Back at the height of Showtime in the 1980s, Michael Cooper recalls, Los Angeles Laker coach Pat Riley used to hand out individual scouting videotapes to his players.
As insurance against failure to complete the homework, somewhere on each player's tape would be inserted a key word— sometimes near the beginning, sometimes toward the end, sometimes in the middle.
"You'd come to practice the next day and (Riley) would say, 'What's your key word?' '' says Cooper, 49, the former Lobo great and Laker defensive stopper who's now head coach of the NBA Development League's Albuquerque Thunderbirds. "You got fined $500 during the season and $1,000 in the playoffs if you didn't know it."
The accountability drilled into him by Riley remains a key word in Cooper's vocabulary, and a cornerstone of his coaching philosophy, as he enters another phase of his three decades-long relationship with Albuquerque.
Several other key words, however, come to mind.
COMPETITIVENESS: John Whisenant, who coached Cooper at UNM and coached against him in the WNBA, knows his student-turned-colleague's competitive side well.
Whisenant, a Lobo assistant coach under Norm Ellenberger from 1972-79, remembers the night in Cooper's senior season (1977-78) when Brigham Young and Danny Ainge, the Cougars hot-shot freshman guard, came to town.
Cooper, always up for a defensive challenge, was ready.
"The first two or three times Ainge shot the ball," Whisenant says, "Coop blocked 'em into the stands. ... I think Ainge only got seven or eight points (actually 13, nine below the BYU star's average, on 5-of-15 shooting) that night."
A quarter-century later, in the summer of 2003, Whisenant witnessed Cooper's competitive streak again— this time, aimed at him.
Whisenant was at the time the brand-new head coach of the WNBA's Sacramento Monarchs. Cooper was head coach of the two-time defending league champion Los Angeles Sparks.
After Sacramento's 83-75 upset of L.A., Cooper refused to shake Whisenant's hand— alleging his old mentor had not returned some phone calls.
"You made this personal," Cooper was heard to say.
INTUITION: Whisenant doesn't recall Cooper ever talking about becoming a coach during his playing days at UNM. Still, Whisenant says, he wasn't surprised to see his former player wind up on the sidelines.
Cooper was, he says, the proverbial coach on the floor.
"There was never any question about his intelligence, his basketball mind," Whisenant said. "He was one of those guys you only had to tell something once.
"He was one of the quickest we had to recognize why we were doing something from a team standpoint and get caught right up in it. You didn't have to pound on him to get him to understand."
Basketball intuition? Perhaps. But it was also basketball absorption.
DETERMINATION: Cooper's athletic career almost ended before it started one day in his native Pasadena some 44 years ago. His uncle had brought home a puppy, and Michael, 5, raced outside to see it. He tripped and cut his left leg to the bone on a coffee-can rim.
Doctors told his mother young Michael would never walk normally again, much less run and jump.
"I had that Forrest Gump (brace) with the boot," he says. "I had that for, like, three years.
"I remember I used to sit at the window and watch my cousins and friends outside playing football, running. I used to say to myself, 'If I ever get a chance to run, I won't stop.' ''
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