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When Growing Up in the Palisades
Leads to Olympic Success--and
So Much More!
By Patrick Healy
PPHS Secretary
Steve Kerr at the White House after one of the NINE championships achieved by
NBA teams on which he played or coached. Photo courtesy The White House.
Isn’t it wonderful that Pacific Palisades can claim Steve Kerr?
Of course, we do have to share him with San Francisco, Tucson, and
Beirut–among other locales!
Since Kerr moved on from his shooting guard days at Pali High, he’s won
nine NBA championships as a player and coach in other cities. But even if his
Golden State Warriors will never feel like our home team, who can’t love the
U.S. men’s basketball team which Kerr coached to the Olympic gold medal in
Paris just last month?
And let’s not limit our homage to basketball. There is so much more to
Steve Kerr, and indeed to the remarkable Kerr family.
Just days after returning from the Olympics, he found himself in Chicago,
having been invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Whether
or not you like his politics, it was hard not to like what he said about long-
cherished American values of teamwork and leadership. From his coaching
experience, he sketched out what he sees as prerequisites for being a good
leader: displaying dignity, telling the truth, having care and love for the people
you’re leading, and recognizing that none of us has all the answers—so it’s
important to listen to others. And Kerr wrapped it up with that inimitable
Stephen Curry meme: Night night!
The extraordinary circumstances of Kerr’s international upbringing, the
powerful worldview of open-minded tolerance shared by his parents Ann
Zwicker Kerr and the late Malcolm Kerr, and the devastating tragedy
Steve endured as he entered adulthood have been well documented with
greater context than possible in this brief column. All had a role in shaping
Coach Kerr, whose passion for basketball first manifested while sinking
baskets with his older brother John and their dad in the driveway of their
Palisades home. (And Malcolm was no slouch–he had played basketball for
his high school’s team.)
We learned a lot about Steve Kerr during an insightful conversation with
mother Ann, who recently celebrated her 90th birthday with generations of
family and friends--and waltzed with all of her sons--in the house with the
driveway hoop that, apart from her recurring trips and stays abroad, has been
home for more than half a century. Refreshingly unpretentious and even
mischievous, Ann describes Steve as “almost as interesting as my other kids.”
(She may have a point. Steve’s sister Susan Kerr Van de Ven wrote a
powerful book, One Family's Response to Terrorism. She now lives in England
and is deeply involved in politics there. John is a Michigan State professor
whose research work has focused on international agricultural development.
The youngest, Andrew, is CEO of a construction company in Washington, D.C.
Ann now has eight grandkids to cherish, and three great-grands).
In Steve's generation, all of the Kerrs but Andrew were born in Beirut,
Lebanon, where Ann had first lived during a junior year of study abroad at the
American University. There she also met her future husband. In 1962, when
Malcolm accepted a UCLA faculty appointment, the growing family moved to
the Palisades. During the next two decades their interest and work in Lebanon,
Egypt, and the greater Middle East brought them back on a regular basis. They
were not deterred by Lebanon’s Civil War. But in 1984, just two years after
becoming President of the American University of Beirut, and in the hallway
outside his office, Malcolm Kerr was assassinated by gunmen.
This was only a few months after son Steve had begun his collegiate
education and basketball career at the University of Arizona. Early
on, inevitably, there were some rocky moments. But suffice it to say, Steve dug
deep and found the strength to move forward. With a gift for understatement,
his mother recalls: “He was very quiet. He really blossomed with basketball.”
Steve offered an appreciation for what he learned from his parents in public
remarks that sports journalist Bill Dwyre quoted:
“My parents literally showed me a whole world that existed beyond typical
American culture. They gave me an education in understanding people, in
being compassionate and respectful. They taught me that people may speak or
dress differently, or have customs or beliefs foreign to me. It was important to
not only understand those differences, but to embrace them as well.”
It’s worth noting that when his alma mater called Steve back to the Tucson
campus in May to receive an honorary doctorate degree, the University
presented the same honor to Ann, in recognition of a lifetime of work for relief
and peace in the Middle East As board member emerita of the American
University of Beirut, she travels there every year for the annual meeting. At
UCLA, she still coordinates the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Enrichment program.
