LOGAN, Utah — As Dick Motta slides into a booth at a breakfast diner and sees the brilliant white coat that winter has pulled over the Wasatch Mountains, he draws comfort. Once again, he has bested Mother Nature. Months ago, when autumn’s crisp was turning into winter’s chill, he secured a crop of garlic in the ground, ahead of the season’s first frost.
“The garlic,” Motta says, “gets a head start.”
He has spent much of his life with his hands in the soil, poking, prodding, plowing the fertile lands of Utah and Idaho. He is the son of a vegetable farmer, and although most people know him as one of basketball’s most accomplished coaches, Motta still sees himself as a simple man with a simple task: till, plant, harvest.
“I believe in dirt under the fingernails,” he says. “There is dignity in working.”
Motta is 94, still sharp, still strong and still as ornery as he was when he stormed NBA sidelines for parts of four different decades. He was not only a successful basketball coach — winning the 1978 NBA title with the Washington Bullets, the 1971 Coach of the Year award with the Chicago Bulls and turning the expansion Dallas Mavericks into a winner by their fourth season — but also one of the game’s most colorful and controversial figures.
He was wild — bringing a live tiger into a halftime locker room. He was spontaneous — leaving a timeout huddle to join a mascot in stomping a referee mannequin. He was combative — countering a Mark Aguirre trade demand in the locker room with a blunt response: “Nobody wants you!” And he was theatrical – once publicly objecting to a trade his front office made for cash considerations. His protest: directing a lineup of four players to take the court, then slapping a dollar bill on the hardwood as the fifth player.
“Just as I thought,” Motta remembers saying at the time, when he picked up the cash and put it in his pocket. “Doesn’t rebound.”
As men of this age often do, he tells stories. Long stories. His memory is vivid, so much so that no detail is spared. He was born in 1931, and depicts his youth as if it was a better time, even though it was during the Great Depression.
He remembers the only time he saw his father cry: after his field horse collapsed and died the next morning.
He recounts an annual athletic feat: catching the greased pig at the county fair.
And then, the story that still haunts him, even now at 94. He was a senior in high school, weaving and pushing his way through classmates to get a glimpse of the posting outside the gym. The new basketball coach had announced which players made the team.
“My name wasn’t there,” Motta says. “Broke my heart. Still bothers me to this day.”
It would be the first of many pains inflicted upon him by the sport he so loves. One of his greatest thrills — coaching Grace to the 1959 Idaho high school championship — came after he was largely ostracized by the town. He had kicked four players off the team for drinking. And for all his success in the NBA, he makes sure to point out he lost more games (1,017) than he won (935).
But perhaps the wound that cuts deepest is his repeated rejection from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He is the winningest retired coach not in the Hall of Fame, even though he has been nominated by the anonymous committee every year since 2011. In February, it was announced that Motta was a finalist for the first time since 2012. The 2026 class will be announced April 4 during NCAA Final Four weekend.
Motta feigns indifference to the nomination and to his yearly rejections.
“When they called me (in 2012) to tell me I hadn’t made it, I didn’t get bitter. At all,” Motta says. “I developed the basic attitude of: ‘Why should some (stranger) out there judge me?’ I object to subjective judgments.”
He also objects to the optics of this interview. Nothing worse than someone who campaigns for an honor, he says.
“It’s beneath one’s dignity,” Motta says. “I don’t need to, and I don’t want to pound my chest. I know what I did.”
More so, he recoils at the thought of his legacy being determined by an anonymous Hall of Fame committee, or by an out-of-town reporter. The way he sees it, his value is on display every September on the shores of Bear Lake, when the members of the 1959 state title team convene for a weekend. Or when former players such as Dallas center James Donaldson show up at his door to visit, or Mavericks legend Rolando Blackman phones him to catch up.
Inside the booth at the breakfast diner, he shoots an arrow of ire across the table. A plastic straw squeaks for mercy under the wrath of his hands as it is twisted, knotted and stretched, its color stressed from clear to opaque.
