/ laugh at PosterX / GroupOfPeopleY who thought / believed *insert though/belief here*"
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I was found this looking for Kozol's Death at an Early Age oddly enough.
It's all dated but still interesting. Detriot Free Press
An hour straight, and the guy played defense against him the entire time. That was interesting, Jerry Stackhouse thought. He made a mental note of it.
He was aggressive, too, this rookie Pistons coach who sweated alongside Stackhouse and Mateen Cleaves at the gym last Wednesday.
Rick Carlisle hasn't played in the NBA in a dozen years. And Stackhouse, the Pistons' star forward, said he wasn't much familiar with the coach's background. No reason to know of Carlisle's career as a longtime assistant, how it was born the same day he was waived as a player.
Stackhouse was just working up a sweat, trying to finesse his way around the 41-year-old coach and former NBA guard who, at that moment, was Stackhouse's new boss and defensive nightmare at the same time.
"I mean," Stackhouse said, lowering his voice, "some of his fouls are a lot harder than the guys I play against."
Through it all, though, Stackhouse couldn't help but wonder about one thing. Nothing big, but the gym was hot that day. And Carlisle, Stackhouse was astonished to discover, did "almost the whole workout with a sweatshirt on."
"I said to myself, 'This guy, there's something goin' on!' " Stackhouse said with a chuckle. "He's either in hell of a good shape or he's trying to lose weight, either one. He pushed just as hard as I pushed."
By the end of the workout, their first meeting together, Stackhouse had it all figured out.
And that was the interesting part.
"In my own case, I'll never forget the first night I stood up there as head coach. I was over 52 years old at the time and had coached at every level.
"I said to myself, 'I've got to learn who I am.' "
-- Chuck Daly, 70, who coached the Pistons in 1983-92, including their only NBA titles in franchise history, in 1989 and '90.
Understand one thing about Rick Carlisle: He's all about basketball.
Certainly, not all basketball to his wife, Donna, a pediatrician, or to his parents back home in Lisbon, N.Y.
Maybe not all basketball to close friends like radiologist Hal Cohen -- his childhood pal from upstate New York -- or to his brother Bill and sister Kari and his 12 nieces and nephews.
But for the thousands of folks tired of seeing the Pistons struggle, Carlisle wants it known that he is focused on a single mission.
For instance, spend an hour with Carlisle, whom team president Joe Dumars selected 13 days ago to become the Pistons' 23rd coach in franchise history, and it takes only minutes for a trend to develop.
Bring up his hometown. He talks about basketball.
Ask about his childhood friends. He brings up basketball.
Explaining his reluctance to stray too far from the court, even in casual conversation, Carlisle says straight off: "I understand that there is some interest in who I am. I don't have a history with the Pistons other than the fact that I played with Boston for three years during the real heavy rivalry years.
"I don't mind talking a little bit about these kinds of things, but for the most part, I think my strength is understanding the dynamics of this league. At this point in time, it's more important -- the things that me and my staff can do to help my players get ready to play -- than what people know about how I grew up and whether I took a few piano lessons and this or that."
His point? It could be that he doesn't want to detract from his job. At least, that's one perception.
After all, the Pistons gave him a three-year guaranteed deal, worth about $5.5 million, and Carlisle expects success from himself from the start.
It's just that along the way, he will try his darndest to downplay attention on his reputation as a brilliant fellow away from the game. Discussions about his hobbies, such as his accomplishments in music (he's a terrific pianist, friends and family say) and other sports (he's also a talented golfer), won't be encouraged.
Besides, if you really want to know, he's not much for sharing when it comes to his personal side.
"The most important thing is that we get things going on the basketball side," said Carlisle, an NBA assistant coach for 11 years. "There are a lot of critical things that are going to happen that's going to shape this franchise for not only the next year, but over the next five or 10 years. Joe and I both understand that what's going on right now is really, really important."
This week, Carlisle is at a pre-camp draft in Chicago. He is close to hiring the remaining assistants on his staff. He already has met with a few of his players.
Still, what's a story about basketball -- about a rookie head coach who's a stranger in this town -- without learning about a few of the experiences that got him here?
Put it another way: Who is he?
"You've got to know both sides of the ball. I read an interesting article recently on Lou Piniella in which he said that managing baseball is all in the locker room.
"You better understand the locker room and handle the dynamics of it. Everybody knows the game."
-- Chuck Daly.
Preston Carlisle thought nothing of it, even at first.
Other players weren't keen on it -- allowing a 10-year-old boy to play on the same court with men two and three times his age.
This was more than 30 years ago, when Preston Carlisle, Rick's father, played basketball four or five times a week, mostly to relieve stress from his job as an attorney.
