Tony Parkers rise to Basketball Hall of Fame: From early tension with Popovich to Spurs legend

Publish date: 2024-06-21

It has long been San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich’s assertion that his success as coach of the Spurs — the most wins in NBA history, five NBA championships, an NBA-record 22 consecutive trips to the playoffs — began with the willingness of his greatest player to allow himself to be coached … and coached hard.

If Hall of Fame big man Tim Duncan, a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player and three-time NBA Finals MVP, could endure high-decibel rants from Popovich with equanimity, didn’t his teammates have to follow suit?

When another Spurs player bristled after a Popovich harangue, the coach usually responded with this rejoinder: Tell it to Duncan.

Popovich also acknowledged in a 2019 interview that few players in his tenure with the Spurs endured tougher coaching than Tony Parker, the starting point guard for the Spurs for all but the first four games (save for injuries) of his 17 seasons in silver and black. It began with his very first training camp.

A 19-year-old rookie in 2001, Parker endured one Popovich training camp tirade after another as the coach tried to channel Parker’s lightning speed, deft ball skills and aggressive instincts to make him more John Stockton and less Speedy Claxton.

After one particularly strident talking to a few days into his first camp, Parker finally sought solace from Duncan, just as Popovich had advised.

He got only a blank stare.

“I would have Pop scream at me and tell me to go talk to TD, and I didn’t want to,” Parker said during a 2011 interview session the San Antonio Express-News conducted with all of the Spurs “big three” stars: Duncan, Parker and Manu Ginóbili.

“I was scared of TD. He always looked like he was mad. He didn’t talk to me for the whole first year. It was kind of tough at first because you want to earn his respect. He was our franchise. It was hard at the beginning because he doesn’t talk.”

Did Duncan make his rookie point guard figure out Popovich on his own?

“Oh, absolutely,” Duncan said in 2011. “It was about him being, whatever, 13 years old, and asking him to start for a team that’s been doing pretty good.”

In his second season with the Spurs, Parker gained a new teammate who tried to mediate his often-contentious encounters with Popovich. Steve Kerr, who had backed up Avery Johnson on the Spurs’ first NBA title team in 1999 returned to the Spurs in 2002, traded by the Portland Trail Blazers in exchange for the point guard Parker had supplanted as Spurs starter, Antonio Daniels. By then a veteran of 14 seasons who had earned three championship rings as a member of the Bulls in 1996, ’97 and ’98, Kerr offered sage advice about how to deal with their fiery head coach.

“I was there for Tony’s second year, 02-03,” Kerr said this month in a phone conversation with The Athletic. “I was already impressed with his play because, as a rookie, he was already a handful and very impactful as a player.

“I got an up-close look at his relationship with Pop. Pop drove him hard, and they butted heads a lot. I was in my last year as a player and trying to be a bit of a calming influence between them, so I told Tony, ‘Sometimes, when you disagree with Pop, just nod your head and let it go. We all have to do that occasionally. I know he’s always on you, but he’s trying to make you better.’”

“Well, Tony said, ‘Aw, hell no, I’m not doing that,’” said Kerr, who then broke into laughter.

Kerr had a keen understanding of the dynamics of the Popovich-Parker relationship.

“Pop had a vision for how a point guard was supposed to play,” Kerr said, “but Tony had his own vision, which included attacking and scoring. Tony needed Pop’s guidance to become a complete player and, by the end, he really had accomplished that.”

By the end, Parker and Duncan also learned to share a word or two. Ultimately, they became close friends.

“As the years went by,” Parker acknowledged, “it got better.”

Parker’s game matured, year by year, just as his relationship with Duncan got better. He made four All-NBA teams and was a six-time All-Star. In a career highlight, he was named MVP of the 2007 NBA Finals, when he led the Spurs in scoring with 24.5 points per game in a four-game sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, in LeBron James’ fourth season.

On Saturday, Parker will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., where he will join Duncan and Ginóbili as members, as will Popovich, whose 1,366 victories make him the NBA’s all-time winningest coach. Parker will be the first French player enshrined into the Hall of Fame. His place in France’s basketball history is singular, and his influence in his native land extends now to ownership of one of its best professional teams, ASVEL in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon.

While he wasn’t in the vanguard of the globalization of basketball, Parker was an important piece of the explosion of its worldwide popularity that followed the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. While the United States “Dream Team,” featuring Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Stockton and Karl Malone, Charles Barkley and David Robinson, dominated on its way to the gold medal, it also captured the imagination of the sports world.