“When you first called, I wasn’t interested,” he growls while gripping the straw. “Still not.”
Dick Motta does not want to be interviewed. But he won’t stop talking.
He talks little about awards, honors or Halls. He would rather talk about the work, the people, the bonds, the obstacles — the dirt under his fingernails.
At The Table, each member has moments to own the conversation. A professor extrapolates on physics, a doctor shines his phone flashlight on the ear of a member. And there is Motta, the biggest talker of them all. (Alex Goodlett for The Athletic)
When he sets his clock at night, Motta is already anticipating his wake-up.
“I can’t wait for that 6 a.m. alarm to go off,” he says. “Then I can go down to The Table.”
The Table isn’t as regal as it sounds — it’s an ordinary seating station inside the Einstein Bros. bagel shop near Utah State University. It’s where an accomplished group of men have met for the past 30 years like clockwork: 7 a.m. on weekdays.
The group is now mostly retired, and includes doctors, physicists, professors and businessmen. It wasn’t until around 15 years ago that they welcomed the most well-known of them all, Motta. At first, he attended sporadically, but for the past 10 years, Motta has been like that garlic he diligently plants at the end of every autumn.
“He’s always the first guy there,” says Dr. Richard Gordin, a professor in Kinesiology and Health Science for 39 years at Utah State. “I mean, you can set your clock to it: 7 a.m., his white Jeep pulls in, and there he is. It’s like he is going to practice.”
It’s a social club, a gathering of old farts who talk about sports, the weather and the happenings around town. There are only three rules for The Table: No politics. No religion. No sex.
“What else is there to talk about?” Motta says incredulously and louder than usual for effect. “But it works out. We’re like a bunch of women sitting around in a sewing bee.”
He thought his golden years would be different, filled with travel and nights of reminiscing. Instead, he spends his winters in Logan and his summers 40 miles up the road in Fish Haven, Idaho, near Bear Lake. He is anchored in these parts as he tends to Janice, his wife of 71 years, who is suffering from dementia.
“I’m a caretaker,” Motta says.
There is no disdain or anger when he describes his role, but there is more than a tinge of sadness.
“One of my favorite things is to reminisce where we’ve been and what we’ve done, and I’ll say to her, ‘Remember when …’ and she can’t,” Motta says. “It tests my patience. Not to where I think I’m going to lose it or anything like that, but my patience wears thin, no matter how hard I try.”
He was once a globetrotter, birding for Andean condors in Peru, collecting sand in a bottle from the Jordan River and visiting troops in Vietnam. He hoped one day to sneak a rock from the Great Wall of China into his coat pocket … or go on a Christmas cruise to warmer climates … or visit the two places he never crossed off his bucket list: Scotland and Ireland.
Now, he finds comfort at The Table, even when the conversation doesn’t involve a person or subject with which he is familiar. He revels in being included and welcomes a commotion that doesn’t involve his wife’s condition. That escape is why he so anticipates the sound of his alarm.
“I don’t know what they are talking about sometimes, but just to hear them, and to be in a different environment … it’s a helluva reprieve for me,” Motta says.
The day Motta was interviewed at the breakfast diner, Janice accompanied him, his oldest son Kip helping guide her. She is 90, but looks 30 years younger, and even though she rarely speaks, she exudes a softness, a warmth. When Motta distracts her from a trance, her large blue eyes twinkle, and she knows exactly what his hand movements mean: He wants her to give him some cash to tip the waitress after breakfast.
The way Motta looks at her — playfully, longingly, admiringly — it’s hard to believe this is the same growling, grumpy, cantankerous curmudgeon trying to dictate terms of his interview. As she opens her wallet, he mutters sweet nothings to her and casts a smile one likely only sees in her presence.
He wishes she could remember the time they went on a cruise from Buenos Aires around the tip of South America, past the Falkland Islands, then up to Lima, Peru. He wanted to see a condor, so they hired a guide, who zipped them up the mountain in a small car along narrow roads.
“She was sitting so close to me I thought she was getting fresh,” Motta says through chuckles. “But she was just afraid of heights.”
