Dan Dickau, Steve Kerr reminisce on podcast over prank call and humbling recruiting visit
Nearly two decades later, Dan Dickau came clean with Steve Kerr.
Kerr was a guest on Dickau’s Scorebook Live quarantine series podcast recently when Dickau steered the conversation from questions to fessing up about a 2002 prank phone call orchestrated by Dickau’s friend and fellow Gonzaga alum Eric “Big Ed” Edelstein.
Edelstein, an actor, grabbed Dickau’s phone during the former Zag great’s bachelor party and called Kerr, posing as an organizer of a basketball camp for special needs kids and asking the then-Portland Trail Blazer guard to assist as a volunteer instructor.
Kerr was a good sport, pledging to do what he could because it involved helping kids, but he balked when Edelstein asked him to bring along some teammates.
At one point, Kerr openly questioned if it was a prank call but told Edelstein to call back in a week with more details.
Kerr chuckled at Dickau retelling of the phone call.
“I had to come clean,” Dickau told Kerr. “If you’ve seen Jurassic World, he (Edelstein) is the security guard that got eaten by a dinosaur.”
“Nice,” Kerr cracked, “he deserved it after that prank he pulled on me.”
Dickau and Kerr shared the same agent, Mark Bartelstein, who set up a round of golf for the two after Dickau’s senior season.
Kerr, who has told the story of his recruiting trip to Gonzaga in the early 1980s several times, expanded on it with Dickau. Kerr toured the campus and athletic facilities before GU coaches encouraged him to join the team for a pick-up game.
“Put my shoes on, I join the pick-up game and I’m being guarded by a guy named John Stockton,” laughed Kerr, who had a standout career at Arizona. “He had just finished his senior season, he was getting ready for the draft. I’m a senior in high school and I knew who he was because I was a basketball fan and growing up on the West Coast I had heard of him, but it was a different time back then. You didn’t have all the games on TV so I didn’t know that much about him.”
“John proceeded to wipe the floor with me. They basically took me in the office and said, ‘You know, we’re going to go in a different direction.’ I always blamed John Stockton for ruining my future at Gonzaga.”
Kerr has been part of eight NBA championship teams, five as a player with Chicago and San Antonio and three as the head coach of the Golden State Warriors. He’s getting quite a bit of airtime in ESPN’s “The Last Dance” documentary on Michael Jordan and the franchise’s six championships in the 1990s.
An episode Sunday recounted a practice scuffle between Kerr and Jordan that ended with the 6-foot-6 superstar punching the 6-1 Kerr. Coach Phil Jackson booted Jordan out of practice, and Jordan later phoned Kerr to apologize.
Chicago’s last two titles came against Stockton and the Utah Jazz in 1997 and 1998.