Anne Ryan-Imagn Content Services, LLC
Steve Kerr has talked about the assassination of his father at length, to so many media outlets, in a collected manner that almost makes it feel ordinary.
In ESPN’s “The Last Dance,” he allowed his emotions to show.
The Warriors coach’s voice cracked as he relived receiving the news that Malcolm Kerr had been murdered in Beirut. A family friend had called Steve at his college dorm room and told him, “Steve, I have terrible news,” Kerr relayed on the Jordan legacy piece.
Kerr scratched at his eye, lowered his chin and allowed a glimpse into his pain.
It was Kerr like The Athletic’s Marcus Thompson had never seen him.
“We’ve heard Steve talk about this before. We’ve seen interviews before. He’s always so composed. He just seems like an expert at talking about things that have depth, heart and feeling and doing it in a way that you can feel he has compassion, but he always seems to maintain his composure,” Thompson said on “Murph & Mac” on Tuesday. “I thought it was kind of incredible to see Steve Kerr get vulnerable like that and step out of the perfect … the guy who knows how to say everything, the guy who knows how to explain, the guy who always knows the right words and how to put things. To see him be wordless and emotional about his dad — I found it refreshing.
“We knew all that stuff, but we’ve never seen him like that.”
To Thompson, who texted Kerr and called him a “gangster,” it was part of what made the 10-episode series so stirring: People bared souls.
“For a guy who really doesn’t like talking about himself, for him to open up like that, I thought it was another layer of what made the documentary great,” Thompson said on KNBR. “People just opened up.”