Furious George
My Forty Years Surviving NBA Divas, Clueless GMs, and Poor Shot Selection
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4.3 • 39 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The most outspoken and combative coach in NBA history—and one of the most successful, amassing more than 1,175 victories, the sixth best winning record ever—reflects on his life, his career, and his battles on and off the basketball court in this no-holds-barred memoir
A man of deep passion and intensity, George Karl earned his bad boy reputation while playing at the University of North Carolina, a rap that continued through the five years he spent with the San Antonio Spurs—and long after he stopped playing.
Karl’s beery nights, fistfights, and barking followed him into a thirty-five-year coaching career. In a game defined by big stakes and bigger egos, rabid fans and an unforgiving media, Karl was hired and fired a dozen times. After leading a team beset by injuries and with no superstar to its best season of all time—an achievement that earned Karl the title NBA Coach of the Year—he was dumped by the Denver Nuggets in 2013. Less than a year and a half later, Karl was at the helm of the Sacramento Kings, snarling and bellowing on the sidelines before being cut loose in May 2016.
Intense, obstinate, and loud, Karl has never backed down from a confrontation, whether with management, officials, or star players, as NBA legends from Allan Iverson to Gary Payton to Carmelo Anthony to Demarcus Cousins can attest. Telling his story, Karl holds nothing back as he speaks out about the game that has defined his life, including the greed, selfishness, and ass-covering he believes are characteristic of the modern NBA player, and the rampant corruption that leads all the way to the office of the NBA commissioner, David Stern. Karl also reveals how he’s learned to deal with the personalities, the pressure, and the setbacks with a resilience he acquired from his three bouts with cancer.
Raw, hard-hitting, and brutally honest, Furious George is as thrilling, unpredictable, and entertaining as the game that has defined Karl’s life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first book, Karl, a successful, well-traveled NBA head coach (most recently of the Sacramento Kings), writing with Sampson (The Masters), promises to settle old scores and get in the last word. Given his history of talking openly, this is a delightful promise but his work soon proves annoying and guarded. There are highlights, such as his descriptions of what it's like to coach a game and how his intensity for work isolated himself from his family, including his son. He examines his relationships with mentors such as Dean Smith to players they coached. He says Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony was a "conundrum" and a "user of people," and his star player in Sacramento, DeMarcus Cousins, "was the most disrespectful person I've ever been around," but his criticism is more petty than revealing. Though Karl talks about how his 2010 diagnosis of throat and neck cancer changed his approach to work and diet, he mostly fails to address his own performance at his six NBA coaching stops all of which ended on less than congenial terms. After a rocky, abbreviated stint in Sacramento, the 64-year-old Karl hints that he'd like to coach again. That may explain the frustrating honesty-with-limits approach employed here.
Customer Reviews
If you like Karl before...you won't after reading the book
It's an interesting read. It's well written and entertaining. It will make you hate Karl, though. His lack of ownership of his faults is nearly comical. Yes, he is a world class coach if you need a guy for half a season or maybe even two. After that, he loses his players. In this book he goes into depth about his different jobs, but nearly always blames the players. How about his inability to win a play off game? Not his fault. The disaster at the World Cup? Not his fault.
He throws so many people under the bus that it is entertaining. You just have to get past his ego and warped reality about his career.
Great Read
Really enjoyed this book shows you different perspectives on a lot of things in life not just basketball.
Furious George deserves high praise
I love how brash Karl is towards something he doesnt care about or disagrees with . There's a few times during the story where readers might think his opinions and views,especially towards a player(s) he has coached, were drastically honest, but isnt drama what we are looking for in a story/book?