by Glenn Stout
The assassination on January 18, 1984, was international news, including on the front page of the New York Times. Malcolm Kerr, 52, had stepped off the elevator toward his office in College Hall and was shot in the back of the head. The two unknown assailants escaped. A group calling itself Islamic Holy War took responsibility later that day.
“Dr. Kerr was a modest and extremely popular figure among his 4,800 students and faculty, according to his colleagues here,” Times reporter Thomas L. Friedman wrote from Beirut that day. “He was killed, his friends insist, not for being who he was, but because now that the Marines and the American Embassy in Beirut are smothered in security, he was the most vulnerable prominent American in Lebanon and a choice target for militants trying to intimidate Americans into leaving.”
Andrew Kerr, who was 15 at the time, heard about his father’s death on a radio in a shop near AUB’s campus. Ann Kerr learned about it while waiting at a campus guardhouse, out of the rain, for a friend. She ran to College Hall, to the second floor, where she found her husband “lying on the floor, face down, his briefcase and umbrella in front of him,” she wrote in her memoir, Come with Me from Lebanon.
A memorial service was held a few days later. John came from Cairo and Susan came from Taiwan. Steve was the only one of the children who did not attend. He missed another one at Princeton, but attended a third in Los Angeles.
“It sounds bad,” he said. “Obviously, the basketball wasn’t more important. But the logistics were really tricky. And it was cathartic for me to just play.”
He had a breakout game in a victory over rival Arizona State two nights after his father’s death. The Wildcats had been 2-11, but won eight of their final 14 games. The next year, they reached the NCAA tournament on their way to becoming a lasting national power.
Four years later, Kerr was the target of pregame taunts at Arizona State. A group of students shouted, “PLO, PLO,” “Your father’s history,” and “Why don’t you join the Marines and go back to Beirut?”
“When I heard it, I just dropped the ball and started shaking,” Kerr said at the time. “I sat down for a minute. I’ll admit they got to me. I had tears in my eyes. For one thing, it brought back memories of my dad. But, for another thing, it was just sad that people would do something like that.”
Where the Vision Comes From
Ann Kerr-Adams is 82, wears Keds, and keeps her hair in a chin-length bob. She is the longtime coordinator of the Fulbright program at UCLA and oversees a class called “Perceptions of the United States Abroad.” She is also an emeritus trustee at AUB and usually goes back to Beirut once a year for meetings.
She remarried in 2008. She and Ken Adams share the California house that she and Malcolm bought in 1969.
The stately living room, with a grand piano and views of the Pacific Ocean, is neatly decorated with treasures of a well-traveled life, like etchings of Cairo and Ann’s framed watercolors of Tunisia. The mantel has an oval-framed photograph of Steve and Andrew in a field of flowers in Morocco.
“I would say Steve’s intellectual interests really blossomed in the last 10 years,” she said. “But I don’t think of Steve being like Malcolm.”
They shared a passion for sports (the children’s hour-a-day limit for television did not apply to sports) and an irreverent sense of humor. But Steve is more diplomatic than his father, she said.
A nearby guest room was where the three Kerr boys slept. The bunk beds that Steve and Andrew shared are gone, but there is a painting that Steve did as a boy—a self-portrait of him in a UCLA shirt and a Dodgers cap, his blond hair hanging past his ears. The bathroom has a painting of poinsettias he did when he was nine, and a closet contains his screen prints of boats in Cairo.
“Here’s a picture of Steve, the ornery teenager,” Kerr-Adams said on a recent Sunday afternoon, stopping in a hallway lined with family photographs. “He was always snarling in pictures. Now he has to smile for photos. The irony of it all.”
Across the hall is the room that Malcolm used as an office. His children harbor happy memories of the sound of his typewriter clacking and the smell of the popcorn that he liked as a snack.
The backyard, with wide ocean views that test the flexibility of the human neck—from Los Angeles on the left, to the Santa Monica Mountains on the right—features a broad patio. On Sunday afternoons, it was frequently filled with professors, neighbors, visiting dignitaries, and friends from around the world. It was the family’s connection to the Middle East that made his childhood unique.
