AUTHOR Thomas Wolfe once wrote a seminal line that has become a commonly used expression about reliving the past. “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood...back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame...back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
While true, Wolfe never had in mind Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra who says the words “home” and “family” resonate strongly within him.
At an early age, Spoelstra thought he was in heaven as he got to attend practices and game days with the Portland Trailblazers as his father, Jon, was the senior vice president and general manager of the National Basketball Association team. “It certainly whet my appetite for the game,” recounted the younger Spoelstra. “Rip City. The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam—who in Portland didn’t read that book? Captain Jack Ramsey. Rick Adelman. Clyde the Glide. And there was Billy Ray Bates.”
While Erik lived in Portland, the links to his familial past in the Philippines where his mother originated from remained. “My cousins would send stories and whatever they could about the PBA [Philippine Basketball Association] and it was an even bigger thrill to learn that Billy Ray was a star here. ‘The Black Superman!’ That’s a fantastic nickname. It only made his legend grow, especially for the people in Portland who saw what he did for the Blazers in that short amount of time.”
At Oregon’s famed Jesuit High School (Mike Dunleavy Jr. of the Golden State Warriors and National Football League players Pete Brock of the New England Patriots and Mike Hass of the Seattle Seahawks are a few notable alumni), Erik became the star point guard of the Crusaders. And it was there his English teacher and basketball coach Herm Schattenberg imbued him with values that would be a huge part of his character makeup. “Coach Herm and Jesuit High had a huge impact on me at a very young age. I learned discipline, the value of hard work and teaching others. I understand that education is a thrust of the Jesuits. Little did I know that later, I’d be following them through coaching which is still teaching,” he laughed.
Spoelstra also ran the point for the University of Portland Pilots after which he played for the Hertener Lions for two years in Germany. It was there where he got his first brush with coaching. “That was my break. I came in first as a player and then as a playing coach. And I realized that it’s something I could do,” he said. “On my way back to the United States and still unsure of my basketball career, I thought about going to the Philippines to try my luck out with a PBA club. And I thought that it would also be retracing Billy Ray Bates’s steps. Only I never got to do that and instead went to join the Miami Heat. It’s one of the things that I regret most in my life—being unable to play in the PBA.”.......................
