Editor’s Note: This is the third and final installment of the three-part series on Dick Motta, who started his distinguished basketball coaching career 67 years ago at Grace High School, built the Weber State program into a Big Sky Conference power and then spent 25 years in the National Basketball Association, winning an NBA title in 1978.
Dick Klein, the former part-owner and general manager of the Chicago Bulls, in his pursuit of unknown college coach Dick Motta, was like the dog that chased the speeding car — once he caught it, he didn’t know what to do with it.
In the 1968 press conference called to reveal his new, hard-won coaching prize, Klein struggled. When it came time to formally introduce his new coach, Klein forgot his last name, and mispronounced the school where he coached.
“This is Dick…from Web-ber,” Klein said.
It’s pronounced Wee-ber State, thank you, and you can bet Motta never let Klein forget that — or his name, again.
NEW GUY IN TOWNDuring the press conference, Motta was asked if he was “Mormon.” After the press conference, in a private sit-down with the Chicago Tribune’s Bulls beat writer, he was asked how many black players he had on his team at Weber State. The implication was obvious.
“I said, ‘Does it matter to you?’” Motta recalled in a recent Journal interview. “If it really matters to you, you must be prejudiced. I’m not prejudiced. Why would you ask me a question like that if you weren’t trying to pin me down as a racist? Why would you ask that question? You must be a racist.’”
In truth, Motta had never encountered people of color, having grown up in rural Utah, and attended Utah State University, then an agricultural school with hardly a black student on campus, until he entered the Air Force. There, he was a recreation officer and coached some outstanding athletes of color, including two All-American defensive tackles, one from Notre Dame and one from USC.
“I was so naïve, I didn’t have a prejudice,” Motta said. “I was not in awe, I just went about my business.”
Adjusting to the racial culture of the NBA was just one challenge for Motta, who hired Bruce Ogilvie, known as the “Father of North American Applied Sport Psychology,” to help evaluate his players and smooth his relationships with them. Remember, Motta was a man who was cut from his high school basketball team and who had never seen an NBA game in person before the Bulls hired him.
He acknowledges now that he was nervous about meeting his new NBA team — just as he was nervous when he moved up from coaching seventh grade to high school, or from high school to college. But none of those emotions impacted his coaching approach.
One of his first official acts as Bulls coach was to host an open tryout at DePaul University. About 80 undrafted NBA wanna-be’s showed up, and Motta was putting them through their paces. Bob Biel, the Chicago trainer at the time, was on hand for the show, and he called Bulls player Jerry Sloan, who was back home in Southern Illinois. He told Sloan, based on what he’d seen from Motta at the tryout camp, he better plan on showing up in shape when training camp opened.
A day or so later, Sloan showed up at the tryout camp and, given that several kids were asking him for his autograph, Motta deduced that must be his starting guard.
“He watched me like a hawk, and I didn’t take my eyes off of him that whole hour,” said Motta. “After we dismissed these kids, he came down and in his old, ‘aw shucks’ accent, he introduced himself and said, ‘Coach, do you think it would be okay if I came and worked out?’
“He was there the next day and for the next three days. And he bought my (stuff). He bought me. And he owned the locker room. I think more than anything, he gave me a chance to coach.”
Sloan would later go on to coach the Bulls and then had a tremendous run leading the Utah Jazz during the John Stockton- Karl Malone days.
HITTING HIS STRIDEMotta’s first two seasons in Chicago were a struggle, although the Bulls did qualify for the playoffs despite having a losing record one season. He and Klein, meanwhile, were at odds constantly about personnel decisions. Eventually, Motta, who was making a royal $22,000 a year in his first NBA contract, won out.
“To win him over, Klein promised Motta complete control of personnel and a vice-presidency if he succeeded,” Frank Deford, one of the great sports writers of his era, wrote in a lengthy Sports Illustrated profile of Motta. “Essentially, Motta believed Klein, and Klein believed Klein, a horrendous miscalculation on both their parts.”
Motta’s characterization of the situation to Deford was typical of his brazenness in dealing with the media.
“I had to be crazy to take that job,” Motta told Deford. “But it was even more ridiculous of Klein to offer it to me. There was no way he could hire me and put me in charge of a $4 or $5 million organization. Not if you think about it.”
Eventually, Bulls ownership forced Klein out of the organization, and replaced him with Pat Williams as general manager.
Then the Bulls team built around Sloan, Norm Van Lier, Chet Walker, Bob Love and Tom Boerwinkle hit its stride. Employing Motta’s set offense and one of the nastiest, most physical defenses in the league, the Bulls won 51, 57, 51, 54 and 47 games from 1970-71 to 1974-75, making the playoffs each season. Motta was named NBA Coach of the Year after the 1971 season.
That prompted Deford to profile Motta, whose fiery personality and blunt approach to the media had made him a minor celebrity around the league.
