Immediately after the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship Tuesday night with a 105-97 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of the commentators asked Golden State coach Steve Kerr who he was thinking about. “Lute Olson,” said Kerr, referring to the legendary University of Arizona coach whom Kerr played for in the mid-80s. Kerr then listed a few other basketball influences, which presumably disappointed the interviewer who was almost surely trying to prompt an emotionally charged response from Kerr about his late father, Malcolm Kerr, who was murdered in Beirut 1984.
Malcolm Kerr, like Steve, was born in Lebanon, where his parents taught at the American University in Beirut, the school that Kerr would later take charge of as president during the country’s civil war. Malcolm Kerr studied at Princeton and earned his PhD at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in 1958 and became one of his generation’s leading scholars of the Middle East. His best-known book, a classic in the field, is The Arab Cold War: Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-1970. As the title indicates, Kerr was primarily interested in the politics of the Middle East as done by Middle Easterners. If the conceit sounds redundant, the reality is that the field of Middle East studies, certainly since Kerr’s death, has tended to see Middle Easterners as supporting actors on someone else’s stage.
