Coach Greg Popovich – Early Roots in a Historic Fair Playing Field

Coach Greg Popovich didn’t pull punches about his take on Trump’s leadership and the danger he felt the former president posed to democracy. “Pop,” as he’s widely known, grew up in my hometown of East Chicago, Indiana – an industrial melting-pot blue-collar town near Chicago.

Popovich was born Jan. 28, 1949, in the gritty Indiana Harbor section of East Chicago to a Serbian father, Raymond, and Croatian mother, Katherine. Then as it is now, East Chicago was a basketball hotbed.

According to a 2014 article, “as a child, Popovich’s first palpable dream was to play for legendary coach Johnny Baratto at powerhouse Washington High in East Chicago, where his father had been a star forward in the 1930s. That fantasy was shattered when, after Popovich’s fifth-grade year, his parents split. His mother moved the family 18 miles south to Merrillville, a semi-rural community ringed by farmland that at the time boasted fewer than 15,000 souls.”

A youthful disappointment in his sophomore year occurred when his Merriville High School Coach cut him from the basketball team. The kid who once dreamed of playing for the great Washington High School Senators as his father had in East Chicago couldn’t hack it as a Merrillville Pirate. This setback to his basketball career seems to have ultimately changed the prism through which Greg Popovich views the game of basketball and perhaps even life.

Instead of limping away sulking or backing down, and determined to improve his game, he and a friend set out to nearby Gary Indiana in search of pick-up games. In Gary, the games were integrated. Many of the players were sons of the steel mill workers with hoop dreams of their own.

The courts at 39^th and Broadway in then-bustling Gary were a hotbed of regional basketball competition. These were the types of courts that produced players like two-time NBA champion New York Knicks Dr. Dick Barnett, Texas Western champion Orsten Artis, and Glenn “Big-Dog” Robinson, 1994 NBA first overall pick. The games were intense and competitive.

After summer’s hard-won lessons toughening up from “pounding the rock” with tough competitors of all stripes on the Region’s courts, when Popovich returned to try out for the Merrillville Pirates his junior year, he won the starting position as center. It was this blue-collar work ethic and the emphasis on meritocracy and fitness above all that seemed to lay the foundation for Pop to become the all-time winningest coach in NBA history.

East Chicago is called the Twin Cities because of its two corridors; Indiana Harbor and the Southwest business and residential area incorporated under the same city charter. “The Region,” as it is colloquially known, is the cluster of towns (Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Crown Point) on the Southeastern tip of Lake Michigan, once powered by a booming steel industry. These geographically contiguous areas are divided by a canal that serves as an inland port for barges delivering iron ore and raw materials like gypsum, petroleum, and coal via the Great Lakes for the Region’s steel mills and heavy industry. The Indiana Harborside is nearest the southern tip of Lake Michigan’s shoreline where, on a clear day, Chicago’s downtown Loop is easily visible.

Each of these sections of East Chicago began with distinctly different racial demographics. Indiana Harbor became a prime destination for Eastern European immigrants during the early to mid-20^th Century. They were attracted by employment opportunities in close proximity to steel mills and the availability of affordable, plant-subsidized family housing developments built to keep pace with the labor demands as “Big Steel’s” global exports began to flourish in the Indiana Harbor.

The wave of Eastern European immigrant families and the arrival of Blacks leaving the South during the Great Migration, along with Mexican and Puerto Rican families settling in East Chicago’s Indiana Harbor neighborhoods made the area one of the most ethnically and racially diverse in the nation.

East Chicago’s mid-20^th-Century public schools were always open to receiving all students with no ostensible criteria for race, ethnicity, creed, or nationality for admission. It was within this milieu that opportunities for gainful employment and shared recreational interests were made accessible across racial lines as part of the normal acculturation process for children growing up in the area. The city’s numerous parks, playing fields, playgrounds, a golf course, tennis courts, and lake-front beaches, along with a full-service Catholic settlement house, enabled broad participation among the city’s youth in various athletic leagues, including Biddy Basketball, Little League Softball, the Elks and Kiwanis, and church leagues.

