Sloan hits coaching milestone

The Utah Jazz hung on for a 93-91 win over the Los Angeles Clippers Tuesday night in the Delta Center, a nice enough present for Jerry Sloan, who with that win became the 10th man in NBA history to have coached 1,500 regular-season games.

Chances are, then, that the game will be filed away nowhere in Sloan's memory.

"Fifteen hundred? Have I been around that long?" said Sloan. "It goes so fast you don't have time to think a great deal about it.

"I remember the losses," he said.

They are the teachers, the things that make men better.

That's not to say Tuesday's win before the Jazz left on their traditional five-game pre-Christmas road trip wasn't important to the coach. It was. "I hope I haven't been to a game thinking it didn't matter or wasn't important to win."

He has never had a losing season at the Jazz helm, sent them to 15 playoff trips and won 50 or more games 10 times.

"I'm not in it just to try to tread water," said the longest-tenured coach in any major professional North American sport (17 years with Utah), who recalls few of his 927 wins but many of the other 573.

"I remember losses, and I remember getting beat when I played. The things that hurt you," Sloan, 62, said.

He doesn't remember coaching for the first time with the Chicago Bulls in April 1979. He does remember going to the first exhibition game that he coached. "We went to Salina, Kansas, and the plane almost, I thought it was going to get blown off the runway trying to land," said Sloan, adding that's all he can recall.

Ironically, he brought that up one day after the 27-year anniversary of the crash of the University of Evansville basketball team's plane that came five days after Sloan had quit as the Aces' coach. That Dec. 13, 1977, disaster for his alma mater still affects him every time he boards a plane.

Sloan went to college hoping to become a high school coach, majoring in physical education. As he was starting his sophomore year, anticipating playing his first games, "My college coach came to me and told me, 'When I retire, I want you to come back and take my coaching job.'

"I was shocked by that comment, but you know, that's what happened," said Sloan.