Remembering Don Nelson – Yahoo Sports

In the mid 1980s, farmers throughout the U.S. were being squeezed between high interest rates on operating loans and low prices for commodities; lacking a sufficient government safety net, over 300,000 farmers defaulted on loans during this decade and even more farmers found themselves struggling to break even.

Clarence Willcome was one such farmer. He owned a dairy farm near Birnhamwood, a small town between Wausau and Green Bay in northern Wisconsin. The 59-year-old father of thirteen was a two-time heart attack survivor with a pacemaker and a pile of debt.

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In April 1986, he wrote a letter to a guy who grew up on a farm asking him for advice.

By the time Don Nelson got around to replying to the letter, his Bucks had been swept by the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals. The team, widely acknowledged as one of the best in NBA history, was on its way to a championship. Nelson would spend his summer doing something that was, perhaps, more significant than winning a title.

After losing game four against the Celtics, Nelson told reporters, “I am not feeling very good right now, yet I’m not losing my home or going bankrupt and having to start over with my life.”

He pledged his share of the Milwaukee Bucks’ playoff bonus to Clarence Willcome, and convinced Herb Kohl, then the owner of the Bucks, as well as Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing, to kick in and help as well.

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But this was just the beginning.

Having put on a few pounds since his playing days, Nelson went on a diet and invited donations for each pound he lost.

He also took off on a 250-mile jaunt through Wisconsin in August of that year, driving a tractor as part of a campaign to raise funds and awareness to assist farmers.

It was a colossal give-back from a guy who definitely knew hardship growing up.

Don Nelson was born on May 15, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan. When he was two years old, his parents moved to Grant, Michigan, where his father tried his hand operating a maple syrup farm. Two years later, the family packed up and relocated again, this time to his grandparents’ farm outside Sherrard, Illinois.

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His first experience playing basketball came there. As happened on farm after farm in the Midwest in that era, Nelson learned to play on dirt, shooting at a makeshift hoop nailed to an outbuilding. In his case, it was a spokeless bicycle rim attached to a chicken coop.

Nelson started school in a one-room schoolhouse with seven other students, three of them being his sisters, and all taught by an 18-year-old girl fresh out of high school. It was a school that Nelson occasionally attended barefoot.

Don had a rocky relationship with his father, who constantly lectured him, but his mother doted on him; in her eyes, according to Sharon, “the sun rose and set on Don.” “He’s got his mother’s heart,” his oldest daughter would later remark, “very tender and affectionate.”

Just before Don started seventh grade, his grandparents lost their farm.

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The family relocated to Rock Island, Illinois, and Nelson began playing competitive basketball, “I went out for my seventh-grade team and got hooked on basketball.”

The Nelsons lived in town, and Don used to stop at various locations on the walk to school in the morning and shoot hoops. His afternoons were spent at the YMCA doing the same.

He grew to a suitable height for the game, topping out at 6′-6″ and playing center for the Rock Island Islanders.

Nelson jumped to the varsity squad as a sophomore, and was a starter by the time his junior year rolled around. He made First Team All-State as a senior. During Nelson’s two years as a starter, the Islanders racked up a 47-7 record, while Nelson put up incredibly gaudy numbers given that he was playing a 32-minute game without a shot clock. As a senior he averaged better than 21 points per game and set a school scoring record. There were opponents and occasions in his senior year where he was triple-teamed in an effort to slow him down.

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Despite those numbers, Nelson was not a hot recruit. The only real interest in his services came from the University of Iowa, and his father thought that he would be better served working as a watch repairman, a thought that amused Don’s first wife, Sharon: “Can’t you see Big Don sitting there with those little glasses, fixing watches?”

Bucky O’Connor was the coach at the University of Iowa, and he’d been recruiting Don. Bucky had an eye for talent, and was fresh off coaching the Hawkeyes to a pair of Final Four appearances (1955, 1956). Nelson signed a letter of intent to play for the team. Then, O’Connor was killed tragically in a car accident in April of 1958.

Bucky’s replacement was Milton “Scharm” Schuerman, who had graduated from Rock Island in 1952, and who had just traded his basketball jersey for the clipboard of an assistant coach the previous fall. The death of O’Connor made him head coach of a Big Ten squad when he was just 24 years old.

As a sophomore (freshmen were ineligible to play college basketball in those days), Nelson averaged a double-double, toting up 15.8 points and an even ten rebounds per game. In his junior and senior years, he averaged 23.8 points per game. His rebounds per game jumped every year, going from ten as a sophomore to 10.6 as a junior and then 11.9 as a senior. He left the program as the school’s all-time scoring leader.

