Over a four-month period, Joe Kleine went from playing for the Portland Trailblazers to coaching Christ the King's sixth-grade parochial league team.
That was one of the life transitions he related to members of the Arkansas Sports Club on Monday at Ryan's.
Kleine, 46, was a two-time all-Southwest Conference selection for the Arkansas Razorbacks in 1984 and '85. He played for the gold-medal U.S. Olympic team in 1984 and was the No. 6 pick in the '85 NBA draft. Over the next 15 seasons, he played for seven NBA teams and was a member of the NBA World Champion Chicago Bulls team in 1998.
He's set to start his second season as an assistant coach for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Trojans.
Kleine was apparently a little too intense for those Catholic sixth-graders.
"I've got kids running up and down the floor crying," he remembered. "Being as smart as I am, I figured I was going to worry about a lot of things their religion, respect for other people, their education, of course but basketball's got to be their thing.
"You can't teach drive or competitiveness."
Kleine is 6-foot-11, but he said his own major attribute was intensity and drive.
"Even if God hadn't blessed me at 6-11, even if I was 6-2, I think I would've played basketball for a long time because I had that drive," he said. "(The Celtics' Leon) Powe has it just watch him play; he loves it. His work ethic is unmatched. Those things you can't teach they have to come from inside."
The principle is true even in his own family. His older daughter, Courtney, is 6-1 and starred during her younger grades, but she decided at Mount St. Mary that she didn't want to play anymore.
"You could tell she didn't have it," he said. "After they'd lose, she get in the car and want to know where we were going to eat. Now my other daughter, Mallory, is in seventh grade, and she won't talk to anybody for two days after a loss. She's got that drive."
Kleine's drive came from his growing-up years in Slater, Mo., a small farming community 90 miles east of Kansas City. He graduated with a class of 55. He spent a lot of time as a youth working on a farm.
"That really helped," he said. "If you've hauled hay, that's work, Jack. Going for a two-mile jog and playing basketball for three hours after hauling hay for 10 hours the day before didn't seem too bad to me. I got a nickel a bale.
"Working on the farm really helped my work ethic. And I loved basketball. I played it everyday. I can't remember not playing basketball."
College recruiters came calling, although he didn't play AAU basketball until his senior year. He narrowed his choices to Arkansas, Notre Dame, Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky and Wisconsin. He came from a devout Catholic family, and Notre Dame was the family choice. When recruiters from the other schools came in, the family joined them for ham sandwiches. Not so with the Fighting Irish.
"First thing, we don't eat at my house we go to Grandma's," he said. "I came in and Digger (Phelps, the Notre Dame coach) was sitting in Grandpa's chair. Nobody sits in Grandpa's chair.
"I have uncles and aunts there I hadn't seen in three years."
He remembered that his father told him to make his own choice but to do it quickly. Kleine said he kiddingly told his dad he wanted to go to Arkansas and announce it the next day, and his father urged him to think about it further.
He settled on Notre Dame and said he loved the school and the campus but quickly realized the basketball wasn't for him.
"I knew halfway through the season I wanted to be at Arkansas with coach (Eddie) Sutton," he said. "Arkansas had a lot of small-town kids, and I thought it was for me. I was right."
He called Sutton "the best coach I ever played for" and said he would never have come to Arkansas or played in the NBA had it not been for him.
"He pushed me," he said. "I came back from the Olympics with a gold medal and we were in practice. I could've taken a charge, but I thought, 'I'm Joe Kleine; I've got a gold medal; I'm not taking any more charges.'"
Sutton fixed that.
After practice he lined up every player and had Kleine take a charge from each.
"If a guy got close to me, I was falling down screaming," he said. "Coach Sutton needs to be in the Hall of Fame. I know he's had problems; the only difference between him and everybody else is everybody knows his problems and imperfections. He's stood up and taken the heat. It's a joke that he's not in there. He should've been in there yesterday."
In response to questions, he dished a bit on some NBA names:
Bill Laimbeer "was dirty; he wasn't mean. He would pop you when you weren't looking. Back then he could get by with that. Today he would've been suspended so many times it wouldn't be funny."
Artis Gilmore was 7-2, 320, "ripped, cut. I was always the biggest and strongest, and he picked me up and put me down over there."
Karl Malone "was dirty, too." He remembered a cheap shot from Malone and pondering on the trip back down the court whether to retaliate at a cost of a $75,000 fine. "It was either the gratification of punching him in the mouth and feeling good or going home and looking at my wife when she would say, 'What were you thinking?' To this day I wish I would've hit him. It would've been worth every penny."
Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan "had the best talent and most skill, but they also work harder than anybody else, and they're accountable," he said. "Smart teams don't pay guys on stats. They pay on how they play do they make other people better? Allen Iverson scores 30 a game, but I don't think he makes other people better. Kobe Bryant makes his teammates better. Scottie Pippen's defense made me better. Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley made me better."
On the ongoing discussion of the Jordan-Bryant comparison, Kleine said the two were very similar offensively.
"But Michael's far better on defense it's not even close," he said. "Three or four years he could've been Defensive Player of the Year, but I think the NBA felt so bad that he was winning everything they didn't want to give him that, too. But he could score at will and then lock down and defend anybody."
He predicted the NBA Finals would go seven games.
Kleine said his relationship with UALR went back to an evolving friendship with coach Steve Shields over the last several years.
"I love to teach and I love basketball, and I'm big into being around good people," he said. "No matter how difficult the job is, you'll have fun and be successful. I think we've only scratched the surface at UALR."
The Trojans won 20 games last year despite having no one average in double figures. Six or seven players, he said, averaged between seven and nine points per game.
"We're hoping one of the guys we have can step it up and become and established scorer or that one of the ones coming in can be," he said. "It helps you as a coach to have a go-to guy."
Charles Ripley, athletic director at Arkansas Baptist College, will be the speaker for the next meeting of the Arkansas Sports Club July 14. Lunch begins at 11:30 a.m. with the program to follow at 12:05 p.m.
Tickets for the second induction banquet of the Arkansas Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, to be held Aug. 9 at the Brewer-Hegeman Conference Center on the University of Central Arkansas campus, are on sale for $30 each. Call (501) 733-8411 or e-mail mharr18745@aol.com.