As a 10-year-old who watched every minute of the Dream Team’s games, Parker, in 2001, would go on to become the fourth French player selected in the first round of the NBA Draft (Tariq Abdul-Wahad was the first in 1997, Frederic Weis was drafted in ’99 and Jérôme Moïso in 2000), followed two years later by his close friend and high school teammate Boris Diaw, the No. 21 pick of the 2003 draft by the Atlanta Hawks.

In June, the Spurs drafted a teenager who grew up idolizing Parker. Victor Wembanyama, who is 7 foot 4, became the first French player ever chosen with the very first NBA Draft selection. One can make a case that Parker’s style of play — attacking the basket from the perimeter so often that he ranked in the top 15 in points in the paint six times during his 17 seasons with the Spurs — was a template for Wembanyama’s approach to the game.

After all, the first time a 9-year-old Wembanyama posed for a photo while wearing NBA attire, it was in the No. 9 Spurs replica jersey of his first basketball hero, Parker.

Yesss he’s going to the @spurs !!! So proud of you💪🏽 pic.twitter.com/vblbw0lcbL

— Tony Parker (@tonyparker) May 17, 2023

Growing up in France in the 1980s, Parker didn’t have to look far to find his first basketball hero.

“I was 2,” Parker said in a 2007 interview. “My dad played basketball, so I was following him everywhere, trying to do the same moves and everything.”

Indeed, the elder Parker was playing pro basketball when his first son was born in Bruges, Belgium, on May 17, 1982. Tony Parker Sr. played 15 years in Europe, beginning in The Netherlands, and then in Belgium before completing the bulk of his European career in France. When his playing days ended, he began coaching youth teams. Of course, his namesake son played for his youth team and became a star.

Each summer, both Parkers returned to Chicago for long visits with family. Tony Jr. played pickup ball on local courts, where many of the players, young and old, sported No. 23 Chicago Bulls uniforms. Then, in his grandparents’ living room, Tony Jr. watched Michael Jordan lead the Bulls to the 1991 NBA championship and made a vow: “I’m going to play in the NBA someday.”

His dream was realized after the Spurs made him the final (No. 28) selection in the first round of the 2001 NBA Draft.

Parker’s path to the Spurs was convoluted. After making himself available for the 2001 draft, at age 19, he nearly blew his chance to play for Popovich’s team.

R.C. Buford, then the Spurs assistant general manager and now Spurs CEO, had first spotted the 15-year-old Parker playing professionally in a French minor league in 1997. Amazed by Parker’s baseline-to-baseline speed, Buford added him to his list of European players to follow.

After leading France to victory in a European junior tournament in 2000, Parker earned a spot on a select team of international players that went up against a select team of young American players in the 2000 Nike Hoop Summit in Indianapolis. Attacking the basket from his point guard spot on the perimeter, Parker scored 20 points and added seven assists as the international team nearly upset an American squad that included numerous future NBA players, including Zach Randolph, Nick Anderson, Darius Miles and Jared Jeffries.

Hoop Summit attendee Buford moved Parker to the top of his list of potential draftees. After Parker made himself eligible for the 2001 draft, Buford called Parker’s agent, Marc Fleisher, to schedule a workout for the Spurs so Popovich could have a first-person look.

A few days after the Lakers eliminated the Spurs in the 2001 Western Conference finals, the team arranged for Parker to fly from Paris to Chicago, where they had set up a workout at Rosemont Horizon (now Allstate Arena) in Rosemont, Ill., about two miles from O’Hare International Airport.

The Spurs contingent consisted of Popovich, Buford, assistant coaches Hank Egan and Mike Budenholzer, basketball operations intern Sam Presti and scout Lance Blanks.

Blanks, who passed away in May, was a former University of Texas standout who played professionally for 10 years — three in the NBA followed by seven years in European leagues — and whom Popovich had hired in 2000. A stout defender and still in great shape, at 6-4 and 190 pounds, Blanks often was asked to go one-on-one against potential draftees.

Parker’s flight to the workout had taken him from Paris to Frankfurt, Germany, for a connecting flight to O’Hare. There was a long delay in Frankfurt, and after Parker’s plane touched down at O’Hare, he had to be hustled right to the workout site.

When the jet-lagged teenager tried to go one-on-one against Blanks, he was no match. The Spurs scout dominated the skinny youngster.

“That first workout, it was like 12 hours (on) the plane,” Parker said during an interview that preceded ceremonies where his No. 9 jersey was retired by the Spurs in 2019. “I went straight to the workout. I was kind of tired. Pop was, like, ‘Eh, he’s not good.’”

Not one to mince words, Popovich had gone far beyond “not good” in giving Parker and his agent an estimation of his talent following the workout.