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Once again, Nelson’s numbers didn’t attract that much interest from the next level of basketball. He had planned on becoming an assistant coach with Iowa, but the Chicago Zephyrs had expressed an interest in him, and as Nelson later recalled, “I figured I could always fall back on coaching if a playing career didn’t work out.”

He was picked in the third round of the 1962 draft by the Chicago Zephyrs. He spent a year in Chicago, where he averaged a respectable 17 minutes as a rookie, but the team didn’t see much of a future in either him or Chicago.

They decamped for Baltimore and became the Bullets (now the Washington Wizards) and Nelson was picked up by the Los Angeles Lakers.

Nelson spent a year and a half playing for Fred Schaus’ squad, but again, the team didn’t see a lot of value in what Nelson brought to the table either, and he found himself unemployed once more when 1965 rolled around.

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Don was 25, hadn’t finished his degree requirements at the University of Iowa, and his future seemed to be particularly dim. The only work he’d done apart from basketball up to that point was manual labor.

By then, Nelson was a family man—he and wife Sharon had welcomed their first daughter, Julie, into the world in 1961, followed, in rapid succession, by a son, Donnie in 1962, and another daughter, Chris in 1963. A fourth child, Katie, joined the family in 1967.

In 1965, the Lakers had just lost to the Celtics in the Finals, and a player who was apparently not good enough to suit up for the losing team had caught the eye of the winning team’s coach.

While Red had a well-deserved reputation for being astute at both drafting and trading, his ability to recognize talent wherever he found it included picking up guys off waivers, and none of these castoffs turned out better than Nelson.

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With Havlicek working his way towards a starting role, the team would soon be in need of a good sixth man, and Nelson was Red’s target to slot into the role that he had pioneered with Frank Ramsey and expanded with Hondo.

Red offered Don a one-year, $11,000 contract, which was $4,000 less than his rookie deal; Don swallowed his pride, took the deal, and spent the next eleven seasons wearing green and white. It wasn’t a bad career for a guy who retained a modest view of his on-court abilities: “I had to work all the time, do everything extra I could,” Nelson would recall, adding, “I was just average.”

The Celtics faced off against Nellie’s former team in the Finals three times in the next four years.

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Boston prevailed all three times.

Down three games to two in the 1969 Finals, Nelson scored 41 points across two must-win games, nearly double his season average. His final two points came with a minute and a half to go in the fourth quarter of Game 7. The Celtics were clinging to a 103-102 lead when Nelson’s shot bounced up off the back of the rim passing high above the backboard before dropping cleanly through the net, narrowly beating the shot clock and stopping an 8-0 Los Angeles run. “I shot it so poorly that it hit the back of the rim and it went way up in the air, and it came down and went straight through the basket,” Nelson would later recall. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

In the early years of the 1970s, the Celtics had to rebuild their squad—among the major contributors to the 1960s dynasty, only Nelson and Havlicek carried the torch on into the 1970s.

However, Auerbach’s shrewd drafting and trading brought the Celtics back into contention by 1973, when they lost a closely contested Eastern Conference Finals to the eventual champion Knicks. The following year, the Celtics would win it all. Coached by Tommy Heinsohn, the Celtics faced the Milwaukee Bucks in the Finals, and Nelson played a key role in defending Kareem, despite about an eight inch height differential between the two players. Heinsohn’s strategy of double- and triple-teaming Kareem in the decisive game didn’t do much to slow down the Bucks’ center, but it did lighten the load on Dave Cowens enough that he was able to outscore Kareem 28-26, as the Celtics secured their twelfth championship overall and their first of the post-Russell era.

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Don played two more seasons with Boston, going out a champion with the 1976 squad that defeated the Phoenix Suns in six games.

After retiring, Nelson had a family meeting in Moline, Illinois at a Maid-Rite restaurant—a small Midwestern chain specializing in loose meat sandwiches and fried chicken. His son Donnie recalled that his father presented the family with three options. He could sell cars, become a referee, or take a job as Larry Costello’s assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks.

According to Donnie, the vote came down 5-0 in favor of the assistant coaching gig.

Although he had spent just a year playing for Auerbach, he called that year “a master class.”

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“I learned everything that I knew about coaching from Red,” Don would say years later. “I basically adopted what he imparted.”

In addition to his year as a player under Red, Nelson cultivated a close friendship with the coach, taking advantage of every opportunity he had to soak up Auerbach’s knowledge of the game—and his ability to handle players.

Eighteen games into his first season as an assistant coach, Larry Costello was fired and he was promoted to the head coach assignment.

