Matter Of Timing Karl Delivers Good Message, But Audience Not Always Right

They say he’s like a volcano, too long dormant and ready to blow. He rejects the image. But the more he protests, the more it appears as if steam is rising from the crater.

A day last summer is one of those days. George Karl is pacing the floor at the Pro Sports Club in Bellevue. The coach is raising his voice, waving his hands, stabbing at the air with his forefinger to accentuate his points.

All the while, his face is stern, almost frozen in anger.

“The game deserves more respect,” he tells his audience, later adding the attitude of some of the younger players stinks.

After considerable discourse on the iniquities of today’s athlete, a familiar refrain for Karl, he launches Rickles-like into members of the audience, tearing into them with thinly veiled insults.

In the middle of it all, a woman turns to her neighbor, raises her hands and shrugs her shoulders in wonderment. Some of the others shake their heads, eyes glued to the floor. A couple mutter expletives under their breaths.

The objects of Karl’s contempt, you see, are recently graduated high-school seniors, employed as counselors at his own basketball camp. And arrayed before Karl at rapt attention are several hundred children, ages 7 to 12. His subject matter seems to be shooting over their heads like tracers in an ambush.

This is vintage Karl. Right message, wrong time, wrong audience. Sometimes it’s variations of that combination - wrong message, right time, wrong audience, or right message, wrong time, right audience.

And so on.

What is to be made of this?

George Karl says, “The perception of George Karl is not the reality of George Karl.”

But how to get to the reality of George Karl? Does one judge him by what he says? He’s all over the map. By what he does? He’s a living contradiction. By his record? Ah, there’s one. The Sonics have won 70.1 percent of their regular-season games under Karl. But they’ve been wiped out in the first round of the playoffs for two straight years, earning a national reputation as flameouts or, worse, chokers.

If the Sonics organization simply established entertainment value as its standard, Karl’s record would be more than laudable. His teams win, are hard-working, skilled and organized - easily worth the price of admission. Yet Karl and the Sonics have promised more.

On Nov. 1, 1993, shortly after the Sonics acquired Detlef Schrempf, Karl said, “We’ve opened up a two- to three-year window to contend for the championship. If we don’t win a championship in two to three years, we should be scrutinized very closely.”

Now it’s two years later. There is no championship banner hanging beside the one captured in 1979, people are scrutinizing and Karl resents them for doing so.

The Big One has escaped Karl at every level. He had a career winning percentage of .727 in the CBA, including a 50-6 Albany team that set a record for all professional sports, yet was sub-.500 in the postseason. He also won 70 percent of his games with Real Madrid, but has nothing in the trophy case to show for it.

What is the reality of George Karl?

Karl is tough and competitive and intelligent. He’s also sensitive in a profession that requires detachment. He is a poor loser in a game where even the best lose fairly frequently. He is a man who speaks his mind, yet changes his mind often.

Perhaps he is the right man at the wrong time: the purist most people applaud when Karl espouses team values and degrades the rising power of the big-monied athlete. Yet, the NBA has consciously rebuilt itself on the backs of individual stars.

This rightfully has been called a player’s league. And in a player’s league, the coach’s job becomes accommodating, coddling and funneling the individual. Judging by what he says, Karl feels out of place in this bastion of the empowered athlete. He’d rather it be a coach’s game, the way it is in college, where the likes of his mentor and idol, Dean Smith, are God-like figures. Karl has talked a lot about possibly succeeding Smith at North Carolina or even buying and coaching his own CBA team, a situation in which he’d have ultimate power.

The danger in Karl’s stance is that criticizing the “spoiled-brat millionaires,” as he calls them, is in effect criticizing his own players. He also broadcasts a mixed message by damning the dollar-consumed athlete.

It has been a frequent complaint among players throughout Karl’s reign that the coach bends to the highest-paid and most well-marketed members of his team. In the beginning, those were the veterans. By now, the pendulum has swung to the younger stars, with complaints by others crescendoing last season about preferential treatment.

So, while assailing the system, Karl in some ways appears to have bought into it.

It was Karl, after all, who capitalized on the post-Bob Whitsitt disarray in the Sonic organization by putting a full-court press on owner Barry Ackerley, replete with media lobbying efforts by Karl’s personal attorney, as well as well-placed whispers about other job offers. Ackerley responded by doubling Karl’s annual salary to $1.1 million.

Karl also has not been shy about joining his coaching brethren at the trough, trading upon his name and success. When he wanted new furniture, he did tradeout advertisements with a furniture company. When he wanted a new car, he found a car dealer and did the same. And when needed work on a chronically painful back, he located a chiropractic group to promote.

On the other hand, Karl is just as quick to lend his name and his time to a charity. He is quick to put tickets into the hands of a stranger. He has been known to sign his home phone number alongside his autograph, or swap stories with a fan who’s interrupted a dinner out.

What is the reality of a guy who can charm you out of your shoes, then thinks little about walking away in them?

Is this the reality of George Karl?

Perhaps he is the wrong person at the right time. By all accounts, Karl has pulled off the most business-like and feel-good training camp witnessed in these parts in some time. With his franchise reeling over its premature postseason ousters, yet still brimming with championship-quality talent, Karl has been tempered and focused.

Those who have followed Karl’s career say he’s at his best when he has been humbled.

After two straight playoff failures, the Sonics have been humbled. Karl has been humbled.

After two straight playoff failures, the Sonics have been humbled. Karl has been humbled.

What is the reality of George Karl?

The reality is something fluid, dictated by whatever happened last or what is to happen next. Whatever it is, the Sonics and Seattle await the next transmutation.