“I told (them) that he’s too soft and I’m looking for someone with more fiber and grit,” Popovich told veteran NBA journalist Jan Hubbard, author of “The History of the San Antonio Spurs,” commissioned by the team and published in 2013.

More damning for Popovich was Parker’s cavalier attitude on hearing his harsh assessment, according to Hubbard’s account.

“He was nonchalant, like he was in a café outside Montmartre, in Paris, having a glass of wine and a croissant,” Popovich said. “It didn’t seem to matter more to him than that.”

Buford was crestfallen.

“(In) that first workout, (Tony) really did play like he had just gotten off the plane,” Buford said before Parker’s jersey retirement ceremony. “He played like, well, let’s just say he was very passive.”

Presti, general manager of the Seattle SuperSonics-turned-Oklahoma City Thunder since 2007, was beyond crestfallen. He was distraught.

“You have to have a handle on the amount of time that was put into identifying and studying Tony over the course of the year, primarily at night in R.C.’s living room,” said Presti, recalling a low point in the life of a 22-year-old basketball intern in an Aug. 5 phone interview with The Athletic. “The best part of my best days was going to R.C.’s house at night, where I was like a DJ. I would throw the tapes in the player and we watched tape of all these different people throughout the year.

“Before long, we became more and more intrigued with Tony Parker. The caveat was, once we moved through the few Tony tapes we had, getting others was a challenge. So, I started something like a black market, trading for them overseas. I’d send all kinds of Spurs gear and other stuff — like Spurs key chains — to French clubs and ask for their game tapes. A lot of them were black and white. But more and more Tony tapes kept coming in, and we watched mountains of them.

“So, when the workout didn’t go well, it was a tough pill to swallow. It was the equivalent of introducing your girlfriend to your parents and they didn’t like her.”

After the disastrous workout, Buford knew he needed to schedule a second Parker workout if the player he believed could be a solid Spurs contributor was to remain on the team’s list of potential draftees.

“I could see right away that the workout was going bad, and I went to his agent,” Buford said in the interview before Parker’s jersey ceremony. “I told him we needed to get a second workout and gave him a date we could do it.”

Then, Buford and Presti went to work convincing Popovich that Parker’s horrid showing in Chicago had been an aberration.

“I listened to all those things (that Popovich said) and then went back through all Tony’s games we had,” Presti said. “I put together a tape that illustrated Tony performing a lot of the things he had struggled with in the workout itself, kind of in succession, five or six in a row of the same thing to demonstrate different games, different situations, same abilities. It was about three minutes long.

“I remember writing on the label of the tape Tony’s age, to make the point not just that he was able to do these things, but he was doing them in a men’s league at age 18. His fearlessness was a big part of the deal to R.C. and me, to play the way he did in a men’s league, with a slight frame, and really hold his own.”

A little more than a week before the draft, Popovich had a plan intended to force the young French guard to prove himself. In a workout at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, where the Spurs often practiced, Parker went one-on-one against another player under consideration, Auburn guard Jamison Brewer. Then, Parker played three-on-three with other players, who Popovich instructed to play physical ball.

“I stacked it, brought in a couple of guys to beat him up, more or less,” Popovich said before Parker’s jersey retirement ceremony. “All we did was post. We didn’t let him play out on the court at all. I just wanted to see what he was made of and if he was going to fold, and see how physical he could be, or what he could take and what he could dish out.”

Buford was thrilled with Parker’s performance.

“Tony tore it up,” he said.

After the tryout, Buford, Presti, Egan and Budenholzer waited outside the gym to hear Popovich’s verdict.

“I remember walking out, standing on the sidewalk just staring down at the asphalt,” Presti said. “We were all waiting for Pop to say something, anything. We all knew we were looking at a different 40 minutes than we had seen in Chicago.”

Finally, Popovich broke the silence.

“That guy’s going to be a starting point guard in the NBA for 10 years,” Popovich said.

“It wasn’t a long conversation,” Presti said. “Then, the conversation was more like, ‘Are we going to have a chance to actually get him?’”

To that end, the basketball operations staff made calls designed to move up in the draft. There were no takers, and on draft night the Spurs were stuck with the final selection (No. 28) of the first round.

The team the Spurs most feared would spoil their shot at Parker was Boston, and, for a few minutes on draft night, Parker was led to believe Boston had picked him. Sitting in the “green room” at the Theater in Madison Square Garden, the site of the draft, Parker recalled an NBA aide telling him to prepare to walk across the stage to shake hands with commissioner David Stern, who was about to announce Boston’s pick.