Don would coach the Bucks from 1976 to 1988, becoming the franchise’s winningest coach, securing eight consecutive playoff appearances, seven straight Central Division titles, and six consecutive 50 game winning seasons. Despite these regular season accomplishments, Nelson’s teams failed to achieve the highest level of success in the playoffs, although a fair bit of that can be attributed to the overall strength of the Eastern Conference. On four occasions the Bucks were eliminated by the eventual league champs. Only once was Nelson able to defeat his mentor’s team, and that was when the Celtics were in nearly open revolt against their own coach, Bill Fitch.

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Nonetheless, Nelson cut a unique and memorable figure as a head coach.

At a time when the informal dress code for coaches was a bit more strict than it is these days, Nelson waged a small campaign of protest by wearing tennis shoes—sometimes held together with tape—and ties that looked like fish.

When the Bucks felt it was time to move on from Nelson, he quickly found a spot in California, coaching the Golden State Warriors.

Nelson brought a run-and-gun style of offense to the Bay Area, with his “Run TMC” squad of Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, and Chris Mullin bringing a measure of success to a franchise that had been mired in the Western Conference doldrums for the past decade. Before Nellie arrived, the Warriors had finished above .500 exactly once in ten years; Don bested .500 in year one, and recorded a pair of 50-win seasons while dealing with an injury-prone team. More than that, though, he brought excitement back to the fans. “The fast-paced play was so fun to watch, and there were so many enter­tain­ing head­lines between games, that I don’t have memor­ies of a single defeat,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle columnist Peter Hartlaub in a tribute to the coach.

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In 1991, the San Antonio Spurs lost to the Golden State Warriors in the first round of the playoffs. Just over halfway through the following season, the Spurs fired head coach Larry Brown, and at the end of the season, his coaching staff was also dismissed.

But, in the same way that Auerbach had seen something in Nelson that the Lakers overlooked, Don saw something in one of Brown’s assistants that Spurs GM Bob Bass had missed.

He leaped at the chance to bring Gregg Popovich onto his staff.

The two would become lifelong friends, even if Nelson did, on one memorable occasion, prank the seemingly unprankable Popovich.

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Popovich had a great deal of admiration for Hank Egan, his coach at the Air Force Academy, and when Nelson discovered that Egan was an amateur painter, he contacted him and offered to buy one of his paintings.

On finding out that the painting was an intended gift for Pop, his former coach pointedly refused to accept any money for it and sent it to Nelson.

When Nellie got the painting and had it framed, he took it to a Bay Area art gallery and had them put it on display with an inflated price tag.

Nelson proceeded to take his staff to the gallery, and lured Pop over to the painting.

“He says, ‘That’s my Coach! That’s him!'” Don recalled, “So I said, ‘Is that really, Pop? I’d like to buy it for you.’ We take it up to the cashier and he says, ‘It’s $25,000.’ I said, ‘Wrap it up and give it to Pop.'”

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“We get the picture wrapped up and we’re walking out. He starts crying. He’s literally bawling like a baby.”

Don takes everyone out to dinner afterwards and reveals the prank; Pop’s only response was, “God damn it, Nellie; you got me!”

Later on, when Nelson was spending a year out of coaching and the Spurs had landed the number one pick in the draft, Don found out that Popovich was considering an offer to trade the pick that would become Tim Duncan. His response to this rumor was an overt threat. “If Pop trades him, I’ll go down there and take a shotgun to his house!”

Nelson was later hired to coach the Mavs in 1997, spending eight years on the bench there, including three 50-win seasons and a single 60-win season. While there, he picked Dirk Nowitzki and acquired Steve Nash in the 1998 draft; both would go on to win MVP awards, and Dirk would be instrumental in securing a championship for Dallas in 2011.

A final stint with the Warriors didn’t go particularly well on the bench; for the first time Nelson’s team failed to crack 50 wins during his tenure, but he did prove influential on the Warriors’ future when he went to a 2009 NIT matchup between Davidson and St. Mary’s on Monday, March 23, in Moraga, California, in the hills east of San Francisco Bay. Davidson lost 68-80, but Nelson was struck by the play of their point guard, “I just thought he was a star,” he remarked of Steph Curry. “I never dreamed we were going to be able to get him.”

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On draft night, he made himself heard, urging rookie GM Larry Riley to take a risk and select Curry with the 7th overall pick in the draft.

During his final year as a head coach, in 2010, Nelson secured the NBA record for most wins, hitting 1,333 and bumping Lenny Wilkens out of the top spot in the 78th game of the season, a contest at Minnesota. Don went on to retire with 1,335 wins—a record that would eventually be broken by his friend and protégé, Gregg Popovich, in March of 2022.

