Posted by chicagomedia.org on February 27, 2009 at 00:26:33:
Chicago Bulls former broadcaster, coach Johnny 'Red' Kerr dies at 76
Johnny Kerr, original coach and beloved ambassador
By Melissa Isaacson | Tribune reporter
12:25 AM CST, February 27, 2009
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He was a high school and college basketball great, an NBA champion and an All-Star, a front-office executive and a respected broadcaster, but Johnny Kerr always will be known as a Chicago Bull.
Kerr, 76, died at home Thursday night after a long battle with prostate cancer.
Perhaps the best ambassador the Bulls will ever have, Kerr's nickname, "Red" ? for his hair color ? couldn't have been more appropriate. In many ways, Kerr was Mr. Bull: the first coach in franchise history, NBA Coach of the Year that 1966-67 season, later the club's business manager and finally its television and radio analyst for 33 years.
The media job was one he fulfilled with great passion and his trademark sense of humor, cutting back only recently to the pregame and halftime shows.
He was a South Side boy born July 17, 1932, to Matthew, who died of pneumonia at 32 when Johnny was 3, and Florence. His father was of Scottish descent; his mother, Swedish.
Kerr rose to prominence, quite literally, with an 81/2-inch growth spurt before his senior year at Tilden High School. It was only then that he left his first-love sport of soccer for basketball, and as its 6-foot-9-inch center, he soon led his team to the 1950 Public League championship.
Recruited to the University of Illinois, Kerr captained the Fighting Illini to a Big Ten title and an NCAA Final Four berth in 1952. He finished his career with a school-record 1,299 points, the third-highest total in conference history, in his three years on the varsity. Kerr was the ninth Big Ten player to be awarded the Silver Basketball by the Tribune as the league's most valuable player.
The Syracuse Nationals used the sixth pick of the 1954 NBA draft on Kerr, and the rookie rewarded them by averaging 10.5 points and 6.6 rebounds while helping them to their first and only NBA championship.
Kerr played in the game that ended with one of the most famous radio calls in history, Johnny Most's "Havlicek stole the ball!" That came in Game 7 of the 1965 Eastern Conference finals between John Havlicek's Celtics and Kerr's Philadelphia 76ers, formerly the Nationals.
Kerr played 12 years in the NBA, playing the same position in the same division as Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain while carving out a career in which he established himself as one of the most dependable and finest passing centers in the game.
"I had the touch of a blacksmith," Kerr once cracked with his typical self-effacing humor. "If I took six shots in a game, they'd check the windows."
Just the same, Kerr retired a three-time All-Star with 12,480 points, 10,092 rebounds and the NBA record for consecutive games played with 844. He was held out by coach's decision in the 845th, but the record stood until the 1983 season when it was broken by Randy Smith and later by A.C. Green.
Kerr's great lifetime achievement, he said, was marrying the love of his life, Betsy Nemecek, a Riverside girl he met at Illinois and married in 1954, a week before beginning his NBA career.
It was an enduring love story, though not without tragedy. The couple's first-born, John Jr., died at 3 of meningeal encephalitis. In the early '70s, they took in the three daughters of Betsy's sister and brother-in-law, who died within months of each other of cancer and a stroke, respectively. One of the daughters, Laurel Ellis, was later murdered in her college dorm room.
Kerr's final heartbreak was losing his sweetheart after 46 years of marriage when Betsy died in October 2000, leaving her husband and the couple's four sons, one daughter and 10 grandchildren.
Kerr, as always, found solace in his life with the Bulls, his friendships with fellow broadcasters, the coaches, the players of the game.
When Kerr took over his hometown team in its inaugural season of 1966-67, several pro basketball franchises ? the Bruins, Gears, Stags, Majors, Zephyrs and Packers ? already had tried and failed in Chicago.
But spurred on by the energy of Kerr, marketing director Jerry Colangelo, public relations man Ben Bentley and owner Dick Klein, the upstart Bulls built from other teams' rejects and somehow survived. Kerr came aboard in the expansion draft even though he had no intention of playing; Klein told him he would pick him first and make him the coach.
"In a way, coaching an expansion team was a break," Kerr said in a 1968 Tribune interview. "We didn't know what we had, so we didn't know how bad we could be. We could do things differently with our material."
They said of those Bulls that as coach, Kerr was the best center they had, and it was no exaggeration. The team was undersized but quick, so Kerr compensated by employing a scrappy, clawing defense and a fast-paced offense that sometimes, he said, "looked like the YMCA out there."
Kerr told their handful of fans: "Bulls is our name. Defense is our game. Look in the Yellow Pages under Excitement."
