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Sam Smith: He was always Stormin’
Norm Van Lier was never really appreciated despite working so hard at it and giving everything he had every time. He broadcast harder than some guys played the game, and he let them know it. Someone was speaking up for us, and we loved Norm for that.
"If Norm had the skills and size of some of the guys he played with, he would have been one of the greatest ever. If he didn’t have the will he did, he’d have been another guy working the mines back in Pennsylvania." (John B. Mitchell/NBA Photos)
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Norm Van Lier remembered as "one of the all-time greats"
From the Archives: Norm Van Lier: My Most MemoraBull Game
Norm had no business being a world class basketball star, writes Smith. He didn’t have any particular great skill other than his attitude and his heart.
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I was convinced knowing Norm Van Lier for decades that it was just being Norm Van Lier—always feeling a bit unwelcome and unwanted and always willing to say so, always being the guy who had time for everyone, the ultimate hale fellow well met, a Chicago original from Western Pennsylvania who could have been the face of this rugged city—that enabled Norm to have the career he did in the NBA.
Norm was found dead at his home Thursday morning, just hours before Johnny Kerr, perhaps the original Chicagoan original, died after a gallant battle with prostate cancer.
We celebrated Johnny at the United Center a few weeks back in a touching tribute, and even then there was Norm being Norm. He was there. We talked a few hours before the halftime ceremony as he was getting ready to return to Comcast SportsNet for his Bulls pre and post game shows.
Norm felt hurt somewhat about not being on the floor with former teammates for the Kerr tribute, as he would frankly say later on TV. I felt sadness and admitted I smiled a bit. Because Norm always was in search of that extra bit of recognition, trying to recover from some slight, real or imagined, intended or unintended.
Norm had no business being a world class basketball star. He didn’t have any particular great skill other than his attitude and, as we like to say, his heart.
No one said yet the cause of death, though I assumed that great big heart which always had time for the smallest guy and any stranger he’d meet finally gave out.
Norm simply willed himself to be an NBA All-Star through more than the hard work and toughness he always lamented was missing from some of today’s players. It was an attitude. Norm lived like everyone was out to get his job or take what he felt was his, and he was willing to fight you for it—in effort, or with fists.
If Norm had the skills and size of some of the guys he played with, he would have been one of the greatest ever. If he didn’t have the will he did, he’d have been another guy working the mines back in Pennsylvania. He was a six-footer in the land of giants. He didn’t look up to them, but he would look you in the eye.
They grew great football players there in Ditka Country. Mike Ditka could identify with Norm Van Lier.
Yet, Norm never was celebrated in Chicago like Ditka.
Again, the slight.
Phil Jackson played with those great Knicks teams of the early 70s which were the model of team basketball with Frazier and Monroe style and DeBusschere and Reed toughness. Jackson said it wasn’t the Lakers and Wilt or Milwaukee and Kareem they most hated to play, but the Bulls with Van Lier and Sloan and Walker and Love. No one played them as hard, not respecting who they were.
That was Norm, whose nickname was way more than a clever rhyme.
We did a radio show together in the early 90s on one of the earlier versions of AM-1000. I had thought about trying it as so many of my fellow writers were beginning to do and talked to one of the executives at the station. He said they actually were looking for someone to work with Norm on his 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift.
Hey, I stay up late, I said.
It wasn’t so much they were enamored of my talents. But they wanted someone who, well, would calm Norm down. It seemed Norm was working solo and he’d rant. Stormin’, as it were. We’ve all heard Norm’s rants on Comcast, and late at night Norm would get going and there was no one to really slow him down, and Norm could get going.
Norm got going so much that at the end of one of the Bulls great and most disappointing seasons, the famed 1975 Mother’s Day game when the Bulls blew a chance to go to the Finals with a home loss to the Warriors and eventual series loss, coach Dick Motta blamed Van Lier and told the players even to deny Norm a playoff share.
So you think those Jordan, Pippen, Jackson, Krause Bulls had some issues and controversies. Those were some feudin’ Bulls back then. Norm battled everyone because it was how he got there. It was a way of life.
