With five champion titles, Gregg Popovich, a unique longevity coach, who announced his withdrawal on Friday, placed San Antonio on the NBA map and watched over to the destinies of the French Tony Parker and Victor Wembanyama between requirement and humor traits.
Arrived in 1996 at the head of the Spurs, who had won nothing before him, he established the record of victories in the NBA (1,422), conquered five titles (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014) and left a colossal heritage, by forming dozens of coaches and hundreds of players with an unusual opening of spirit. Sometimes funny and brilliant, often grumpy and sarcastic, Popovich sometimes sketched a little smile at the end of the exercise he hated the most: responding to journalists. Nothing amused him as long as seeing their livid mines after having abused them.
He paid for example the extravagant costumes of his “favorite victim”, the late Craig Sager. The day when TNT’s journalist came across the treatment of cancer, “pop” hugged him and showed his true, warm, human, before recovering: “Now asks your two stupid questions”. “Having a sense of humor is a huge importance for me because I think people who do not have self-mockery, who do not appreciate funny moments, will not be able to give everything for a group,” he explained in 2015.
At the top with the Duncan-Parker-Ginobili trio
The previous year, it was with a damn united team that he won his last coronation, the most beautiful. Firstly because at the top of their art, the Spurs took a brilliant revenge on the Miami Heat of LeBron James, after a cruel defeat in the 2013 final. Then because this title, which also owed a lot to the young Kawhi Leonard, devoted the Tim Tim Duncan-Manu Ginobili trio to the last time, seven years after the fourth thought to be their last.
From these three players so different, “Coach Pop” fired the best. If he found Duncan Son alter ego And immediately knew that their “marriage” would work, he agreed, a little in spite of himself, to give free rein to the genius of the artist Ginobili, whose unpredictability – the enemy of any coach – was more often winning than losing. As for Parker, drafted at 19, he decided on the contrary to push him after himself. This did not prevent French from considering it then as a second father. “During one of his first training sessions, I had brought a few guys to get into it. I wanted to see what he had in his stomach. He impressed me. So, I said to him, ball in hand: “It’s you, find solutions, I’m going to love you and yell at it at the same time”, “he summed up.
-Five years in the air force
In doing so, Popovich, born January 28, 1949 in East Chicago (Indiana) of a Serbian father and a Croatian mother, returned to his past as an officer. From his five years in the Air Force, after studying Soviet civilization, he retained the virtues of organization and discipline. Captain of the American Armed Forces team, he traveled in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1972 and understood that basketball was not just American. No coincidence that the Spurs would become the most cosmopolitan of NBA teams under his era. The legend made him spy. After maintaining the mystery for a long time, he conceded that it was for a time in intelligence, at the base of Diyarbakir, in Türkiye. “I was parked on the border, it’s not like I was James Bond. »»
He took his first steps in the NBA in 1986 as awarded to San Antonio then Golden State, before returning to the Spurs as a general manager in 1995 and taking the team’s head a year later. A first season weighed down by the injury of the star David Robinson allowed him to obtain the first choice of Draft in 1997 to select Tim Duncan, the starting point of his epic.
Two raw diamonds
Twenty-six years later, fate offered Spurs a new first choice, the French phenomenon Victor Wembanyama (2.24 m), a crude diamond on the short-minded that Popovich took pleasure in polishing for a little more than a season to launch a new cycle.
Popovich, coach of the United States crowned Olympic champions in 2021 in Tokyo, liked to train “players” and “men” and also launched as a defendant of dozens of coaches among whom, unpublished in the NBA, a woman, Becky Hammon.
This architect of the game does not chew his words against the twice president Donald Trump, “liar”, “racist”, “pathetic”. “Pop ‘Art”, on and out of the courts.