“…There are basketball general managers walking about today, like schoolgirls mooning over some crush, saying how much they need A Motta,” Deford wrote. “Another Motta…. This is not only a tribute to Motta’s success — which culminated this past season in his overwhelming selection as NBA Coach of the Year — but it also indicates a fascination with the man and the events that lifted him in the sort of upward mobility previously experienced only by those frogs lucky enough to get kissed by princesses.”
The only former college coach working in the NBA at the time, Motta disdained the fast break offenses propounded by his peers. His team ran established plays, set screens and ate up the 24-second clock. On defense, led by Sloan and Van Lier, two of the most vicious defenders in the league, they consistently finished in the top 10 in the league in fewest points allowed.
“As much as anything,” Sloan told Deford, “his system works because we do what he tells us to do, and if we don’t do what he tells us to do, he raises hell.”
Not everybody appreciated the Motta approach. Longtime Celtics coach Tom Heinsohn called the slow-down system “chicken (manure),” because the Bulls never took advantage of early offense opportunities. But it was a system that worked perfectly for the personnel on hand.
Like most runs in the NBA, the Bulls’ came with a time limit. With Sloan, Love and Boerwinkle all in their 30s, the Bulls came crashing down in the 1975-76 season, finishing 24-58. Motta still had two years left on his Bulls contract, but he and the team agreed it was time for a change. He negotiated a deal with the Washington Bullets (now the Wizards) to succeed K.C. Jones as coach.
BECOMING A CHAMPION IN WASHINGTON
Led by Hall of Famers Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes, the Bullets finished 48-34 in Motta’s first season at the helm, losing to Houston in the second round of the playoffs. The following year, they were besieged by injuries during the regular season, and squeezed into the playoffs with a 44-38 record. But getting healthy and hot at the right time, Motta’s team won the Eastern Conference championship despite having to start every series on the road, then faced off against the Seattle Supersonics in the NBA Finals.
The Sonics were up three games to two with home-court advantage guaranteed if the series went to seven games. The Bullets, with six players scoring in double figures, blew out Seattle in Game 6 at home, 117-82. Motta took a gamble, moving future Hall of Fame forward Bob Dandridge to guard and inserting rookie Greg Ballard in the lineup. Ballard responded with a double-double of 12 points and 12 rebounds. The 35-point margin of victory stood as an NBA finals record until 1998.
Then the Bullets held off a late fourth-quarter Seattle rally to hang on for the NBA championship in Game 7, 105-99. It was the last time an NBA team won a Game 7 in the finals on the road until LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers did it in the 2016 Finals over the Golden State Warriors. Unseld, the Bullets powerful post player, was named the Finals MVP.
Motta celebrated with his team afterward, wearing a bear-soaked T-shirt bearing a saying that he had popularized during his NBA career: “The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings.”
“What made the championship so great was that we weren’t supposed to win it,” Motta said afterward. “We came a long way. Most people didn’t give us a chance, but I felt all along we could. I really did.”
LEGACY AND RETIREMENT
Motta and the Bullets were back in the NBA Finals again the following season, but the Supersonics dispatched them in the rematch in five games.
Getting restless once again, Motta left Washington to take the coaching job with the expansion Dallas Mavericks in 1980. He coached in Dallas for six seasons, making the playoffs four times. He finished his coaching career with Sacramento, then Dallas again, and finally a season in Denver, ending in 1997.
The final six campaigns in his 25-year NBA career were losing seasons that ended without playoffs. So while Motta finished his NBA career having coached 1,752 games, the eighth-most in NBA history, and he accumulated 935 wins −14th in league history − those last six years left him with a cumulative record of 935-1017.
In 2015, he was honored with the Chuck Dailey Lifetime Achievement Award. Motta, was also nominated and a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame numerous times, but those last six seasons probably cost him induction.
No matter.
Motta was always one to put things in perspective. After his Bullets won the NBA championship in 1978, “a kid pushed a microphone in my face and said, ‘This has to be the greatest accomplishment in your life,’” Motta recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, it’s great, there’s no question about that.’”
But then he recalled his 1959 Grace High School team winning the state championship and the relationships and memories that still live on to this day.
“My high school team, the championship of my high school team, is still the most important thing to me,” Motta continued. “I don’t want to run the NBA down. But how many teams, 60, 70 years later, are still having reunions? Every one of them was successful. Not one of them got in trouble. One was in the service, one was a chemical engineer, one guy owned a tire company. ... They all come and we’ll sit here at the bed and breakfast. ... Nothing in my mind will ever replace those 12 kids.”
After leaving the NBA, Motta and his wife Janice owned and operated for many years the Bluebird Inn, a bed and breakfast in Fish Haven, right across the street from Bear Lake, with assistance from his son Kip, a longtime teacher and basketball official, and Kip’s wife Cindy. The Bluebird has now been converted to an Air B&B, but many summer mornings you can still see Kip and Dick, now 92, working in the garden next to the guest house.
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