Lone Ranger

Kevin McHale loves to lose himself in the northern woods of Minnesota. As a boy growing up on the Iron Range during the 1960s, it wasn’t uncommon for him to disappear in the morning and be back at dusk. “I’d spend five, six, seven hours walking all by myself; maybe sit on a log for a couple of hours and watch what was going around,” McHale relates in an uncharacteristically wistful tone of voice. “I’d just absorb all this solitude. I am at my most peaceful when I am outdoors.”

McHale’s older brother, John, according to more than one person, is Kevin’s best friend. “We bought some hunting property in northern Minnesota in 1989,” John says. “We have a deer shack there we call Bearville because it’s in Bearville Township.

“We’ve started doing some farmer food plots around the place. There are no cell phones, no e-mail. The only thing you have to worry about is keeping the tractor running. Kevin’s happiest when he’s doing that. As a matter of fact,” John says, speaking in early September, “I bet you he’s there right now.”

As Kevin McHale sits in the forest watching the birds flit and the deer forage, or turns the wheel of the tractor and engages the power-takeoff that drops the plow, there must be moments when he wonders why he didn’t kiss the Minnesota Timberwolves goodbye in 2004.

McHale, the local basketball legend hired to evaluate talent and bring luster to a floundering franchise in 1994, had finally assembled a team that delivered unprecedented rewards to long-suffering Wolves fans. There were fifty-eight wins, the first-ever trip to the conference semifinals and finals, and, as a righteous capper, the naming of resident superstar Kevin Garnett as the league’s Most Valuable Player. Through astute trades and free-agent signings, McHale had surrounded Garnett (who he traded to McHale’s old team, the Boston Celtics, last summer) with an almost entirely new supporting cast of complementary veteran stars such as Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell and selfless role players Trenton Hassell and Fred Hoiberg. Throw in a couple of would-be starters (Wally Szczerbiak and Michael Olowokandi) and it wasn’t surprising that the Wolves were a trendy pick to win the NBA Championship in 2005.

“I came very close to leaving that year,” McHale says now. “The team was in good shape and I really contemplated it. Then I thought, ‘Nah, maybe do a couple more things, see if we can get to the next level.’ ”

Flash forward to April 2007. Even with the selfless, charismatic Garnett continuing his string of great seasons, the Wolves had failed to qualify for the playoffs three years in a row. For the second straight season, Garnett—who had missed a mere thirteen games the previous ten years—had been sidelined with what seemed to be a specious injury at almost precisely the time the Wolves were eliminated from playoff competition. Two years earlier, McHale had made a disastrous trade with the Los Angeles Clippers, which compelled Minnesota to give the Clippers its precious pick in the upcoming NBA draft unless the Wolves finished among the worst teams in the league that year. The trade had put the franchise literally in a no-win position: It could lose a bunch of fairly meaningless games at the end of the year or lose the chance to draft a quality collegiate or international player who could improve the club in the near future. Wolves fans had reason to suspect the ball club was purposefully losing games.

Nor was the trade McHale’s only terrible decision. Ever since contract squabbles and bad chemistry had sabotaged that 2005 edition of the Wolves, he’d been frantically pulling levers like the Wizard of Oz, yet the team’s fortunes kept plummeting. Nearly all of the players from the glory days of 2004 were gone, replaced by less talented performers, many rewarded with expensive, long-term contracts. Another precious draft pick had been traded away to the Boston Celtics. Two coaches had been fired.

This was the demoralizing situation on April 19, when McHale loped into the Target Center media room for his year-end press conference. In classic fashion, he minced few words and bore the burden for a franchise in disarray: “It was a bad season. There is no other way you can say it. And it starts with me. I was responsible for putting that team on the floor and for the coaches that coached it. We had a bad year and I did a bad job. That’s the way it is. We have to make some changes.”

