Steve Kerr's been beating the odds his whole life

The two played together in more than 300 games as members of the peerless Chicago Bulls of the mid-and-late 1990s. But this moment in December 2002 came months before both men retired.

Jordan was a 39-year-old legend playing with the Washington Wizards. Kerr, 37, was with the San Antonio Spurs and hoping to be part of one last championship team.

Kerr is holding the ball away from Jordan. Both men are smiling, Jordan widely. Kerr's is more the Cheshire Cat variety.

"We got cross-matched in transition," Kerr says, "which means he wasn't supposed to be guarding me, but it just happened. I caught the pass and waved everyone away. Said, 'Clear out! I got a little one! Mouse in the house!'"

This was theater of the absurd.

Jordan was rated the second-greatest athlete of the 20th century in an Associated Press poll. He averaged 30 points a game for his career, and took control of untold games down the stretch with his unsurpassable skills and will to win.

As for Kerr, he played in 910 regular-season NBA games, a notable feat, but started only 30 and never scored more than 24 points in any game.

As a consummate journeyman with an uncanny shooting talent, Kerr also improved other parts of his game through hard work.

Then there was that luck of his. In addition to the rings he won playing with Jordan, he won another two playing with the great Tim Duncan.

So what happened after the smiles and the trash talk during that December 2002 Wizards-Spurs game?

"I passed the ball as soon as I could," Kerr says.

The subtext here was delicious.

At one time, Steve Kerr on an NBA basketball court joshing with anybody (much less Michael Jordan) would have seemed as implausible as young Houston rapper Paul Wall writing this 2003 lyric:

To broads, I'm a sharpshooter like Steve Kerr

Flash the wrist, cause a blur

Most basketball experts once perceived Kerr as too slow, not athletic enough, and not big enough (he's just under 6-foot-3, and he says he's never dunked a ball in his life) to compete with the best.

"If you were to have told me that he'd have a professional career at all — I mean a professional basketball playing career — I'd have to have said no way," Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson tells New Times. "He's unbelievably bright, but that doesn't mean you're going to be an NBA ballplayer."

With his choir-boy looks, Steve Kerr didn't seem capable of standing up to the likes of the physically and psychologically intimidating Jordan. But he was.

The pair had fisticuffs during training camp before the 1995-96 season, with Kerr sustaining a black eye in the scuffle.

At the time, Jordan was returning full-time to the game he had left two seasons earlier to take a stab at pro baseball.

"Michael . . . worked out like a maniac in the off-season," Kerr says. "He was intent on domination. From the first moment in practice, the intensity was incredible. He set the whole tone, and it was almost savage. We were going at it in practice, and [Coach] Phil [Jackson] took a phone call — or what happened wouldn't have.

"M.J. was talking trash to me, and I was going back at him. He was guarding me close, and he kind of gave me a forearm. I pushed him back. He's a big, strong man. We started fighting, and he caught me in the eye pretty good.

"Later, he apologized in a phone message at home. We got along really well after that, because I stood up to him, man to man. Michael didn't give a free pass to anyone. He had a history of that kind of stuff. Some guys didn't make it with him. I did."

If readership of this story were concentrated in Tucson or even in Chicago or San Antonio, a biographical recap of Stephen Charles Kerr's life would be unnecessary.

But, as his mother Ann notes, "I know it's another generation now since Steve was a player, and people may not remember."

Actually, the story may as well start in the mid-1950s, when Ann, a college student spending her junior year abroad, met Malcolm Kerr at the American University of Beirut, in the same building where Dr. Kerr would be assassinated three decades later.

Malcolm Kerr's parents had taught at the university, on beautiful terraced bluffs above the Mediterranean, and it was his favorite place in the world.