Photo: San Antonio Spurs/Courtesy

We have no idea what people carry. Even those we see every day, the ones we laugh with, break bread with and spar with, the ones we cheer and we boo, do not let us in on everything.

Sometimes we might think we have an idea. We might hear a whisper, or we might pick up on what we think is some telling body language. But even if we have our suspicions and make our guesses about a burden, we cannot know exactly how they choose to carry it, or for how long.

And more often than not, we don’t see what carries them, either.

Most of us never saw Erin Popovich. We heard tales of her generosity and her spirit, and we knew people who spoke of her with immense respect. But she did not sit courtside. She did not take the stage during championship celebrations. She did not go on road trips.

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Gregg Popovich never told us what his wife carried. He never told us of the long illness that kept her from sharing firsthand in so many of those moments, and he never told us of the way his heart and mind must have been conflicted through them all. He did not think it was our business. He was right.

But some of us knew more than others. Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili might not have understood the depth and breadth of exactly what the Popoviches carried, but they had a better glimpse than most. Parker, having joined the Spurs’ family as a teenager, considered Erin a mother, and Ginobili came to love her, too.

“We all know the type of guy Pop is,” Ginobili said Thursday, barely able to contain his emotions hours before the Spurs’ 110-97 loss to Golden State. “Not many people know the type of gal Erin was.”

The world does not know because Popovich kept that under wraps, like so much else about himself. Anyone who has been around the Spurs for any significant length of time has heard anecdotes about acts of profound kindness from Popovich, and by extension, Erin, but he guarded those stories like he once guarded the information he gathered as an Air Force intelligence officer.

And so it was not surprising at all that before the Spurs took the floor for Game 3 of their playoff series, the AT&T Center held no moment of silence for Erin on the evening after her death, and made no mention of Popovich’s absence. He would not have allowed it.

Even if there were 18,000 people ready to mourn with him, to share in his grief, he did not want anything out of the ordinary. What he carried, as usual, was his and his family’s alone.

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Those who knew that family best had a window most of us did not. Steve Kerr, the Golden State coach who played for Popovich a decade and a half ago, spoke Thursday about how “Erin was sort of the balance that Pop needed.”

Popovich has spent much of his career imploring his players to give a little more, to show a little more fight, to not be, in one of his favored terms, “soft.” To hear people who knew Erin tell it, she always provided him with a frame of reference.

“She’s dealt with a lot, health-wise, over the past few years,” Kerr said. “And she’s been very courageous in her battle.”

It could not have been easy for either of them. But by all accounts, they decided together that Popovich would keep coaching, because what else was there for him to do?

Charlie Amato, chairman of Spurs shareholder SWBC, got to know Erin well over the years and said Popovich’s retirement never was an option.

“She never asked him to slow down or retire,” Amato said. “She was always 110-percent supportive of him.”

Erin was, after all, a big reason why he caught his big break with the Spurs in the first place. The daughter of Jim Conboy, the longtime athletic trainer at the Air Force Academy, Erin was childhood best friends with a girl with an even more impressive job title.

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Betsy Gwin’s dad was Robert McDermott, an Air Force brigadier general.

When, as Spurs chairman in 1994, McDermott was considering the idea of hiring an unknown candidate to take over as the franchise’s general manager, Gwin vouched for Erin’s husband. Popovich nailed the interview, of course, but his wife’s connections didn’t hurt.

So she helped carry him from the beginning, even if most of us never realized it. And last weekend in San Francisco, when Popovich was asked why he keeps coaching, he listed all of the ways he was lucky. He mentioned all of the perks of his job and none of the drawbacks, and he sounded, above all, like a grateful man.

Those of us who listened to him that day did not realize what he was carrying, or what was carrying him.

We still don’t. But now we might have a better idea.

mfinger@express-news.net

Twitter: @mikefinger