He says his nickname should be “Snoopy” because he is always curious, always snooping to find the next interesting thing. Janice was his Woodstock, always along for the ride, willing to help. Among their business ventures, they bought and operated a gas service station in Fish Haven and ran the Bluebird Candy Company in Logan. Then, in 1993, four years before he retired from the NBA, they found their calling: running The Bluebird Inn, a bed and breakfast lodge on Bear Lake in Idaho.
“I think you have a picture of me in the zinnias,” Motta said to our reporter. “Well, I wouldn’t go posing if I wasn’t proud.” (Photo courtesy of Kip Motta)
As guests filed in, she made breakfast, and he set the table. While she did laundry, he worked the vegetable garden, producing lettuce, potatoes, peas, corn and peppers that would end up on the guests’ plates. The flower arrangements at the table and in rooms were from his prized flower garden, which featured Janice’s favorite: zinnias, as well as gladiolas and dahlias. As guests dined on breakfast, Motta regaled with stories from the NBA.
They ran the business for 15 years before passing it down to Kip and his wife, but Motta still tends to the garden and flower beds, weeding, transplanting, pruning. Till, plant, harvest.
“It’s what I know,” Motta says. “And I can still bend over and touch the ground with my fingers and keep my knee straight.”
He has given up hope that he and Janice will create new memories, and it pains him that the old memories are unrecognizable to her.
“You can give her this ketchup bottle, and a few minutes later she will ask if there is ketchup,” Motta says. “To see it, how she is deteriorating, is bad. I wish she wasn’t sick, but the reality is, she is, and it’s my responsibility. I’ll take that responsibility, but I don’t like it and it breaks my heart.”
Motta gets his dander raised whenever the conversation drifts back to the Hall of Fame. He does his damnedest to divert the dialogue back to stories about the vegetable fields or his Italian immigrant father earning American citizenship, which Motta calls his proudest moment.
“This Hall of Fame … it was never my goal,” Motta says. “I mean, I can’t put it on my Wheaties …”
The biggest blemish on Motta’s candidacy is he has a losing record, but that didn’t prevent Bill Fitch — who has a lower winning percentage than Motta — from being elected in 2019. And there are five coaches in the Hall who have more wins than Motta, but no NBA title.
Those facts aren’t what irritate Motta. It’s the anonymous, seemingly arbitrary manner in which nominees are chosen.
“They’ve never met me, they’ve never watched one of my practices, which were PRE-CIS-ION,” Motta says, tapping the table with each syllable.
The beauty of his offense was in its simplicity and empowerment. Players didn’t run to designated spots, and they didn’t have predetermined passes; it was all based on read-and-react instincts. There were five sets — he called them “Automatics” — and they all started with a guard passing to a forward, then cutting to wherever the defense wasn’t.
“Where’s your pen?” Motta asks, reaching across the table. “You need a lesson … Automatics … always start the guy on the low post, doesn’t matter which side.”
His left hand begins diagramming plays, and his words are trying to keep up, but the lines and arrows are ahead of his speech. If you didn’t know any better, he was back in the huddle, talking to Wes Unseld, Elvin Hayes and Bob Dandridge, the core that led Washington to the 1978 title.
“Forward, pop out. Gotta be moving to the ball. If you pass to the guard, you have the option to go to the outside and get the ball back … we call that the Get.”
He goes through the plays: Get … Corner … Up … Diagonal … Fade. All of the sets are centered around players finding spaces in the defense, a “run to daylight” concept Motta stole from his coaching idol, Green Bay Packers’ coach Vince Lombardi. The offense granted players freedom and challenged them to be intuitive. The way Motta describes it, players didn’t have the “option” to pass; they had the “convenience” to pass.
What set his teams apart wasn’t necessarily the plays, but the precision with which they executed the plays.
“We practiced, practiced, practiced,” says Blackman, the Mavericks guard. “And we practiced not only the plays, but the options to every play. All the ifs, ands and buts were covered, and he did a great job explaining why. And I mean, we executed. Nobody executed like us, except for maybe Utah.”
