Nancy Lieberman interview: ‘Players don’t worry if I’m a guy or a girl’

Nancy Lieberman – aka ‘Lady Magic’ – is only the second woman to coach in the NBA and, despite initial problems with the Sacramento Kings and star centre DeMarcus Cousins, tells Tim Rich the only thing that really matters is being good enough

Assistant coach Nancy Lieberman talking to Sacramento Kings point guard Seth Curry at Sleep Train Arena in California (Getty Images)

“How long has England had a Queen? You had a woman Prime Minister years ago. This is 2015. It should be a normal thing for you.”

Nancy Lieberman, America’s greatest woman basketball player – so good they called her “Lady Magic” – is pondering the fact that the England women’s football, cricket, rugby and hockey teams are all coached by men. In California, where Lieberman works, coaching the men of Sacramento Kings in the NBA, it would be unthinkable.

“I think there would be women qualified to coach every one of those teams you are talking about,” she says. “You hope there will be a moment when people realise that, if you are qualified, you are qualified and that it has nothing to do with gender.

“The most important thing for any coach is not your gender but whether the players believe in what you are telling them. What I have found in the NBA is that personal relationships do mean something and they count for much more than who you are.

“The cool thing about players of this generation is that they don’t worry if I’m a guy or a girl. Their biggest fear is that I don’t know what I am doing.”

England’s football and cricket teams have done rather well with male direction. Under Mark Sampson, who is Welsh, England’s footballers finished third in the World Cup in July. This year has seen huge advances in women’s cricket. A few months after Kate Cross became the first woman to turn out in the unforgiving world of the Central Lancashire League, the England wicketkeeper Sarah Taylor made her debut in the equally tough environment of Australian grade cricket. However, their national coaches have always been men.

Lieberman began coaching men when she was asked to head up the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League six years ago. She had, however, been playing against the boys for much longer.

She grew up in Far Rockaway, where New York meets the Atlantic Ocean and where WC Fields and Mae West used to take their holidays before recession claimed the town.

Her passion was baseball but the Police Athletic League in Far Rockaway would not insure the nine-year-old Lieberman to play against boys.

There were no such issues with basketball, although her mother objected because all sport was unladylike and the basketball courts, in particular, were too full of black kids.

By the time her daughter was travelling to Harlem to play at Rucker Park – the courts that produced LeBron James and Kobe Bryant – Renee Lieberman had lost the battle. At 18, Nancy Lieberman would be part of the United States Olympic team that won silver at the Montreal Games in 1976. She was still playing in the Women’s NBA 21 years later.

Lieberman was not the first woman to be given a coaching job in the NBA – that was Becky Hammon, an athlete strong-willed enough to have represented Russia in two Olympics when she failed to make the United States team. However, Hammon, the assistant coach of San Antonio Spurs, did not carry Lieberman’s status. On the day in July when Sacramento announced she would be the No 2 to head coach George Karl, the club received 600 interview requests.

Lieberman’s argument is it makes sense for a sports club to have a woman somewhere near the centre. All clubs employ the cliché that they are “a family” but many resemble boys’ boarding schools or, occasionally, borstals.

The stereotype that the average NBA player comes from a broken home in the inner city is no longer true. The majority who make it come from strong family backgrounds far from Harlem or Washington Heights.

“What I do know is that the players will come to me and share some things that are on their hearts,” Lieberman says. “It’s the sort of thing that they maybe would not want to tell a male coach because they don’t want to show a weakness.

“If you are a basketball player who has reached 25, it is pretty likely you have had experiences of dealing with strong women; whether that is your mother, your grandma or your aunt.

“You guys are sensitive creatures, perhaps more than you realise, and you need to be loved and trusted. Just because I am in a locker room with big, powerful guys, it doesn’t mean I can’t tell them how much I appreciate them.”

Lately, Lieberman has had to tell Sacramento’s captain, DeMarcus Cousins, how much he is appreciated. The Kings have traditionally been one of the NBA’s smaller clubs, forever in the shadow of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Two years ago, they were bought out by Vivek Ranadive, an Indian software entrepreneur who proceeded to spend big on players and on building a new arena. Shaquille O’Neal was brought in as an investor while Ranadive appointed Karl, a veteran head coach who has won 1,000 NBA games, and authorised a four-year, $62m (£41m) contract for Cousins.

Cousins is brilliant – the first Sacramento player to make the NBA All-Star team in 11 years. He is generous, donating $1m of that contract to local charities. And he is also hard to handle. When Lieberman talks about her captain, she might almost be describing an NBA version of Roy Keane.

Among the offences on his charge sheet is punching a fellow player and aggressively confronting the match announcer after a defeat at San Antonio. One of his previous coaches at Sacramento, the soon-to-be-sacked Paul Westphal, commented that Cousins was “unwilling or unable to travel in the same direction as the rest of the team”.

At the start of last month, after Sacramento lost their seventh match in eight to record their worst start to a season since 1990, Cousins exploded in front of everyone in the dressing room, reportedly telling Karl exactly what he thought of his coaching methods – an outburst for which he has since apologised.

“DeMarcus is a superstar,” says Lieberman. “He works hard and he doesn’t mess around. When your best player is in the gym more than anyone else, it has an impact.

“But what chews away at him is that he wants to win. DeMarcus is young but he has been in the game for six years and he hasn’t even made the play-offs – and that is exceptionally important to him now.

“We think of Sacramento as a family but families are not perfect. We needed to talk to him and we won our next game. That was the result.”

The firing of coaches is a familiar ritual in the NBA and Lieberman believes that sooner or later a woman will be appointed as head coach of a major franchise. “It is going to happen,” she says. “The first thing we do at the start of every season is tell the players that you cannot win a championship without making the play-offs.

“You cannot be a head coach without first having been an assistant coach. Then you have to have relationships in the sport and you have to have credibility. That’s what some of us are trying to achieve.”

As she once remarked when asked if she had bitten off more than she could chew: “I would rather choke on greatness than nibble at mediocrity.”

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