From Idol to Friend: Remembering Flip Saunders and His Last Great Assist

Last Sunday Flip Saunders, the head coach of the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves, died from complications related to Hodgkin lymphoma. Saunders, who was just 60 years old, had been a hoops icon in the Land of 10,000 Lakes for two-thirds of his life, tracing all the way back to his college years as a point guard for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers.

Mike McCollow is a Minneapolis-based basketball coach who was close to Saunders for many years. McCollow, 49, spoke to Newsweek about Saunders's effect on basketball in his adopted state (Saunders grew up in suburban Cleveland, where he was the state's Player of the Year as a high school senior, averaging 32 points per game) and on a friendship that endured for decades.

When did Flip Saunders first come to your attention?
My dad had season tickets for the Golden Gophers when we were growing up. In 1977, Minnesota had its best team ever. They were on probation so they didn't make the NCAA tournament, but the Gophers went 24-3.

Anyone who lives in Minnesota and loves basketball can tell you that starting lineup: Mychal Thompson, who would be the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft [and is the father of Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors]; Ray Williams, who played more than 10 years in the NBA; Kevin McHale, a Hall of Famer and one of the NBA's top power forwards ever; Osborne Lockhart, who would go on to play 12 or so years with the Harlem Globetrotters; and Flip.

And the Twin Cities were in love with that team?
It was more than their success. The coach had been Bill Musselman, and he was light years ahead of his peers in terms of understanding how to attract fans. The team would run out and do a pregame warmup routine that was choreographed like something from the Globetrotters: guys spinning balls on their fingers, juggling, you name it. Musselman put one guy, a drummer in the pep band, on the team primarily because he knew how to ride a unicycle and could juggle.

It was a circus. Fans would show up an hour before tip-off just to make sure they didn't miss pre-game. Musselman, he demanded perfection: He actually ran game films of the pre-game if someone messed up. And Flip, being the point guard, he was the ringmaster.

[Saunders once said, "When you went up on the floor, you were more worried about the pregame than you were about playing Indiana."]

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.

How did your relationship mature?
Flip would run summer basketball camps. In the beginning I was a camper. Then I became the guy who'd run the concession stand or sell t-shirts. As I got older, I became one of the counselors.

Flip and Kevin McHale were close friends, and Kevin's career was taking off with those great Boston Celtics teams of the 1980s. Kevin ran a camp on Cape Cod and invited Flip to be the director and for me to help run it. It was only a day camp, and these were wealthy kids from Boston who couldn't play dead. NBA stars would show up—Doc Rivers, Charles Barkley, Bill Walton. They used to call me 'Mini-Flip,' as if I were his clone.

Those were some of the best days of my life. All of our friends in coaching and basketball, we all worked the camp. And when I say 'worked,' McHale paid for everything: lobster, golf, our travel. And the coaches were just as focused, to be honest, on their afternoon tee times. You'd see counselors running drills in their golf spikes at one o'clock, or practicing their back swing.

What stood out about Flip back then?
He loved basketball and he was a lot of fun. The two of us would come up with basketball obstacle courses or skills decathlons to make camp more fun. Anything that combined basketball skills with some sort of race or competition, we had our campers do that. The same sort of stuff you now see on All-Star Saturday in the NBA.

The other thing about Flip? He never slept much, all the time I knew him. He'd stay up late and watch infomercials and buy all sorts of junk. When we were at camp you'd get a call at 1 a.m. and he'd say, "I just had a few ideas for drills tomorrow, come on up," and you knew that all you were going to do was watch Porky's for the 34th time, but you didn't care because Flip would mix in some basketball knowledge, too.

[McCollow was an assistant coach for Saunders with some of his CBA teams—Saunders won a pair of CBA championships as coach of the La Crosse Catbirds. McCollow then moved on to coaching positions at Oklahoma State and North Texas, and as a head coach in Poland in the European League. By the time he returned home to Minneapolis, Saunders was head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, having replaced his college coach, Bill Musselman.]

Flip's associate head coach, Sam Mitchell, is now the Timberwolves' interim coach. You two have a close relationship as well, no?
Flip's first stint coaching the Timberwolves was from 1995 to 2005. You may remember that there was an NBA lockout in 1999. One day I'm shooting baskets at a gym and I notice Sam Mitchell, who played on those Wolves teams.

Now you have to understand, Sam Mitchell is a remarkable story. He had been one of the oldest rookies ever (26 years old), and he likes to tell people that the first NBA contract he'd signed was on a piece of paper that he was pressing against Bill Musselman's back. Anyway, by 1999 he had established himself in the NBA and was a local favorite. But as I watched him, I saw that he could not even dribble with his left land. I have never lacked for confidence, which is both a strength and a flaw. So I approached Sam and told him that I thought I could help him fix a few weaknesses in his game.

And what did Sam Mitchell say?
I'm sure he was wondering who this 5-foot-9 white guy thinks he is. But he was polite about it. After a few more times seeing him around, I kept bugging him and he let me work with him. I didn't want to be paid; I just wanted to fix some of Sam's flaws. Before long Sam was calling teammates and telling them to join him for the workouts: Terry Porter, Tom Gugliotta, Billy Curley. They became my 'campers,' too.

[After Mitchell worked out with McCollow, he signed a $2 million contract with the Wolves and then sent McCollow what he calls "the largest check I have ever received." Mitchell also promised McCollow that if he ever became an NBA head coach he would put McCollow on his staff, a pledge that he kept upon becoming coach of the Toronto Raptors in 2004. McCollow is not currently coaching in the NBA, but was the TV studio analyst for four years for the Timberwolves and two years for Milwaukee Bucks, and he has been a personal coach of many top Minnesota-born professionals and college players, including current NBA players Jon Leuer and Cole Aldrich.]

When did you last speak to Flip?
He called me a year and a half ago during the NBA All-Star Weekend. It was on Saturday, as the different skills competitions were airing on TV. "Mike, can you believe this?" he asked me. "All of those drills we used to make our campers do, the NBA is devoting an entire night to it. We should've copyrighted this a long time ago."

I owe so much to Flip, in and out of basketball. There are feelings of sadness and guilt, the latter because I never really got to say goodbye. Or to thank him. I'll be at the funeral service this weekend.

But there's a sort of symmetry here with Sam now taking over for Flip as the Timberwolves' coach. Like Flip, Sam wasn't originally from Minnesota, but this is where he forged a basketball career. Sam came up the hard way, too, through the CBA, but as a player, not as a coach. And now Sam has the duty of finishing the job that Flip started when he returned here last year as the head coach.

Flip was always a point guard at heart. Sam getting this opportunity, it feels like it was Flip's last great assist. I'll miss him dearly.