In practices, Motta barked out instructions and critiques as if he were running a boot camp. Blackman likened him to a general, and Donaldson — an Air Force son himself — asked if Motta had a military background, because he sure coached like he spent time in the service. (Motta served two years in the Air Force after two years in the Air Force ROTC.)
“He was a real stickler for execution. But I tell you, we ran offensive plays that were to perfection,” Donaldson says.
But not everything was perfect. He sometimes clashed with players, none more than Mark Aguirre in Dallas, the No. 1 pick in 1981.
Motta, shown coaching Brad Davis, Rolando Blackman and Mark Aguirre of the Mavericks in 1987, had an infamously rocky relationship with the talented Aguirre. “It was not pleasant,” Motta said. (Rick Stewart/ALLSPORT)
Motta was a disciplinarian and a perfectionist with three basic rules: Play hard, be on time, be a team player.
“Guys like Mark, they were a little more free-spirited,” Donaldson says. “They wanted to be more innovative and do their own things from time to time.”
A common scene in Dallas: Motta yelling at Aguirre for being late, for not playing hard or for taking a bad shot and Aguirre either sulking, pouting or talking back.
“It was not pleasant,” Motta says.
Added Blackman: “Lord knows, (Aguirre) and Motta didn’t get along … at all. It was the crux of our team (not) moving forward and not being able to get where we needed to.”
Neither side budged until Aguirre was traded midway through his eighth season to Detroit for Adrian Dantley and a first-round pick that later became LaBradford Smith.
As stubborn as Motta was with his rules, he was just as obstinate in his game planning. If an opponent couldn’t stop a play, he would run it until they did.
In 1994, Motta and the Mavericks trailed the Nuggets 66-43 at halftime in Denver. The Mavericks’ first play in the third quarter was a post-up for wing Jimmy Jackson. He scored. Motta called the same play the next trip down. Jackson scored. On the bench, within earshot of Motta, was assistant coach Brad Davis, a former point guard under Motta.
“Dick ended up running that same play the whole second half,” Davis says.
Surely not every play …
“I’m telling you,” Davis says. “Every play.”
Jackson finished with 50 points. Jamal Mashburn 35. And the Mavericks erased the 23-point deficit and won 124-123 in overtime. Two weeks earlier, Jason Kidd — then a rookie point guard — remembers Motta using a similar tactic in Chicago against the Bulls.
“We ran the same play over and over,” Kidd says.
Mashburn had 50. Jackson 38 and the Mavericks beat the Bulls 124-120 in overtime.
“He was into the idea that if something worked, he wasn’t going to go away from it,” Kidd says. “He paid attention to how teams were playing you, and if they weren’t playing one of our guys well, he was going to go to them until they stopped him.”
Motta shows off his 1978 NBA championship ring. Yet, he says, “My fondest memory is the Grace High School team that won the Idaho state championship.” (Alex Goodlett for The Athletic)
If his hands have spent a lifetime in the soil, Motta’s tongue has spent a lifetime spinning yarns.
“He’s a great storyteller,” says Kidd, the Hall of Fame point guard.
Motta was Kidd’s first coach in the NBA, and Kidd said some of his most indelible moments were spent with Motta in sports bars on the road, where the two would watch NBA games and talk strategy. Kidd says Motta taught him about player and team tendencies, and how to anticipate a player’s move or a team’s execution.
“We watched a lot of basketball together, went to a lot of sports bars, and he was a great teacher,” Kidd says. “Just sitting there with him, and listening to someone who had been around the game so much, it was great for me as a young player. It’s really how I learned to play the NBA game.”
Kidd was one of many who noted that some of Motta’s stories are best not repeated. Motta carries some grudges, his rocky relationship with Aguirre among them, and he still has a penchant for locker room talk that would make many in today’s audience blanch. For instance, Motta scoffed when it was noted that one of his former players was often injured with sprained ankles.
“More like bruised ovaries,” Motta deadpanned.
