Last Halloween, not long after the kids finished trick-or-treating and got in bed, I settled on my couch to watch the San Antonio Spurs, my favorite basketball team. Five games into a new season, I was full of optimism. The team was a healthy mix of savvy veterans, young stars, and Victor Wembanyama, the most hyped NBA prospect since LeBron James. If the players found the right chemistry, perhaps this could be the year that the Spurs snapped an uncharacteristic playoff drought. And led by Gregg Popovich, a Hall of Fame coach who directed his players like a maestro conducting an orchestra, this scenario really did seem possible.
That night, the Spurs won the game, Wembanyama had an insane stat line, and everything was looking up. But a few weeks later, I got the sinking feeling that it might have been Popovich’s final hurrah. In mid-November, the Spurs announced that Popovich had suffered a mild stroke that would keep him off the sidelines for the foreseeable future. As the season progressed, he continued to stay away from the team. And on Friday, Popovich—or “Pop,” as he is often called—announced that he would be stepping down as head coach after nearly 29 seasons at the helm, and transitioning into a full-time role as the team’s president of basketball operations. Every Spurs fan had been mentally preparing for this moment since Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, and other defining players of the 21st century, all of whom Popovich had coached, hung up their sneakers one by one. Popovich himself is 76 years old, and Father Time is undefeated. But to realize that he was indeed mortal was heartbreaking.
In the symphony of tributes that followed the announcement, I thought of one person: David Robinson, the first superstar to play with Pop. San Antonio is a military city with one major sports team, and Robinson, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate whose playing nickname was “the Admiral,” was an informal figurehead. In October 2014, I attended a conference in a hotel ballroom outside of Austin where Robinson delivered a keynote address about leadership. Naturally, his speech turned to Pop. “He’s not afraid to be countercultural,” Robinson said. Mainstream basketball culture was self-congratulatory, but Pop’s style, Robinson suggested, was to say, “No, don’t look at me.”
Countercultural was exactly right, because Pop did things differently. In a league built around individual personalities, Pop created a winning team environment. He brought an internationality to the game—in terms of both the players he pursued and the style of basketball they played. Perhaps most important, he realized that although basketball is a game with winners and losers, the National Basketball Association is a business. Coaching was his job, not his life—a perspective he tried to inculcate in everyone, players and fans and sports journalists alike.
Pop’s global perspective came from his own background. He was born in Indiana to a Serbian father and a Croatian mother; for college, he attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Soviet studies. After his mandatory five years of service in the military, he began coaching at Pomona College in Southern California, where he became the head coach in 1979. He made himself at home, talking politics with students, popularizing something called a “Serbian taco,” and playing intramurals with professors. Eventually, the Spurs came calling.
By 1996, Popovich had risen through the organization to become the head coach. The next year, a series of unfortunate injuries—primarily to Robinson—meant the team was one of the worst in the league, giving them better odds in the NBA draft lottery, where they won the No. 1 pick: Tim Duncan. A native of the Virgin Islands, Duncan became the ideal linchpin for Popovich’s tenure. Pop would later explain that Duncan was something of a soulmate—the one person he would prefer to have a conversation at dinner with over anyone else. “He is the most real, consistent, true person that I have ever met,” Popovich once said.
To complement Duncan, Popovich ignored American high-school prodigies and blue-chip college prospects and instead drafted an array of unheralded international players who were a fit for his preferred style of play: cohesive, defense-first basketball that emphasized passing. No single player was bigger than the team. Pulling from his experience overseas, Pop’s teams resembled the pass-heavy, positionless style of European soccer revolutionized by the Dutch legend Johan Cruyff. Players were essentially interchangeable, whipping the ball around quickly and dizzying opposing defenses. The result was basketball in its purest form. Players would pass up a good shot at the basket if it meant their teammate could take a great shot at the basket. Watching the Spurs offense, to me, felt like watching an artist at work—every brushstroke was intentional, and the finished product a masterpiece. (During Pop’s time as coach, the Spurs ultimately won five championships.)
Under Popovich, the Spurs drafted the French speedster Tony Parker and the Argentine dynamo Manu Ginóbili, whose respective “teardrop” and “Euro step” techniques were quickly emulated across the American game. The team’s roster often resembled a United Nations conference, with other players from Slovenia, Brazil, Australia, and Italy. More than internationalizing the game, though, Pop brought perspective. Players gushed about his infamous dinners, where he covered the tab and let the wine flow freely. He cared about his players as people, and worked to develop relationships that would outlive anyone’s tenure in the NBA.
“Winning the championship is great, but it fades quickly,” he once said. “The satisfaction I get from Tony Parker bringing his child into the office, or some other player who came through the program and now I hired him as a coach and he’s back—that’s satisfying.” This style was uncommon, yet contagious. In the business of sports, it’s natural to want to be the best at any cost—to be paid the most money, to get the most playing time, to win the most acclaim. But Popovich always behaved like his position was about more than just basketball.
Pop isn’t leaving the organization; still, this feels like an end, one that’s tugged on every emotion for me. Pop was the only head coach of my favorite basketball team for as long as I’ve been able to watch the sport. When I saw the news on Friday, I messaged Allen, my best friend of almost 20 years, with whom I had been texting back and forth during the game on Halloween—Pop’s last as the maestro.
I offered the only words I could summon: “Damn. Pop really retired.”
