NBA: Why 88-year-old caller and former coach Hubie Brown is still going strong

I’d long wanted to talk to Hubie Brown, because, well, I think Hubie Brown’s quietly amazing. The planet has a collective cow when Tom Brady takes snaps at 44, but here’s a former NBA coach who remains a television stalwart, a Hall of Famer wearing headphones on snow white hair, making sense of frantic playoff games … at age 88.

Now Brown is on the phone, and I want to know why he keeps at this, why he loves it, why he isn’t on a beach or back nine somewhere.

“It allows me to stay in the basketball world,” Brown says. “Watching games, looking at video, preparation, sitting at half court and being involved with all of these incredible young athletes — it gives you the vibes that you’re still part of it.”

He doesn’t say being around basketball keeps him young. And yet it’s obvious.

“I don’t think I’m 88,” Brown says. “But the calendar tells me I am.”

Brown’s been around basketball for so long, he didn’t have to Google any members of the NBA’s 75th Anniversary team — “I probably saw most of them,” he says. He coached against the stars and forgotten stars, Bird and Magic, Jordan and LeBron, and don’t get Hubie started on Elgin Baylor, whom he first saw play in college. (“I’ve never seen anyone like Elgin Baylor,” he says.) He avoids the greatest-ever debates, because it’s unfair to compare eras, and he’s not stuck in the past. He admires what Ja, Giannis and Steph can do, like everyone else watching today. But a chat with Hubie makes me look up a name (Bailey Howell) I should know much more about.

Brown’s basketball journey mirrors the game’s growth: a playing career with Niagara University and the Rochester Colonels of the old EPBL, then a coaching job at St. Mary’s Academy in Little Falls, N.Y. Nine years in high school … assistant jobs at William & Mary and Duke (with fellow assistant Chuck Daly) … and on to the NBA as an assistant to Kareem’s championship Bucks.

He became a pro head coach with the Colonels, then in Kentucky, and part of the ABA. Head coaching jobs followed with the ’70s Atlanta Hawks, ’80s New York Knicks — check out Hubie in plaid blazers and mock turtleneck sweaters — and, in a midlife twist, the early 2000s Memphis Grizzlies, where in 2004, he was named Coach of the Year for a second time.

It’s been some kind of run.

“I can honestly say this: I was happy at high school. I was happy in college, I was happy in the pros,” Brown says. The itinerant lifestyle wasn’t without challenges; Brown and his wife, Claire, moved their family, which grew to four children, nine times by Hubie’s recollection, each move meaning new schools, new churches, new neighbours.

“You can’t do this unless your family buys in,” Brown says gratefully.

By now, Brown’s coaching tree has sprouted its own forest, with names like Mike Fratello and Rick Pitino as well as Brown’s own son, Brendan. His clinics schooled generations more. Brown’s innovative playbook lingers in today’s NBA. (Have you heard about a “Hawk set”? You’ve definitely seen it. That’s Hubie.)

“End of quarter, end of game,” says Fratello. “You’ll see stuff he gave them.”

“He’s probably the greatest teacher that basketball has ever had,” says Eric Musselman, the head coach at Arkansas, who briefly worked with Brown during a Nike trip to France.

Television became Brown’s unexpected calling. After breaking in with USA, there were stops at CBS and Turner. Today you can see and hear him on ESPN/ABC, his rumbly North Jersey accent making hoops argot like down screens, back screens, double screens sound like inbound stops to Penn Station.

On air, he remains the coach. “You have to say something that is going to educate the fan,” he says. He doesn’t like negativity; that’s easy. He stays enthusiastic, but neutral.

“People honestly think sometimes that you’re rooting for one team over the other,” he says. “I never rooted for one team over another in 33 years of doing this.”

Brown calls fewer games than he used to. But for the ones he does — he’s set to call Celtics-Bucks Game 3 in Milwaukee on ABC on May 7 — he’s locked in, prepared.

“When the lights go on, he brings it,” says Brown’s current play-by-play partner, Dave Pasch. “His ability to communicate the game, to teach the game, is unsurpassed. I forget his age and I’m sure people listening do as well. He just sounds like a great broadcaster.”

At a time when sports voices can come and go, Brown’s endurance makes him a marvel. Dick Stockton, who called games with Brown at CBS, says he’s “really proud” of his former colleague.

“The analyst has the tougher job than the play-by-play man,” Stockton told me. “Hubie has to talk about the why, and the how, and to do that at 88, the way he does it, is an incredible discipline.”

“Nobody can bring ‘the painted area’ to life like Hubie,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “He’s a cherished basketball icon to multiple generations of players, coaches and fans and all of us at the league office.” (Silver says one of his favourite Hubie-isms is an “endless buffet of blunders.”)

The game Brown calls is different now. It’s more spread out and airborne — “not rim level, but at the top of the box,” Brown says. Analytics and the 3-point shot have changed the priorities of offence, and the elimination of hand-checking and harsher penalties on fouls have dampened physicality.

Brown doesn’t say this is good or bad. It just is.

“Look, people today, if they enjoy the game, that’s wonderful,” he says. “They enjoy the way the game is played, the pace, that’s great. They enjoy the long 3-point shots. And you live and die [by it] sometimes — that’s terrific. The fan is a different fan than that fan back in the ’70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s.”

He is OK with it. It’s basketball, it’s a sport that’s designed to evolve, and he’s still part of the evolution. The playoffs are here, and Hubie Brown has another game.

– Wall Street Journal