Since opening in the early 1920s, the city’s two high schools; East Chicago Washington and East Chicago Roosevelt, now combined as East Chicago Central, were both by de facto integrated. So, for decades, inter-scholastic integrated boys’ sports teams were commonplace in the Indiana Harbor, where Coach Greg Popovich grew up playing pick-up games on asphalt courts outdoors, in well-equipped gymnasiums’ indoor basketball courts, or in neighbors’ back yards. East Chicago’s multi-service youth and family settlement center, the Katherine House, catered equally to new immigrants of all ethnicities and races, Black Southern migrants, and a variety of creeds. It sponsored a youth league that reached far beyond the religion’s Catholic Diocese, where integrated social activities were the norm and youth-based recreation and integrated tournaments flourished, enabling boys from fourth and fifth grades through high school to learn the values of team sportsmanship and fair play while acquiring fundamentals for playing sports competitively. It also sponsored a two-week sleepover summer camp.

It was within this melting-pot milieu that competitive school athletic programs for boys became accessible to boys from all backgrounds, and later on to girls. Monroe Walton, who is in the Indiana Sports Hall of Fame for his accomplishments, is seen pictured below on the front row, right, was among the early athletes to be distinguished in basketball and track and field. He played on the Senators basketball team in 1927 in their runner-up efforts to become State Champions. Walton was the first African American to play in the hallowed interscholastic competition that is synonymous with Indiana’s Hoosier Hysteria for the game. He went on to compete in the 1936 Olymiad Trials in Chicago Stadium, where he was narrowly beat out in the 100-yard dash by Ralph Metcalf, who later became a Congressman from Chicago.

By crafting skills based on merit rather than privilege to advance to higher levels, these neighborhood sports competitions bred a mosaic of talent among the dozens of nationalities and ethnicities represented by the young players, even when the question of skin color and race in American professional sports limited opportunities for equal access prior to the advances of the Civil Rights movement and Jackie Robinson’s entry into major league baseball in 1948.

The East Chicago Washington Senators have been by consensus rated within the top 8 – 15% of the 100 best boys basketball teams in history. Popovich’s success is honed by the conflation of opportunity and the values of an equal playing field in a culture that valued hard work and meritocracy.

Since Greg Popovich left the high school arena that is Indiana Hoosier basketball, he’s had enormous growth and success as a coach. Popovich has the most wins in NBA history (regular season and playoffs), surpassing Lenny Wilkens and Don Nelson on April 13, 2019. He has led the San Antonio Spurs to a winning record in each of his 22 full seasons as head coach, surpassing Phil Jackson for the most consecutive winning seasons in NBA history. During his tenure, the Spurs have had a winning record against every other NBA team, with Popovich leading them to all five of their NBA titles. He is one of only five coaches in NBA history to win five titles.

Whenever I hear Greg Popovich address this nation’s Achilles heel – racism and race relations – I’m reminded of his early East Chicago beginnings. His roots are in the rough and tumble of learning to get along with and compete against the best of all types of players, competing against and playing on teams built among young athletes starting out on those integrated playgrounds in that gritty, blue-collar steel-mill town. East Chicago is the place where Michael Jordan started his NBA career with the Bulls in an exhibition game and where Junior Bridgman pursued and achieved a stellar NBA career and became a captain of American business. I can’t help but believe that part of their astounding success is anchored in the notion of both men having experienced early in life America as a “melting pot” of splendid diversity and possibility.

If America ever is to become a nation unfettered by racial bias and irrational fears of the “other,” it must afford all citizens equal opportunity. I believe NBA multiple-championship coach Greg Popovich and others like him, committed to fairness and an end to racism, realize the benefits of experiences garnered within diverse settings; benefits garnered from exposure, relationships, and awareness of human difference and similitude. Individuals with mindsets like Popovich’s have a stake in our genuine inclusion at all levels of society. They tend to view our nation’s great strength as its abundant diversity and, like Greg Popovich, they possess strong voices, clear values, and the hearts of true patriots that will not be ignored nor denied. D.Day Media 3.19.22.

Popvitch speaks about his early exposure to basketball in East Chicago.