Sam Amick

USA TODAY Sports

OAKLAND – All those months had passed, with Steve Kerr telling Bob Myers day after day that he just wasn’t ready to return to the court, and the response from the Golden State Warriors general manager to his ailing coach was always the same.

“Steve, do what’s best for you,” Myers would say to Kerr. “The Warriors are going to be fine. It’s a basketball game.”

Those words held true on Friday night, when Kerr coached for the first time in more than six months and the fact that the Warriors beat the Indiana Pacers to improve to a league-best 40-4 had almost nothing to do with the meaning of it all. The part that mattered most, that had Myers smiling afterwards and inspired Kerr to call his general manager “an amazing human being” before tipoff, is that he was happy and healthy again.

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The Warriors’ beloved coach was back doing the work he loved, this job that moves him.

Just like Myers’ late brother-in-law, Scott Dinsmore, used to say.

As Kerr made his way back from complications caused by offseason back surgery, those kind and patient words from Myers had come from a place that was as special as it was sad. On Sept. 12, 2015, right about the time Kerr was deciding whether or not he’d be ready to take on the rigors of training camp while dealing with severe headaches and fatigue, the 33-year-old Dinsmore was killed by falling boulders while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with his wife, Chelsea.

The love of her life, this passionate man whose TED talk imploring people to follow their dreams has approximately 2.6 million views and who founded a company – “Live Your Legend” – based on that uplifting principle, was just a few feet away from her on the mountain when he was taken. Their backpacking adventure around the globe had come to a tragic end. She would hike back down the mountain alone.

Chelsea Dinsmore lives in the Myers’ San Francisco home now, with Bob, his wife, Kristen, and their two young daughters all trying to fill an unfillable void. As Myers searched for the right words to explain the devastation of it late Friday night, the look of anguish on his face said more than enough. He was forever changed by this.

But somewhere along the path, while Myers’ family grieved and Kerr wondered how he’d gone from the NBA’s mountaintop in June to a lonely hike downward of his own, these two men who had no relationship before becoming partners in May of 2014 began to lean on one another. Their bigger-than-basketball bond was born.

“We would often say that this was the best year and worst year of our lives,” Myers, who joined the Warriors in April of 2011, told USA TODAY Sports. “What he went through personally, and what I went through in a family way, it’s a true statement. Only a few people knew about it, or know it, and so yeah there was a very sad common bond that we both were able to talk about and empathize.

“I’m lucky to have a guy like that in my life, who I respect and trust. He spoke to my wife and family (after Dinsmore’s passing) and wrote an e-mail to them afterwards that was one of the most beautiful e-mails I’ve ever seen. It meant a lot to me to do that to my wife’s family, so there’s a lot of layers here that go deeper than (the typical) coach-GM (relationship).”

Kerr, the five-time champion as a player who served as Phoenix Suns general manager and TNT analyst before joining the Warriors, is certainly no stranger to loss. His father, Malcolm Kerr, was the president of American University in Beirut when he was assassinated on Jan. 18, 1984. Kerr, who was a star at the University of Arizona at the time, has spoken openly for years about the profound effect losing his father had on who he would later become.

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But these past six months have been trying in their own right. Kerr, who spent most of his time in his San Diego home with his wife, Margot, until reappearing around the team recently, was forced to step away from this job he so dearly loves. His return date kept moving. The symptoms kept coming. Those constant chats with Myers, though, helped keep his restless mind sane.

“Bob is an amazing human being; he really is,” Kerr said. “His support is just … incredible. There (are) no conditions to it. He’s going to support me and cares me and he feels that way about everybody on our team. Obviously we all want to win, but Bob is a person who has an understanding of humanity and people and family and he knows all that stuff is way more important than winning a game and it’s genuine. His support has been huge for me.”

As has Kerr’s for Myers.

“(The NBA is) so results oriented, and that’s OK because it always will be and we signed up for that,” Myers said. “But if you can somehow, within all of the chaos, understand that there’s going to be some really good days and some really hard days, have strong relationships and bonds, it makes it all that much better. That’s the part that I think I’m proud of (with Kerr), and I hope he’s proud of it. It is real.”

Before the past few months, through Myers’ time as a high school star in nearby Danville, Calif., a member of the national champion UCLA Bruins in 1995 and his career as an NBA agent-turned-front-office-executive, he said he never considered himself the empathetic type. He was widely known as affable and very capable, to be sure, but truly understanding the trials of others, he said, was a weakness.

In this, however, there is strength. For them both.

“With these last two experiences, I have a profoundly different outlook on life based on what he went through and what I’m going through with my wife, and her parents,” Myers said. “It certainly changed me, because there are depths of emotion I hadn’t gone to (before). I viewed what (Kerr) was going through in a different light too – as a person, as a friend…That will last a lot longer than whatever happens in the next year or five years.

“I always said, ‘Steve, do what’s best for you. The Warriors are going to be fine. It’s a basketball game. We’re going to be ok. How are you?’ That’s what you want to get to. Hopefully we go through this together a long time, but we’re not always going to be this good. We know it. And then when things are tougher, and you face adversity, having that strong bond is very meaningful.”