And Rick was his father's No. 1 teammate.
The oldest son of Preston and Joan Carlisle's three children, Rick spent his childhood in upstate New York, in an area known as the North Country. He grew up in Lisbon, not far from Ogdensburg and the Canadian border.
The surroundings of his youth were different from most. The family home was on a 185-acre horse farm called Sunnybrook, which still is owned by his parents.
Thanks to his mother, Rick was an accomplished rider by the time he was a third-grader. But that was about the time a new hobby was developing.
Even now, folks in Lisbon still remember Rick Carlisle.
He was the kid who could spin a basketball on his finger like a Harlem Globetrotter. He was the first 1,000-point scorer at Lisbon Central, a small school that houses all grades -- kindergarten through 12 -- in one building.
During those early years, Carlisle's confidence was boosted by knowing that he was the player who knew exactly where his father wanted the ball in pickup games: under the basket.
"We would play at any gym at any place throughout the North Country," recalled Preston Carlisle, 70. "We went to Canton and Ogdensburg. We'd rent gyms. We'd play at the armory, at the high school, or St. Lawrence University. That's all I did was play basketball. Maybe that's what got him started."
Rick Carlisle agreed.
"Here's the deal: I would get in these pickup games with my dad, and he would always want me to throw him the ball, so I became a very good passer," Rick said. "Then I'd get out and be playing with my JV team, and he wanted me to shoot every time. There was this contradictory force -- and I laugh about it -- but he really helped me understand the aspect of vision, passing and position."
When Carlisle was a kid, his best friend was Hal Cohen, who grew up in nearby Canton, N.Y., and played at Syracuse in 1977-80. Two years older than Rick, they met through their fathers.
Cohen's dad was a gym rat, too.
But in the months before joining their fathers on the court, the two boys played basketball on their own by slipping off their socks and rolling them up into a ball.
"First of all, I think this is just a great story," said Cohen, 42, a radiologist at University Hospital in Syracuse. "Rick coming from a very small town, having this dream of playing in the NBA, and along the course of this dream he could have stopped at any point. He wasn't recruited hard in high school. He wasn't a really gifted athlete or anything. He just stuck with it and believed in himself.
"It's a good story to tell your kids: If he can do it, you can do it."
"There are so many different aspects of your job in addition to just coaching. Everyone wants to take a piece of your time, and you've got to learn to divvy it up and spread it around."
-- Chuck Daly.
Here are a few of Carlisle's idols when he was a kid: Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, Bill Bradley, Scotty Bowman.
Scotty Bowman?
Carlisle explained: "We lived out of the city limits, and back in those days we didn't have cable TV. So what we watched, sports-wise, was 'Hockey Night in Canada' on Wednesday night and Saturday night. And in those days, the only pro coach I knew of was Scotty Bowman. I was a huge (Montreal) Canadiens fan. I remember watching Scotty Bowman behind the bench. I'm a big fan of his going back 25-30 years."
Carlisle played hockey in the winters with his neighbors, but it didn't captivate him like basketball did.
"I coached Rick in the ninth grade," said Al Dailey, Lisbon Central's athletic director. "He set every record we ever had at Lisbon. He was a great kid, totally devoted to basketball."
After graduating from Lisbon Central in 1978, Carlisle didn't get any major-college offers. So he went to prep school for a year in Worcester, Mass., before playing at the University of Maine for two years. He then transferred to Virginia, sat out a year, and ended his college career as co-captain of Terry Holland's 1984 NCAA Final Four team.
He graduated at 24, with a degree in psychology.
"You could see that he would make an excellent coach," said Holland, now Virginia's athletic director. "He would shoot in the dark, which I discovered from him is a really good drill. Rick was one of these self-made players, and he spent a lot of time talking to coaches. I always thought he might gravitate back to college, but he's adjusted to life in the pros."
Selected by Boston in the third round of the 1984 NBA draft -- the 70th pick overall -- Carlisle is modest when asked to describe his pro playing career.
"Marginal would be generous," he said. "But I figured out what the business was all about. I figured out a way to survive for a few years."
A role player who averaged 2.2 points a game, Carlisle reached the NBA Finals in each of his three seasons with the Celtics, helping them win the championship in 1986.
After he was waived by Boston, Carlisle played with Albany in the Continental Basketball Association for three weeks. He got called up by the New York Knicks -- that lasted a season -- but during that year he suffered a dislocated shoulder. He spent the summer of 1988 trying to work his way back "and give it one more shot," he said.
It worked. For a while.
Carlisle caught the eye of Bill Fitch and the New Jersey Nets, who signed him to a non-guaranteed deal. But a few games into the season, Fitch called him.
