Lawrence Frank, Swamped No More -- The Sports Section

In November of 2004, I found myself eating a cheeseburger at the New Jersey Nets’ practice facility in East Rutherford with coach Lawrence Frank. He was prepping his chronically depleted team for their season opener against the Shaq-led Miami Heat. It was election night, and eventually he clicked from game tape to CNN. Frank watched for a minute and then had a question. “Now the Electoral College, what’s that all about?” he asked in his always-raspy voice. He was serious. After a brief civics lesson, Frank wrinkled his brow and stood up to stretch. “Man, that’s screwed up. Do they vote tonight?”

Now Frank has all the time in the world to catch up on electoral politics. The Nets fired him yesterday.

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“In coaching, there’s winning and there’s misery,” Frank told me. With the Nets, he experienced more of the latter as the team descended to comic-book ridiculousness: The owner trades away every single one of the team’s marquee players and then sells the team to the Russians. (The deal isn’t official yet.) Frank’s worldview might have been small, but his rise through the ranks instilled a humanity rarely seen in professional sports. He never publicly called out his players or bemoaned his fate as head coach of one of the NBA’s historically anemic organizations.

Not long after that election night, I visited with Frank at his Englewood, New Jersey, home. After dinner, I headed out into the remnants of a hurricane to make the drive back to New York. Frank looked at the sideways-falling rain and insisted on leading me to the George Washington Bridge in his car. “It’s complicated, and there could be trees down,” explained Frank with a tired smile. By the time I reached home, he had left three messages wondering if I was safe.