Bulls will honor Kerr Tuesday and celebrate his legendary career

Whenever the Bulls played the Boston Celtics in recent years, Johnny "Red" Kerr and Tom Heinsohn, broadcasters for the respective teams, usually sat together at dinner in the press rooms.

The urge to discreetly slide a digital recorder onto the table occupied by two veterans of the NBA's early years was overwhelming.

Besides Michael Jordan, Kerr is probably the person most widely associated with the Bulls. He was the first coach in franchise history from 1966-68 and spent the past 33 years as a broadcaster.

Kerr, 76, will get a well-deserved tribute at halftime Tuesday of the Bulls-Pistons game at the United Center. The guest list is expected to include Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, former Syracuse teammates Dolph Schayes and Al Bianchi, along with many others. A statue of Kerr is set to be unveiled at a later date.

More than just a Chicago icon, Kerr is a national treasure. Few people walking the earth share the kind of experiences he has lived. Needless to say, he has told some pretty good stories in the press room over the years.

"Johnny always had his quips and his one-liners. Today you have Shaquille O'Neal - the sportswriters love him, the fans love him because he's entertaining. Well, that was Johnny Kerr for his entire career. Had he been playing today, he certainly would have been a face of the NBA with his wit and his one-liners and his outlook. He's one of a kind."

- Dolph Schayes, former Syracuse Nationals teammate

When he played center for the Syracuse Nationals, Kerr would face Bill Russell's Celtics 12 times per season and often in the playoffs. He probably guarded Wilt Chamberlain 75 times and the two were even teammates for half a season with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1964-65.

Kerr sent an NBA record for consecutive games played with 844, which stood for 17 years and still ranks third in league history behind A.C. Green and Randy Smith.

As a coach, he started up two expansion teams, the Bulls and Phoenix Suns, and is still the only NBA coach to lead a first-year franchise to the playoffs (Bulls in 1966-67).

"When you coached expansion teams, how superstitious can you get?" Kerr once said. "I used to tell people, 'I'm wearing my lucky suit, because I only lost six in this one.'"

During a brief stint as general manager of the ABA's Virginia Squires, he was responsible for signing Julius Erving and George Gervin to their first pro contracts.

"When I attended the University of Illinois, I dated a girl, Betsy Nemecek, who was from Riverside. When I first saw her, wow. I think if you looked in the dictionary under the word 'mesmerized' you would've seen my picture. During the summers, I tried to figure out all kinds of ways to visit her."

- Kerr on his future wife, from the story "One of a Kind" on bulls.com

Kerr's story began on the South Side, where he was born in 1932. His father, a Scottish immigrant, died when he was three and his mother, Florence, never remarried.

Kerr grew up playing soccer in Ogden Park and didn't go out for the basketball team until his senior year at Tilden Tech. By then, he was 6-feet-9 and a natural at the sport. He chose to attend Illinois and helped lead the Illini to the Final Four in 1952.

After finishing his career at Illinois, Kerr discovered he was Syracuse's first-round draft pick by reading about it in the newspaper. The Nationals had lost in the Finals to the Minneapolis Lakers in seven games the previous season and Kerr turned out to be the missing piece. Syracuse won the championship in his rookie season, beating the Fort Wayne Pistons with a 1-point victory in Game 7.

"It was a small town, the Green Bay of the NBA, you might say," Schayes said. "We all lived close to each other and we were always close. Johnny and Betsy were the center of the social world for our team, always giving parties. I think that had a lot to do with our success."

As an example of how much different NBA life was back then, players on the Nationals joined a softball league during the summers. Fast-pitch, according to Schayes.

"Johnny and Al Bianchi went into several businesses together," Schayes said. "They went into the soft drink business; tried that for two or three years. You couldn't take the summer off. You had to work to make a few bucks for the family. It was a different life then."

So did the soft drink business ever hit it big?

"No, it didn't work out," said Bianchi, Kerr's assistant coach with the expansion Bulls. "Then we had a couple of other ventures that didn't work out. But we tried. I think we figured out early that we weren't businessmen. We were basketball players."

"What surprised me when I turned pro was (Syracuse coach) Al Cervi asking me for a cigarette. In college, we didn't drink, we didn't smoke, they didn't even want us to date. But about half the players smoked. We'd light up at halftime. I drank a lot of beer. Once, we had a coach who said no more than one can of beer was allowed on a train ride. So we went out and bought these 40-ounce cans of Foster's."

- Kerr, from the book "Tall Tales: The Glory Years of the NBA."

Kerr played 13 seasons - nine in Syracuse, two in Philadelphia after the Nats became the 76ers, and one for the Baltimore Bullets. A three-time all-star, Kerr averaged 13.8 points and 11.2 rebounds over his career.

His consecutive games streak finally ended when Bullets coach Paul Seymour, a former teammate and the pitcher on those Syracuse softball teams, simply didn't play him in a game against Boston.

"After the game, Seymour just said to me, 'It had to end sometime,'" Kerr wrote in "Bull Session," his 1989 book. "He said it was 'best that it ended,' whatever that meant. I don't think it was best for me.

"Obviously, there were nights when I didn't feel like playing. But when I'd get to the dressing room, I'd see the guys and I'd get taped up. When I'd go out for warmups, I'd start to feel a little better. But what really got me going was hearing the 'Star Spangled Banner' and hearing my name announced for the introductions. My heart would pound. I felt I just had to play and I couldn't wait for the ref to throw the ball up."

"My last game was in St. Louis when Baltimore was knocked out of the playoffs (in 1966). I spent a long time in the dressing room - I could look out the door and see that Kiel Auditorium was nearly dark. I went into the arena and watched them dismantle the floor. I began to think that there would be no more nights after the games, drinking beer with the guys. No more parties at the house with Betsy and the players and no more times when my name was announced and people cheered. I was 34, I had never made more than $30,000 as a player and I cried that day in St. Louis. Not because I wouldn't play again; my body was hurting too much to play anymore. But because I wouldn't be a basketball player."

- Kerr, from "Tall Tales"