The assembled media mob wasn’t mollified. They’d heard McHale be “responsible” three years running and wondered why the “changes” never included replacing McHale himself, the architect of this team’s freefall from respectability. Calls for McHale to be fired began in earnest among both the fan base and the media about two years earlier (I wrote a column for City Pages calling him a lame duck eighteen months ago). Yet here he was—a night after a fan was forcibly removed from Target Center for wearing a bag over his head that said “Fire McHale!”—talking about what he was going to do to bring fans back to Target Center.

McHale was peppered with harsh, insinuating questions. Did Kevin Garnett still have confidence in his leadership? Why did he want to rehire coach Randy Wittman after he lost thirty out of forty-two games while the man McHale fired played .500 ball? Did McHale ever think he might not be the right man for the job? If previously fired coaches Flip Saunders and Dwane Casey were accountable for their bad records, why not him? And what about the fans who paid good money to come and chant for that dismissal last night, including the bag man who was ejected?

An answer typified why McHale has gone from demigod to antihero in less than four years. “I have never been concerned about whether people like me or don’t,” he declared. “I am going to do what I do and hopefully it works. But whether you like me or not is not going to cause me from losing one minute of sleep tonight.” With that, he took a pull from a water bottle, and the slightest trace of a smirk passed across his face. It is fair to say Kevin McHale has disdain, even contempt, for the idea of celebrity. “There is a difference between people thinking they know me and people actually knowing me. And that is a difference I am going to keep,” he declares, explaining why he is denying access to his wife, mother, and five children (the youngest now teenagers), and why he won’t consent to be interviewed at his home in North Oaks, or while hunting, fishing, playing golf, going to his cabin, or visiting the touchstones of his youth in Hibbing.

Instead, we’re on the basketball courts of the health club side of the Target Center, where McHale and other members of the Wolves’ brain trust are working out a half-dozen or so prospects every day to determine who to select in the seventh pick in the NBA draft the following week. “And I wouldn’t even be [interacting with you] this much if these numb-nuts hadn’t talked me into it,” McHale crows good-naturedly, nodding toward a sheepish member of the Wolves’ media relations crew. “I want this over and done in one visit. I know you are trying to turn this into This Is Your Life. But I already know my life, so I’m not really comfortable with that.” He’s only half-kidding.

But as McHale would readily concede, there’s no great secret to what makes him tick. “My father was the biggest influence on my life, by far,” he says of Paul McHale, who toiled in the mines for U.S. Steel for forty-two years and never missed a day of work. “If it was forty-below or there was two feet of snow, Kevin and I knew we had to shovel out and get the car ready for him in the morning,” John says. “If he was on the night shift, we had to be quiet during the day. He never talked about never missing a day; he just always got up and went.”

McHale pere quit school in the ninth grade but at home, you could usually find him in his chair, where he read one newspaper in the morning and a different one in the evening. If John or Kevin or their two younger sisters wanted to go outside and play catch, he’d comply, but he never asked them; never pushed.

“The one thing that I’ll always remember was if you ever asked my dad a question, he would always put down whatever he was doing and give you his undivided attention,” says Kevin. “I’d say, ‘Hey dad,’ and”—at this he mimes uncrossing his legs, folding up a newspaper and setting it aside, then leans forward, establishes eye contact and says, “Yes.” Dropping out of character, he continues: “When you give that type of attention to your children it makes them feel very important. And the better you feel about yourself, the easier this world is, because your foundation is pretty much set. The stuff that gets thrown at you, it never shakes you.

“I get a lot of my perspective from my dad too,” McHale adds, getting enthused at the tribute he’s building. “I love basketball, but it’s not curing cancer or something really special. I’d come home from a game feeling pretty good about myself. And my dad would go, ‘Hey, Kev, did you have fun?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Thataboy,’ he’d say. That was it. He kept it pretty simple: Work hard, be the best you can be, and have some fun.”

