Dwane Casey is trying to recall a childhood memory of growing up in the small farming town of Morganfield, Kentucky. Here’s the first image that pops into his mind.

“I remember (activist) Dick Gregory coming to town to try and get rid of segregation. I remember him speaking on the courthouse steps. I remember the Klan rally, them riding through town as he was speaking.”

What does a Klan rally look like?

“Guys with white hoods riding in their cars,” Casey shrugs. “I knew what it stood for. I knew someone didn’t like me. Growing up, you hear all these stories about the Klan — Klan, Klan, Klan. You think of the boogeyman.”

Casey can’t put a finger on exactly how old he was at the time. Eight? Nine? But he remembers the tableau vividly.

Standing there in the broad Kentucky daylight, surrounded by his neighbours, Casey remembers the fear. Fear has animated Casey’s life — fear of poverty, fear of missing his chance, fear of not doing enough once he gets it. Fear is a constant in every man’s life, and some are consumed by it. Casey chose to harness fear. It has driven him to the top.

The picture Casey paints of Morganfield in the early ’60s is of some antediluvian holdover, a place progress forgot for too long.

When he was a child, the town of some 4,700 souls was racially segregated. Casey went to the black school, Dunbar. White kids went to Union Square.

When the family went into town to get barbecue, they couldn’t set foot in the restaurant. Couldn’t even knock on the front door. Blacks put their orders in at the back entrance, then waited in their cars until it was ready. They were allowed to attend the town’s only movie theatre — movies are a big part of Casey’s life — but were relegated to the back two rows of the balcony.

Casey’s grandfather, Urey, whom he still calls ‘Dad,’ worked as a janitor at the Bel Air Motel.

“He cleaned it at nighttime, but he wasn’t allowed to eat there during the day,” Casey says.

Casey’s parents left Morganfield in pursuit of work. They ended up in Indianapolis. Casey stayed throughout the school year and was raised by his maternal grandparents, Urey and Elizabeth Miller. Urey worked 90-hour weeks at a drycleaner during the day and in the motel at night. Elizabeth Miller was a housemaid and, to Casey, a titan.

As Casey entered Grade 4, Morganfield was choppily integrated. He was forced to leave Dunbar and cross town to Union Square. He remembers the fights — “just about every other day.” It speaks to something in Casey that he also remembers the first kid he fought — Michael Turner.

“After that, we became best friends.”

Why?

Casey shrugs: “We got the fight out of our system . . . and then it turned out that he was a pretty good athlete.”

Casey was better, a multi-sport threat. Integration opened up new sporting vistas. Suddenly, black kids could play in little league and use the town swimming pool. Up until that point, Casey hadn’t known the town had a pool.

It was, by Casey’s telling, a bucolic, outdoorsy childhood. There was never enough money, but they ate and felt safe.

While Casey was whiling away his days, his grandmother was planning.

Elizabeth Miller was closely connected to two of Morganfield’s most famous citizens — she raised the one and cleaned house for the other.

Miller made sure to introduce her young grandson, now a highschooler, to Earle Clements, a native of Morganfield and the former governor of Kentucky. Casey made enough of an impression that he was dragooned in to become Clements’ driver.

It was Miller who suggested to Clements that Casey, by now a star basketball player, should go to the University of Kentucky.

Kentucky is a monolith in many ways. It’s arguably the most storied college basketball program in America; and inarguably the program that became most closely identified with segregation. Kentucky did not welcome its first black player, Tom Payne, until 1969.

Casey preferred Western Kentucky, a majority black school.

After Clements arranged for Kentucky scouts to come to Morganfield, a scholarship offer was extended. Casey was still keen on Western, but his grandmother was insistent.

“She understood the significance of going to Kentucky,” Casey said. As in most arguments of substance, Miller had her way.

Casey was the sixth black man to play at Kentucky, and now more than just a local grandee. Nonetheless, after his freshman year he returned to Morganfield and worked in a coalmine.

