By Mike Fisher -- DallasBasketball.com
Welcome to Don Nelson’s annual dark visit to his own personal March Madness.
You watch. In the coming days, Nellie will begin to talk to reporters after practice about how much he misses Maui, about how much he loves his wife, Joy, about how he hasn’t had enough time to escape the pressures of his job and play golf. He will compliment Mark Cuban for his generosity, Donnie Nelson for his leadership and Avery Johnson for his ability to maybe be Nellie’s successor. He will occasionally reminisce about times past, about how his trophies mean little to him, about how great it was to play alongside Bill Russell, and how great it is to coach this generation of Mavs.
You will notice the growing weariness in Nellie’s voice, the growing paleness of his skin, the growing width of his belly, the growing depth of his wrinkles.
And like the groundhog that emerges from a hole to pronounce the coming end of winter, Don Nelson will pronounce – in his folksy, funny, exhausted manner – the coming end of Don Nelson.
“It’s just part of his makeup to be honest about something that has an effect on every coach in the league,’’ says son Donnie Nelson, the Mavs’ president of basketball ops. “The hours, the travel, the practices, the games, the demands, the pressures. … they take their toll.’’
Nellie has been this way for most of his quarter-century as a coach. Maybe it wasn’t as severe when he was in his 40’s as it is now, but it was there. I’ve talked with him often about the phenomenon, of how much it resembles the before-and-after photos of U.S. presidents’ faces from inauguration day to four years later.
They appear to have aged a decade in four years. To make the same transformation, Nellie takes just 82 games.
“You get to this late in the season, and you’ve already gone through so much, and now the playoffs start, and you have to do it all over again, and in a hurry,’’ Nellie told me last spring. “That’s why at the beginning of a season, you feel like you can coach forever, but at the end of the season, you feel like to may never want to coach another game.’’
This year seems especially trying, especially emotional. There was his contract wrangling with ownership, and major roster-altering decisions, and another apparent threat to his job security, and his at-times underachieving team, and a controversy over Antoine Walker’s playing time, and now, the allegation from ex-friend and teammate Wayne Embry that Nellie once made a racist remark.
But really, maybe every season is like that. While in Dallas, Nellie has fired people, almost been fired himself, endured a cancer scare for Joy and one of his own, learned he has an adult daughter, you name it.
Or maybe the Embry conflict makes this one different. Maybe that’s the one that really does injury him too much to continue on.
Said Nellie: For this to happen when I'm in my final contract and my career is ending is so disappointing.’’
To me, that sounds like a Don Nelson not just entering his usual, personal, dark March Madness. It sounds like a Don Nelson that is, for the first time, concerned about his legacy. And when do most men evaluate their legacy, their careers, their places in history?
At the end.