Some great stories on Flip in this Q&A by Newsweek:
But at this point you had not met Flip. How did that come about?
Flip was an outstanding, albeit undersized, shooter. Being an undersized basketball junkie myself, I idolized him. He got a free agent tryout with his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers, and he used to like to tell people that he was the last guy that [Cavs coach] Bill Fitch cut.
I grew up in Bloomington, [Minnesota,] and I was the kind of kid who dribbled a basketball to and from school. One day, it must have been in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, I’m riding my bike along 98½ Street, and I happen by this house and there’s a guy out front washing his car. I do a double-take. Wait a minute, that’s Flip Saunders!
So you approached him?
No. You have to remember, we idolized him. Flip had just gotten the head coaching job at a local junior college, Golden Valley Lutheran College. That’s why I figured it might have been him. But I wasn’t sure.
So my best friend, Steve Rushin [now a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, who has written a very funny version of this event] hatched a plan. Steve ran up to his mailbox and went through his mail to look for the name on the address. The only problem was that Steve looked at the return address and it said ‘Joe Lipschitz’ or something like that. Steve ran back to me and said, ‘You’re crazy. That’s not him.’” But I knew that it was.
There was a light pole out in front of Flip’s house. So we made an ‘X’ on it with black tape about 10 feet up, where a basket would be. And we just kept shooting at our homemade ‘basket’ for hours on end. Finally, Flip’s wife, Debbie, must have realized that we were trying to smoke him out. “Flip,” she said, “I think these two boys know who you are.”
And from there?
It was such a different time. Flip invited me to go shoot baskets with him at a local playground and of course my parents and I thought nothing of it that I’d be getting in a car with an adult they’d never met. I had my boom box and Flip liked that I had my Earth, Wind & Fire cassette ready to go.
But we also both were basketball junkies. He saw that in me right away, and he was incredibly accommodating to both me and Steve. We’d play basketball in his backyard. We even created a two-on-two tournament.
In our senior year of high school, Steve and I started on a team that advanced to the state semi-finals. There we were playing in the same arena where Flip had played in college and he was in the stands watching us. Flip wrote me a note after that to tell me how proud of me he was. I still have that note.
http://www.newsweek.com/remembering-timberwolves-coach-flip-saunders-388388
Go Gophers!!
