On some mornings, just as the sun began to warm the Giza Plateau, a teenage Steve Kerr would go climbing. Up a pyramid.
Because in his former life, two scores ago, scaling the first of the seven wonders of the ancient world was a rather normal way to start the day.
“And there was an old guard in a galabeya,” Kerr recalled, “a probably 60-, 70-year-old man with an old, like, World War II rifle. And the guy would just yell at you. And you just give him a 10-pound note and he’d say, ‘OK,’ and wave you up.’ And you could literally climb to the top of the pyramids and sit on the top. Look at the Nile and the whole city of Cairo.”
That former life — the one that saw him as an expat living in Egypt, the one that feeds his reputed depth, the one that underscores his father’s significance — snuck up on Kerr recently in Las Vegas.
During halftime of a Golden State Warriors summer league game, he made his way through a tunnel beneath the Thomas & Mack Center to a trailer a few hundred feet from the court. He knew a surprise was coming. The cameras and reporters tipped him off. Still, he wasn’t prepared for the coming tug at his heart.
He was greeted by Michelle Johnson, his friend from those days living in Egypt. He hugged her — a classmate a year ahead of him in the early ’80s at Cairo American College, a pre-K through 12 school just outside of the city. Johnson, a singer/producer/writer who lives in Las Vegas, had kept in touch with Kerr over the years. She had sung the national anthem at games in front of him, when he was with the Suns and Warriors. She wasn’t the surprise herself, though, but the deliverer.
Kerr initially flashed a smile at Johnson’s guest. Then she introduced her as “your teacher.” The 91-year-old woman — with kind eyes, a smile warmer than fresh cookies from the oven, and a stylish ponytail bun — started to look familiar to Kerr. His eyes widened and he gasped when it hit him. He slapped his left hand over his eyes in disbelief.
Hers was a face he hadn’t seen in four decades, but one he could never forget.
It was Barbara Johnson. Mrs. Johnson to Kerr. She was the principal of CAC while he attended the school, as well as his social studies teacher in the 10th grade, and Michelle’s mother. Johnson’s husband, Martinus L. Johnson Sr., was the Liberian ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Egypt.
“I came all the way from Cairo to get your homework,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Where is it?”
“My dog ate it,” Kerr replied.
Suddenly, Kerr was transported, past his current perch as one of the NBA’s best coaches, with four titles since 2015 in Golden State, to go with his five championships as a player with the Bulls and Spurs. Past his previous lives as a broadcaster and team executive.
He was, again, the teenager who, along with his buddy Matt, would visit the Johnsons at their private residence after school and constantly sign the official embassy book in the foyer every time he came over. It was supposed to be for, you know, prime ministers, diplomats and people like that to sign when they came for official business and receptions. Not 14-year-olds.
“Who is Steve Kerr?” Martinus Johnson would ask, and not happily, after seeing the name many times written among the dignitaries.
Kerr hadn’t seen Barbara Johnson since 1981, the year he left CAC after three years there as a student, ending with his sophomore year of high school. All he talked about was basketball. He was obsessed with it, as Johnson remembers. Finally, for his junior year, Kerr returned to the States to play. He graduated from Palisades High in Los Angeles in 1983 before going to Arizona, where he became a two-time All-Pac 10 selection and All-American, leading the Wildcats to the Final Four in 1988.
But before all that, he had been Barbara Johnson’s student. A good student. She was a good teacher, Kerr said.
“But, I was scared of you,” he said during the reunion. “Everybody’s scared of going to the principal’s office.”
A lifelong educator, Johnson took a journey that seems as unfathomable, in some ways, as Kerr’s. She’s taught in Harlem, Hong Kong, Egypt, Detroit, New Mexico, and helped create Model UN teams at CAC. And there she was again, if just for a few moments, in Kerr’s life. Now, of course, she roots for the Warriors, led by her former student. (She chose not to tell him she was a big Bad Boys Pistons fan back in the day.)
“She’s obsessed,” Michelle Johnson said.
Barbara finds herself asking, through the television, that her former pupil calm down on the sidelines. She remembers that same explosive temper from his teenage years.
“You still have some of the same mannerisms — very calm, and intuitive,” Barbara said to Kerr. “And then, all of a sudden, if you get mad…”
This reminded Kerr of something his wife, Margot, says often: “Beware the fury of a patient man.”
But he’s months away from fury. Now is for memory, of a long-ago, fondly remembered influence. Of a time when Michelle Johnson taught him the words to “Rapper’s Delight,” and when he played on outside courts throughout the country: in Cairo, Maadi, Gezira, Zamalek, Ahly.
