At 70, Brown up to old tricks

Hubie Brown and the Memphis Grizzlies were in town last night. That's 70-year-old Hubie -- a true Grizzly by any measure.

"Once you hit 60, everybody thinks you're over the hill," Brown said before his team beat the Celtics, 96-89, in one of the darker nights for the Green Team. "They think you have nothing to offer. How can you communicate? But if you have presence, if you have a plan and show it to them, they get it. It's the same as it was in the 1970s."

There. The young and the restless can still learn from those who've been sitting in a hammock On Golden Pond.

Hubie Brown has three grandchildren. When he came into the NBA 32 years ago as an assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks, he advised players named Oscar Robertston and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He coached against Larry Bird. Now he's lining up for the Early Bird Special.

Brown is coaching the fourth-youngest roster in the NBA, a lineup that includes five players born in the 1980s. Hubie has shoes older than some of his players. Before last year, he hadn't coached in the NBA since the Knicks let him go in '87. You might say he went from the Big Apple to the Granny Smith Apple.

Doesn't matter. It's working. The Grizzlies reached new heights after Hubie took over last year (hired by Jerry West) and are now a .500 team (8-8), which would make them better than your 7-10 Celtics.

Not bad for a guy who was already an old friend when Paul Simon wrote "Old Friends."

Why not? It's part of a trend in professional sports. Seventy-two-year-old Jack McKeon (now 73) -- who gave "rocking chair inning" a whole new meaning -- just won a World Series as manager of the Florida Marlins. Sixty-seven-year-old Dick Vermeil, who has 11 grandchildren, is coaching the team (Kansas City Chiefs) with the best record in the NFL. Retired coach Scotty Bowman was 68 when he last had his name engraved on the Stanley Cup.

Grand-Papa's got a brand new bag -- coaching your local pro franchise.

Come to think of it, Dick Williams is still only 75 years old. Why don't the Sox put Terry Francona on hold and bring back Williams for one more year? It worked for the Marlins.

The popular thinking is that guys raised listening to 33-RPM LPs can't communicate with guys downloading songs on Ipods. Something was lost in the years of 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs.

Hubie's not buying.

"The winners get it," he said. "The middle-of-the-roaders, they're always going to step over it. The losers never get it. We had guys like that in the 1970s, but nobody wanted to say it. That's why we play 10 players every night. That way only two guys are ticked off.

"We have a team with no All-Stars. The coaching staff provides the leadership. These guys wouldn't know what to do if you asked them to lead. There's no Larry Bird here. But I see a great work ethic. Our guys work like crazy. Back in '73, we had all kinds of malcontents, problems off the court. They were different kinds of problems from today, but nobody knew about them because there was no ESPN, no Fox News.

"As coaches, we have to tell these players, `You're not going to change us. We've been around too many great players.' So we keep teaching. We were in Boston yesterday and went to their facility and I looked up at all those championship banners and I took our guys through every one of them. I covered every banner."

One of those banners came at the expense of Hubie Brown. In 1984, his New York Knicks took the Celtics to a seventh game before bowing in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Brown won an ABA championship with the Kentucky Colonels, but the '84 playoff series vs. the Celtics represents his finest hour as an NBA coach.

Here he is, 19 years later, bringing a 9-year-old team into a building that did not exist when he last coached in the NBA.

"He is doing an unbelievable job coaching this team," said Celtics director of basketball operations Danny Ainge. "It's a miraculous turnaround. Hubie is just a born coach and teacher. There are other old coaches working in the league, but the difference between Hubie and the rest of the old coaches is that he is a born coach. He lives and breathes it. He's got the passion for the game.

"I worked with him as a broadcaster and his notes and preparation were unbelievable. He is so into the game and has so much energy. I've seen older coaches who are just collecting paychecks. Not Hubie."

Cedric Maxwell, who like Ainge played against Hubie's Knicks in '84, said, "He's going with the times. He always prided himself on the man-to-man coverage, and I didn't think I'd ever seen his teams play zone, but he's doing it now."

"Winning players want to be coached," said Hubie. "They want to be prepared and will do exactly what you want as long as you are fair."

He says the players today aren't that much different than the players of 30, 40, and 50 years ago. Winners are still winners and losers are still losers.

And the true coaches? They never change, either. They are lifers.

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is dshaughnessy@globe.com.