“It would be totally different without that,” Kerr said. “Totally different. I wouldn’t be exposed to not only the travel and the interaction with people, but I wouldn’t be exposed to the political conversations at the table and at barbecues about what was going on in the world.”
But talk around the house was more likely to involve the Dodgers or Bruins. Malcolm was a good athlete, a basketball player growing up and an avid tennis player until the end. He and Steve spent a lot of time at the high school hitting and fielding, and Malcolm sometimes joined Steve in the driveway.
“He was a lefty and had a nice hook shot,” Kerr said with a laugh.
Kerr credits his father for his demeanor on the sideline as an NBA coach: calm and quiet, mostly, and never one to berate a player. Kerr was not always that way.
“When I was eight, nine, ten years old, I had a horrible temper,” Kerr said. “I couldn’t control it. Everything I did, if I missed a shot, if I made an out, I got so angry. It was embarrassing. It really was. Baseball was the worst. If I was pitching and I walked somebody, I would throw my glove on the ground. I was such a brat. He and my mom would be in the stands watching, and he never really said anything until we got home. He had the sense that I needed to learn on my own, and anything he would say would mean more after I calmed down.”
His father, Kerr said, was what every Little League parent should be. The talks would come later, casual and nonchalant, conversations instead of lectures.
“He was an observer,” he said. “And he let me learn and experience. I try to give our guys a lot of space and speak at the right time. Looking back on it, I think my dad was a huge influence on me, on my coaching.”
Kerr played for some of the best basketball coaches in history—Olson at Arizona, Phil Jackson with the Chicago Bulls, and Gregg Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs among them. By the standards of basketball coaches, they were worldly men with interests far beyond the court.
“I remember Phil talking to the team about gun control, and asking the players: ‘How many of you have guns? How many of you know that if you have a gun in your house you’re more likely to have a fatality in your house?’ ” Kerr said. “It was a real discussion, with guys saying that we need to have some level of protection, because we are vulnerable in many ways too.
“And I remember one presidential election, it was probably 2000, I was with the Spurs and we did two teams shooting—the silver team against the black team or whatever,” he said, referring to a drill run by Popovich. “Pop was like, ‘Okay, Democrats down there, Republicans down here.’ I think it was about 12 against two at that point, so he had to even up the teams a little bit. He would just make it interesting.”
Kerr—who has three children, all young adults, with his wife, Margot—has never talked about his father in front of the team, and Warriors players have only a vague notion of Kerr’s family history. It is context, mostly, an unstated part of his background.
“I really realized from Pop and Phil that I could use my experience as a kid and growing up to my advantage as a coach,” Kerr said. “And connect with players and try to keep that healthy perspective. Keep it fun, and don’t take it too seriously.”
It was during Kerr’s tenure with San Antonio that the family, after years of reflection following the 1996 passage of the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, decided to sue Iran. The Kerrs came to believe that Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah had targeted Malcolm.
“I didn’t need revenge, I didn’t need closure,” Steve Kerr said. “So I was indifferent to the lawsuit. But then I recognized that it was important to a couple of members of my family, my sister and my younger brother, in particular.”
When it came time to testify in United States District Court in Washington in December 2002, Kerr was with the Spurs, in the last of his 15 seasons in the NBA. He did not want to miss games.
“There’s nobody better than Pop to talk about something like this,” Kerr said. “I told him, ‘I don’t really want people knowing what it is.’ I didn’t want the attention. But I also don’t want people thinking I’m injured. So Pop said: ‘You missed two games for personal reasons. Big deal. Your reputation precedes you. Nobody is going to question what’s going on with you.’ And he was right. I told my teammates and nothing ever really came of it.”
He testified in a nearly empty courtroom, missing two Spurs road games on the West Coast. The Kerrs learned two months later that they had won the suit—millions of dollars that they may never see. But money was never the point.
