ESPN’s The Last Dance has been a main topic for sports fans during the absence of live sports because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Last Dance was originally supposed to air starting in June, but was pushed up because of the pandemic. Episodes nine and ten, the final two episodes of the documentary, aired Sunday night and part of episode nine talked about then Bulls’ guard, and now Warriors coach, Steve Kerr.
Kerr’s portion of the episode focused specifically of the murder of his father, Malcolm Kerr, in 1984. Malcolm was a professor at UCLA during Steve’s childhood and in 1982, Malcolm was offered the opportunity to be the president at the American University of Beirut. During that time, Lebanon was in the midst of a civil war, the university’s previous president had been missing for multiple weeks, and there was significant hatred toward Americans in Lebanon. In 1984, Kerr was shot in the head by two men, killing him at the age of 52.
In the documentary, Steve talked about the moment he heard his father was murdered as he was a freshman at the University of Arizona in 1984. “So, I received a phone call in the middle of the night from a family friend,” he said. “My phone rang at my door at 3 o’clock in the morning, so I knew something was up and he just said, ‘Steve, I have terrible news.’ So, yeah.… Basketball was the one thing I could do to take my mind off what happened. So I went to practice the next day. I didn’t know what else to do.”
This was yet another similarity between Kerr and his Bulls teammate Michael Jordan. Jordan’s father James was murdered in 1993 and when asked if he ever talked to Jordan regarding their respective fathers, Kerr said it never came up. “We never discussed that. I think it was probably too painful for each of us,” he said.
