How Pop became a legend

A few days ago, while attention NBA while the public's attention was occupied by fierce playoff battles, the San Antonio Spurs announced that Gregg Popovich was definitely stepping down as head coach trainer, and that he will continue to serve as president of basketball operations for this franchise. Considering his health condition and the stroke he suffered in November of the previous year, news like this is somewhat expected. Still, it's hard to believe that we won't be seeing the 76-year-old Popovich doing what he loves most and what he does best.

Fate wanted teams led by his former protégés, Ime Udoka and Steve Kerr, to meet on the same evening. Both appeared at the press conference wearing T-shirts with his image, emphasizing how much they learned from him and how important Coach Pop is to basketball as a sport.

A few days later, Popovic himself addressed the media, and in his own manner pointed out that he is no longer a coach, and that from now on he will be "El Jefe". Right next to him were Duncan and Ginobili, his basketball sons, watching over him and showing a loyalty rarely seen in today's sports world.

Gregg Popovich succeeded because he listened and learned, tried and repeated. In his first season of his college career, he had two wins and 22 losses. In his first season in his NBA career, he achieved 17 wins and 47 losses. He was able to take advantage of the opportunities presented to him and that is why he became one of the greatest coaches in the history of basketball.

Growing up and education

As is usually the case with people who have reached the very top of their trades, Gregg Popovich is a man of many interests and talents in a number of fields. Many claim that he could have been equally successful in at least five different professions, from a wine producer to an intelligence agent, but fate wanted Gregg Popovich to play basketball, and to be more successful at it than almost all other people on planet Earth.

Greg was born in 1949 in a small town called East Chicago, in the federal state of Indiana, as the child of immigrants from our area, Radovan and Katarina. With this, he will clarify numerous later situations in which he will yell at the referees and his players, and the exact description he will use is - "go Serbian".

Basketball in the former Yugoslavia was not that popular when Gregg Popovich was a child, nor while his parents still lived in the homeland, so we must attribute his love for this sport to the fact that he was born and grew up in Indiana, which is considered the most basketball-friendly state in America.

However, he didn't have too many scholarship offers when it came time to go to college, so he decided to go to the Air Force Academy, the prestigious "Air Force", where he played basketball, but also studied to be an intelligence officer and read Russian literature - his favorites were Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Lermontov. He spent part of his studies in the "field", more precisely in the turbulent area of ​​eastern Turkey, near the borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria.

However, his love for basketball won, so in 1973 Popovich returned to the academy as an assistant coach of the basketball program, until 1979 when he took over the not-so-prestigious Pomona-Pitzer College, where he would stay for the next nine years.

How did Greg become Pop?

There is a theory put forward by the famous American sports journalist Bill Simmons, according to which you become a legend in the NBA when everyone knows you by one word, be it a name or a nickname. Everyone knows who Hakeem, Shaq or LeBron is; Logo, Magic or Joker, and the listed names only confirm what is persistently emphasized - that the NBA is a league of players, not coaches, referees or owners.

However, one coach managed to find his place among the legends of the league, while satisfying the aforementioned theory. He fought, although he didn't care too much about such a thing, with his knowledge, charisma, sense of humor, but also with the relationships he built with players and associates. Ok, the winning of five championship rings, three awards for the best coach of the league did not take long, but the "human" factor was very important for the complete story of the legendary "Pop".

However, the path to such a status "was not strewn with roses, but with thorns". Gregg Popovich, who did not have a rich basketball background, could testify that in life it is necessary to sacrifice something in order to reach a higher goal. He didn't play or coach at any of the major universities, so he had no one to recommend him for a better job than coaching the modest Pomona-Pitzer College.

That was probably the main reason why he took a year off without pay in 1986 and decided to spend the next season as a sort of apprentice to the famous Larry Brown at the University of Kansas. From their business relationship was born a friendship, later godfatherism, but also Larry's invitation to Popovich to be his assistant in the San Antonio Spurs. So in 1988, Greg got a ticket to enter the best basketball league in the world. What no one could have guessed at the time, one of the most successful coach-club relationships in the history of basketball began at the same moment.

However, not everything went perfectly here either. San Antonio managed to reach the playoffs, but not beyond the first round, so this period will not be remembered for the trophies - because there were none - but for anecdotes like the one in which he took Žarko Paspalj to quit smoking.

After four years in the Spurs, he spent the next two seasons in the coaching staff of another famous coach - Don Nelson - in the Golden State Warriors. Popovich picked up valuable knowledge and experience, before fate got its fingers involved again, which didn't give up on what it envisioned, to bring Gregg and the Spurs together. The hero of our story then returns to Texas, first to the position of general manager, and then to the position of coach, after firing the existing one and promoting himself to the new one.

In the first year under his leadership, the San Antonio Spurs will be the worst team in the league, but that status will give them the opportunity to draft Tim Duncan, and therefore Gregg Popovich to become - Pop.

