Losing Flip Saunders: A Fan's Perspective

 

For various boring reasons, it has been many years since I have actually posted a blog. My writing is rather rusty, and my grammar may not be up to par, but the loss of Flip Saunders was something that I felt compelled to blog about, so here goes…

 

It felt like a punch in the gut. I had avoided the internet all day since I was watching football later on my Tivo, so I was feeling fairly chipper about the Vikings comeback win in Detroit on October 25, 2015, when I picked up my phone to read the alerts I had missed during my self-imposed media blackout. “Timberwolves Coach Flip Saunders dead at 60” and numerous variations of the same message appeared as notifications from all of my sports and news apps. I felt sick inside. The signs had all been there for awhile, if I’d wanted to read them: Sam Mitchell being named interim coach for a few months and then for the whole season, before that season even started; Glen Taylor saying he was in touch with the family every day (but not Flip), then saying that it was really serious; Flip’s close friend/Michigan St. men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo getting emotional after talking about Saunders during Big Ten Media Day, saying he hadn’t talked to him in nearly 2 months, but he had talked to his family; Star Tribune writer Jerry Zgoda’s web chat citing sources saying that this was possibly a life threatening situation. I should’ve seen this coming, but I didn’t, or at least I didn’t want to, and I was not alone.

 

Flip was 60, which of course, isn’t that old, with the energy of a 20-year-old, seemingly in the shape of a 30-year-old, aside from this “treatable and curable” Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis that he was given in June 2015, which we found out about two months later in August. Flip had just lost his 93-year-old dad Walter Saunders in May (the man who continued to wear Timberwolves clothing even as his son sent him gear from the Pistons and then the Wizards); it couldn’t be Flip’s turn to go already. Flip had come back in 2013 to rescue his former franchise, the Minnesota Timberwolves, in his adopted home state, and had a huge impact in just 2 years, on player personnel, practice facilities, work culture and fan excitement, making his mark in every facet of the organization as the Head Coach/President of Basketball Operations/Partial Owner. There was no way he could be gone this fast, before getting to see his plans come to fruition. But it was written there in black and white, over and over and over; CNN, ESPN, AP News, Yahoo Sports, Score, USA Today, etc. I opened Twitter and immediately saw messages and thoughts from all over the world of basketball, and all throughout Minnesota. As hard as it was to believe, and as much as I didn’t want to believe, it was true.

 

Like most Minnesotans, I didn’t actually know Flip Saunders. I had “met” him once 16 or 17 years ago while I was working at the Ridgedale/Minnetonka Best Buy, when he asked me to help him find a DVD. I wished his team good luck, and he graciously thanked me. That was it. But like most Minnesotans, I loved Flip Saunders. How can we have strong feelings about someone we don’t even know? While I am no expert, I have taken a number of psychology classes, and have read countless behavioral articles over the years, which have taught me, well…nothing. It seems as if there are more theories to explain this than there are stars in the sky, but there is no logical reason for us to feel an attachment to a person we have never truly interacted with, and have only watched from our couches or bleachers, but logic has nothing to do with it. Perhaps it is because sports give us something to be passionate about without having many “real world” implications. With passion and emotion comes a form of attachment, which is manifested in our love of players (and for those of us too young to have seen him play, our love of a coach). But really, what does it matter why we feel this way? We just do. It might not be logical, but I know I am not the only Minnesota sports fan who feels genuine sadness about the loss of someone that had no direct involvement in my life. Flip was “our” guy. He might not have been from Minnesota, yet he was a quintessential Minnesotan: loyal, kind, hard-working, generous, friendly, humble, and of course [Minnesota] nice. He had been a Minnesotan by choice since he was 18-years-old, even after his then close friend and former Minnesota Gophers teammate Kevin McHale fired him just months after Flip took the Timberwolves to their first (and still only) Western Conference Finals. He could’ve moved elsewhere as he held jobs in Detroit, Washington & Bristol, Connecticut, but he chose to keep his family base in his adopted home state, telling his ESPN colleagues who wondered why he stayed in the state so long after he had been fired by the Timberwolves “Well, you don’t really understand unless you’re from Minnesota.You don’t really get it. Even when it snows on May 3 you don’t really get it.And the loyalty and the passion that the people have here is what always drives me back.” We finally got him back here to save our basketball team from the destruction that began the year he left with the sour attitudes and unhappy contract situations of certain players, and the even more hopeless scenario that developed during the dubious tenure of David Kahn. As Star Tribune columnist Patrick Reusse wrote last week, Flip was “our point guard.”