And so he did. “Back when we were growing up, Hibbing was a small town of about 20,000 people,” says McHale’s childhood friend Joe Ryan. “The mines were operating at capacity, there was a lot of new construction, it was a very robust economy; people were feeling good, feeling positive.” Older neighborhoods were characterized by ethnicity: Brooklyn was the name of the Italian enclave, and McHale’s mother, Josie, who he describes as “a feisty Yugoslavian,” was born and raised with other Yugoslavians in Hibbing’s Latonia neighborhood. But McHale and his siblings grew up in Greenhaven, a cultural polyglot because it was a newer development with fairly cheap housing. “The distinctive thing about my neighborhood was that there were tons of kids, so there was always somebody to play football, or street hockey, or throw apples at cars, which we used to do,” McHale remembers.

And there was always John, just eighteen months older. “Growing up, Kevin and I slept in the same bed together. I remember him, when the Wizard of Oz came on, hiding in the corner because he was afraid of the Wicked Witch. We made camps together, caught turtles, hunted grouse, always played sports, always wound up wrestling and fighting over something,” says John. Adds Kevin, “We were competitive, and I was a little big for my age, so things often ended up in a fight rather than a score. But I probably became an athlete because of John, being able to play with his friends and all the kids in the neighborhood.”

When he led Hibbing to the state high school championship game and was named Mr. Basketball as the top prep player in 1975, McHale ignored out-of-state recruiters and made up his mind to play for the University of Minnesota before he’d even visited the campus. Even as he became a star at the U, eventually finishing second all-time in rebounds and fifth in points, McHale’s best friends in the Cities were from the Range, including Joe Ryan, who was attending college at St. Thomas, and Lynn Spearman, another St. Thomas student from the Greenhaven neighborhood, who began dating McHale in their junior year in high school. Now she’s his wife and mother of their five children.

Whatever else he does, McHale will always be professionally defined by the thirteen seasons he played for the Boston Celtics. Although he probably needed every one of his four years at the U to become totally at ease in his gawky, gangly frame, McHale arrived in the NBA instantly ready to contribute. He played hardball in his first contract negotiation, even threatening to play in the Italian League, and thus signed with the Celtics after the team was already in the midst of training camp. When he made his first appearance at an evening practice, then-coach Bill Fitch ordered him to get dressed and into a scrimmage.

“Fitch was determined to teach this impudent rookie a lesson and humble him right away,” says Bob Ryan, who has covered the Celtics and pro basketball for the Boston Globe for more than thirty-five years as a beat writer and columnist. “What happened instead was that Kevin dominated, blocking shots and making great moves under the basket.”

The Celtics won three NBA championships during the 1980s, mostly by relying on Larry Bird, McHale, and Robert Parish, who are generally regarded as the best front-court combination ever assembled in the NBA. By the 1986-87 season, McHale was an unstoppable offensive force, becoming the only player in NBA history ever to sink more than 60 percent of his field goal attempts and more than 80 percent of his free throws in a single season.

“There is absolutely nothing as good as being able to play pro basketball,” McHale says, watching wannabe draft picks try to become pros on the Target Center courts. “I can’t remember how old I was, maybe twenty-five, driving home from the Boston Garden right after we won the Eastern Conference finals. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I am maxing out my life while I’m in my twenties. That can’t be good.’ For pure, unadulterated fun that makes you feel lucky and blessed, nothing even comes close.”

Perhaps that’s why, after breaking the navicular bone in his right foot near the end of his unprecedented 1986-87 season, McHale ignored doctors’ warnings that it could be a career-threatening injury without immediate surgery and rest. McHale continued playing heavy minutes straight through to the NBA Finals and paid the price in limited endurance and maneuverability in the last six years of his career. To this day, he walks with a pronounced limp due to the break and other ailments acquired during his time on the court. 

“The doctors said I was taking risks and I said, ‘I hear ya,’ ” McHale recalls. “I kept going. Part of it is that you think you’re bulletproof and part of it is that injuries are a part of basketball. I guess I should be telling you I would never do it again. But if all of a sudden I was twenty-eight again and in the same situation, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Since retirement in 1993, McHale has been named one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history and voted into the league’s Hall of Fame. His Celtics jersey has been retired to a place of honor in the rafters of the Fleet Center in Boston, just as his Gophers jersey adorns a wall in Williams Arena. In 1995, the U of M officially feted him as its basketball Player of the Century.

