laundry, which Margot folds, which he carries upstairs. He likes a routine. Every morning, Margot says, he makes the bed.
A bottle of tequila sat untouched in his suite. He gets one in every city, which for years he has given as a reward to the young coach who did a successful scouting report for a road win. We walked across the street, past the autograph hounds, and joined the team at Nobu inside a casino. He and I ordered cold Asahi beers. Team assistant Nikola Milojevic walked past. Nikola is the son of beloved Warriors coach Dejan Milojevic, who died at 46 after a dramatic heart attack at a team dinner just like this one. Kerr invited Nikola to join us and for the next few hours, the young man leaned across the table, rapt, as Kerr told stories about life in the food chain.
"When was your last year with the Bulls?" Nikola asked.
"1998."
"The Last Dance?" Nikola asked.
Kerr nodded. He remembered Game 6. The stricken silence of the Utah crowd during the trophy ceremony, the stale smell of champagne on the ride from the Delta Center to the airport. They boarded the plane, music blasting.
Nikola grinned.
"The plane ride was so much fun," Kerr said. "The sense of relief when you go through two months of playoffs and you win, it's so incredible."
Kerr recommended a book to Nikola called "The Inner Game of Tennis," which is a metaphysical self-help guide that divides all competitors into two people, the one who does things, and the one who offers non-stop negative commentary on them.
"That book saved my career," Kerr said, as more sushi arrived. "I was so in my own head the whole time. I was so mean to myself. So harsh. I read it pretty much every season. I'd go back to it. I realized we are all two people. We are Self One and Self Two. There's our body and our mind. What we all try to do, in life and in sports, is combine the two. To find the rhythm of life."
The author, a coach, told his tennis students to pretend they were the best player in the world. Kerr decided to try that, too.
"I pretended to be Jeff Hornacek," he said.
He looked across the table at Nikola.
"I don't know if that name rings a bell," he said. "He was an All-Star."
"I know the name," Nikola said.
"He was built just like me," Kerr said. "He's my size but he was way better than me. He was free and aggressive and loose and confident and I pretended to be him and I had the best practice of my life."
Soon it was midnight in New Orleans.
"What time is the flight?" Kerr asked.
"8:45," Nikola replied.
"Too early!" Kerr said.
On the way out of the restaurant, he smiled and spoke to Steph, who was decanting a bottle of red wine. Madonna played in the background. He headed back to Peyton Manning Kobe Bryant. He thought about the day Kobe's helicopter crashed. An assistant coach, Jarron Collins, came to him during practice with an "ashen look on his face."
"Kobe died," Collins said.
Word spread and the team just dropped to the floor. Even now Kerr can picture it. Everyone sat on the court with their own thoughts. Nobody spoke. Kerr didn't say anything. Neither did Steph. Eventually practice just ended. Everyone slipped away.
Now the flight to Orlando was looming. 8:45. They'd face the Magic and then fly to Miami immediately after the game, for another back-to-back, then a flight across the sleeping country, landing at 3 a.m., with another game the following night.
"This is the NBA," he said, in a voice that suggested he couldn't imagine his life without it. He told Nikola one more story that Luke Walton told him. On the last day of Hall of Fame center Bill Walton's life, he'd been asleep for eight hours in the bed where he would later die when he suddenly woke up and looked over at the black television screen in the room.
"Why isn't the game on?" he asked.
That yearning connects Steve Kerr and Draymond Green and Steph Curry, and Bill Russell and Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant and Bill Walton. Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, Lute Olson, James Naismith. Quitting basketball isn't retiring from a job. It's going into exile, willingly, leaving behind a world that keeps on going without you.
"How do you walk away from this?" Kerr asked and he walked toward the lobby elevators.
They flew to Florida the next morning, grinding through the schedule, sitting on the edge of the playoff bubble. In Orlando Kerr stayed in Juan Toscano-Anderson Jim McMahon. In Miami he stayed in Vlad Guerrero Kenny Stabler. In Denver, Charlie Hough Mike Trout. In Houston, Pete Rose O.J. Simpson. In Chicago Pete Rose O.J. Simpson again. Gravity worked on his team. One night Curry, Green and Butler were all injured and unavailable. The Warriors were blown out. Kerr struggled to sleep after a loss or two. One night before a game, his back went out while he was putting on his pants.
"He's so passionate," Kerr said of Draymond Green. "He's so loyal. He's such a winner. But he's complex." Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images HE WOKE UP every morning, home and away, and set a timer on his phone for 20 minutes. Then he took out his laptop and journaled. He wrote about the pain he carried about his father's death, and the anger still burning inside at the people who killed him. This was new for him. His college teammate and current assistant Bruce "Q" Fraser told a beat writer once that he did not recall a single conversation with Steve about Malcolm. Despite being written about regularly for most of his adult life, there's no story where Kerr really bares his grief about his dad. Other days he'd write about his inability to show himself compassion, or about relationships that hurt him, people who disappointed him, or about the current situation with the Warriors. Sometimes, Sachs told him, just write about minor annoyances; it didn't need to be as dramatic as an assassinated father.
