I just had to write a note about NBA great and Austin NBA D-League coach Dennis Johnson, who died last Thursday and whose memorial service was in Austin on Sunday. I wish I could have attended, but I was out of Texas and couldn’t make it.

I met DJ a couple of times over the past year. The first time was in Austin where I saw him in a parking lot and stopped to say hello. I was really surprised how nice he was. I think he even asked what I did for a living, and we talked for a few minutes.

Then when I was in Las Vegas last summer for the Vegas Summer League, I saw him in the stands and mentioned how I met him in Austin and how I worked on this Yao Ming web site. I swear, we ended up talking for 20-30 minutes in the stands while watching some of the action on the court. Here he was, an NBA legend who had more basketball experience in his pinkie finger than I had in my whole body, and he was interested in what I had to say about Yao Ming, and basketball in general. We talked about a lot of other topics beyond the NBA, like how he loved Austin, how he was planning on moving his family there, etc.

I always respected his game as a player when he was the Sonics and the Suns, but I always hurt that his Boston Celtics beat my Houston Rockets in 1986 in the NBA Finals. However, by his spending that much time with me, just a regular guy, proved to me that he was a class act and I became a big DJ fan after that.

Now when I read all the stories about how great of a person he was, I can believe it. He had ex-teammates like Bill Walton and Cedric Maxwell fly into Austin just for the memorial service. That goes to show how great of a man he must have been – that teammates 20 years ago flew halfway across the country to pay their respects. I wish I could have been one of them.

Click here, here and here for details from the memorial service, how much he was loved, and how much he’ll be missed.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.