The news is mostly terrible these days. But there is a ray of light: The Golden State Warriors just re-signed Steve Kerr. 

For the next two years, Warriors fans — and non-basketball fans smart enough to pay attention when a singularly wise, kind, funny, humble, tough, and empathetic person pops up in public life — will once again get to enjoy Kerr, in what will likely be his last hurrah as coach. And we will enjoy him not just as a great coach but as something even rarer: a man who epitomizes our region’s best qualities — the ones we’re proudest of, and the ones most uniquely associated with us. Kerr may or may not be the greatest coach in Bay Area history — the consensus seems to be that he’s slightly behind former 49ers coach Bill Walsh — but he is the one who best reflects our values. As a coach and as a man — the two cannot be separated — he is whom we aspire to be, and who at our best we are. 

Coaching is a unique, and uniquely challenging, profession. I’ve never coached, but I have worked as an editor for most of my career, and there are some striking similarities between the two. In a 2007 Salon piece (opens in new tab), I described editors as “craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons — sometimes all while working on the same piece.” This pretty much describes any given interaction Kerr has ever had with Warriors forward Draymond Green. Coaches and editors both must possess not just technical skill — mastery of the Xs and Os of their respective crafts — but people skills. Just as every athlete is unique, so is every writer. With some, a taste of the lash is required; with others, merely a raised eyebrow will do the trick. EQ is as important as IQ.

During his 12-year tenure with the Warriors, Kerr has shown that his EQ is up there with Esther Perel’s. Managing the fiery, and frankly often impossible, Green alone qualifies him for the Coaching Hall of Fame, not to mention an honorary master’s degree in family therapy. But Kerr has also dealt with a host of other challenging personnel issues, from the unfortunate Jonathan Kuminga standoff to the tricky post-punch Jordan Poole situation (opens in new tab), and he’s handled them all with tact, grace, and generosity. Coaching is also a lot like parenting — yes, some professional athletes are grown-ass men, but others are closer to half-assed boys — and watching Kerr navigate the varied personalities and maturity levels of his players is like watching a master class in being a dad. He’s empathetic but firm, flexible, and self-deprecating without giving up his authority, and, above all, funny as hell. In an area that prides itself (often to the point of insufferability) on being a model of self-awareness and psychological sensitivity.

Of course, everything a coach does is in the service of one overarching goal: winning. That’s all that matters. And that’s true for Kerr — except that it’s also not.

Kerr is a winner. His Warriors have won four titles. The 2015-16 team went a ridiculous 73-9, a record that will probably never be broken. He has the fourth-highest winning percentage among coaches with at least 900 games. But perhaps the most unusual thing about Kerr is that in a win-or-else league and a win-or-else culture, he openly accepts the possibility — and, in some cases, the likelihood — of defeat. He’s a realist who has not attempted to deny that the Warriors are, as he said, “a fading dynasty.” And he has made his peace with that. From the very beginning of his tenure with the team, Kerr has insisted that it’s all about what he calls “the journey.” Winning can be part of that journey — and if you have a skinny kid from Davidson named Wardell Stephen Curry on your team, there’s a much better chance it will be — but so can losing. Kerr not only accepts this truth, he embraces it. In fact, it is an integral part of his coaching philosophy. 

That philosophy has four components: joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition. The last quality needs no explanation. But the first three are a little unusual. They’re not words that are used a lot in the world of sports — with the notable exception of former Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, one of Kerr’s mentors, who incorporated a Zen mindfulness into his coaching practice. They seem too woo-woo, too personal-growth-y. But as Kerr uses them, they’re far from new age pablum. In a brilliant ESPN profile (opens in new tab), Wright Thompson traces how Kerr’s life was marked by personal tragedy as well as competitive triumph, by agonizing physical pain as well as worldly success, by recurring self-doubt as well as hard-earned confidence. And all those experiences went into his coaching philosophy. 

Kerr’s players respond to that philosophy because it’s real, and it’s real because he’s real. And it also works: It’s as hardheadedly effective as the most ferocious Vince Lombardi tirade. Kerr demands the best of his players, but he also knows that athletes, like all of us, give their best when they’re happy, when they’ve tapped into the most authentic part of themselves, and when they care about their teammates as much as they do about themselves. 