Twenty minutes, every morning. Routine mattered as much as substance.
Delete the entry. Letting go mattered as much as spelling things out.
Meditate for 10. Stillness mattered as much as action.
Now go coach the team. Seeing it through maybe mattered more than anything.
Sachs told him to delete the entries because he could be loose and confident and know nobody would read them, and because there was a washing clean in it, a release.
His back pain began at the same time he started to coach. Taking the Warriors job, at the pace the game and the 82 demanded, forced him to bridge the gap between his body and mind, to open the first thin lines of communication.
In the beginning he learned how to be a head coach. He understood tactics but needed his own philosophy, not a cribbed mix of Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. As part of his preparation he got his agent to connect him with Pete Carroll in Seattle. Carroll agreed to host Steve for a few days. Kerr watched practice and took notes, listened to all the meetings, then ended each day with a debrief. On the third or fourth day, Carroll asked him a simple question.
"How are you gonna coach your team?" Carroll said.
"What offense are we gonna run?"
"That stuff doesn't matter," Carroll said.
"What do you mean?"
So Carroll told him his theory of coaching. His main job was to decide what emotions he wanted his players to feel every day and then foster an environment that created those emotions. What's practice gonna feel like? What's the vibe?
Carroll told Kerr his own origin story.
He'd been fired from the Jets. He knew everything about football and nothing about coaching. So he took a huge step down the ladder and got a job as a position coach with the 49ers, mostly so he could be close to the retired legend Bill Walsh, who kept an office in the Niners facility. Carroll spent hours with Walsh and learned that coaching was about values. Were you paranoid like Belichick? Or stern like Landry? Carroll turned Walsh's question on Kerr.
"It's a HUGE question," Kerr said, "and I was not introspective."
Carroll told him to come back the next day with 10 values and they'd edit down to three or four. Kerr worked on his list, delving into the caverns of his heart, mining places he'd long ago sealed. He returned the next day with a list of 10 and left Seattle with four things he felt defined him. Each of them flowed from different people in his life. He chose joy, which came from his family, and mindfulness, which came from Phil. Competitiveness came from himself, and from Pop, and empathy came from his father, whose writings are full of attempts to walk in another man's shoes.
Joy, mindfulness, competitiveness and empathy would define his team for the next 12 years. It started immediately. He met with all his players in person, going to Australia to visit Andrew Bogut, and playing golf at Pebble Beach with Steph Curry, a meeting in which he first laid out how he wanted the team to play, the joyful, electric ball movement. He asked everyone to name a person they trusted. Then Kerr reached out to those individuals, too. Draymond Green said Tom Izzo so Steve cold-called him. "Nobody does that," Izzo told me one morning. "Nobody has ever done that to me before. Boy is that unique."
Kerr's back pain started at the end of that first season, and continued in waves through treatment after treatment in the years since. Now, he could feel it receding, the pressure behind his eyes almost going away. The emotional awakening left him raw, and he remained uncertain in his own future with the team, but his daily journaling and meditation brought comfort. Down in Rancho Santa Fe, he even played golf after not swinging a club for a year.
STEVE SAT DOWN at his computer and typed out a letter to Draymond Green. Green had been in a spiral. Draymond's plus-minus stats in one stretch were -17, -10, -12, -10, -6, -5, -9. The team performed better when he wasn't on the court, after a decade of being the Warriors' emotional center. To prove to himself, and the team, that he mattered, he forced things on offense. He missed three straight games in December and on the night of his return in Portland, he committed eight turnovers. That's when Kerr wrote the letter.
He told Dray how much he meant to him. He talked about the turnovers, how the Warriors were 9-2 when they turned the ball over less than their opponents, and 3-11 when they turned it over more. He talked about aging, about how all great players adapted at the end of their career. Magic Johnson learned how to shoot threes, he wrote, and Steph Curry got stronger, and Michael Jordan learned to dominate the low post. Your superpower, he told Green, is your brain and your defensive instincts. He told him he loved him. Most of all, he told him he understood him. Kerr and Green fought because they were wired so similarly, with lots of internal rage that Steve had learned how to outwardly control better than Dray. "He's so passionate," Kerr said once as we walked through the Presidio. "He's so loyal. He's such a winner. But he's complex."
Four years ago, coming off a championship, Draymond punched Jordan Poole at practice and destroyed the team's season. Kerr understood this situation better than anyone else in basketball. He'd famously been punched by Michael Jordan in 1995, ending up with a black eye. The next day Kerr told Poole that how he responded would follow him for the rest of his life.
"This happened to me," Steve told him.
Then the video leaked. Poole was humiliated. Their title defense that year ended before it began. The following season Green choked Rudy Gobert, and the league suspended Green. Kerr sensed a man in crisis. He went to Dray's house in Los Angeles. They had an emotional meeting. Kerr told him to protect his storybook career by not destroying himself at the end.
"You're walking on the edge," he told him. "Don't go down this path of anger."
That was two years ago.
"I've been very proud of him," Kerr said. "But at least once every season you can just see the rage building."
