The Fred Roberts Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
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Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
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Late in your career you played for the Los Angeles Lakers, making you one of the few people who could say that they've been teammates of both Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Tell me a little about both legendary players, and what memories stand out the most about each?
With Larry, it was his level of competitiveness and tenacity, and his singular focus. For him,
it was
all about the game for him. That's
where he found his great joy, that's
where his love was, and it was
obvious that it was all about the
game for him. That's where he felt
the most free. What a tough, strong
guy. I loved that about Larry. And
then, every now and then, you'd get
to see his sense of humor. It was
nice when that sense of humor wasn't
coming your way, but...
I remember when I played for the Jazz, and the Celtics had just lost a game to the Lakers the night before, and now the Celtics are in Utah getting ready to play us. And we're just finishing shootaround, and Larry walks up to me and says, 'Tonight, I'm going to melt the salt off the Salt Palace.' And you could just see that anger in his eyes because he'd lost to the Lakers. So he comes out and he kills us. And in the second quarter he runs past Frank Layden and says, 'Frank, don't you have anyone on this team that can guard me?' And Frank could only smile and look down the bench and say, 'Well, you see the same thing I do!' Larry loved that [laughs]. Larry had a lot of fun torturing the people that played against him.
He was a great leader. He was impressive in so many ways. Even when he was beat up and hurting he came to practice and he practiced. He always wanted to be on the top of his game and that's how he got there.
Magic Johnson – I got there at the very tail end of his career when he made that last comeback. You could just tell they were alike in so many ways. It seemed that Magic had a lot more going on off the court than Larry did, but that didn't mean he cared about the game any less. He knew that the fame he'd achieved away from basketball was directly related to what he'd done on the court, and he approached the game of basketball like a true professional. It was also his passion, and it was the thing that drove him to be the very best.
Those two guys were never distracted from their desire to excel on the court. There are a lot of guys that come into the league that are easily distracted, but not Larry and Magic. They were gifted players with the drive to be the best.
Let's talk about the job Danny Ainge has done as President of Basketball Operations for the Boston Celtics since taking charge in 2003.
Danny is as clever and as bright as anybody I've ever know. I think he's very smart. He's not afraid of taking risks – but the risks are calculated and not random. He really has a vision, and he works hard to ensure that the risks that he takes has the best chance of working out. It was like that from Day One, when he went into the Boston situation and took over as president of basketball operations. I knew that he was the perfect guy for the job, because for as long as I've known him he was always playing the personnel game in his head: What players would be best together, what coaches would be the best to take over certain situations, which systems would work best for given personnel, things like that. So when we accepted the Boston job he'd already been doing it for twenty years, he just hadn't been doing it for a living. It was very natural for him to work deals, because he always knew of ways to get what he wanted.
I remember a time when I was playing in Milwaukee, and Jack Sikma went up to Danny, who was playing for a very good Portland team at the time, and he said, 'Boy, you sure know how to land on your feet.' And Danny said, 'Hey, I paid the price, I played a season in Sacramento.' And I said, 'Danny, most players spent their entire careers playing for bad teams – you get to play with Boston, you get to play with Portland, you get to play for Phoenix, and everywhere you go you get to play for championships!' We had a good laugh about that. But that's the way Danny is. He knows how to get to the top. He's good enough, and he's smart enough, and he works very hard. He's a sharp, sharp guy.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing Ainge as he attempts to rebuild the Celtics into title contenders?
You're right, it's a big challenge for him right now. But he's got something planned. There's the Rondo situation, that's been in the news. And Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen come off the books at the end of the season. Ray Allen – good grief, there's a guy who looks like he could play another ten years. What a tremendous player he turned out to be. He's fantastic.
The one thing about Danny is that he doesn't sit back and hope that something works out. He's got something going, and he's going to find the players that will get that team back to the top. He loves the history of the Boston Celtics, and he takes a lot of pride in that team, and he takes a lot of time in putting a competitive team out there.