“We went the entire season without playing in a gym because our school did not have a gym until after I left,” Kerr said. “And we would play all games outdoors. … Either blacktop or sometimes we’d play tennis courts where they take the net down. Try making a jump stop on a tennis court. Good luck to you.”
Culture, diversity and perspective was being poured into his development in these pivotal years abroad. He didn’t recognize it as a teenager but it’s obvious to him now. But Mrs. Johnson represents a cornerstone of his foundation.
“She was just dignified,” Kerr said. “You know, like, you just didn’t want to disappoint her. You know, like, she was so dignified and stately. … and Michelle was this talented singer and performer, and she was kind of part of our crew. And we really had this great American group of friends, but also mixed in with people from all over the world who are going to the American school. So, you know, we have friends from everywhere, but it was special to be an American overseas. You just felt like you kind of stuck together. You know, we were typical high school students. You get away with stuff and push the envelope a little bit.
“You just didn’t want to disappoint Mrs. Johnson, you know. So I think she helped us all toe the line without even trying. Just by being herself.”
Kerr’s parents were also educators, his father specializing in the Middle East, where Steve Kerr spent much of his youth after being born in Lebanon. Malcolm Kerr was a visiting professor at the nearby American University of Cairo at the time; his and Ann Kerr’s four kids attended CAC, another stop in a journey around the world. The Kerrs lived in Oxford and France as well as Lebanon and Egypt during Steve’s childhood, continuing a family tradition of service in the region.
Steve Kerr with his mother, Ann, and his two brothers, Andrew and John. (Courtesy Steve Kerr)
Steve’s grandparents, Stanley and Elsa Kerr, had helped rescue and provide care for thousands of Armenian refugees fleeing the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23, including helping to establish a relief orphanage at Nahr Ibrahim in Lebanon, about 30 miles north of Beirut. (An endowed lectureship at UCLA, the Kerr Family Lecture, began this year in honor of Stanley’s and Elsa’s work.) Stanley and Elsa both joined the faculty at the American University of Beirut – Stanley as a biochemistry professor, Elsa as Dean of Women – where their son, Malcolm, would spend much of his youth.
CAC sits on 11 acres in Maadi, a Cairo suburb about seven miles southeast of the city. (The campus is surrounded by huge walls for security purposes.) Its student body is composed of children of U.S. nationals and children whose parents work at the nearby U.S. embassy, Egyptian and Arab kids from families of means, international students and children of diplomats and executives in the area.
At the beginning of this past academic year, according to the school’s website, there were 873 students at the school, with 327 ninth through 12th graders, 220 sixth through eighth graders and 326 students in the Pre-K through 5th grade classes. Of the total, 324 were U.S. citizens, 171 were host-country nationals, and 378 were of other nationalities.
And whatever hoity-toity, swanky private club you had your prom at, or whatever fancy arena you graduated from, CAC kids have you topped.
Their prom is held annually … at the (bleeping) Sphinx. This Sphinx, fool! And their graduation is held … at the (bleeping bleeping) Pyramid! Not this Pyramid. Or this Pyramid. We’re talking Great Pyramid of Giza! The one built 4,600 years ago! When CAC students want to hang out on the weekends, they get on a boat and ride down the Nile River. That Nile River! The Cleopatra and Moses Nile River! When CAC classes get together for reunions, they ride in on camels. That beats your little pub crawl that ends with someone throwing up in the rose bushes outside of Smart Alec’s.
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As an upperclassman, Michelle Johnson was manager of the CAC varsity basketball team. She was looking forward to the team’s trip to a tournament in Athens that year. Enter Kerr, who was joining the varsity team.
“Because of him, I didn’t get to go on the trip,” she said. “When he turned 14, he was allowed to join the varsity. And so they added him, but to add him (to the Athens trip), they had to bump me. And I worked all year to go! And then, they bumped me. The coach was like, ‘I can’t not take him. He’s our star!’ And they won, and it was fine.”
But Kerr wanted to play back in the States. His father was on sabbatical from AUC, and had returned to Los Angeles, where he was a professor at UCLA. Malcolm Kerr remained at UCLA through Steve’s junior year of high school.
Just before Steve’s senior year at Palisades, Stanley and Elsa’s son realized a life’s dream when he was named president at AUB. Malcolm had met Ann there while they were undergrads.
Steve Kerr’s younger brother came back to the States during his senior season of high school, while their father commuted between New York, where he was helping to run AUB amid the turmoil in Lebanon, and L.A. After Steve left for college, his parents and younger brother moved to Beirut, and Malcolm assumed the presidency.
It was a perilous time in the war-torn country, which had been roiled after the 1982 Lebanon War, begun by Israel’s invasion of the southern part of the country in June 1982. AUB’s previous president, David S. Dodge, had been kidnapped in July 1982, and held hostage for nearly a year before being released.
