Doc Rivers, a former NBA Coach of the Year, didn’t win any Father of the Year awards.
Because Doc was away, playing and coaching in the NBA, while Austin Rivers grew up in Florida, went off to Duke and made it to the NBA himself.
“He doesn’t really share his life outside of basketball with me,” Austin told ESPN this week in a sobering peek inside the relationship of a father and son. “He and I don’t know each other like that. We know each other as strictly basketball.
WATCH: SEE WHAT QUESTION MADE DOC RIVERS TEAR UP, LEAVE
“A lot of people on the outside don’t understand that because people think we have a relationship like every other father and son. We just don’t. That’s because he’s been gone my whole life, and that’s fine.”
Ironically, the game that pulled them apart has put them back together again. Last year Austin was traded to his dad’s team. In a game marked by dozens of great father-son combinations, from the Waltons to the Currys to the Bryants, Austin Rivers is the first player in NBA history to play for his father.
Unfortunately for Doc and Austin Rivers, that team is the Los Angeles Clippers, the unluckiest franchise in pro sports.
The Clippers have been mired in bad luck in perpetuity, and Doc Rivers, the former Knicks guard, has been no stranger to being called on to right the ship. Whether it was the racist rants of former owner Donald Sterling or a string of untimely injuries that stretched to five years now, he has been a stabilizing force for the NBA’s most unstable franchise.
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In that respect, this spring is no different: the Clippers were hit this week with crippling injuries in the same game to their two best players, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. It’s another shot of bad luck, another obstacle to overcome, which Rivers and the Clippers are more than used to. Except this is the first playoff gut punch Rivers had to take without his mom, Bettye, who died a year ago.
Clearly, the Clippers lean on Doc Rivers. But Rivers was asked this week who he leans on. And the question brought him to tears.
“I’m not crying over being discouraged,” he said. “[the question] made me think about my mom. That would have been the person.”
Austin added: “The one person he could always really be with was his mom. That’s the toughest thing I’ve ever seen him go through; more than the Sterling stuff and even when his dad passed away. His mom was everything to him. I’ve never seen him like that.”
Amid the wreckage of what appears like another dumpster dropped on the Clippers by the basketball gods, the Rivers family ties are on full display. Here is a coach who was brought to tears because he doesn’t have his mom in his life anymore, which is ironic because it seems like, from what Austin said, he was not there for his own son to lean on during his formative years and the challenges he faced.
Although Austin said “it worked out for both of us,” maybe that’s why Doc Rivers wept. Or maybe the guy just misses his mom.