"He said, 'Well, you're waived,' " Carlisle said, recalling the phone conversation. "But he kind of said it with a sense of humor."
That's because Fitch had a job offer. He wanted Carlisle to be one of his assistants. And that was how Carlisle got his start in coaching.
"There wasn't a lot of thinking for me to do at that point," he said. "I was pretty much done as a player. I had a lot of nagging injuries, and it was getting to the point where it wasn't fun anymore. I had gotten basketball out of my system -- I really had. I was fortunate. Not everybody who gets waived out of the league can say that."
"At the end of the game, the time when you take off your sports jacket, there's only one coach whose shirt is soaking wet. That's the head coach."
-- Chuck Daly.
As an assistant in the NBA, Carlisle has been associated with success -- two trips to the playoffs in five seasons with New Jersey, three appearances in three seasons with Portland, and three straight with the Indiana Pacers, including last season's NBA Finals.
Known as an offensive specialist, Carlisle has worked for some of the top coaches in the league, including Fitch and Daly in New Jersey and Larry Bird in Indiana.
When Bird resigned last summer, Carlisle was considered the favorite to become the next Pacers coach. But team president Donnie Walsh went with former Piston Isiah Thomas instead.
Instead of diving right back to the bench, Carlisle spent this season as a television-radio analyst for the Seattle SuperSonics.
"I missed (coaching), but in my own mind I knew that what I was doing was better for me," Carlisle said. "I think one of the most important things I've learned about myself is to be effective as who I am. I can't be Chuck Daly; I can't be Bill Fitch.
"I've learned how to be more effective as a leader and a teacher -- as who I am -- to gain as much personal knowledge to help me be a better me. That might sound silly. There's probably a better way of saying that."
No clarification needed for Stackhouse, whose first impression of Carlisle has been thumbs-up. Heck, he's still talking about that day in the gym.
"You find out a lot about a person based on their competitiveness," Stackhouse said. "That's what we're trying to bring to the Pistons -- his competitive fire, my competitive fire. He's going to bring a professionalism. But different people will have different perceptions. Some people are going to perceive it as cocky or whatever, but that's where it's kind of funny -- that our parallels are similar."Asked what he meant, Stackhouse laughed.
"Some of his knocks are also some of my knocks," Stackhouse said. "He's very confident about himself. You can tell that, and rightfully so."
It's all dated but still interesting. Detriot Free Press
An hour straight, and the guy played defense against him the entire time. That was interesting, Jerry Stackhouse thought. He made a mental note of it.
He was aggressive, too, this rookie Pistons coach who sweated alongside Stackhouse and Mateen Cleaves at the gym last Wednesday.
Rick Carlisle hasn't played in the NBA in a dozen years. And Stackhouse, the Pistons' star forward, said he wasn't much familiar with the coach's background. No reason to know of Carlisle's career as a longtime assistant, how it was born the same day he was waived as a player.
Stackhouse was just working up a sweat, trying to finesse his way around the 41-year-old coach and former NBA guard who, at that moment, was Stackhouse's new boss and defensive nightmare at the same time.
"I mean," Stackhouse said, lowering his voice, "some of his fouls are a lot harder than the guys I play against."
Through it all, though, Stackhouse couldn't help but wonder about one thing. Nothing big, but the gym was hot that day. And Carlisle, Stackhouse was astonished to discover, did "almost the whole workout with a sweatshirt on."
"I said to myself, 'This guy, there's something goin' on!' " Stackhouse said with a chuckle. "He's either in hell of a good shape or he's trying to lose weight, either one. He pushed just as hard as I pushed."
By the end of the workout, their first meeting together, Stackhouse had it all figured out.
And that was the interesting part.
"In my own case, I'll never forget the first night I stood up there as head coach. I was over 52 years old at the time and had coached at every level.
"I said to myself, 'I've got to learn who I am.' "
-- Chuck Daly, 70, who coached the Pistons in 1983-92, including their only NBA titles in franchise history, in 1989 and '90.
Understand one thing about Rick Carlisle: He's all about basketball.
Certainly, not all basketball to his wife, Donna, a pediatrician, or to his parents back home in Lisbon, N.Y.
Maybe not all basketball to close friends like radiologist Hal Cohen -- his childhood pal from upstate New York -- or to his brother Bill and sister Kari and his 12 nieces and nephews.
But for the thousands of folks tired of seeing the Pistons struggle, Carlisle wants it known that he is focused on a single mission.
For instance, spend an hour with Carlisle, whom team president Joe Dumars selected 13 days ago to become the Pistons' 23rd coach in franchise history, and it takes only minutes for a trend to develop.
