Cheering for Monty Williams
While you, like me, are enjoying this year’s NBA playoffs, and while you, like me, are cheering for a Suns–Hawks Finals, remember what kind of man is coaching Phoenix. Just under seven years ago Sports Illustrated wrote an extensive piece about Ryan Anderson, who at the time played for the New Orleans Pelicans. The story was about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Anderson’s girlfriend, and the personal and emotional fallout afterward. Monty Williams, now coach of the Phoenix Suns, was the New Orleans coach that year. Here is how Williams, a devout Christian, responded to Anderson’s crushing shock and grief:
Pelicans coach Monty Williams hurrying in with a team security guard and finding Ryan slumped on the carpet, his back to the door, unable to rise. Williams dropping to his knees and hugging his player, the two men rocking back and forth. . . .
As a crowd milled outside the apartment complex, Williams and the security guard hoisted up Ryan, who was limp and drenched with tears and sweat, too hysterical even to walk. They dragged Ryan to the elevator and then into a waiting car, the tops of his feet, still wedged into flip-flops, scraping the asphalt so hard that his toes still bear thick white calluses more than a year later.
As they drove in silence, Williams kept thinking that it was fine if he blew a game, but he couldn't mess up now. Once home, he huddled with his wife, Ingrid, and Ryan in the family room, praying. Ingrid's brother had committed suicide recently. She knew not to say it was going to be O.K., because it wasn't. "This is going to be hard for a long time," she told Ryan.
That night, as the family pastor came and went, Ryan cried so much that it felt as if he were dry heaving or bleeding internally. Each convulsion ripped his insides apart.
Around 1 a.m., at Ingrid's urging, Monty brought one of his sons' mattresses down to the living room. There the two men lay through the night, Ryan curled on the sofa and his coach on the floor next to him. When Ryan wanted to talk, they talked. Otherwise there was only his muted sobbing. Finally, just after the sun came up, Ryan fell into a fitful sleep.
At the time, I learned of the SI piece via Deadspin, which similarly quotes this excerpt. Go read the rest here. (And read this, too, if you can stand it.) And as you’re following the conference finals, and when you notice that poised, intelligent, humane man on the Suns sidelines, send him a cheer or a prayer or good vibes or what have you. This Spurs fan is hoping he reaches the finish line.
