A decade ago Sam Mitchell was the loud, wise-cracking coach of a Toronto Raptors team that was skidding out. Sam was always like that: he would joust with reporters and staffers, snap at softball questions, jibe and joke, a funny rascal, a pain in the ass. God, he was a pain in the ass.

But the talk I remember is a night in Orlando when he had returned from a funeral, his father-in-law’s. On the flight he had dreamed about his former Minnesota Timberwolves teammate Malik Sealy, who had died six years earlier. And before the game, Sam spoke quietly about death.

“I’ve had so many people die,” says Mitchell, now 52 and the interim head coach in charge of Minnesota’s precocious kids. “It’s ridiculous.”

Sam came back to Toronto this week, so I asked him about that night. He said, fire away.

The first one changed his life. His big brother Fessor, a sensitive kid who grew to seven-foot-one, was accused of assault by an elderly woman while he was playing pro ball in Europe; he said she was just scared when he tried to help her. After the charges were dropped, Fessor burned the news clippings, and committed suicide.

“We were very similar, both of us laid-back, quiet,” says Sam, who was in the ninth grade at the time. “He and I just became really close, man. We were just really close. And it really, really affected me.” He only started taking basketball seriously after Fessor died, because he wanted his big brother to be proud.

In the 10th grade, his high school teammate, Joe Veasley, got in an argument at a party, and someone pulled out a gun; Joe died bleeding under a bush. Sam still remembers the eulogy. During Sam’s freshman year at Mercer, his aunt Belinda, his mom’s youngest sister, told his mother someone else would have to do her hair from here on. That night Belinda called her minister, told him she was scared of dying, and they met at a Denny’s, and afterwards she told him she wasn’t afraid to die anymore. She went home and laid down on her bed, fully clothed, and that’s how her son found her. Sam thought it might have been a heart attack. She was 39.

“It looked like she had fell asleep with her clothes on,” says Sam.

In college at Mercer, the kid recruited to replace him, Eric Chambers, died of heat stroke while playing in a park. Sam accompanied Mercer’s head coach to see Chambers’ parents.

“Eric was really from a small town, a country kid, and he called his dad Paul,” says Sam. “And during certain times of the year he had to go home and help his dad bring the crops in. He was a great kid, and I remember feeling so bad for his dad. He kept saying, ‘Y’all don’t understand, he wasn’t just my boy, he was my best friend.’ They did everything together. When he would visit Mercer, Eric would be waiting on the curb, waiting for his dad so that when he got there he could jump up and they could hug each other. They were close. It broke my heart to see that man in so much pain. It was one of the saddest things I’ve seen in my life.

“That was the first time I’ve ever spoken at a funeral.”

It didn’t stop. His mother’s only brother, Tillman, one of the first black managers at the textile mill in Columbus, Ga. He lost the job, lost his marriage, drank himself to death. The last time Sam visited him he said, ‘Nephew, I’m tired of living.’ Sam’s aunt Bethora had a heart attack, in her early 30s. A couple friends he grew up with got sick and died, in their 30s.

“From the ninth grade, it just seemed like every year or two, somebody close to me was dying,” says Sam.

In the NBA, there was Malik. Sam got the call early in the morning, and arranged to be there with the police to tell Malik’s wife. She collapsed when he told her, and he caught her. He called Malik’s parents, too. Malik was the baby of the family.

“It reminded me of when my brother died,” says Sam. “My mother, when she got the phone call, she let out a scream that I had never heard before. And Malik Sealy’s mother let out a scream, and all I could hear was Malik’s father in the background saying, ‘What’s wrong?’ ”

Then came his father-in-law. Then came his father. Sam Sr. was a hard man. He once got fired from his job at the mill after punching a white manager who called him “n--------.” He would hand his work cheque to Sam’s mother and go make money shooting pool, or playing cards. He would get in fights, and cut the other guy with the little pocketknife he carried when it was over. When Sam or his brothers misbehaved, they would get the belt. They were young black men growing up in the south, and their father wanted them to be tough. It made for a difficult childhood.

And when Sam and his father finally became close his dad got pancreatic cancer, and died in a month.

“As soon as I fell in love with my dad, as soon as we had the relationship that I always wanted, he was gone,” says Sam. “I bought a house on a lake, because I always knew my dad loved fishing. And when he and my mom would come visit, my dad was a homebody, and I was living in Atlanta, my hometown an hour and a half away. And I felt like buying a house on a lake, I could go visit him more, because he could go fishing. And shortly after I bought the house on the lake and he came up a couple times to go fishing and stuff, that’s when he got sick and died. And you know, after my dad died, I never went back in my backyard and fished again. It just wasn’t the same without him.”

He has felt like death follows him around; he tries not to think about it, but he is familiar with the mechanics of grief. In the last few years he lost another brother, Jessie, also to pancreatic cancer, and Flip Saunders, the man who pulled him out of the coaching scrapyard, to Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He carries them with him, like we all do with people we’ve lost. Life leaves scars.

“There are times in my life when I can feel it,” says Sam. “Like, when (Flip) died, or what happened to Monty Williams (who lost his wife in a car crash), it reminds me of those times, and how hard life is, and how precious life is.

“The thing I tell people when they lose people is, let all your feelings show. Don’t be afraid, don’t feel like you can’t. Because all you’re doing is telling yourself how much you’re going to miss that person, and what they meant to you.

“I just keep telling myself I can take it, I’m a strong man, I can handle it. I know I have this persona, this hard, stoic thing, and I can be tough, we all can. But if you ask my mother, she laughs when people write about how tough I am. Your mother knows you. My mom says the reason I put on this front of being so tough is that I’ve been hurt so many times. That I’m afraid to get my feelings hurt, so I always act like nothing bothers me and I can take anything.”

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Has it changed him? A better word is maybe that it has shaped him. The little brother became a basketball player; the quiet kid became a loud-mouthed wiseass. He’s trying to do better, be kinder, as time goes on. He puts a lot of trust in faith. He’s trying to be wiser, day by day. He’s trying.

“I’ve seen the difference in Sam with trust,” says Kevin Garnett, one of Mitchell’s best friends. “He didn’t trust a lot of people, and those people you mentioned were people that he’s trusted and befriended, and when you lose that, you lose a piece of yourself. He’s a lot more under control, obviously, and you would expect that with growth and him getting older. But more importantly, he’s learned how to communicate, and he’s a lot more patient. He seems to be in a better place for himself, now. Mellowed out. He’s mellowed out a lot.”

Sam came back to town this week, and he was still a bit of a rascal. He still joked and jibed, still a pain in the ass. It was just finally easier to understand why.