Bring up his hometown. He talks about basketball.
Ask about his childhood friends. He brings up basketball.
Explaining his reluctance to stray too far from the court, even in casual conversation, Carlisle says straight off: "I understand that there is some interest in who I am. I don't have a history with the Pistons other than the fact that I played with Boston for three years during the real heavy rivalry years.
"I don't mind talking a little bit about these kinds of things, but for the most part, I think my strength is understanding the dynamics of this league. At this point in time, it's more important -- the things that me and my staff can do to help my players get ready to play -- than what people know about how I grew up and whether I took a few piano lessons and this or that."
His point? It could be that he doesn't want to detract from his job. At least, that's one perception.
After all, the Pistons gave him a three-year guaranteed deal, worth about $5.5 million, and Carlisle expects success from himself from the start.
It's just that along the way, he will try his darndest to downplay attention on his reputation as a brilliant fellow away from the game. Discussions about his hobbies, such as his accomplishments in music (he's a terrific pianist, friends and family say) and other sports (he's also a talented golfer), won't be encouraged.
Besides, if you really want to know, he's not much for sharing when it comes to his personal side.
"The most important thing is that we get things going on the basketball side," said Carlisle, an NBA assistant coach for 11 years. "There are a lot of critical things that are going to happen that's going to shape this franchise for not only the next year, but over the next five or 10 years. Joe and I both understand that what's going on right now is really, really important."
This week, Carlisle is at a pre-camp draft in Chicago. He is close to hiring the remaining assistants on his staff. He already has met with a few of his players.
Still, what's a story about basketball -- about a rookie head coach who's a stranger in this town -- without learning about a few of the experiences that got him here?
Put it another way: Who is he?
"You've got to know both sides of the ball. I read an interesting article recently on Lou Piniella in which he said that managing baseball is all in the locker room.
"You better understand the locker room and handle the dynamics of it. Everybody knows the game."
-- Chuck Daly.
Preston Carlisle thought nothing of it, even at first.
Other players weren't keen on it -- allowing a 10-year-old boy to play on the same court with men two and three times his age.
This was more than 30 years ago, when Preston Carlisle, Rick's father, played basketball four or five times a week, mostly to relieve stress from his job as an attorney.
And Rick was his father's No. 1 teammate.
The oldest son of Preston and Joan Carlisle's three children, Rick spent his childhood in upstate New York, in an area known as the North Country. He grew up in Lisbon, not far from Ogdensburg and the Canadian border.
The surroundings of his youth were different from most. The family home was on a 185-acre horse farm called Sunnybrook, which still is owned by his parents.
Thanks to his mother, Rick was an accomplished rider by the time he was a third-grader. But that was about the time a new hobby was developing.
Even now, folks in Lisbon still remember Rick Carlisle.
He was the kid who could spin a basketball on his finger like a Harlem Globetrotter. He was the first 1,000-point scorer at Lisbon Central, a small school that houses all grades -- kindergarten through 12 -- in one building.
During those early years, Carlisle's confidence was boosted by knowing that he was the player who knew exactly where his father wanted the ball in pickup games: under the basket.
"We would play at any gym at any place throughout the North Country," recalled Preston Carlisle, 70. "We went to Canton and Ogdensburg. We'd rent gyms. We'd play at the armory, at the high school, or St. Lawrence University. That's all I did was play basketball. Maybe that's what got him started."
Rick Carlisle agreed.
"Here's the deal: I would get in these pickup games with my dad, and he would always want me to throw him the ball, so I became a very good passer," Rick said. "Then I'd get out and be playing with my JV team, and he wanted me to shoot every time. There was this contradictory force -- and I laugh about it -- but he really helped me understand the aspect of vision, passing and position."
When Carlisle was a kid, his best friend was Hal Cohen, who grew up in nearby Canton, N.Y., and played at Syracuse in 1977-80. Two years older than Rick, they met through their fathers.
Cohen's dad was a gym rat, too.
But in the months before joining their fathers on the court, the two boys played basketball on their own by slipping off their socks and rolling them up into a ball.
"First of all, I think this is just a great story," said Cohen, 42, a radiologist at University Hospital in Syracuse. "Rick coming from a very small town, having this dream of playing in the NBA, and along the course of this dream he could have stopped at any point. He wasn't recruited hard in high school. He wasn't a really gifted athlete or anything. He just stuck with it and believed in himself.
"It's a good story to tell your kids: If he can do it, you can do it."
"There are so many different aspects of your job in addition to just coaching. Everyone wants to take a piece of your time, and you've got to learn to divvy it up and spread it around."