“I remember the lady from the NBA coming to get me,” Parker said in 2019 before his jersey retirement ceremony. “There was, like, three minutes on the clock. She came to get me and said, ‘OK, you’re going to be the next one. They’re going to draft you, 19 or 21, something like that.’”

Indeed, the Celtics had the 21st pick that year, their third pick of the first round, but before Parker could make the walk, something changed.

“She came back and said, ‘Oh, no, go back, I don’t know what happened,’” Parker recalled.

What had happened, according to an NBA executive who was granted anonymity to speak freely, was that brand new Celtics general manager Chris Wallace had been overruled by an 84-year-old Celtics legend.

Arnold “Red” Auerbach, who had served as Boston’s coach from 1950 through 1966, then as general manager from 1966 through 1984, remained club president and vice chairman. He was still actively involved in basketball decisions, including the draft, even though he resided in Washington, D.C.

Auerbach insisted that Wallace select North Carolina shooting guard Joe Forte instead of Parker, the NBA executive said. The Celtics’ elder statesman remained skeptical of European point guards. Plus, Forte had played at DeMatha High for Auerbach’s close friend Morgan Wooten.

So, Parker returned to the green room and watched as all the other teams for which he’d worked out — Sacramento, Boston, Seattle and Vancouver — pass on him.

When NBA officials put the Spurs on the clock, it had barely begun ticking when their representative in New York gleefully pronounced that Parker was the club’s selection. “The lady from the NBA” again told Parker to be ready to walk across the stage to shake hands with the commissioner.

As Parker shook Stern’s hand, the Spurs’ basketball brain trust celebrated in their draft night headquarters at the Alamodome.

Parker led the Spurs in scoring during their sweep of the Cavs in the 2007 NBA Finals and won finals MVP. (Bob Rosato / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

Popovich had been partially right when he pronounced Parker would be a starter in the NBA for 10 years. He was a starter for 17 of his 18 years in the NBA and on the court for tipoff in 1,151 of his 1,254 NBA games.

His first start came in a home game against the Orlando Magic in the fifth game of his rookie season. He scored 12 points, grabbed three rebounds and had four assists in a 15-point Spurs win.

Though committed to Parker as his starter, Popovich also was determined to slightly alter his style of play. With Duncan the focal point of the Spurs offense, he needed Parker to accept the John Stockton approach to playing the point.

It was a process.

“(Parker) was a scoring guard,” Popovich said in an interview on Nov. 12, 2019. “He wasn’t really a point guard, on that (Stockton) spectrum, so to speak. I thought if we could bring him halfway into the middle and he became more of a distributor … he could be very effective and help us win.

“So, he learned how to do it. He found his teammates, but he kept his scoring abilities. He was a great finisher at the rim. Over time, he learned to shoot the 3-pointer from the corner and gain more confidence in his shot. He did do what I asked him to do, whatever challenge I gave him.”

As Duncan’s scoring average slid from the low 20s to the teens as he neared the end of his career, Popovich asked Parker to return to being more of a scoring point guard. Parker led the Spurs in scoring for six seasons, including four consecutive years (2011-14).

Regardless of which of the Spurs’ “big three” led in scoring, all three remained committed to team play, and to one another. Popovich calls it the primary reason for the Spurs’ four championships during the big three’s reign.

“Just imagine they had egos such that they couldn’t deal with each other,” Popovich said before Parker’s jersey retirement. “You don’t have championships. You have pretty good seasons. We were unbelievably fortunate. It was like serendipity to have three guys that you could coach and hold them accountable just like you would anybody else on the team; no special treatment or anything like that.

“If you’ve got character, you have your own standards. You don’t need somebody else to constantly push you, lead you in a certain direction. You know what’s right; you know what wins. That mutual respect they had for each other was pretty obvious.”

When Parker, Duncan and Ginóbili sat down with two San Antonio Express-News reporters for a group interview during the 2011 preseason, they were asked where they believed they ranked among the NBA’s all-time big threes.

Parker blurted out a quick response.

“Yeah, that’s a great question,” he said, citing instances when the Spurs’ big three were omitted from such discussions. “I don’t know why they never put us on that list. It’s not like it’s going to bother me, because I have the rings, and I’ll sleep well at night. But they just don’t want to put us up there.

“I always say if we did what we did in New York or Chicago, we’d be gods right now,” Parker added.

On Saturday, Parker will join his brothers from the Spurs’ big three as recognized basketball gods, inducted into the Hall of Fame, with fellow-2023 inductee Popovich watching happily as Parker gets his due.

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Tony Parkers rise to Basketball Hall of Fame: From early tension with Popovich to Spurs legend

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