Excerpts from The Believer: Island Time
Reporting poolside from Don Nelson’s home on Maui, where the Hall of Fame NBA coach is enjoying a dog-filled and largely barefoot retirement.
I call Don Nelson from my rental car, which I’ve parked by some food trucks near the Kahului Airport. It rings through, which means I’m welcomed to the island by a sardonic voicemail: “Hey, you’ve reached Nellie. I’m veeeery, veeeery buuuusy… on Maui.” Three weeks earlier, the Hall of Famer, who retired in 2010 as the all-time winningest NBA coach, agreed via text to an interview with a single word: “Anytime.” Now, a bit before 11 a.m., I start to wonder if he remembers who I am. He calls right back, voice gravelly and subdued, but friendly enough. “Come on by,” he says, giving me his address. “I’ll be in the poker room. Above the garage!”
His property in Kihei has a white stone facade and a pond lined with tropical flowers. The garage, to the left of the house, is open, and I find a small staircase beside a Ford F-150. At the top of the stairs, I’m greeted by a nervous Chihuahua mix and two wooden Native American chiefs who guard the door. Inside are two more dogs and a man cave for the ages. There’s a bar, shuffleboard, backgammon and pool tables, and a flat-screen TV. Every inch of wall space is covered with memorabilia, photographs, and paintings. The highlight is a painting by his friend John Woodruff depicting a crowded, Last Supper–ish poker night with Nellie, Willie Nelson, Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, and twenty-six other friends. Though I can’t locate any cigar butts, the room smells of smoke. Nellie and his pal Mike—who tells me he sold Nellie a cell phone thirteen years ago “and, uh, we’ve been friends ever since”—sit at the poker table playing gin rummy for five dollars a hand. Nellie’s down more than a hundred so far this morning.
Mike, who now manages Nellie’s properties on Maui, wears black jean shorts and a Carhartt T-shirt he’s cut off at the sleeves. The eighty-five-year-old Nellie, in a blue-and-white-striped polo and khaki golf shorts, is still NBA tall and broad-shouldered. His white hair is close-cropped now and he wears a beaded bracelet on one wrist and a silver bracelet on the other. He’s barefoot. He stares at his hand of cards through reading glasses, which sit too high above his large ears. Mike fills the silence with small talk about his three young kids and his work with Nellie (“By far the best boss I’ve ever had”) and their celebrity-filled poker games. “Who’d we play poker with that one time? Westbrook?” he asks Nellie, referring to NBA point guard Russell Westbrook. “Yeah, Westbrook,” Nellie responds. Now he’s quiet again, attention back on the cards. “He was a pretty good player,” Mike tells me. “His friends were terrible.”
About thirty minutes in, I ask Nellie if I can record. He agrees. But as I start the interview, he stops me. “Oh, I can’t concentrate,” he says. He promises we’ll have time after the card game. “This guy is killing me!” After another half hour of losing hands, he says to Mike, “One more.” He tells me I can spend the afternoon with him, and also ride along when he picks up his wife at the airport. Now he grins at Mike. “So we can play a little longer.”
A few things to know about Don Nelson—better known as “Nellie”—for the uninitiated. He joined the NBA in 1962, when the league was still in its teenage years, and spent the next half century as one of its key figures. He won five championships as a player on a Celtics team with Bill Russell. (“He used to pick me up in his Maserati; he was a crazy driver.”) Right after retiring, Nellie thought about becoming a referee, but instead stumbled into a head coaching job with the Milwaukee Bucks at thirty-six years old. From then until his retirement in 2010, Nellie won 1,335 regular-season games. Yet despite all those wins, no team he coached ever made it to the Finals.
Still, Nellie was an NBA revolutionary. He was one of the first to identify the European talent pool, sending his son, Donnie, to scout behind the Iron Curtain. He helped popularize the point forward, allowing a big guy to dribble the ball and run the offense. And, most important, in the idyllic form of Dallas Mavericks legend Dirk Nowitzki, he brought the “stretch big” to prominence, forcing the NBA to admit there was value in having a seven-footer who could spread the floor by shooting from distance. In each case, he was early—and out on a limb because of it. Eventually, the league caught up. Today, NBA basketball looks much more like “Nellie Ball” than the style his innovation was created to disrupt. He shifted basketball as we know it.