This team that he has this year is really special and very resilient. I've watched them play four or five times this season, and in almost every game they've come back to win. They've had to battle through injuries, the loss of players like Jeff Green to that heart problem. They don't have a lot of size or depth, and the core players like Paul Pierce, Allen and Garnett are getting older. But they still find a way. Doc Rivers is just a tremendous coach.
Looking forward, Danny has players in his brain that will make things happen. He's got a great mentality for it. He doesn't dwell on things. When I played, if I shot ten free throws and missed one, I was concerned with the shot I missed. If Danny took ten shots in a game, he was mad because he didn't shoot twenty. He just looks at things differently, and he has a short memory when it comes to misses. That's true in his current job – he's not afraid to take risks, and he's aware that some of them won't work out. But he's fearless that way. And if you hire Danny, you need to accept that there are going to be some misses along the way. Overall, he's going to succeed far more than he fails.
The Kendrick Perkins trade is an example of his fearlessness. When that trade went down I was shocked, because I thought Perkins was the heart and soul of that team, and I thought he took a lot of heat off of Garnett. But again, Danny made that trade and didn't look back. He took a lot of heat for it, but I'm sure he had his reasons. Again, you've got to be willing to live with those types of deals and trust that he knows what he's doing.
Your career ended 12 games into the 1996-97season, which meant you played in parts of 13 NBA seasons. Not bad for a second round pick. Do you realize how many players drafted ahead of you didn't last?
I did look at that – it gave me satisfaction knowing that I found a niche and I found a way to hang on and play a long time in the NBA. There were a lot of guys in my draft that just didn't make it for one reason or another, and it sort of game me satisfaction knowing that I found a way to hang on in a league with some of the greatest athletes in the world.
Do you know who Bill Garnett is?
I sure do – he was drafted fourth overall in my draft, by the Dallas Mavericks. We played in the same conference in college, but for some reason he was one of those guys in my draft class that never made it. I think part of my success was that I had a good body, I didn't get injured, and I stayed in shape. Coaches knew I could make free throws, and that I'd show up for practice. Dependability goes a long way, especially when a player can play two or three different positions and know how to run the plays. That was me.
When you were playing ball in Europe in the early 80s, could you have envisioned how global the game would become today?
That's a good question – absolutely not. I played my first year in Italy and my tenth year in Spain, and the game changed so much in those ten years. I never would have thought that those teams in Europe and throughout the world would ever be able to compete with what we have in America.
When I was in Italy, basketball was like soccer is in the States today. People follow soccer and play it over here, but the passion isn't the same as it is everywhere else on the world. But when I went back a decade later, basketball had moved up the ladder. It's a bigger game now, the coaching is much better. When I was there in the '80s, Russia and Yugoslavia were the two powers and there wasn't much after that. But now you have Spain, you have Germany, you have France. And that's just for starters. It's a different world today. Basketball is definitely a global sport.
What are you doing now?
When I finished my career I kept my house in Milwaukee because we loved the city so much. But our families lived in Utah, so we eventually made the decision to move back home. I kind of fell into education – for five years I served as a principal at a private school. That gave me a chance to transition into something that I really enjoyed, which is working children and their families. I went back to school and got my degree in education and my teaching certificate. That was in 2007, and that's when I started teaching sixth grade.
I'll tell you this – leaving the game of basketball was a very difficult transition for me. I certainly didn't think it was going to be as difficult as it was. I just loved the game of basketball, everything single thing about it. I loved the competition, I loved the camaraderie of being on a team. It was a great life to be a part of from my perspective; playing a great gym every night, getting to play against great players, the thrill of competition. So I really missed that a lot. So I was looking for something to fill that void, and that's when I found education. I think because I'm able to work with children that it gives me some of that excitement and joy of seeing success, and seeing people struggle and having success. It puts life back into my life.
If you could pass a piece of advice to others, what would that be?
Above all else, be grateful for everything that you have.
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