“It provides a structure to enable people to channel their feelings through justice and the rules of law, rather than become vigilantes,” his sister, who is now known as Susan van de Ven, said in a phone interview from England, where she is involved in politics as a county councilor. “It gives a very focused approach to people who are rightly and insanely aggrieved. That’s the kind of culture we should have. We shouldn’t be responding with violence. I’m sure that’s why Steve talked about guns. It’s all related, isn’t it?”
Her book detailed the family’s experience with the lawsuit.
The night before the Warriors visited President Obama to celebrate their 2015 NBA championship, Steve had dinner with Andrew, who works for an architectural design and residential builder in Washington. They discussed what Steve might say to the president. Andrew recommended complimenting him on his efforts toward gun control. Kerr did.
In June, at the end of a podcast with Bay Area sports columnist Tim Kawakami, Kerr asked if he could raise one more topic. Our government is “insane,” he said, not to adopt stronger background checks on guns that most Americans agree upon.
“As somebody who has had a family member shot and killed, it just devastates me every time I read about this stuff, like what happened in Orlando,” Kerr said, referring to the June massacre at a Florida nightclub. “And then it’s even more devastating to see the government just cowing to the NRA and going to this totally outdated Bill of Rights right to bear arms. If you want to own a musket, fine. But come on.”
Since then, Kerr has become a go-to voice in sports for matters of bigger meaning. It surprises his family in some ways, knowing that he was probably the quietest of the siblings as a child.
“He’s carrying around the family business in another discipline,” said John Kerr, a professor of community sustainability at Michigan State. “There was no way he would do anything for a living that didn’t involve sports. No way. And now that he’s at the pro level, he has the opportunity to speak out. He’s smart enough to realize he can do it.”
NBA training camps began just as debate swirled over the decision by Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, not to stand for the National Anthem, a protest over the killing of unarmed black men by police officers. Amid the divisiveness, Kerr was a nuanced voice in the middle.
“Doesn’t matter what side you’re on on the Kaepernick stuff, you better be disgusted with the things that are happening,” Kerr said.
He added: “I understand people who are offended by his stance. Maybe they have a military family member or maybe they lost someone in a war and maybe that anthem means a lot more to them than someone else. But then you flip it around, and what about nonviolent protests? That’s America. This is what our country is about.”
In November, after the presidential election, Kerr was among the NBA coaches, including Popovich, who criticized the state of political discourse in the age of Donald J. Trump.
“People are getting paid millions of dollars to go on TV and scream at each other, whether it’s in sports or politics or entertainment, and I guess it was only a matter of time before it spilled into politics,” Kerr said. “But then all of a sudden you’re faced with the reality that the man who’s going to lead you has routinely used racist, misogynist, insulting words.”
It is no surprise, then, that Kerr also has opinions on the Middle East. Like his father decades ago, Kerr said he believes that American policies have muddied the region. The heart of the problem, he said, stems from the lack of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. The Iraq War made things worse.
“To use Colin Powell’s line, ‘If you break it, you own it,’ and now we own it,” Kerr said. “And it’s, like, ‘Oh, my God, wait, it’s so much more complicated than we thought.’ Everybody looks back and thinks we would have been way better off not going to war. That was really dumb. But history repeats itself all the time. We didn’t need to go into Vietnam, but circumstances, patriotism, anger, fear—all these things lead into war. It’s a history of the world. It just so happens that now is probably the scariest time since I’ve been alive.”
In Beirut, AUB still thrives. On its campus overlooking the Mediterranean is a new College Hall, a virtual replica of the one where Malcolm Kerr was killed, the building destroyed by bombs in 1991. There is the dignified Marquand House, where Malcolm Kerr lived when he was a young professor and returned to when he became president.
In an oval garden between College Hall and the chapel, there is a banyan tree that Malcolm Kerr climbed as a boy and carved with his initials, now high out of sight. Under the tree is a Corinthian column that the family chose in the days after his death to mark the spot where his ashes were buried.
