Jerry Sloan is the last of the strong, silent types in the NBA, a relic from a bygone era who has the bearing of Gary Cooper and the spirit of James Cagney.
Sloan is the Midwestern farm boy who competed with his nose stuck in the opposition’s navel.
“Hit me,” his mug suggests. “I can take your best shot.”
His world is filmed in black and white, in absolutes.
Players undergo the “Pleasantville” device in reverse after landing in Salt Lake City, going from color to black and white against the sound of Sloan’s percussion instruments.
You either see it his way or you see the highway. You are either tough or weak. You are either a worker or a malingerer.
Sloan is a politic-free zone. He is not out to impress or win approval or boost his self-esteem. He missed the memo on all that touchy-feely stuff.
If no one ever mentions his name after he has concluded his business with the Utah Jazz, he will be too busy with his farm in McLeansboro, Ill., to notice.
His sense of self is not staked to another’s opinion. If it were, he would have walked away from the Jazz a long time ago.
The Jazzmen were considered irrelevant long before now, long before they advanced to the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998, back when John Stockton and Karl Malone were thought to be in the downward spiral of their mid-30s.
With the departures of Stockton and Malone this season, the Jazzmen were judged to be inadequate before the first game, destined to sleepwalk through a season of 15-20 wins. Sloan, as usual, was overlooked again, the Jazz holding firm with a 19-17 record in the Midwest Division, the NBA’s toughest.
Sloan coaches the kind of game that served him well as he was coming up in the late ’50s. It is fraught with the basics: screens, picks, backdoor cuts to the basket and a devotion to in-your-face defense.
His playbook appears to have been pulled from a time capsule. The team’s backboards should be made of wood, with a faded coat of white paint on them. Sloan might as well have the town drunk on his bench, as played by Dennis Hopper in “Hoosiers.”
The sum is inevitably stronger than the parts with a Sloan-backed team. The Jazzmen seemingly exist to rise above their individual deficiencies. Sloan is the great neutralizer in a game, if you care to listen and are willing to dive for the next loose ball.
Sloan, in his 16th season of prodding the Jazz, is the longest-tenured head coach with the same team in professional sports. He is hardly sentimental about it. Go ahead, ask: What does it mean? It means he has been at it a long time. There is nothing more to read into it than that. It is a job, his job. The reward is in the job itself, if done well.
Sloan kept it real long before the concept became fashionable. He is an unpretentious sort who never has lost his deep connection to the flyover portion of the country. He works in a John Deere cap by day and a rumpled suit by night. He is a walking embodiment of family values, married more than four decades to wife Bobbye, a fighter like him.
Theirs is an uplifting NBA love story, grounded in a small town, strengthened by the enemy within the wife.
She stepped out of her husband’s shadow in the late ’90s to raise public awareness of breast cancer, the battle she won as a prelude to the cruel struggle before her now.
She is up against pancreatic cancer, a virulent foe that has both jarred and bonded the two anew.
The crusty coach was prepared to leave the Jazz to be at his wife’s side, to care for the one person who always has known how to find the old softy lurking within. She refused to hear the word quit. She kicked the coach back to the bench because she, too, loves the team, loves its grit, loves how it reflects the coach’s spirit and, by extension, hers as well.
Sloan secured his 800th victory with the Jazz in their last outing, the 894th victory of his career, numbers that merit a league-wide toast.
By habit, the honoree is unwilling to accept the gesture.
Sloan has a sick wife who needs him and a team that needs his hard-nosed attention to detail.
Here’s to the victories ahead for Sloan and his wife.
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