Steve Kerr's been beating the odds his whole life

On this cool mid-March evening, Kerr's been watching his team's road game against the Seattle SuperSonics on television.

It's the 15th game since the "Big Aristotle," also known as Shaquille O'Neal, first donned a Suns uniform after the startling February 6 trade with the Miami Heat for star forward Shawn Marion and lesser talent (but highly paid) Marcus Banks.

Though it's a weekday, Half Moon Sports Grill is packed with Suns fans.

Kerr is recognizable to just about everyone in the joint, but the patrons respectfully keep their distance, allowing him to eat, sip on a beer (one), and chat quietly with two dining companions.

The team secures its sixth-straight victory in a less-than-artistic fashion, but a win is a win, and few have come easily this year.

As soon as the game ends, a chant arises from a table of young men sitting nearby: "Steve Kerr! Steve Kerr! Steve Kerr! Steve Kerr!"

Their cadence isn't that of the celebrated call-and-response between the public-address announcer and fans after Kerr scored during his college days in Tucson in the 1980s. That was more like: "Steeeeve Kerrrrrrrr."

Kerr ambles over to the table, the smile on his boyish face expressing his intentions.

"Thanks a lot, you guys," he tells them, pausing momentarily for effect.

"But I'll bet you, two weeks ago, you weren't going 'Steve Kerr, Steve Kerr,' huh? It was more like, 'What the fuck is Steve Kerr doing?'"

Everyone roars, even as one fellow looks down at his beer glass as if to say, "Yeah, you're absolutely right. I did wonder why you traded Shawn for that washed-up old man (O'Neal is 36)."

The Suns lost six of their first nine games with Shaq onboard.

Kerr, fighting a cold, walks outside toward his car. It's been a day of phone calls, meetings, a workout at the U.S. Airways Center, and, finally, talking to fans. It's a short hop from the grill to the condominium he's been leasing since Suns majority owner Robert Sarver hired him as GM last June.

"I'm quite the genius," he says in the parking lot, his tongue, as it often is, firmly in cheek. "But Houston's coming in, and they've been winning everything. I might be the idiot again real soon."

He wasn't. The Suns won that game against the Rockets, 122-113.

The Phoenix Suns are at a crossroads, trying to hold their own against the hated San Antonio Spurs in the first round of the NBA playoffs.

At press time, the Suns were about to take the court for game 2 in San Antonio, following Saturday's gut-wrenching double-overtime loss.

Whether this year's team will turn out to be something special or go down in flames in the first round is anyone's guess.

Unlike most other years, all eight teams now battling to be top dog in the Western Conference are capable of beating each other, and not just on a given night.

Phoenix finished with 55 regular season wins, six fewer than last year when the eventual champion Spurs eliminated them in the second round of the playoffs after a controversial and hotly contested series.

That Phoenix endured so much to get to this point is par for the NBA course. Few squads sail through any season without enduring a crisis of some magnitude.

Even the five championship teams on which Steve Kerr played during his 15 years in the NBA struggled on occasion, though low points were rare for the Michael Jordan-led 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, who finished with more wins (87, including playoff victories) than any team in league history.

Kerr owns one more ring than Shaquille O'Neal, and five more than Steve Nash, one of the best point guards to ever play the game. That seems proof positive that even Michael Jordan couldn't have won his six rings without an excellent supporting cast — probably.

The Suns' travails began in training camp, when four-time All-Star Shawn Marion (then the highest-paid Sun) asked publicly to be traded.

That request came after Kerr, in one of his first major decisions as the new GM, declined to extend Marion's contract for three more years and umpteen million more than the $34.2 million the Suns would have owed him if he'd stayed here through next season.

Marion, an athletic player capable of transcendent things on the court (though his playoff performances were spotty), became an instant X-factor to the franchise.

This was the high-dollar, high-profile, high-stakes world that Kerr jumped into at owner Sarver's urging after last season.

Admittedly, it was daunting for a guy who had spent his time since retiring as a player in 2003 doing weekly NBA game commentary for TNT, surfing with his college and pro teammate Jud Buechler, and hanging out with his wife, Margot, and their three children.

Kerr had earned a lasting reputation in college and in the NBA as a gutsy competitor, a loyal teammate, and an incomparable shooter. Sportswriters and fans adored him as a great quote, a funny guy, and a gentleman, win or lose.

But until he took the gig as GM, Kerr never had hired or fired anybody in his life. Then, in short order last summer, he rejected Marion's contract extension, and traded Kurt Thomas and two future draft picks to Seattle, the latter essentially for nada.

The Thomas deal still eats at Kerr, who thinks the world, personally and professionally, of the 12-year NBA veteran. But he says it had to be done for financial purposes (the Suns would have owed Thomas $16 million for this year and next, and that would have put the franchise well over the league-mandated salary cap).

What added insult to injury is that Thomas later landed in San Antonio, where he is playing an important role in the ongoing series against his old team.

But Marion's contractual issues and the Kurt Thomas trade had nowhere near the impact of the Shaq deal, one of basketball's biggest and most controversial trades in years.

Even before the swap, Kerr was sorting out what he calls "the awkwardness" of his new position — including how to finesse the changed dynamics of his relationship with top brass in the Suns front office, particularly Coach Mike D'Antoni.

Last season, D'Antoni served as both head coach and general manager after then-GM Bryan Colangelo took the same job with the Toronto Raptors.

When Kerr entered the picture, D'Antoni became a subordinate to the neophyte GM overnight, a change both men concede took time to wrap their heads around.

"We've come a long way in terms of trusting each other," Kerr says. "I've always liked the guy and his demeanor. Not a lot really gets under his skin. I admire his background — all of his travels in Italy, his perseverance — and it doesn't hurt that our political beliefs are similar."

For the record, those beliefs are liberal.

D'Antoni tells New Times, "Obviously, we have our spheres of influence and ideas, but Steve has been doing a great job of getting us as many weapons as possible to be able to be successful."

The coach laughs when asked if Kerr grills him about why or how he used a player during a given game.

"Not if he wants to live long," D'Antoni says. "That wouldn't work."

D'Antoni has been an innovative leader since his hiring as head coach in early 2004. He then led the internationally popular Suns into the NBA's elite after Steve Nash rejoined the team before the 2004-05 season. It won him an NBA Coach of the Year award after Nash's first year back.

Nash, himself winner of the league's Most Valuable Player award in back-to-back seasons, led a renaissance of run-and-gun style and substance that translated into a ton of wins.

But winning the franchise's first NBA championship, or even getting to the league Finals, has been elusive, and it didn't seem as though the dream was getting any closer as this season progressed.

Though the Suns had a stellar record of 34-15 when they traded for Shaq, the team seemed to have lost some of its feel-good vibe in and out of the locker room.

Just days before the trade, Nash, in a rare admission, told reporters, "We haven't had that same joy. We just need to shut up and play ball."

Though this team never will be confused with a juggernaut, it did become far more formidable in the last weeks of the regular season. Still, this year has seemed like one long adjustment process for the players, coaches and general manager, even now in the desperate struggle against the Spurs.