In public, however, he doesn’t make much of a stir, unless he’s at the ESPYs and Jon Hamm is jokingly mistaking him for musician Bruno Mars.
By now, Spoelstra has won two championships, guiding one of the most celebrated teams in modern times, and yet he still can slip into the shadows when out anywhere other than South Florida or on his summer visits to his mother’s home country, the Philippines.
In fact, there are likely still some who passively follow basketball and still aren’t sure of his role with the Miami Heat. Consider what occurred in January in Washington D.C.
Spoelstra had just been on the White House’s East Room stage, receiving praise from President Obama for his steadiness in steering the Heat to the 2012 championship. The next stop was Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where a staffer didn’t understand why this young man with the jet black hair was being introduced as the Heat’s coach.
“I thought Pat Riley coached the team,” the staffer said, as Spoelstra laughed.
If you think this relative anonymity bothers Spoelstra, you need to get to know him a bit better. This is someone who recoils when reporters ask him to cooperate for stories about him, who appears awed and embarrassed when other coaching luminaries know his name, who says simply of his Heat responsibility: “My job is to land the plane.”
Still, now that he’s landed two titles, it’s worth letting the world in on some of his secrets.
To that end, here—from a sportswriter who has covered the Heat for South Florida newspapers since 1996 and currently does for The Palm Beach Post—are 10 things to understand about the Heat’s head coach:
1. He’s big on Bono: Music says a lot about a man, but Spoelstra’s not all that different in this sense than many of his generation. Not yet a teen when U2 released Boy, he first saw the Irish quartet while a college senior (and point guard) at the University of Portland. Since that show in Seattle, he’s seen them at least six times.
He claims he’s not a groupie, and he didn’t appear to be one during the 2011 show at Sun Life Stadium; LeBron James got invited backstage, while Spoelstra stayed up in a suite.
