Steve Kerr's been beating the odds his whole life

"He'll feed his kids pancakes, work on his laptop, field a call about trading for Shaq, or something. He's such a devoted father, family man, husband. When people say the trade might cost him his job and he says, 'Good,' he really means it. If it doesn't turn out like he had hoped, he'll move along."

Just one day after the Shaq trade was announced, Kerr sneaked away for an afternoon flight back to San Diego. He made it to Nick's freshman basketball game by 5 p.m., ate dinner with the family, slept in his own bed, then returned to Phoenix the next morning to face the music, much of which wasn't easy listening.

The mood around town and nationally, at that point, was incredulous.

One sports blogger stated, "If Steve Kerr is front and center with this deal, the Suns should send him packing and looking for work next year."

Kerr says he was the last person in the Suns' decision-making chain to sign off on the trade (Sarver and Coach D'Antoni embraced it first).

But he has learned during 42 years of an extraordinary life that the windows of sporting opportunity can shut abruptly — a blown-out knee, a lousy trade, or even just plain bad luck.

So, like the protagonist in the Robert Frost poem, Kerr took the road less traveled and sanctioned one of the biggest basketball trades in years.

So all those championship teams Kerr played on in Chicago and San Antonio don't mean a thing right now to a community with serious expectations for the Suns.

"The only way I win in this is if we win," he told New Times shortly after the trade, one of many conversations over the course of several months.

"We made the decision to do this, and I'm the guy whose name is on the line. It might become, 'Bring me the head of Steve Kerr,' but that's okay. I know what Shaq can bring to the court and to a team. And, besides all that, I just don't want to do things like everyone else does them."

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After Kerr sealed the Shaq deal on February 6, sportswriters and basketball fans wondered very loudly whether he'd taken leave of his senses.

"Idiot" was one of the kinder nouns used to describe a guy who has exemplified what the original (and smaller) Aristotle wrote a few thousand years ago: "Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit."

On the Yahoo! Sports Web site — for which Kerr had written a regular column before his new Suns gig — bloggers debated the post-Shaq trade question in a forum titled: "Is Steve Kerr an Idiot?"

The consensus? He was.

Sportswriters here and around the nation ran down a similar path.

In a New York Post piece headlined "Suns Burned by Shaq Deal," columnist Peter Vecsey wrote, "I can't help but think we've seen this movie: Weekend at Bernie's."

You'll remember that Bernie was the dead guy.

"Getting Shaq back in the West to reinvent the dysfunctional Suns makes great theater," concluded the Los Angeles Daily News, "but nothing else. Shaq is done."

Another blogger wrote an item titled "Hubris, The Big Aristotle and the Phoenix Suns," in which the scribe compared Kerr's actions in trading for Shaq to the Greek tragic flaw of excessive pride or arrogance.

The day after the trade was officially announced, Kerr told New Times, "This is going to be interesting. If we hadn't done anything and lost, the questions would be, 'Why didn't you do anything?' You've got to make a move sometimes. We know we're taking a risk, a big risk, and a risk is a risk."

Kerr stopped to laugh at himself: "Jeez, Steve! How many times can you say 'risk' in the same sentence?"

He went on: "I don't blame anyone for wondering what's up. But we have to believe that we as a team can do this, even though there are so many intangibles — especially that one big intangible. The guys really do like each other on this team, and that matters. We're going to try to figure it out, what we are as a team, and that doesn't happen overnight."

That was just before the improved Philadelphia 76ers upset the Suns in Phoenix on March 1 — at the time, the fourth loss in Shaq's six games here.

Then, the venom directed at Kerr took a cruel and frightening turn. The Suns received e-mails that night from two addresses. Both were death threats against the new GM.

One of the addresses was dead@beirut.com, and the name of the sender was listed as "Your Father."

Kerr provided the e-mails to New Times, but asked that some of the more vile language be kept private so that his family wouldn't be upset.

The first missive said in part: "You screwed up the Suns by giving away Kurt Thomas, James Jones, Shawn Marion, and drafting Alando Tucker."

That was fine.

But it concluded, "One last thing. PLO, PLO, ASU had it right."

The second e-mail contained much the same vitriol.