System and culture

There are few situations where the arrival of one player changes the future of a franchise as much as it did with Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs. That the Spurs hit the jackpot was already clear in Duncan's first season in the league, and in the second, the premier championship title in the history of the franchise arrived. It was 1998/99, a season that started with a players' strike, so many challenged the Spurs for this title for two reasons - that it was achieved in a shortened season, and because there was no retired Michael Jordan in the league.

Quite logically, the Spurs didn't care about that, and from that moment on, no one could stop the team from Texas. Over the next 18 years, the Spurs would go on to record over 50 wins a season, win four more championships, and become what every franchise in American professional sports dreams of - a dynasty.

Apart from dynasty, two other words can describe the rise and numerous successes of San Antonio, and they are system and culture. And as much as Pop refused to take credit for the Spurs' dominance -- saying that he was ``not a good coach, but that he was lucky to coach Duncan'' -- there is no doubt that he was a central figure in establishing the NBA's longest-running dynasty of the 21st century.

They had other coaches at their disposal and better players than Duncan, so they did not manage to achieve everything that Pop was able to do. A big reason behind San Antonio's success is the numerous fantastic decisions Popovich has made regarding players and associates. He liked to give outsiders a chance - probably because he had been one himself for a long time - believing that such people were more ready for hard work and progress, and he was far more open than many of his colleagues about players born outside the US borders.

San Antonio has become a favorite destination for international players, who will have a huge contribution in the future success of the team, such as Parker and Diao from France, Ginobili and Obert from Argentina, Mills from Australia, Belinelli from Italy, Spliter from Brazil, Udrih and Nesterović from Slovenia, and many others.

However, San Antonio was not only strong on the field, but perhaps even stronger off the field. Pop recognized the potential in certain people to whom he entrusted serious tasks, so the Spurs had, according to many, the best general manager (RC Buford), the best coach for individual work on player shooting mechanics (Chip Engelland), and San Antonio's coaching staff was regularly considered the best in the league.

The Spurs were considered a prestigious basketball academy, and individuals from their system were later given fantastic jobs because they were believed to be smarter than their counterparts from other teams. To be considered one of the best teams in any American sport for two decades, with a system designed to prevent such a thing, is tantamount to a miracle. The Spurs were a model of stability and an indicator of how a franchise should be run.

Photo: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Heritage

The story of Pop's basketball legacy could begin factually - 2,291 wins (the most in history), five championships, three Coach of the Year awards and two golds with the US national team. It has more playoff wins (170) than numerous other NBA franchises (21 to be exact) since its inception.

From a strictly artisan point of view, his motion attack, with numerous variations, will become one of the most important attacking principles in basketball, on a par with the famous triangle attack. He will also be remembered as one of the coaches who managed to modify his philosophy in a very successful way and adapt it to the current demands of basketball and the capabilities of his players. In this way, his Spurs went from a defensive machine from the first period of the dynasty to a team that plays beautiful team basketball, according to many the most beautiful in the history of the game.

Many of his assistants and former players would go on to become fantastic head coaches, such as Steve Kerr, Mike Budenholzer, Ime Udoka, Brett Brown, Monty Williams... expanding the impressive "coaching tree" of Gregg Popovich.

In order not to pass the entire text in superlatives, Pop is also responsible for certain things that many NBA fans do not like. For starters, he was the first to rest players when he felt there was a need, keeping them fresh for the most important playoff matchups. With these moves, he severely annoyed commissioner David Stern, but also paved the way for something that is now called ``load management'' and is very annoying to the league and fans.

In addition, his attitude of not committing a tactical foul at the end of the game, when leading his team by three points, is well known, which cost them the title in the final with the Miami Heat in 2013. On the other hand, he was able to suggest to his players to deliberately foul weak free-throw shooters in the opponent's ranks, in order to disrupt their offensive rhythm and force the opposing centers to struggle from the penalty line.

He had a specific relationship with journalists, so he often knew how to answer their questions sarcastically - which, in truth, could also be very banal - but no one questioned his knowledge, charisma and sense of humor. Neither did the human qualities, which came to light over time.

There are already numerous stories about how and how much he helped various people - from waiters and sommeliers, to whom he left generous tips and recommended them for better-paid positions, through former players whom he was able to forgive and the attempt to lure Tim Duncan away from San Antonio, to current assistants, about whom he spread praises and found engagements for them. When he found out in Belgrade that Dule Vujošević was ill, he asked his great friend Žarko Paspalj to take him to visit the man he greatly appreciates. It's just one of the indicators that he appreciated what basketball gave him and how much he cared about the people he met during his career.

During that time, he did not forget his beginnings and the most important thing - that life should be enjoyed. Wherever the Spurs played, Pop organized team dinners at his favorite restaurants, where they talked about a variety of life topics, but not basketball. "The world is much wider than the basketball court," he was able to say and switch the topic to Argentine politics or Italian cuisine.

He learned more about wine than basketball, and he spent more on wine than on anything else in his life. Nevertheless, with wine he celebrated victories and overcame defeats, made friends and created memories. He gave basketball everything he had, now it's time to continue enjoying life, food and wine.

One of the most important basketball minds deserved something like that.