And yet, as gaudy as they are, the accolades, citations, and ceremonies don’t do full justice to McHale’s legacy. It was the way he played or, more accurately, the way he behaved as a player that is so memorably piquant. His Celtics teammates used to tease him about passing him the ball and never getting it back, but they knew, and McHale knew, that no defense could stop him. “Defense is all about taking away what somebody likes to do,” McHale told me two years ago, explaining why he worked so hard to develop some of the most extensive moves and sophisticated footwork the game has ever seen. “The more options that you can show people, the more you can dictate what you want to do.” The great Michael Jordan—himself a cutthroat competitor who liked to needle the opposition—once said that McHale talked more trash than any player he’d ever heard.

And so it was off the court as well. “Kevin was Eddie Haskell; always throwing spitballs when the coach’s back was turned,” Bob Ryan says. “The guy who doesn’t have the highest grades, but is the smartest kid in the class, with the best one-liners and the ability to rebel in ways that show he’s smarter than the teacher. I never encountered a player who told more stories that would have gotten anybody else in trouble, except he always had the perfect metaphor, the apt analogy.”

That trademark insouciance didn’t flag when McHale returned to Minnesota after retiring from the Celtics. (Even before his father was diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life in 1994, there was never any question that McHale would come back to his roots.) He signed on as color man for Timberwolves TV broadcasts and was an instant hit for his irreverent yet insightful lampooning of a franchise that had yet to win more than twenty-nine (of eighty-two) games a season in its first five years of existence. When then-new Wolves owner Glen Taylor convinced him to get involved in personnel matters, he made the bold, trendsetting decision to choose eighteen-year-old Kevin Garnett as the fifth overall pick in the 1995 NBA draft. And then there was the near-total and successful makeover of the team, which resulted in that 2004 season.

In context, it is shocking how far and fast his star has fallen and how much it has remade his public persona. All his life McHale had lived his father’s “keep it simple” credo—work hard, be the best you can, have fun—with a neon flourish. In response, he was not so much revered as warmly embraced as a blunt-spoken Iron Ranger with a sense of personalized, small-town integrity. Today, his reputation is so tattered that even casual fans making small talk at a party are quick to criticize him. He’s become “Kevin McFail.”

Having lived a charmed life for more than forty years, McHale wasn’t prepared for this. As the criticism intensified, Eddie Haskell became the Invisible Man. “I think all the negativity the past few years has made him withdraw a bit from public appearances and the news media,” Glen Taylor concedes. “Kevin feels he’s already tried to explain it. We ask him as a team to do some of those appearances and I know it is not easy for him.”

McHale clearly feels defamed. “There are a lot of things that happened around here that [the press] has written about where I could have said, ‘That’s not what happened,’ because I know what happened,” McHale says. “Somebody tells you something to cover their rear ends and you run with it and it’s not true. You can say what you want about me, but I don’t leak deals and I don’t throw other people under the bus.”

So he remains stoic, but recedes further. “The opinion of people who don’t spend hundreds and hundreds of hours doing this [job] don’t matter to me. Everyone was a lot smarter three years ago [when the team was winning]. I was. You were, you guys in the media.”  

But McHale has been vulnerable to criticism for more than three years on a variety of fronts.

Foremost is that McHale does not put in the time required of an NBA general manager with a struggling team. When Taylor first approached him about a job with the Wolves, McHale warned the owner that he wouldn’t be a workaholic. His family had grown to five children, ranging from toddler to teenager, and the example of his father’s steadfast presence and support pricked at his conscience and goaded him to follow suit. Now that he was finally back in Minnesota year-round, McHale itched for the chance to hunt and fish and wander the woods of the Iron Range, and he didn’t need the aggravation of a job that would get in the way. And McHale didn’t need the money, which gave him leverage. Taylor agreed to time off and flexibility. “Those were the conditions agreed upon and both of us have taken criticism for it,” the owner says, “but to me it would be different if he had promised something different.”

