Raise a glass to Gregg Popovich, the gruff teddy bear who lifted the San Antonio Spurs into the NBA’s elite. After three decades on the Spurs’ sideline, he is stepping back from coaching to become the team’s president of basketball operations. It’s a back-to-the-future move for the 76-year-old: he was the Spurs’ general manager for eight years before he became the team’s coach. (“I’m no longer the coach, I’m El Jefe,” Popovich jokingly declared this week before unveiling a T-shirt with that Spanish title.) Altogether, Pop won five NBA championships from 1999 through 2014, a run that puts him among the greatest coaches in league history. But when it came to being the NBA’s unflinching statesman, he was in a league all by himself.
Popovich wasn’t just the NBA’s backbone. He was, perhaps, the most fearless truth teller in all of sport. Certainly no one was bolder when it came to taking on Donald Trump – whom Popovich has described as a “soulless coward,” a “pathological liar” and a “deranged idiot”. Popovich told beat reporters he was “sick to my stomach” after Trump’s 2016 presidential election win, a tipping point he likened to the fall of Rome. He slammed Steve Bannon’s appointment as chief White House strategist as a fear-mongering exercise. During the Spurs’ 2017 media day, Popovich launched into a 21-minute condemnation of Trump and the Maga movement after the president attacked NFL players and Nascar’s Bubba Wallace for their national anthem protests. “Our country is an embarrassment to the world,” Popovich said. “This is an individual that when people held arms during games, [he thought] that they were doing it to [dis]honor the flag. That’s delusional. But it’s what we have to live with.”
