In 1988, near the end of his final year as a guard with the University of Arizona basketball team, Steve Kerr was warming up before a game against local rivals Arizona State when a smattering of opposing fans started to taunt him.
Among the chants were “PLO! PLO! PLO!” and “Your father’s history!” One loudmouth even roared: “Why don’t you join the Marines and go back to Beirut?”
These were not your usual put-downs, chosen to distract a star player, these were calculated to genuinely hurt.
Kerr was so upset by the onslaught he dropped the ball and took a seat courtside. Four years earlier, his father Malcolm, then president of the American University in Lebanon, had been shot in the head by terrorists (now believed to have been Iranian-backed Hezbollah), and a group of moronic undergraduates had just used that information to torment him. He was shaken but not deterred.
That he recovered from the ordeal to make six three-pointers from six attempts that night, scoring 22 points and leading his team to a resounding victory, gave a measure of the man he would eventually become.
Almost three decades later, Kerr, in his capacity as the coach of the Golden State Warriors, was asked the other week to comment on president Donald Trump's executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.
With the eloquence of a student of world affairs and the authority of somebody with unique experience of the power of hate, he didn’t hold back.
“If we’re trying to combat terrorism by banishing people from coming to this country, by really going against the principles of what our country is about and creating fear, it’s the wrong way of going about it,” said Kerr.
“If anything, we could be breeding anger and terror. So I’m completely against what’s happening. I think it’s shocking. It’s a horrible idea. I feel for all the people that are affected. Families are being torn apart, and I worry in the big picture what this means to the security of the world. It’s going about it completely opposite. You want to solve terror, you want to solve crime. This is not the way to do it.”
Fresh outrage
The chorus of celebrities from showbiz and sports denouncing Trump and his policies has become so constant and almost repetitive that it’s tempting to become blasé and to tune it out as background noise.
After all, with each fresh outrage from the White House, what more is there left for sane people to say? Then, you hear Kerr, an individual with a personal history like few others, articulate his fears and you realise there are opposition voices still worth listening to. Witness his visceral reaction the morning after the election last November.
"I thought we were better than this," said Kerr. "I thought The Jerry Springer Show was The Jerry Springer Show. Maybe we should've seen it coming over the last 10 years. You look at society, you look at what's popular. People are getting paid millions of dollars to go on TV and scream at each other, whether it's in sports or politics or entertainment, and I guess it was only a matter of time before it spilled into politics.
“But then all of a sudden you’re faced with the reality that the man who’s gonna lead you has routinely used racist, misogynist, insulting words.”
Kerr’s career graph is a monument to self-improvement.
Largely unknown entering college, he achieved enough in Arizona to get picked in the second round of the draft by the Phoenix Suns. Coming off the bench, he was a three-point machine on the Chicago Bulls in the mid-90s when Michael Jordan was posterising an entire generation.
He picked up three titles there, later adding two more in a similar role with the San Antonio Spurs. Once uncertain whether he'd even make it as a pro, he endured 15 years in the NBA and finished with the highest three-point scoring percentage of all-time.
Basketball history
That footnote in basketball history was bolstered by him helming the Warriors (
Stephen Curry
et al) to a championship as a rookie coach in 2015, breaking a slew of records along the way. At 51, he’s chasing another title this season but is unafraid to use his profile to speak truth to power. In that much, he’s living up to a family legacy hallmarked by making a difference in arenas and matters of far more import than sport.
His grandfather Stanley worked zealously to save Armenian refugees fleeing the Turkish Genocide during and after the first World War, chronicling his experience in a classic book The Lions of Marash. His philanthropy eventually took him to Lebanon where Malcom Kerr was born in Beirut in 1931. Steve came into the world in the same city 34 years later when his father was working there as an academic with an international reputation as an astute commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.
In 1982, Malcom took over the presidency of the American University even though the previous incumbent had been kidnapped by Iran. He and his family recognised the danger involved but given the Kerr history of service in that troubled corner of the Levant, he was determined the college might somehow remain a beacon of light and tolerance in the darkness of a country torn by civil and sectarian strife.
The very gospel that his son is still preaching.
