SALT LAKE CITY — Like so many others around the state and the nation, Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller took time to reflect on the life of Jerry Sloan, the much admired and respected former coach of the Jazz who died this past week. It was Miller’s late husband Larry who hired Sloan on the recommendation of Frank Layden, another keystone of the franchise, and then let him coach and coach and coach … for 23 years, an almost unheard of length of time in modern professional sports, where coaching jobs have the shelf life of doughnuts.
“Jerry changed the attitude of basketball in Utah,” says Gail Miller. “He brought us something we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. He was so dedicated to creating a good product that could unite everyone. A lot of it fell on Jerry’s shoulders. He was Mr. Basketball. People respected that. The Jazz are the big fish in a small pond here. They draw the attention of everyone. The way (Sloan) went about his business endeared him to people. He taught a lot of lessons — do your job, come to work everyday, give everything you got, it’s a team sport …”
Apparently, the feeling was mutual. Sloan, who always returned to his native Illinois and his farm in the offseason, settled in Utah after retiring from coaching.
Sloan, who died Friday of complications from Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, won universal admiration with his simple, hardworking approach to the game. He was a remarkably unpretentious man who showed up at practice in an old van and went to work every day, like the farmer he was in the offseason.
“He never relaxed enough that he thought we wouldn’t fire him. As much as we told him he would always be our coach and he would always be in charge, that we would never undermine him with the players and that it was his right to deal with the team the way he wanted to, he had a hard time believing that he was not going to be let go. We always expressed it — you’re our coach.” — Gail Miller
“He never relaxed enough that he thought we wouldn’t fire him,” says Miller. “As much as we told him he would always be our coach and he would always be in charge, that we would never undermine him with the players and that it was his right to deal with the team the way he wanted to, he had a hard time believing that he was not going to be let go. We always expressed it — you’re our coach.”
Maybe it was his background. Sloan’s first wife Bobbye, who died of cancer in 2004, once noted that Sloan grew up as poor as any player who ever played in the NBA. He was the youngest of 10 children and his father died when he was 4. The Sloans grew or hunted what they ate. Basketball was a lifeline.
“His life was just basketball,” says Miller. “I think what he determined throughout his life is that it was just so hard in his growing-up years, and he had to fight for everything, that he latched onto something he could be good at and have a good life and he never let go.”
He was tied to basketball as a player and a coach for a half century. Under Sloan, the Jazz qualified for the playoffs 19 times, the conference finals six times and the NBA Finals two times. Even when the Jazz swooned in the post-Stockton/Malone era, failing to make the playoffs for three years, the Millers and the Jazz remained committed to Sloan. He had only one losing season. He ranks fourth in career wins by an NBA coach.
In his biography, “Driven,” Larry Miller noted, “One of the best things we have done is hire Jerry Sloan. At the time, (Sloan) said, ‘I am only going to ask you for one thing — if I get fired, let me get fired for my own decisions.’ I’ve always honored that. Too often management makes decisions that affect the team and the coach, and the coaches take the fall for it. From the start, we gave Jerry complete charge of the team. In this era of multimillion-dollar player salaries, the players are often given more power than the coach. Owners and management bow to the demands of their star players because they have invested so much money in them. We let Jerry run the team the way he saw fit.”
Sloan bent the players to his way of doing things and ran a tight ship, but Larry Miller delighted in telling about a time the coach let things slide. As Larry Miller told it, “Once, in the locker room at halftime Jerry was talking to the team and said something that (center) Greg Ostertag didn’t like. Ostertag threw a bag of ice at Jerry’s head. Jerry simply moved his head to one side to dodge the ice and then kept talking as if nothing had happened.”
The relationship between Sloan and Miller wasn’t always easy, as one might expect between two intense people.
“(Larry) had deep respect and gratitude for what Jerry was doing, but Type A personalities in the same room have a hard time with each other. (The relationship) was not quite ‘love-hate,’ but it was stressed.”
On more than one occasion a frustrated Miller burst into the postgame locker room and chewed out the team with Sloan looking on. “I’m sure that it was hard for Jerry,” says Gail. “I’m sure (Larry) made him wonder what he was thinking about him.”
Gail continued. “(Larry) would voice his frustration once in a while. He wanted what everyone wanted. He wanted players to give their all. … Larry was a person who built deep relationships. He allowed people to do their job and he did not like change. … He was very loyal. Not a lot of people have it. It created a bond. I think (Jerry) respected that.”
Gail Miller says she didn’t have frequent interactions with the coach, but she recalls sitting with him during a roast for her husband and being struck by his friendliness and his shyness. “He was very shy,” she says. “He felt out of his element anywhere but a basketball court.”
She developed a close relationship with Sloan’s first wife Bobbye, with whom she worked to create an organization for the wives of the players. “They really did love each other,” she says of the Sloans. “They had that high school sweetheart relationship.”
She recalls that when Bobbye had cancer she pestered her husband to quit smoking (he did eventually). Says Gail, “She would say, ‘I’m fighting for my life, but you’re throwing yours away.’”
About two years after Bobbye passed away, Sloan married Tammy Jessop. “I’m really grateful that they found each other,” says Gail. “In some ways it was hard because I knew Bobbye, but for Jerry to find someone else that he could spend these years with him and cared so much and took good care of him … that’s really a tribute to her.”
Gail Miller was present for the controversial and sudden end of Sloan’s employment with the Jazz. In the middle of the 2010-11 season, he suddenly quit just days after revealing that he had signed a contract extension for the next season. Gail Miller was among those who met with Sloan.
“We tried to talk him out of it,” she says. “We threw everything at him. I think he was just worn out. He was just at that point in his life and he may have been beginning this illness. He was spent. He said, ‘I’m done.’ The thing that was hard is we couldn’t even talk him into staying till the All-Star Game. He said, ‘No, I’m not coming in tomorrow.’”
As fans might expect, the Jazz are planning to formally honor Sloan. “We will do something,” Miller says. “We’d like to do it at the right time with the family in a way that really honors him.”