Then there was the scandal involving signing forward Joe Smith to an illegal contract in 2000, resulting in both McHale and Taylor being suspended for a year and the Wolves being deprived of four first-round draft picks over five years, a devastating sacrifice the team could not overcome. Once again Taylor defends McHale, implying he was unaware of or perhaps opposed to the arrangement: “Kevin fell on his sword for that one. That whole story has never been told and probably never will be.”

Afterward, McHale appeared to not intensify his scouting efforts to maximize the second-round picks the Wolves had to rely on. He punted those picks with now-deservedly obscure choices (Rick Rickert? Marcus Taylor? Blake Stepp?). Meanwhile, San Antonio was laying the groundwork for future championships by taking the initiative to scout and draft international players (Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili) ahead of the rest of the league.

McHale’s antipathy toward player’s representatives is well known and has its roots in the breakup of the early troika of stars—Garnett, Stephon Marbury, and Tom Gugliotta—that he assembled shortly after taking over the team.

McHale eventually consented to three extensive interviews for this story, and each time he unilaterally brought up the synergistic potential of that trio. It was a potentially special foundation, and his railing against the perfidy of agents may well be justified, but that is the reality of the league in which he is an executive. (Not to mention that McHale always played hardball in his own negotiations as a Celtic.)

There also is the flaw McHale himself concedes: In the rush to surround Garnett with already mature talent before the superstar’s contract expired in 2008, he sacrificed value and long-term potential. The gambit worked briefly in the 2003-04 season, but backfired in trades with the Clippers and Boston in which the Wolves surrendered precious draft picks and gambled on mediocre role players with crushing long-term contracts.

Regardless of how the Timberwolves play in the next couple of years, it is a safe bet that Kevin McHale’s tenure with the team is drawing to a close. Taylor’s loyalty to McHale is already a source of derision and a drag on the team’s ability to maintain season ticket sales. The owner has made no secret that he is grooming assistant general manager Fred Hoiberg as McHale’s replacement, and another hopeless year would almost necessitate a change. On the flipside, McHale is proud and competitive enough to leave only after he’s satisfied that the team can move forward on a firm foundation.

If there is a case to be made in defense of McHale’s tenure with the Timberwolves, it is that only now, for the first time in thirteen years, does he have a ballclub in sync with his philosophy of how to play the game—a shocking and sad admission for a figure as basketball stubborn and headstrong as McHale.

McHale is most often criticized for squandering Kevin Garnett’s talent and scapegoating a great coach by firing Flip Saunders. But one of the best-kept secrets of the McHale era has been how philosophically incompatible he was with both his coach and marquee player.

McHale has consistently preached the benefits of “smash-mouth basketball,” a style that emphasizes physical toughness at both ends of the court. On offense, the plan is to score from “the paint” area close to the basket, often with bruising physical effort. On defense, the job is denying opponents access to the paint through rugged jousting and dedicated teamwork.

For all their virtues, neither Saunders nor Garnett play this style of game. Saunders prefers an offense designed to create shots from outside via crisp passing and a defense built on guile and strategy. Garnett shuns physical contact as much or more than any front-court star in the league.

So why did McHale hire a coach with a philosophy of play he thought could not win? Actually, he didn’t. People assume that because McHale and Saunders were college teammates, even roommates, McHale got his buddy through the door. In fact, Taylor reveals that Saunders independently contacted him about a front office job, and Taylor hired him just after he hired McHale. When then-coach Bill Blair got off to a bad start in 1995, Saunders succeeded him, presumably with McHale’s blessing. But the longer Saunders was on the job, the more the two bickered over how to play.

A similar difference of opinion existed with respect to locker room chemistry. McHale believes in a tight ship, with respected veteran players—or, failing that, the coach himself—exercising aggressive verbal leadership and discipline. But Saunders was conflict-averse, and KG preferred to lead by example. (Both Flip Saunders and Kevin Garnett declined interview requests.)

