Steve Kerr's been beating the odds his whole life

Kerr fell in love with sports as a kid, and his father encouraged him. Having an older brother with whom to shoot hoops and toss a baseball around was cool, but Kerr himself wasn't.

"One of his greatest achievements in life was to overcome his temper," says his mother.

That would come as a revelation to the millions who watched the level-headed Kerr play at Arizona and then in the NBA.

Though Steve was a born jock, the Kerrs placed a far higher premium on academics than on learning the nuances of a pick-and-roll.

"We have many dimensions to the family," Ann Kerr says drolly, "and this sports thing is only one piece. All of my children are doing well, some of them more in the tradition of the family."

She means that two of her children earned doctoral degrees, one from Harvard and one from Stanford, and the other was on staff at the National Security Council before starting a home-rebuilding business. Steve earned his bachelor's degree from Arizona in 1988.

He spent most of his high school years in Los Angeles' affluent Pacific Palisades, where he pitched on his baseball team and played basketball.

He says plainly that he never was the best player on his hoops team, but never tired of working on the one thing he had going for him — a sweet jump shot.

Still, top-flight college ball seemed a long shot (pun intended) as his senior year ended.

Kerr got precious few nibbles from college coaches, and ended up at Arizona as a last-minute choice for new coach Lute Olson, who needed bodies. Even a 160-pound body with the face of a 15-year-old.

The year before Kerr enrolled at Arizona, the basketball team had won just four games overall.

Olson's first team, in 1983-84, wasn't remotely as talented as those just around the bend. "If I had come along even two or three years later, I wouldn't even have gotten a sniff," Kerr suggests. The team was scrappy enough to cobble out 11 wins.

Kerr lived in the Babcock dormitory during his freshman year, and his father visited during that first semester. Before Malcolm Kerr returned to Beirut, his son promised to send him game tapes once the season started.

Steve Kerr saw his father for the last time on that visit.

After the murder in January 1984, Kerr relied heavily on coaches and teammates for support, as his mother and siblings were living thousands of miles away.

"To this day, my teammates are still my best friends," he says. "Coach [Olson] and [the coach's late wife] Bobbie and everyone else down there, I never will forget any of them for what they did and who they are."

Kerr and the rest of the team improved tremendously over the next two seasons. In the summer of 1986, after his junior year, Olson chose Kerr and All-American teammate Sean Elliott to play in the World Championships against all international comers.

The tournament was in Madrid, and Kerr more than held his own against the most physical teams he'd ever played against.

But near the end of the semifinal game against the Soviet Union, in which Kerr scored 14 points, he blew out his right knee and crumpled to the floor.

He underwent 16 months of rehabilitation before suiting up again in the fall of 1988 for his red-shirt season.

"It's interesting how things happen for the right reason," Olson says. "If Steve hadn't been injured and played that next year, he probably wouldn't have gotten more than a sniff in the NBA because he still was pretty scrawny."

Never one to be warm and fuzzy in public, the 73-year-old Olson is openly fond of Kerr.

"[One year] the reporters were doing the end-of-the-year story about New Year's resolutions," he recalls, "and they asked Steve what he had in mind. He said there was only one thing. He was hoping to keep Coach off the cocaine next year. I read it in the paper, and it made me laugh. But he was the only, and I mean only, player I've ever had who could have gotten away with [that]. Make that the only one in the world who would have tried."

The 1988-89 Wildcats made it to the Final Four, where Kerr had what he still calls "the worst game of my life" in a semifinal loss to Oklahoma. It haunts him.

"It comes up in my mind at the weirdest times," he says. "No one will ever make me believe that I didn't cost our team the national championship that night."

What stuck with journalists more than the 11 missed shots was how Kerr, though crushed, sat by his locker for far longer than he had to after the game, answering every question.

Though he'd made second-team All-American in his senior season, Kerr wondered if he'd even get a chance to pursue his dream, which was to play in the National Basketball Association.

Then in June 1988, the Phoenix Suns drafted him late in the second round, 50th overall, which Olson says may have been as much a courtesy pick by Jerry Colangelo as anything else.