That tiger he brought into the locker room at a road game in Oakland, Calif.? He borrowed it from the halftime show in an attempt to motivate his Mavericks during their inaugural season.
“I said, ‘If you bastards don’t start rebounding …,’” Motta says with a smirk. “I don’t think they saw my humor in that. I thought it relieved the tension. And … it was a nice tiger.”
Or how, on a whim during a timeout, he joined a skit by the San Diego Chicken and stomped on a stuffed referee doll. Official Tommy Nunez Sr. didn’t take kindly to the skit. He gave Motta a technical.
“And it cost me about five games after that,” Motta says, noting that Nunez held a grudge. “But the funny thing is, later in the game, The Chicken started shining my shoes, and said, ‘That was great … can you follow me to my next game?’”
Or how he sent a message during the 1978 NBA Finals, keeping his starters in during the fourth quarter of Game 6 to run up the score on the Seattle SuperSonics. The Bullets won by 35.
“You are taught all your life, when you are up good at the end of the game, you pull back and play the youngsters,” Motta says. “But this time, I looked them in the eye and told the starters I was keeping them in. I wanted (Seattle) going home with doubt.’”
After the Bullets won Game 7, Motta was asked by a reporter if winning the NBA title was the greatest accomplishment of his life?
“It was a great win, but my fondest memory is the Grace High School team that won the Idaho state championship,” Motta said.
Motta, pictured with finals MVP Wes Unseld, won the 1978 NBA title as head coach of the Washington Bullets. (Peter Read Miller / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
It was in February 1958 when Dick Motta went to get a haircut in Grace, a farming town of about 700 in Southern Idaho. Motta was 27 and the first-year head coach of the high school team.
And the town was angry.
Their anger wasn’t derived from Motta’s youth. Or that in practice, he made kids run up and down the bleacher stairs for mistakes. The townspeople couldn’t believe Motta kicked four players off the team for drinking alcohol. Included in the exile was the team’s leading scorer.
Motta said he would come home to find beer bottles scattered on his lawn. Once, he and Janice returned to find two chickens with their feet tied together on their porch, their heads cut off, and blood soaking the doormat. When the team would return from road games, Motta said it wasn’t uncommon for him and his players to find the tires slashed on their cars.
“If you are honest with yourself, every one of us has a turning point in our lives,” Motta says. “That was my turning point.”
He decided he was going to be a coach who was unwavering when it came to rules. There would be no budging, no exceptions, no second chances. If you don’t stand for something, you fall for everything.
That hard line was what led to a discussion with Orville Christiansen, the father of Boyd, the team’s center. Orville was a dry farmer — which means he didn’t irrigate his crops — which is a highly specialized technique. There was skill and knowledge needed to create a dust mulch to keep moisture in the soil. Around Southern Idaho, few if any, were better at dry farming than Orville.
“I said, ‘’Orville, I grew up on a farm. And I would in no way come to you and tell you when to bring in your wheat or alfalfa crop,’” Motta remembers telling him. “I could study forever and not know what you know. And you could study forever and not know what I know. So, let me set the rules.”
And on this February day, as Motta sat down for a haircut, a scene developed that would lay the groundwork for a memory that would echo throughout Motta’s 25-year NBA career.
Herb, the barber, affixed a cape around Motta’s neck and started in on the young coach. Why did he cut the player? Was it really necessary? Kids have been drinking for years … let them be kids.
“I said, ‘Herb, you wanna cut hair, or you wanna talk?’” Motta remembers. “And he said, ‘I think I want to talk …’”
Motta whisked off his cape, walked out and drove 13 miles to Soda Springs for his trim. And his groceries.
The Red Devils went 24-2 and lost in the state final. The next year, they went 24-2 and won the state title.
In the crowded celebration in the locker room, Motta felt a hand slap on his back. It was Herb, the barber. He rattled off atta boys and congratulations before trumpeting free haircuts for the whole team. Motta says he told Herb to take his cuts and put ‘em where the sun don’t shine.