“In memory of Malcolm H. Kerr, 1931–1984,” the engraving reads. “He lived life abundantly.” Those were the words that Susan wrote on a piece of paper that marked the site until the stone was etched. The paper is still there, on a plaque that also features an excerpt from Kerr-Adams’s book. “We are proud that our dad and husband came to AUB,” Susan wrote, in words that are now faded with time.
Steve Kerr has never seen it. He has not been back since his father was killed. But, more and more, he hears the echoes.
PATRICK HRUBY
Four Years a Student-Athlete
from vice sports
Before Robert and Amy McCormick could see the racial injustice at the heart of big-time college sports, they had to wake up—literally. It was the summer of 2002, and the McCormicks, a married pair of professors at Michigan State University, were living in an East Lansing neighborhood located between a block of student housing and the school’s athletic department.
Every morning around 5:30 a.m., Michigan State athletes would ride their bicycles past the McCormicks’ house on their way to practice. Among them was Charles Rogers, one of the best college football players in the country, a tall, speedy wide receiver whom professional scouts were likening to National Football League star Randy Moss.
One morning, Robert saw Rogers whizzing by, his six-foot-three frame dwarfing a rickety bike that barely seemed roadworthy. He’s a first-round NFL draft choice, thought the sports and labor law professor, who had attended Michigan State himself and taught a sports law class at the university since 1984. Next year, he’ll be making millions. But now, he’s making nothing.
The imbalance ate at the McCormicks: college sports were a multibillion-dollar business, and here was a top talent stuck with a dilapidated two-wheel. While standing on the field at the school’s Spartan Stadium during a football game, something else struck Robert, an image he couldn’t shake. The players were in uniform, covered in Michigan State’s green and white colors, but Robert could see their bare lower legs. “Almost all of them,” he says, “were black.” Just like Rogers. Meanwhile, everyone else—the coaches, the administrators, the faces in the crowd, and Robert himself—was overwhelmingly white.
<
br /> “I saw a small group of black faces in the stands, and they were [football] recruits,” Robert says. “It was incredible. I realized all of the people being paid or getting the pleasure out of the game were white, and the vast majority of the people playing and risking their health were black.”
When the championship game of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s men’s basketball tournament between the University of North Carolina and Villanova University tips off tonight in Houston, the scene will be similar, a microcosm of major college revenue sports as a whole. Most of the players on the court—whose sweat and sacrifice make the whole show possible—will be African American. Almost everybody else, from Tar Heels coach Roy Williams and Wildcats coach Jay Wright to the corporate glad-handers in the luxury boxes, will not. The game will be the culmination of another successful season for a cash-rich campus athletics industry—and thanks to the NCAA’s long-standing amateurism rules, which apply to college athletes and no one else in America, the lion’s share of that money will flow from the former group to the latter. From the jerseys to the suits.
From black to white.
“You have two sets of legal rules that treat two different classifications of people differently, and it’s unjustified,” Amy McCormick says. “I would never say college sports are as bad as a system where people are jailed and killed, but it’s an Apartheid system.”
In 2010, Amy and Robert coauthored a law journal article titled “Major College Sports: A Modern Apartheid,” arguing that revenue-producing campus football and men’s basketball hold black athletes in “legal servitude for the profit and entertainment” of whites. “These are sharp words,” they wrote, “but the facts are indisputable.”
Others agree. Sports agent Don Yee, whose firm represents NFL players including New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and retired linebacker Dhani Jones, calls the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes a racial injustice. Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker described campus amateurism as a regressive wealth transfer from mostly poor African American athletes and their families to mostly well-off white managers, nonrevenue sport athletes. and their families. Pulitzer Prize–winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch has written that Division I revenue sports exude “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation,” while former NCAA executive director Walter Byers—a man who ran the organization for decades and essentially built modern college sports as we know them—wrote in his Road to Damascus memoir that his creation was suffused with a “neo-plantation mentality” in which the economic rewards “belong to the overseers,” with “what trickles down after that” going to young men such as Rogers.