McHale doesn’t throw people under the bus, but if you listen carefully, you can hear him driving over the toes of Saunders and KG. Over lunch one afternoon, he spends ten minutes wondering why the Wolves always cast themselves as the underdog in the playoffs against teams that had won only a few more games over the course of the season. Translation: Saunders style was to deflate expectations rather than instill his troops with “swagger” crucial to success.

Another five minutes were spent talking up the virtues of boxing-out opponents and taking charges, two physical moves that Garnett rarely executes. And five more minutes were consumed praising new coach Randy Wittman for demanding accountability in the locker room. In any event, the sniping between Saunders and McHale has grown more pointed since Saunders was fired two years ago, and the relationship between McHale and KG has become increasingly aloof and antagonistic in recent years.

“Kevin and KG probably don’t communicate like they did when KG first came here,” Taylor acknowledged about two weeks before McHale traded Garnett to Boston in summer. “At one point, KG really looked up to McHale. That relationship has changed. Each might hold the other accountable for some of our failures.”

In the past two years, McHale has purposefully drafted experienced, team-oriented college players from winning programs who enjoy physical contact on both offense and defense. And Wittman, a disciple of taskmaster Bobby Knight, was rehired despite his putrid 12-30 record last season. Finally, the bulk return on the Garnett trade—five players and two draft choices—provides McHale with the components to implement his philosophy. The key to the deal is power forward Al Jefferson, a prototype of McHale’s style of play. Most of the others in the trade likewise enjoy taking it hard to the basket.

The vices and virtues of Kevin McHale stem from essentially the same source. He grew up believing himself blessed with his hardscrabble, Norman Rockwell background and has held to it. It was a crucible for emotional security and self-confidence, and it ingrained in him a conservative approach to social relationships that is the epitome of “old school.” “Some of my favorite times have been in a duck blind with my best friends, which is pretty much the guys I grew up with,” says McHale. “We are very open and honest with each other and tell very personal things that you don’t say to many people . . . I don’t want to say it’s liberating but . . . after you get done, you look at the guy and think, ‘Now I know why we have been friends for forty years.’ Most everything we’ve done, most of it we have done together, so there is really nothing they could say that would change how you feel about them. And that’s a very nice feeling.”
Joe Ryan is one of those lifelong friends. Prompt him to think of an anecdote that would reveal who McHale is, and he replies, “I can think of a whole bunch of them, but not any I’d want to share with you. Kevin is a guy who if you have a problem, you bring him into the foxhole with you. He’s stubborn as the day is long and hasn’t really changed in thirty years. He’s got integrity.

“And he’s friends with us because he knows we knew him before he went to the Cities or to Boston.” To everyone else, McHale is aggressively unknowable, and that’s how he prefers it.

Kevin McHale thinks he knows the right way to build a winning basketball team. After working for the Wolves just one year less than he played for the Celtics, he’s finally got a clean slate and a clear shot at proving himself. If it doesn’t pan out, then all his disparaging talk about the “excuse society,” the “microwave society,” and the “look the other way society” comes off as sad caricature.

It’s a risk he’ll gladly take. McHale’s most influential role model worked for forty-two years without a sick day or a peep of braggadocio about it. Yet his own competitive spirit is such that he grew up fighting with his brother rather then letting him score, honing rather ordinary athletic gifts through constant refinement and then intimidating his opponent with trash talk and a bruising style of play. He’s bided his time, heard the taunts, and taunted back: He doesn’t care.

But you know he does.

“Kevin is not the type of guy to say, ‘This losing is eating me up,’ but believe me, it is eating him up,” says Joe Ryan. “We Rangers, we don’t like to lose, and Kevin is as competitive as anybody I’ve ever met. I don’t know much about basketball, but I do know this: Kevin is just dying to say ‘I got it! I did it right.’ ”

Britt Robson is a Minneapolis writer who has covered the Timberwolves since 1990.