Still, after starting the season 7-6, they lost 14 of their next 15, prompting critics to predict the Bulls would go the way of their predecessors. Early in the season, St. Louis Hawks coach Richie Guerin even predicted the expansion team would be lucky to win 10 games.
Kerr brushed it off, and while the players and coaches of other pro teams in Chicago could command appearance fees, the Bulls coach spoke for free at nearly every opportunity he had.
"We did bowling banquets, Little League dinners, B'nai B'rith luncheons and youth group breakfasts," Kerr said. "I'm non-denominational. [One day] I helped sell bonds for Israel at noon, played handball at the YMCA after lunch and then held a scrimmage at DePaul in the evening."
And while he sold the Bulls, Kerr also sold the NBA to a scrutinizing audience that knew the league only as a bunch of guys in funny uniforms who fired up shot after shot with nary a speck of defense.
"Everybody on Boston uses his hands on defense," Kerr explained as he taught his young charges the Celtics' (illegal) way of playing defense. "Of course, you have to understand that the Celtic uniform comes with an extra pair of hands."
That attitude was perfect for Jerry Sloan, the first player the Bulls selected in the expansion draft, a 6-5 guard who led the team in rebounding.
Kerr was respected as one of the best minds in the game. But he was nothing if not funny.
"I'm always looking for a hot hand," he once said of his first Bulls team. "Then I milk him. Make him shoot till he cools off. Unfortunately, this year I've run through the whole lineup and couldn't find a hot hand."
Once, in a game against Philadelphia, Kerr was giving out defensive assignments and told his center, Erwin Mueller, "You watch Chamberlain."
"So Wilt scores 40 in the first half," Kerr recounted. "I'm really boiling when we get to the locker room. I yell at Mueller, 'I thought I told you to watch Chamberlain.' And he says, 'I did, Coach. Gee, he's great, isn't he?'
"It broke me up. Broke up the whole squad. Loosened us up too. We went out and beat 'em, despite Wilt."
Far from the 10-win prediction, Kerr willed the Bulls to 33 victories and became the first head coach in any of the four major American sports to take an expansion team to the playoffs in its first season.
The Bulls were eliminated by St. Louis in the first round 3-0, and a year later Kerr left the Bulls and their bull-headed owner, Klein, at the behest of Colangelo, who had been hired as general manager of the expansion Phoenix Suns.
It was there he first tried his hand at broadcasting, teaming with Hot Rod Hundley.
After Phoenix, Kerr was lured to Virginia and the American Basketball Association, where he joined former teammate, Bulls assistant and longtime friend Al Bianchi and became the general manager of the Squires.
There, Kerr signed Julius Erving to his first pro contract and discovered George Gervin on the playground.
As the ABA foundered, Kerr felt the pull to return home to Chicago. Pat Williams recently had left the Bulls, leaving a general manager's vacancy, and Dick Motta took over the basketball operations in addition to his coaching duties but hired Kerr as the team's business manager, a job he held from 1973-75.
Kerr credited Jim Durham with graciously getting him into broadcasting by passing him the microphone during Bulls games. Soon Kerr was hosting a halftime show, and Kerr stayed behind the mike from then on.
Kerr prided himself on never having missed a single minute of Michael Jordan's Bulls career ? and on their resin-bag exchange ? Jordan clapping his hands together before each game as the dust blew all over Kerr ? beginning in Jordan's first exhibition game, enduring as Jordan's superstitious pregame ritual and the duo's schtick.
Kerr's r?sum? also included insurance investment consultant, president of Kerr Financial Services and author of "Bull Session," published in 1989. The great void is that Kerr was not named to basketball's Hall of Fame in his lifetime despite his contribution to one of the sport's greatest franchises as well as the fact that he is one of fewer than two dozen players to amass more than 12,000 points and 10,000 rebounds.
"I've made it clear time and time again," Kerr cracked, "that if I'm chosen posthumously, I will not attend the induction ceremony."
Kerr once called basketball the most demanding sport there is behind soccer.
"Basketball isn't supposed to be a contact sport," he joked, "but all I know is I've had my nose broken, stitches taken all over my face and around my eyes, and my bridgework is courtesy of George Mikan and Wilt Chamberlain. And then there's the legs. As I got older, I seemed to get shorter. [I'd] start working out each year, and the basket was higher. Used to stand and stare at it and wonder how I ever jumped that far off the floor. Well, I never could jump anyway."
In a little more than a year over 2003 and '04, Kerr had an operation on his artificial left hip, a toe amputated and a stent placed in his heart. But in an interview with the Tribune's K.C. Johnson, he said he had no intention of giving up broadcasting or any of his other loves.
"One of my granddaughters said she admired me not for basketball," Kerr told Johnson with the trademark twinkle in his eye, "but because I can karaoke and moonwalk."