“So Herb became my beacon. Any time someone booed me during an NBA game, I would turn and say ‘Herb?’ … or if someone patted me on the back … ‘Herb?’” Motta said. “You can hear ankles breaking when people jump off your bandwagon. And it taught me you are only as good as you were yesterday in this business. Yep … Herb pulled me through a lot of things.”
Of all his accomplishments, Motta says coaching Grace High to 1959 Idaho state high school title sits alone. (Photo courtesy of Phil Johnson)
Till. Plant. Harvest.
For much of his 94 years, Dick Motta figured that process related to his hands in the dirt, working the land, churning the soil, burrowing seeds and then reaping the rewards.
But here in his golden years, he is beginning to realize his hands followed much the same patterns with basketball as when he was in the fields. He took teams, and players, and worked them like soil, cultivating with discipline and nourishing with guidance.
His home is scattered with trophies, plaques and pictures, but those mementos are not the harvest of his career. The reward, the yield of his career, is in the players who come back.
Every September, the boys of 1959 — the Grace High team that won the Idaho state championship — shuffle their octogenarian knees into the Bluebird Inn to stay the weekend with Motta. For a weekend, they rekindle the stories, reframe the legendary plays, and remember what it felt like to be young.
“Five years ago, the talk used to be how good they were, you know, how they could stuff and rebound,” Motta says. “Now we sit around and talk about hips, shoulders and what medication we’re taking.”
The weekend has been planned and coordinated every year since 2001 by Wayne Andersen, the point guard of the team.
“Dick, he’ll call me here in a little while and say ‘Are we still going to do it in September?”’ Andersen said in December. “At first we did it every five years. Then we decided every three because we are getting older. Then all the sudden we’ve been doing it every year for the past 10 years.
“There’s not too many guys who can say that they get to do that with their high school basketball coach.”
Less than three months later, on March 2, Andersen died in Ogden, Utah. He was 85, the third member of the 1959 team to die. The week of his death, Andersen had lunch with Motta.
Kip said his father took Andersen’s passing hard. Motta in January said he views the kids from the 1959 team as his sons.
“He knew Wayne longer than he’s known me,” Kip says, his voice cracking.
Absorbing grief is one of the curses of aging. He led the Chicago Bulls to the Western Conference Finals in 1974 and 1975, and the starting lineup for the 1975 team has all died (Norm Van Lier, Jerry Sloan, Bob Love, Chet Walker and Tom Boerwinkle).
“You know, at my age, a lot of my friends are dead,” Motta said in January. “But I’m not afraid of it, because I’ve lived life.”
Years ago, Donaldson made the trek to Bear Lake and stayed with Motta at the bed and breakfast. He said he is planning another trip to see Motta this spring. Blackman, who after his rookie season spent a week with Motta at his basketball camp in Montana, where they became close, periodically checks in with phone calls. They talk about the state of college sports, whether he is exercising, and how the family is.
“We talk about life,” Blackman says. “And you know what? He still very much has the power of thought.”
But that power of thought gives little time to the impending Hall of Fame decision.
Up the hill from the Bluebird Inn is the Bear Lake West Golf Club. In the bar is a display of area sporting legends. There’s former pro golfer Bob Betley (Weber State). Football player Merlin Olsen (born in Logan). Basketball coach Phil Johnson, a member of the Grace 1959 team who later became NBA Coach of the Year in 1975. And, of course, Motta, the vegetable farmer who won 935 games and an NBA title.
He is in the Big Sky Conference Hall of Fame after leading Weber State for eight years (1960-68), which included three conference titles and the school’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in 1968. And he’s got his own Hall of Fame at Bear Lake West.
On Monday, Motta received a call informing him he did not make the 2026 Hall of Fame class. The kid from Union, Utah, who taught himself how to be a coach by reading books and attending clinics, almost made the Hall of Fame. For the last month or so, it was a fun idea to dream about. Just like he did in 2012, Motta will shrug his shoulders and move on.
After all, his garlic crop has taken root … and last weekend, it started to sprout.