Basketball icon and Tucson favorite Steve Kerr confirmed Thursday that his childhood home in Pacific Palisades was destroyed by fire this week.
“It’s a lifetime of memories of occasions and birthday parties and everything else, and to see the destruction seems unfathomable,” the Golden State Warriors head coach said at an NBA press conference.
“My mom is in good hands, but her house is gone,” he said.
He expressed his gratitude that she evacuated safely on Tuesday after the massive Palisades wildfire was sparked in the Los Angeles neighborhood, and that “fortunately, almost everyone escaped.”
Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr
The wind-whipped fire destroyed more than 1,000 structures and ripped through 17,200 acres.
“The pictures remind me of Lahaina a couple of years ago and so, I’m so happy that there wasn’t the loss of life Hawaii experienced,” Kerr said. The 2023 wildfire on Maui killed 102 people.
But the level of destruction in his California hometown is “surreal and devastating,” Kerr said, calling the images apocalyptic. “It’s hard to fathom how Pacific Palisades rebuilds,” he said, noting that most of his childhood friends also lost the homes they grew up in and “our old high school is gone.”
The devastation from the Palisades Fire is seen from the air in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Thursday, Jan. 9.
Kerr was a standout at that school, Palisades High, before Arizona Wildcats Coach Lute Olson brought him to Tucson in 1983, where he went on to help lead Arizona to its first Final Four, in 1988.
He said he doesn’t think his mother cares much about items lost, and that she got out photos, paintings — she's a watercolorist — and as much as she could when evacuating.
But the lifetime of “amazing memories” included celebrating her 90th birthday there last summer, he noted, with “100 guests up on that hill,” a place he described as “idyllic and beautiful,” with sunset views every night.
He was also there just two weeks ago for dinner with his mom, Ann Kerr.
The hoop in front of the house was where Steve sharpened his shot, enough to grab the attention of Hall of Fame Coach Olson. The Associated Press photographed Ann changing the basket’s net in 1996, the year Kerr, by then a former Wildcats star, won one of his NBA titles as a Chicago Bulls 3-point specialist.
In this 1996 file photo, Ann Kerr, mother of Steve Kerr, then a Chicago Bulls player, put up a new net on the basketball rim in front of her Los Angeles home that her son used to practice on as an aspiring NBA player. The home burned this week in the massive Palisades wildfire.
On Tuesday night, before the home’s loss was confirmed, Kerr opened his regular post-game press conference by sending “condolences to everybody in Los Angeles dealing with the fires. Everything I’m seeing and reading is just terrifying what’s happening down there, so just want to send thoughts to everyone who’s going through the devastation of the fire.
“Obviously the game is secondary to that and to many things in life. Perspective is important,” he said.
Six fires were raging across the Los Angeles region as of late Thursday night and the death toll had risen to 10.
The Kerr family bought the ranch-style home in 1969, the year Steve turned 4, and he spent most of his childhood there, he said Thursday, which confirmed reporting this week by the San Francisco Chronicle. His late father was a UCLA professor.
The house was surrounded by trees and thick vegetation, leading to a canyon below. It was filled with family mementos, including a school painting Steve completed at age 8 that Ann kept to adorn a wall, the Chronicle reported.
Ann Kerr coordinates the Visiting Fulbright Scholar program at the UCLA International Institute. The Chronicle noted she was due to meet her winter-quarter students Wednesday. “A great distraction, which I appreciate!” she texted.
The family also spent several years living in the Middle East, where Steve’s father, Malcolm Kerr, was a college professor. Malcolm Kerr was killed by gunmen in January 1984, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, while serving as president of American University of Beirut.
Steve Kerr, who donated $1 million for renovations to the University of Arizona’s McKale Center after his college years, has nine NBA title rings, having won five titles as a player and four as Warriors coach.
He was named one of the 15 best coaches in NBA history by a panel of NBA coaches in collaboration with the National Basketball Coaches Association. He also coached the U.S. men's team to gold in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
