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Hoops for life
Van Gundys have basketball in their blood
Long before Stan and Jeff Van Gundy ever made it to the NBA as successful head coaches, they had a coaching assignment that was much more daunting and pressure-packed.
The year was 1971, and their father, Bill Van Gundy, had just undergone brain surgery to remove a tumor. The 26 days in the hospital and recovering took Bill away from his job as a small-college men's head basketball coach in California.
To help their basketball-obsessed father in the only way they knew how, Stan, a seventh-grader at the time, and Jeff, then a fourth-grader, went to games to monitor upcoming opponents. They filed crude scouting reports that Bill, now 73, still remembers to this day.
"They did a pretty good job with them," he said, chuckling as he ventured down memory lane last week. "They wanted to help and all I wanted from them was what the other team was doing defensively. They could tell the difference between zone and man-to-man and whether or not a team pressed full court or half court. Before, they would go scouting with me and they knew what the UCLA high-post offense was.
"Yeah, (the reports) they gave me were pretty detailed."
Stan remembers that time more for the sheer fear that he might lose his father and Jeff doubts the credibility of those scouting reports and stresses that the two brothers were hardly child prodigies.
But the moment does encapsulate just how much coaching has coursed through the Van Gundy family. Bill spent 42 years along the sidelines, toiling mostly in dark, drafty gymnasiums in California and New York. Jeff shot to fame in 1995 as the head coach of the New York Knicks, later coached the Houston Rockets and now serves as ABC's lead NBA analyst. And as the second-year head coach of the Orlando Magic, Stan has breathed life into the organization with his hard-driving ways and innovative ideas.
Today, when Stan's 22-6 Magic host the New Orleans Hornets in a nationally televised game, Bill and wife, Cindy, will sit directly across from their oldest son and cheer him on in Orlando. And 3,000 miles away, Jeff will be working the Lakers-Celtics game, delivering the kind of sharp critiques and self-deprecating humor that only a coaching lifer could.
Basketball, particularly coaching basketball, runs in this family. The Van Gundy's vacations years ago were usually to college basketball Final Fours. They were always coaches, their friends were coaches and many of their laughs, arguments and tears through the years were about coaching.
"We're living proof that insanity is inherited," Cindy Van Gundy said from her and Bill's home in suburban Orlando. "We've always had an inner drive and a great respect for the game. Basketball has been very good to this family."
Family affair
The Van Gundys have been very good for the profession of coaching, devoting their lives to teaching the game. Bill was a raging, vein-bulging type of coach in the Mold of a Bobby Knight. They lived and died with the victories and defeats because winning meant dad got to keep his job and losing meant getting fired, moving to another city and finding a new set of friends.
Wherever Bill coached, scouted or recruited in northern California, Stan, 49, and Jeff, 47 in January, usually weren't far behind. One of the perks of coaching at small colleges was that every day for the Van Gundys was take-your-sons-to-work day.
One of Stan's greatest memories is tagging along with his dad to a coaching clinic and serving as an errand boy for legendary college coach Pete Newell. Jeff still remembers that when shooting on the side courts to never let the ball bounce after the whistle blew otherwise it might jeopardize getting to tag along to dad's practices.
"It was a different time and they could go with me to the practices and the games and on scouting trips. Just being around the coaches and the game gave them an understanding of the game," said Bill, who retired from coaching in 1998 after working at Genesee (N.Y.) Community College. "From middle school on, they never talked about wanting to do anything other than coaching."
Stan and Jeff played the game, both as scrappy, overachieving point guards, but they always approached the game from a coach's view. After all, that's the perspective that was most prevalent. They saw all of the hours their dad worked, the way the losses ate at him and how seriously he approached coaching. And they still chose it as their profession.
"From him, that's where I started forming a foundation of my philosophies and what's important in the game," said Stan, who took an underachieving Magic team and made it a winner of 52 games last season. "He was very emotional on the sidelines, very intense, a hard worker and always well prepared. I got a lot of stuff from him. His passion is beyond anybody's I've ever been around. He wanted to do it every day and it wasn't a chore at all."
Stan paid his dues as a coach, working at the NAIA and Division I levels while compiling a 135-92 record in eight seasons. Jeff got his coaching start as a high school coach in Rochester, N.Y., and later served apprenticeships under Rick Pitino and Stu Jackson at the college level before cracking into the NBA as an assistant under John McLeod, Pat Riley and then Don Nelson.
When Riley bolted New York for the Miami Heat in 1995, he wanted to take his top assistant, Jeff, with him. When the Knicks balked, Riley instead hired Stan off of Jeff's recommendation.
Jeff's big break came in 1995 when Nelson was fired and he was elevated into the pressure cooker that is the Knicks head coaching position. In the moments before his second game as head coach, when the Knicks stunned the Micheal Jordan-led Bulls team that won 72 games, Jeff cried in his office. The fact that he got the big-time opportunity that his dad never did hit him especially hard.
"When you choose the same profession as your father and your older brother you ask yourself, 'How did I ever become the lucky one?' " Jeff said last week from his home in Houston. "You find out in coaching pretty quickly that while the best players rise to the top, there is no set path to the top in coaching. My opportunity just so happened to come early."
Brother vs. brother
After 12 years as an assistant coach in Miami, Stan's opportunity to be a NBA head coach came in 2003 when Riley resigned just days before the season opener. Stan's first team lost its first seven games, but rallied to not only make the postseason, but it also defeated New Orleans in the first round.
With Stan atop the Heat, it meant that he and Jeff would have to square off as opposing NBA head coaches. They met dozens of times when Stan was a Miami assistant and Jeff was New York's head coach, none more important that the four years in the playoffs with Jeff's Knicks winning three series in a row at one point.
But as head coaches, staring across from one another during the national anthem and trying to outwit the other in games, was a different dynamic all together. They faced each other five times in the regular season and once in the preseason, joining Larry and Herb Brown as the only brothers ever to coach against one another in the NBA.
Originally, Bill and Cindy vowed to never go and watch these games, fearing the pain of losing for one son would be greater than the joy of victory for the other. Instead, Bill would watch on television with the sound turned down so he could concentrate on the strategies his two sons were employing.
Eventually, Bill and Cindy decided the decision to boycott the games was nonsense and they went to revel in their two sons reaching the summit of the coaching profession. They were careful not to show impartiality with the eyes of media and fans watching them, but deep down inside the parents glowed with pride.
Admitted Bill: "The first time I went and they were standing across from one another, I can't say that I didn't get a little teary-eyed."
On appearance alone, Stan and Jeff look like anything but brothers. Stan is the round one, while Jeff is the bald one. According to Bill, they fought as children "all day, every day," because they were so strong willed and stubborn.
But they have grown significantly closer through the years, and regularly lean on one another for coaching and parental advice. Stan was there for support when Jeff wasn't retained by Houston in 2007. And Jeff is just a phone call away when Stan wants advice on how to get the ball inside to Dwight Howard more in Orlando. Bill openly admits now that both Stan and Jeff are far better coaches than he ever was.
Jeff might be an announcer now, but Bill and Stan stress that they still view him whole-heartedly as a basketball coach. If the circumstances are ever right again -- there are concerns about not disrupting his family -- Jeff will almost certainly coach in the NBA again.
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