Anyway, I joined up with Norm for about six months and it was a ball. We’d answer some calls and off Norm would go, and I’d offer some counters, and Norm would be up off his chair and nearly pulling off his headset and banging the desk and debating, and it was never, ever, ever, once mean or angry, but just fun and furious and not once ever did we ever have an issue or problem or argument or leave and Norm not inviting me out with him.
The night would just start for Norm at 2.
He loved life and breathed it in deeply and never didn’t have time for you.
I’d see him stop and get into the same spirited debates with guys he’d never met. Norm was a man of passion all day, every day, and people loved him for it.
Walking down Michigan Avenue with Norm was like the opening of those Cheers TV shows.
“Norm!” you’d hear from every direction.
You know how it is with some people on TV or the movies whom you feel you know but have never met. Norm was one of those guys. Everyone felt they knew Norm and he seemed to feel a connection. Not because he was a star and had been in the NBA and even because he owed someone for their support. He seemed always to feel he was them, interested in what they had to say and ready to debate it.
He was those guys because he never saw himself as special and never felt that way. He seemed most to identify with the guy who was working his butt off and getting kicked in the rear by his bosses because Norm always felt he was as well.
He thought everyone favored Sloan unfairly over him, and he’d say so.
The scorers’ table was always scared when Norm was near. It got kicked a lot.
He fought legendary battles with then Bulls management over contracts, and he and Love staged a famous holdout into that 1974-75 season. Motta, himself an angry man but not willing to cross Norm when standing in front of him, blamed Norm and Love for costing the team home court advantage with their holdout and told the team not to give them a playoff share.
So you think things were calmer in the old days?
Norm loved music and the Rolling Stones, not surprisingly. He loved the passion.
“Norm was a competitor,” said former teammate Chet Walker, who had his own legendary battles with Motta. “He competed every night and all the time, a very good point guard who probably was underrated, fiery, a guy who went after guys. He was the type of player who made the game easier for us, a good teammate who had your back. Yeah, I remember when Motta tried that. I was upset. We all were upset. We’d never go along with something like that.”
That Bulls team broke up soon after that last great run in 1975 and Norm would play through the 1979-80 season, finishing an injury shortened 10-year career with the Bucks and with a career average of a modest 11.8 points and seven assists.
Norm went on to a few minor league coaching jobs and into broadcasting, though again overlooked and denied, and always fighting back. Norm wasn’t corporate, and the NBA was never too comfortable in the executive suites and sidelines with the guys who pushed their way in the door, like Norm did. So Norm found his way into broadcasting, and he was good. Too honest, really, for the big networks, though it probably wouldn’t have played as well as it did in Chicago.
Chicago understood Norm because it is known as the Second City. It is in the flyover region. Norm couldn’t crack the big time and run with the big boys, not among the playing elite and not afterward. But he never accepted being less than them and always was sticking his foot in the door to remind them he wasn’t going away.
Norm was like us. Never really appreciated despite working so hard at it and giving everything he had every time. Norm broadcast harder than some guys played the game, and he let them know it. Someone was speaking up for us, and we loved Norm for that. And he loved us because he understood, if not accepted, rejection.
Johnny Kerr was a Chicago guy in a somewhat different way, though no less reflecting Chicago’s character. Johnny started in Chicago and never really left and threw his big arms around his town in a group hug that spoke of his affection and understanding. He smiled; Norm scowled. Both were gentle men.
And Johnny was no less tough, if not so demonstrably. He clearly was close to death when he gathered his strength for that one last night at the United Center at a time, with his son reading from notes, that even the family didn’t believe him strong enough to finish. So he ripped the notes away from his kid. “You never listened,” he quipped in a hoarse voice and we all smiled. You smiled with John and got angry with Norm, and you knew them both as friends.
But that’s how you become an iron man, as Kerr was as a player, never stepping back, even when Wilt or Russell is in your way. And never letting them know you are hurting.
We’re the ones in pain now. The Bulls have lost two of the most glorious members of their basketball family. We have lost two of Chicago’s best.
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