By a happy coincidence — or maybe it’s not a coincidence — that selfless credo is reflected in the kind of basketball the Warriors play, with its nonstop movement, a hardwood version of soccer’s jogo bonito — “the beautiful game.” The Warriors’ jogo bonito has been not only some of the most aesthetically pleasing basketball ever played but some of the most successful. But it’s Kerr’s embrace of the journey, whether that journey ends in victory or defeat, that sets him and his approach apart. 

And it’s a very San Francisco vision. The openness to experience for its own sake is a leitmotif in the city’s history, from the Gold Rush to today. We think of the frenzied stampede in 1849 as all about “winning” — striking it rich — and for many, it was. But for others, “seeing the elephant,” as the 49ers called the Gold Rush experience, came to mean something different and deeper. They came to understand that whether they found gold or not, the journey out west had been the great adventure of their lives — and that adventure was its own reward. In Buddhist terms — and Kerr’s — theirs was a mindful journey. From the first San Franciscans, the Yelamu who left a fragment of poetry that reads “dancing on the brink of the world,” to the mavericks and escapists who in the 1830s ended up at a hamlet at the end of the world called Yerba Buena, to the Beats, the hippies, and the avant-garde urban explorers of today, this place has always danced to its own interior drummer. When he asks his team to play with joy, Kerr is part of a long and honorable Northern California tradition. 

The other thing that makes Kerr the perfect coach for the Bay Area is his willingness to speak passionately on political subjects. After the 2022 school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 fourth-grade students and two teachers were killed, Kerr exploded in rage and anguish. “When are we going to do something?” he yelled, slamming his fists on the table. “I’m tired. I am so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I am so tired of the moments of silence. Enough!” It was a cathartic and wrenching moment of raw emotion, an eruption of unfiltered feelings all too rare in the cautious, homogenous world of billion-dollar sports franchises. Nor would many of his peers have the cojones to call our current president a “buffoon,” as Kerr did. 

And Kerr is willing to take on even more explosive subjects than gun control or Donald Trump. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, (opens in new tab) Kerr blasted the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. “Violence begets violence. We’ve seen it in Israel and Lebanon as well,” he said. “There was an opening for Israel to handle their business with the Palestinians diplomatically. … Instead, Israel sought revenge for Oct. 7, and now 72,000 Palestinians have been killed and Israeli settlers are taking over the West Bank illegally, with the approval of Israel’s government and the U.S. Ambassador, Mike Huckabee. That’s not a path to any sort of peace or security for Israel or the rest of the Middle East.”

In light of the fact that not a single coach of any major U.S. sports team has spoken out about Gaza, and very few players (opens in new tab), Kerr’s willingness to do so is even more impressive: Apparently he did not hear Laura Ingraham’s demand that sports figures “shut up and dribble.” But his views, and his outspokenness, fit right in with the place that gave the world the Free Speech Movement and remains the most politically progressive region in the country.

As Kerr heads into what will likely be his final two seasons, he and the team will be doing everything they can to win another title. If they do, it will be an amazing finish to this saga. But I don’t think any Warriors fan will think that the Dubs need to win another championship to make Kerr’s journey, or the team’s, or our own, complete. The fact that Kerr is coming back, and Curry will be playing for him to the end, and maybe Green and Jimmy Butler as well, means we have already won. We’re playing with house money. We’ll enjoy the ride on the wheel of fortune until it stops turning — and we’ll enjoy it all the more because we know that Kerr will be enjoying it too. For Warriors fans, the next two years will be a kind of farewell tour, a lovely and elegiac chance to see the last incarnation of a fabled dynasty, a player the likes of which none of us will ever see again, and a coach who won both on and off the court — and did it his way. For a man who preaches the gospel of joy, it couldn’t end any other way. 

Gary Kamiya is the author of “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco (opens in new tab)” and a lifelong Bay Area sports fan. A version of this article also appeared on his Substack, Kamiya Unlimited (opens in new tab).