And then he left. It’s been a decade and a half since he retired and moved full-time to Maui. Before a trip back to Dallas and then to Oklahoma City to accept the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Basketball Coaches Association in June, he hadn’t been away from Hawaii in seven years.
But, Nellie being Nellie, he couldn’t help but capture some headlines on his mainland visit. He wore Luka Dončić’s signature sneakers to the event “in protest for the trade from Dallas” to the Lakers, which had shocked the league. He grins when I bring it up. “We wanted to raise a little hell in Dallas,” he says.
While a football coach is a general (diagramming coordinated attacks to gain a yard for his troops), and a baseball manager is a skipper (keeping a tight ship and trying to avoid mutiny), a basketball coach’s role is more amorphous. There are some who play the drill sergeant and others who are more theorists or Zen masters. The key factor is that teams are small and a great player outweighs any tactic, and so, in a way, the closest comp is to a director. You must organize a cast of players, tend to and support a star, and hope the result, which you must watch from the sidelines, is a hit. How? Your guess is as good as any.
Nellie, who wore his emotions on his suit-jacketed sleeve, worked his players hard, especially as a young coach. But it was his leadership style that always separated him. “I was a disciplinarian, maybe too much on occasion,” he says of those early years. “But I always loved my players. When the game was over, if somebody wanted to go and have a beer, we’d have a beer together. I became close to guys that way after the game, you know? They knew who I was.” He had his wild strategic theories, but all of them allowed the players to play a loose, pass-heavy, joyful brand of basketball. Off the court, he had a style all his own.
He was an anomaly, partly for his innovation and partly because he never stopped coaching like the guys he’d played for in the ’60s. On good days, he was like the lively tactician and Celtics coach Red Auerbach; on worse days, he was like the blunt, beer-drinking coaches of his first days in the league—and so he was always a polarizing and entertaining character. After eleven hugely successful seasons in Milwaukee, where only Larry Bird’s and Julius Erving’s brilliance kept him from the Finals, he left after a very public feud with owner Herb Kohl. During his first run in Golden State, “people were throwing around the g word, genius,” as his son Donnie told Sports Illustrated in 1999, but he resigned after feuding with star forward Chris Webber. He lasted just half a season with the Knicks, and his tenure in Dallas, which saw him coaching Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki to the highest of highs, ended in him suing owner Mark Cuban for over six million dollars (and winning).
See, that’s the other thing you gotta know about Nellie: The farm boy from Sherrard, Illinois, entered a league that was just old enough to drive and watched it turn into a Concorde jet. Over the years, the game may have started to look the way Nellie had always imagined it, but the NBA became a place where men like him no longer fit in. When Nellie played, you had to work summers to make a living. He’d pick up shifts at the agricultural equipment manufacturer International Harvester. “Here I am a basketball player, right? And I’m working the night shift, running the punch press.” With protective gloves on, he could make $1 an hour; with them off, he could manipulate the machine better and make $1.20. “I had to take those gloves off so I could go faster,” he says, shaking his head. “What a dummy! These guys next to me, they’re all missing fingers.”
By the time he left the league in 2010, the NBA was a corporate behemoth—nineteen-year-olds started arriving with personal trainers, chefs, corporate sponsors, and full media training. Nellie’s last decade of coaching coincided with the arrival of a new era of owners: younger billionaires with ideas about how to change basketball. As evidenced by the lawsuit, Cuban, one of the first vanguards of the era, clearly rankled Nellie. Nellie never quite figured out how to have anything less than total control of his team. He lost more than one job because of it. “I wasn’t the smartest guy in the world that way,” he says. “I probably should have been more delicate.”
But Nellie can’t even hold that conciliatory pose until the end of his thought. Because the truth is, he still can’t grasp why someone would hire you to know absolutely everything about their team, and then try to butt in. “It’s just not the way to run a team,” he continues. “Basketball people make the basketball decisions, and money people make the money decisions.”