Bill Larsen

By John Murphy

I follow many coaches on Twitter. A topic one week was “Who’s the best coach you ever had?”

Easy one for me – Bill Larsen. My eighth-grade basketball coach. But let me backtrack.

I was in fourth grade at St. Robert’s School in San Bruno. Our class got a transfer named Keith Larsen, who’s now the basketball coach at Menlo School in Atherton. Hyperactive kid with a mop of black hair and as thin as a reed. We became fast friends.

He’d visit my house and I’d go to his. I met his three siblings, his mom Rose, his grandma “Noni” and, of course, his dad Bill Larsen.

Bill was this burly guy with sandy brown hair, eyeglasses and a tattoo on his forearm that said “Swede.” I’m not into body ink, but the tattoo was cool.

So was Bill. He started coaching our team in eighth grade. He inherited it from a high school kid named Hank McLaughlin and his pal Frank Schaukowitch. Don’t get me started on that pair – they’re a separate blog.  

Keith’s dad – or “Mr. Larsen” as we called him — was super-charged during games, clapping his hands and exhorting us on. He was upbeat.   

We played our games at the San Bruno Rec where the Golden State Warriors practiced. Then on Mondays Bill did his post-mortem and read our stats.  

“Keith Larsen, you made 3-of-18 shots from the field and 8-of-9 from the line and scored 14 points,” Bill would say.

“Nice job, Keith!” I’d say, slapping my pal on the back.

Bill Larsen: “Murph, you made 2-of-11 shots from the field and 4-of-6 from the line and scored eight points.”

“Eight points!!!” Keith would marvel. “All right, Murph!”  

Field-goal percentage? We didn’t know about that.  

I kept in contact with Bill in later years after Keith and I went our separate ways. Then early in the 1990s something happened to me – I lost something important — and I went into a deep funk. It seemed like the end of the world.   

So I left SoCal and went back to San Bruno and looked up my old coach, Bill Larsen. We went for a drive, through San Bruno, past the rec center and all the old haunts. Then up the 280 freeway and down into Pacifica along the ocean. I spilled my guts to Bill about my problem, fretted about the future.

Bill didn’t say much at first, just listened. Then he took a deep breath and said, “You know Murph, you’ve got something that not everyone has, and you need to remember that.” Then he paused and added, “I wish I had something like that.”

Maybe he meant bad breath – I don’t know. But his kind words resonated. I thought it over. Then I thought it over some more. And before long I was OK, putting one foot in front of the other again.   

That, folks, is what a coach is. Upbeat when he’s coaching you and kicking your butt when necessary. And who you can go to 20 years later with a problem and he’ll say the exact right thing. Lift you up all over again.  

That’s why Bill Larsen, now 88, is the best coach I ever had. Plus, he gave us Gatorade at halftime. I liked the Gatorade.