-- Chuck Daly.
Here are a few of Carlisle's idols when he was a kid: Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, Bill Bradley, Scotty Bowman.
Scotty Bowman?
Carlisle explained: "We lived out of the city limits, and back in those days we didn't have cable TV. So what we watched, sports-wise, was 'Hockey Night in Canada' on Wednesday night and Saturday night. And in those days, the only pro coach I knew of was Scotty Bowman. I was a huge (Montreal) Canadiens fan. I remember watching Scotty Bowman behind the bench. I'm a big fan of his going back 25-30 years."
Carlisle played hockey in the winters with his neighbors, but it didn't captivate him like basketball did.
"I coached Rick in the ninth grade," said Al Dailey, Lisbon Central's athletic director. "He set every record we ever had at Lisbon. He was a great kid, totally devoted to basketball."
After graduating from Lisbon Central in 1978, Carlisle didn't get any major-college offers. So he went to prep school for a year in Worcester, Mass., before playing at the University of Maine for two years. He then transferred to Virginia, sat out a year, and ended his college career as co-captain of Terry Holland's 1984 NCAA Final Four team.
He graduated at 24, with a degree in psychology.
"You could see that he would make an excellent coach," said Holland, now Virginia's athletic director. "He would shoot in the dark, which I discovered from him is a really good drill. Rick was one of these self-made players, and he spent a lot of time talking to coaches. I always thought he might gravitate back to college, but he's adjusted to life in the pros."
Selected by Boston in the third round of the 1984 NBA draft -- the 70th pick overall -- Carlisle is modest when asked to describe his pro playing career.
"Marginal would be generous," he said. "But I figured out what the business was all about. I figured out a way to survive for a few years."
A role player who averaged 2.2 points a game, Carlisle reached the NBA Finals in each of his three seasons with the Celtics, helping them win the championship in 1986.
After he was waived by Boston, Carlisle played with Albany in the Continental Basketball Association for three weeks. He got called up by the New York Knicks -- that lasted a season -- but during that year he suffered a dislocated shoulder. He spent the summer of 1988 trying to work his way back "and give it one more shot," he said.
It worked. For a while.
Carlisle caught the eye of Bill Fitch and the New Jersey Nets, who signed him to a non-guaranteed deal. But a few games into the season, Fitch called him.
"He said, 'Well, you're waived,' " Carlisle said, recalling the phone conversation. "But he kind of said it with a sense of humor."
That's because Fitch had a job offer. He wanted Carlisle to be one of his assistants. And that was how Carlisle got his start in coaching.
"There wasn't a lot of thinking for me to do at that point," he said. "I was pretty much done as a player. I had a lot of nagging injuries, and it was getting to the point where it wasn't fun anymore. I had gotten basketball out of my system -- I really had. I was fortunate. Not everybody who gets waived out of the league can say that."
"At the end of the game, the time when you take off your sports jacket, there's only one coach whose shirt is soaking wet. That's the head coach."
-- Chuck Daly.
As an assistant in the NBA, Carlisle has been associated with success -- two trips to the playoffs in five seasons with New Jersey, three appearances in three seasons with Portland, and three straight with the Indiana Pacers, including last season's NBA Finals.
Known as an offensive specialist, Carlisle has worked for some of the top coaches in the league, including Fitch and Daly in New Jersey and Larry Bird in Indiana.
When Bird resigned last summer, Carlisle was considered the favorite to become the next Pacers coach. But team president Donnie Walsh went with former Piston Isiah Thomas instead.
Instead of diving right back to the bench, Carlisle spent this season as a television-radio analyst for the Seattle SuperSonics.
"I missed (coaching), but in my own mind I knew that what I was doing was better for me," Carlisle said. "I think one of the most important things I've learned about myself is to be effective as who I am. I can't be Chuck Daly; I can't be Bill Fitch.
"I've learned how to be more effective as a leader and a teacher -- as who I am -- to gain as much personal knowledge to help me be a better me. That might sound silly. There's probably a better way of saying that."
No clarification needed for Stackhouse, whose first impression of Carlisle has been thumbs-up. Heck, he's still talking about that day in the gym.
"You find out a lot about a person based on their competitiveness," Stackhouse said. "That's what we're trying to bring to the Pistons -- his competitive fire, my competitive fire. He's going to bring a professionalism. But different people will have different perceptions. Some people are going to perceive it as cocky or whatever, but that's where it's kind of funny -- that our parallels are similar."Asked what he meant, Stackhouse laughed.
"Some of his knocks are also some of my knocks," Stackhouse said. "He's very confident about himself. You can tell that, and rightfully so."
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