As a coach in an era dominated by centers, Nelson frequently built winning teams by going small and exploiting mismatches by running the court, something he learned from Auerbach, “Red used to play the smalls against the bigs in practice to get everyone fired up. When we played full court games, the bigs never won. They were ineffective because they couldn’t handle the basketball, and that gave the smalls an advantage.”

“All I did was use a small lineup with a team that didn’t have very good big men, and I was very successful with it.”

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Nellie downplayed his own contributions to the game, “Over time I added a few of my own wrinkles.”

One of those wrinkles, and one which has been incredibly influential, is the ‘point forward.’

By inverting the typical ballhandling duties, Nelson’s teams created the mismatches he loved by pulling defenders into parts of the court and assignments that they were decidedly uncomfortable with. Today, when Jayson Tatum brings the ball up court after a basket, he’s filling a role that Don Nelson practically invented.

Naturally, in a 31-year coaching career, there were a couple what-ifs. After the Celtics lost to the Bucks in the 1983 playoffs, with the team in need of a new coach, Red approached Nellie and offered him the top spot in Boston. Don turned down his friend, “I felt a loyalty to the Milwaukee Bucks because they had been so good to me,” Nelson said. In reflection, he added, “maybe I should have been more willing to make that break and pursue the Celtics job.”

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Eleven years later, Gregg Popovich was hired as the Spurs’ general manager. He wasn’t particularly pleased with the team’s current head coach, Bob Hill, so he reached out to Don and offered him the coaching assignment. Nelson was more than willing to accept the job, as he was having difficulties coaching Chris Webber, and he was well aware that in the NBA coaches are often far more expendable than talented players are. However, the Warriors refused to negotiate a deal with Nelson and the Spurs that would’ve gotten him the San Antonio gig.

There were perks as well.

Nelson’s son Donnie grew to be 6′-4″ and was a pretty good basketball player himself. After attending Wheaton College, near the family home in Milwaukee, Donnie was hired by the San Francisco Warriors as an assistant coach. The following year, the Warriors hired his dad as their head coach, and the two would work together throughout Nellie’s tenures at Golden State and later in Dallas. Their years together on the bench helped make up for time lost during Don’s playing career when he was frequently gone on road trips, and when the demands of coaching left him little time for his family. These years also helped repair a relationship that was damaged when Don left the family and divorced his first wife, Sharon in 1982. “It gave me an opportunity to get to know him at a different level and really gain a ton of respect for him away from the household,” Donnie told the Dallas Morning News, reflecting on his father’s “passion, integrity, and honesty.”

After retiring from the game, Don moved to Maui, “I know how far I’ve come from being a hog farmer. I’ve come a long, long way from being some country kid. I got in the fast lane, and I’ve stayed there a long time,” he once said.

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And yet, as it turned out, in some ways, Nelson didn’t come that far after all.

As a child, Nelson had a pet pig, Butchie, that the family butchered while he was at school one day—a lesson, no doubt, in the sometimes harsh nature of life on a farm.

But Nelson retained an affection for pigs that carried over into adulthood. While he was on his first stint at Golden State he ran afoul of Alameda city regulations when it was found that he was keeping a potbellied pig as a pet.

He also returned to farming as a retiree—although he ended up raising a crop that might not have been approved of by his parents or grandparents.

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Nelson’s second career, after basketball, was growing medicinal marijuana in Hawaii.

Actually, Don’s hobby farm of 22 acres grows flowers and coffee as well as pot, but pot is undoubtedly what grabs the headlines—especially since Nellie admitted to smoking the stuff. He also hybridized two strains of cannabis, producing a variant dubbed “Nellie Kush.” He even went so far as to build a guesthouse on his property out of ‘hempcrete,’ a concrete which uses embedded hemp fibers for reinforcement.

Nellie claimed that he didn’t smoke pot as a coach or player, but at least one account out there suggests that he was not unwilling to engage in a celebratory puff or two.

Nelson had his number retired by the Celtics in 1978, and was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach in 2012. He was named the NBA’s Coach of the Year three times (1982/83, 1984/85, and 1991/92). In fact, no one has won the award more than Nellie, although Pat Riley and Gregg Popovich have also won the award three times.

“I spent 50 years in the NBA,” Don once remarked, “Can you imagine doing something that you love the most in the entire world and doing it for your entire life?”

Nelson moved from Maui back to Dallas earlier this year. He passed away on August 9, 2026.

Reflecting on his career as a coach, Nellie once told Michael D. McClellan, “I have no complaints with the way things worked out,” adding, “If you write my epitaph, I would be very happy if you just said that Don Nelson was a good guy and a pretty good coach.”