 

Perhaps I am wrong, but I got the sense that the majority of Minnesota Timberwolves fans also trusted Flip Saunders to resurrect our team. We may have questioned drafting a controversial player like Shabazz Muhammad, but we trusted Flip’s judgment, maybe because he didn’t just give the party line about Shabazz being the player they wanted all along – he admitted that he had his own doubts about the former high school superstar who by this time was best known for his selfish style of play at UCLA and lying about his age. Unlike the “throwing darts at the wall” type of personnel management of the David Kahn era (Jonny Flynn over Steph Curry? Ugh…), Flip seemed to have a plan, and we believe in Flip, and believe that Flip knows what he is doing, and that Flip cares. Then when Flip managed to turn a disgruntled Kevin Love into 2014 #1 overall pick Andrew Wiggins, we felt like the tide was turning. He later convinced Timberwolves legend and future NBA Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett to waive his no-trade clause and come back to the team where he grew up, to be a mentor to the young players, and a role model who has won it all, and knows what it takes to be a champion. (After all, “Anything is possibbbbbbllllllleeeee!!!!”).

 

When Minnesota finally won the NBA Draft Lottery this year for the first time in franchise history, despite being in position to win countless times in the past (while never so much as even moving up one spot), it seemed like the curse was lifted. As he drafted Karl-Anthony Towns #1, a player with seemingly unlimited upside whose interviews showed the maturity of someone twice his age, and then negotiated a trade to bring hometown star Tyus Jones back to a Minnesota team after one year in Durham, NC, running the Duke Blue Devils offense and being named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four in their successful championship run, it truly seemed like things were going our way. Perhaps Target Center wasn’t built on Indian burial grounds after all, as many fans have jokingly suggested (and perhaps some conspiracy theorists thought was actually true), looking for some explanation for the continual absence of any good luck, and an all too steady stream of bad luck that seemed to follow the team. When we found out that Flip was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, it just seemed like a minor speed bump, as doctors described it as a very treatable and very curable cancer. Plus he had already been getting treatments at Mayo Clinic for nearly 2 months, all while continuing to run the team without any noticeable difficulty. A cancer with a 5 year survival rate of 85-95% (per various articles posted in the past 9 days) was certainly not going to take out a guy like Flip Saunders just months after his diagnosis, especially not now, after the Murphy’s Law scenarios that perpetually dragged down the Wolves had finally been defeated. We had heard Flip tell the media during spring that the fact that Kevin Garnett had not done everything possible to try to play in the last couple games on the schedule, was a good sign that KG was planning to return for his 21^st season. We never imagined that Flip would be the one that we would never again see on the Timberwolves bench.

 

Yet here we are, just 2 months after learning of this very beatable cancer battle that Flip was fighting, and he is already gone. It just doesn’t seem fair to Minnesota sports fans. And more importantly, it doesn’t seem fair to his family and his friends…and Flip’s “friends” list seemed to include anyone who was able to spend any significant time with him, as everyone who knew him, loved him. The tributes all over social and traditional media show just how much Flip had positively impacted everyone that was a part of his life for any length of time. I wish we had been able to hear so many of these stories about him before he passed away. I never knew he did magic tricks, or loved watching infomercials and home shopping networks, calling his friends in the middle of the night to talk about what new gadget he had just ordered. I knew he liked to do nice things for people, but I never knew the extent of it until all the stories started rolling in over the last 9 days: Timberwolves head coach (the second time around) Flip Saunders giving a little Twolves bib to Twin Cities AP journalist Jon Krawczynski for his newborn daughter, Timberwolves President/partial owner Flip Saunders buying Girl Scout Cookies for fans outside Target Center after a game, Timberwolves Head Coach (the first time around) Flip Saunders getting a magic tricks coloring book for the young children of his then player Sam Mitchell, 24-year-old Golden Valley Lutheran College Men’s Basketball Head Coach Flip Saunders going to shoot hoops at the playground with kids in his Bloomington, MN neighborhood after they relentlessly tried to make him notice them “shooting” a basketball at a light post outside his house (as told in separate stories by those former kids Mike McCollow, a basketball coach who was once an assistant on Sam Mitchell’s Toronto Raptors team, and Steve Rushin, a long time sports writer). I know how much it means to me when people do something “little” for me that they didn’t have to do and I tend to remember those things, even as other memories fade away. It sounds like Flip tried to do that for as many people as he possibly could, which merely reaffirms that he was the special person described by all those who were close to him.

 

As fans, we obviously can’t mourn for him in the same way as people who truly knew him, but that does not mean that we don’t have the right to feel sadness about losing him, or to already miss his impact on our lives as followers of Minnesota sports. Only time will tell if his dreams for this team will come true without him here to guide them, and we’ll never know how things would’ve turned out with him at the helm. Those are the types of “what if?” questions that life never answers for us. What we do know, however, is that having Flip back in our lives, even if it was only through a TV or from an arena seat, made us believe that perhaps this franchise is not destined to fall apart at the seams anytime a small thread is loose. Flip believed that things were moving in the right direction, and we believed in Flip, giving us a hope that Timberwolves fans have not experienced since, well, the last time Flip was working in Minnesota. Rest in Peace Flip Saunders. Even those of us who were not lucky enough to truly know you, will miss having you in our lives.