But of all we learned from Ann about her son the coach, perhaps most
telling about his character was hearing Ann's cellphone ring during our
conversation with her–it was Steve, just checking in on a Saturday morning to
see how Mom was doing.
Ann Kerr and son Steve at the University of Arizona this past May, when both
received honorary doctorate degrees in recognition of their exemplary lifetime
accomplishments. Photo courtesy Arizona Athletics.
Of course, for all his uniqueness, Steve Kerr is but one of many U.S.
Olympic standouts over the years with a Palisades pedigree.
In fact, Kerr tapped another Pali High basketball alum, Chip Engelland from
the class of 1979, to assist with the coaching of those gold medal Olympians.
During Kerr’s NBC playing days, as resident Palisades sports expert Sam
Laganà recalls, player development coach Engelland helped Kerr improve his
own game.
And while they were busy in the Paris basketball venues, another Pali High
grad, 24 year old fencer Nick Itkin, was winning his second straight bronze
medal in Men’s Individual Foil. An even more recent Pali alum (and 2020
Valedictorian!) was on the sand courts in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. This
would be Miles Partain, 22, who grew up playing beach volleyball at Will
Rogers Beach when not on the skinny turf court at the family home. Partain
and partner Andy Banesh (from a few miles down the coast in Palos Verdes)
made it to the quarterfinals in Paris, returning home already mapping out the
work and training it will take to earn the right again to represent the USA in the
2028 Olympics, when Santa Monica’s sand will host beach volleyball.
Talk about a home court advantage!
In 2028, there will also be an Olympic event actually within Pacific Palisades
—golf, to be played at the century-old Riviera Country Club, host of a PGA
tournament every February.
Indeed, the Palisades has a rich tradition of Olympic involvement, in no sport
more so than volleyball. In fact, four Pali High Dolphin alums have won
volleyball gold: Steve Salmons (1984), David Saunders (1984 and 1988), Ricci
Luyties in 1988 and Kent Steffes in 1996 (the Olympic inaugural of beach
volleyball). Chris Marlowe missed team USA’s 1984 gold by a whisker–on the
national team, he was the last player cut from the roster before the games.
And speaking of dolphins, in swimming—decades before Pali High was
built—the legendary Johnny Weissmuller brought home five gold medals in
1924 and 1928, catching the eye of impressed movie-makers who cast him as
“Tarzan” in a dozen films that, if nothing else, at least showcased his
athleticism. Weissmuller lived for many years in on Latimer Road in Rustic
Canyon, and often swam at the Uplifters Clubhouse pool.
The last time the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles, in 1984, the
Palisades did not get to host any events. But during L.A.'s first Olympics in
1932, only a decade after Pacific Palisades was founded, an enormous crowd
turned out alongside the coast highway in Castellammare for the finish of the
men’s 100km cycling road race that had begun in Moorpark. Looming beyond
the spectators and visible in photos was the coastal landmark known as Castle
Rock—just 13 years before its dynamited demise made room for widening the
highway.
PPHS and Pacific Palisades–We have history together, sometimes of
Olympian proportions! And we share it.
That's Castle Rock at the top, between the highway and the boulders in the surf
below. This photo of the 1932 road race home stretch through Castellammare
was taken from the then-new pedestrian bridge that remains to this day. Photo
courtesy Elliott Welsh.
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or you can write us at
Pacific Palisades Historical Society
P.O. Box 1299
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
Membership dues and contributions enable PPHS to continue community
outreach through our website and emails, present free community programs,
provide historic photos, record oral histories, award a scholarship to a PaliHigh
graduate, and archive and research our community history. Our volunteers
appreciate your support!
Independence Day, 2014, when Steve Kerr served as grand marshal of the
Palisades Fourth of July Parade.
Here he's flanked by former honorary mayors Jake Steinfeld ("Body by Jake")
and actor/director/producer Steve Guttenberg. Rich Schmitt Photo
Copyright © 2024 Pacific Palisades Historical Society, All rights reserved.
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