Flip Saunders 1955--2015

FLIP SAUNDERS was 5'11", but he had the wingspan of a power forward, and exceptionally strong hands, fortified as a child by rubbing the pain from his mother's muscles—she had polio—and shucking corn on summer jobs outside his native Cleveland. Those arms and hands helped him become the Class A player of the year in Ohio as a high school senior in 1973 and ensured, for the rest of his life, that little would exceed his reach or escape his grasp.

It didn't hurt that he had long fingers. They helped him perform magic—he loved coin and card tricks—and to play point guard on a University of Minnesota team in the mid-1970s that featured future NBA stars Kevin McHale, Mychal Thompson and Ray Williams. But his greatest sleight of hand may have been conjuring an NBA coaching career out of the ether. "He always had this Walter Mitty idea that he'd be an NBA coach," says Mike McCollow, who coached with Saunders in Rapid City, S.D., and La Crosse, Wisc., in the CBA, where Saunders spent seven seasons from 1988-89 to '94-95. "And then he became one."

Before he coached the Timberwolves, Pistons and Wizards—and then the Timberwolves again—Saunders was a 24-year-old juco coach at Golden Valley Lutheran College living with his wife, Debbie, on West 98½ Street in Bloomington, Minn. McCollow was 13 years old, and he dragged his best friend to the foot of Saunders's driveway after school to dribble a basketball in the street, hoping the former Golden Gophers star would emerge. I was that best friend, and Flip—if only to make the dribbling stop—did come out to play with us, again and again.

When he died on Sunday, due to complications from Hodgkin's lymphoma, at age 60, the basketball world mourned a famous coach with 654 wins and 592 losses over 17 seasons in the NBA. But that lifetime record is hardly the record of his lifetime.

It doesn't show him, for instance, spending hours perfecting his Michael Jackson moonwalk to perform "Billie Jean" for three dozen kids at his basketball camp's Friday-afternoon talent show in the 1980s.

On his backyard half-court in Bloomington, long before the NBA made him rich, Flip hosted a two-on-two basketball round robin and barbecue that I named, as a high school kid, the Saunders Hoop Invitational Tournament. The winner of the S.H.I.T. was awarded a Cool Whip container covered in Reynolds Wrap, which we treated with all the reverence of the Larry O'Brien Trophy. Years later, when the Timberwolves were playing the Lakers in the 2004 Western Conference finals and I was covering the game for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Flip walked by and said, "You think the winner of this thing gets a Cool Whip container covered in tinfoil?"

He once sent me a note that said, "You've come a long way from the S.H.I.T.," but the truth was that Flip had come further and shone brighter than any of us—himself excepted—could imagine. In his three seasons in Detroit, 2005--06 through '07--08, Flip took the Pistons to three straight Eastern Conference finals. He led Minnesota to the brink of those 2004 NBA Finals before the Wolves succumbed to the Lakers. So despite the long arms and fingers, and those walnut-crushing hands, one bauble did escape his grasp, and that was the golden Larry O'Brien Trophy.

But there were more important rewards. He and Debbie raised four children and made a home in their beloved Minnesota, the state Flip never really left, no matter where his work took him. And anyway, there was a different trophy—a Cool Whip tub covered in Reynolds Wrap—that was a truer measure of the man. It was less shiny than the Larry O'Brien but somehow more reflective.

To read a Steve Rushin story from the SI Vault about Flip Saunders, go to SI.com/saunders

PHOTO

JOHN W. MCDONOUGH FOR SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

Minnesota North Star Saunders coached three NBA teams, but his most lasting impact came with the Timberwolves, whom he led to the first eight postseason berths in franchise history.