On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. And on Oct. 23, 1983, a 19-ton truck crashed through the entrance of the U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut International Airport, the truck filled with explosives. The suicide bomber set off the bombs, lifting the building into the air before it collapsed on itself, killing 241 U.S. military personnel, including 220 Marines. It was the largest loss of U.S. Marines in a single day since the Battle of Iwo Jima, toward the end of World War II, in 1945.
Ten minutes later, another car bomb exploded at the barracks of the French 3rd Company of the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment in Beirut, totaling the nine-story building and killing 58 French paratroopers.
Tragically, that was not the end of the hostilities.
Steve was midway through his freshman season at Arizona when his father was assassinated by two gunmen outside of his office at AUB on Jan. 18, 1984, by members of Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization, and the precursor to the militant group Hezbollah. Dr. Kerr had declined to have a protection detail trail him around campus. A month later, U.S. troops withdrew from Lebanon.
But the Kerrs did not abandon the Middle East, or CAC, after Malcolm’s murder.
“My mom and my brother moved back to Cairo because the university there offered my mom a job and we had a ton of friends there,” Steve said. “And it was actually an easier transition to go there than it would have been for them to go back to Los Angeles, just because of the number of friends and the life that we had already had there for a couple of years. So, they moved to Cairo and my older brother, John, was actually living in Cairo at the time, too. And so they all moved in together. That’s why my brother graduated from there (CAC). They stayed there for a couple of years.”
Steve, of course, went on to a most remarkable life in basketball. But, like his family, his time in the Middle East had a great impact on him, even if he didn’t realize it in real time. To be sure, his father’s murder has tempered his views on guns, and gun violence, and made him more willing to speak out, forcefully and angrily at times, on such issues. But being in that part of the world also made Kerr seek out and embrace the empathy that, his father wrote, was the mark of a truly civilized man.
“It’s shaped my entire worldview and my projection, how I live and the way I interact with people,” he said. “… And the ironic thing was I never wanted to go. You know, I always loved my life in Los Angeles. I never wanted to go overseas, never happy when we would do it. But looking back, I realize it was one of the most valuable experiences and most important experiences of my life.”
Education and service continue to be at the center of much of Malcolm and Ann’s children’s lives. John is a professor at Michigan State, with a Ph.D in economics from Stanford. Susan, also older than Steve, attended AUC before getting her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, and has a doctorate in education from Harvard. Steve’s younger brother, Andrew, worked at the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration and got his MBA from Arizona State.
Ann Kerr, since remarried and about to turn 89, returns to the Middle East often, and still coordinates UCLA’s Fulbright Scholar Enrichment Program. In 2017, the family established the Kerr Family Centennial Scholars Endowment for Middle East students persuing graduate degrees in the humanities or social sciences at UCLA. The Carnegie Middle East Center, a think tank and research/policy center in Lebanon, was renamed the Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in 2020 in Malcolm Kerr’s honor.
This day, in Vegas, after their brief reunion, Barbara Johnson walked, with some help, to sit and watch the Warriors for a few minutes, a few feet from her most famous pupil. Warriors swag was en route. Seeing her, Kerr would say later, was like stepping into a time machine.
Steve Kerr returned to Egypt last summer, as one of the coaches of the annual Basketball Without Borders Africa camp in Cairo, along with the Blazers’ Chauncey Billups, the Wizards’ Wes Unseld, Jr., the Pelicans’ Willie Green and the Timberwolves’ Chris Finch. He visited the U.S. Embassy, and spoke admiringly to reporters about the great Egyptian star forward Mohamed Salah. It was the first time he’d been back to the continent since 1985, the year after his father’s murder, when he’d briefly returned to be with his family.
There is a regal marker at Malcolm’s grave at AUB, where his ashes were interred, near a huge banyan tree he loved throughout his many years spent there. The marker reads: In Memory of Malcolm H. Kerr 1931-1984. He Lived Life Abundantly.
But there was also an initial, handwritten marker, written before the permanent one was installed, that also provided Malcolm Kerr’s dates of birth and death, and which also read He Lived Life Abundantly. Underneath that was written, by his daughter: We are proud that our dad and husband came to A.U.B. Susan, John, Stephen and Andrew Kerr.
Underneath that note is a long quote from Ann Kerr’s memoir, “Come With Me From Lebanon,” about her life with her husband, which started on the grounds of that same university they both loved, and where he died. You see, the family is, now and forever, entwined with the country and region that shaped them, and which reaches back from time to time, still, to remind them of what they gained, and what they lost, and what endures.
(Photo Illustration: Rachel Orr / The Athletic; photos courtesy Steve Kerr)