This is not the usual course for college stars now or then, and certainly not for one living in Kentucky who plays at Kentucky. But Casey needs to work, needs it compulsively.

“I’ve always worked like I don’t have anything,” Casey says. “Growing up poor, you have that feeling that you’re not doing enough, that you’re not working hard enough. I still have that feeling.”

But you’re a coach in the NBA.

“My whole life has been about, ‘I’m never going back to living that way’ . . .” — and despite what he’s achieved and where he is, a small note the uncertainty on this point —“. . . I don’t think I will be.”

Casey’s Kentucky team won an NCAA championship in 1978, the school’s first in 20 years. Casey dabbled with the idea of going into business after graduation, but returned to the thing he loved best — teaching the game.

He has coached ever since, though with significant interruptions that deeply inform the way he approaches life.

“When I went through the investigation at the University of Kentucky, I learned the fear of failure, how fragile life is. You’re always working not to go back to that.”

Casey first worked as an assistant coach at Western Kentucky. In 1985, he returned to his alma mater. Three years later, Casey was the fall guy in a recruiting payoff scandal. He has always maintained his innocence and fought the matter in court, but as a junior member of the coaching staff the scandal left him professionally adrift.

“I felt like I was never going to coach again.”

Casey is a great one for aphorisms and motivational lines. ‘Fear of failure’ is more than that. It’s his secular prayer, a sort of memento mori.

The fear of failure — as Casey means it — becomes more important once you have failed.

Like his grandmother, Casey has always cultivated people. He has the key ability that makes that possible — genuine curiosity about others. After Kentucky, a small act of kindness from his student days — when he went out of his way to befriend a visiting Japanese coach — turned into an opportunity to coach Japan’s national team. Eventually, George Karl pulled him to the NBA as an assistant in Seattle.

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Casey parlayed that stint into a head-coaching job in Minnesota. That lasted a year-and-a-half. Casey was fired in 2007, despite a .500 record with a rubbish team.

“It was like, ‘What did I do wrong’? I felt like it was a knock that I didn’t work hard enough, that I didn’t do enough.”

That wasn’t the problem. Like Urey, Casey logs 15- and 16-hour days, up at 6:30, in bed at 1, and thinking about basketball most of the minutes in between.

After Minnesota, Casey went on a professional trek — Russia, Turkey — trying to bolster his resume.

He and coach Rick Carlisle met and made a deal. Both men had been fired. The first of them to get a new job would hire the other. This agreement tended to favour Casey, which he’s well aware of. That was 2007.

He’s been professionally pulling G’s since then. Carlisle brought Casey to Dallas, where he was largely credited with making a great offensive team good enough defensively to win a championship. That earned him a second shot in Toronto.

It’s a ways from his early recruiting days in clammy shacks, but Casey is still drawn to the sort of player he chased at Western Kentucky.

“You want a kid who has that fear of failure, who doesn’t want to go back. I end up looking for guys much like myself. I wasn’t as talented, but I’d outwork anybody,” Casey says. “Make no mistake — talent wins in the NBA. But if I see a player who’s busting his butt, I gravitate to that guy.”

Asked for an emblematic example, Casey chooses Raptor-for-a-moment Reggie Evans.

“I can shoot better than Reggie today, but I saw that in him,” Casey laughs. “(Current Raptor) Jamaal Magloire is that type of guy.”

Curiously, much of this wisdom goes untapped. That may be the nature of the NBA, where everything is fleeting. It’s not an environment that encourages contemplation.

Hundreds of young men have passed through Casey’s hands over the last 30 years. He’s 55 now, amongst the youngest who can testify first-hand to an era that seems as distant as the horse and buggy. How many of your players have ever asked about segregation?

“None.”

None?

“I suppose it’s hard for them to relate to those times,” Casey says, which leads him to further contemplation. “I was lucky. I was able to get away . . . There were some basketball players that I grew up with who were far better players, who never got the opportunity I got. They were a little older and they just missed the change.”

That’s a successful life — small moments and good fortune; opportunities recognized and failures overcome.

The changes continue, some more ironic than others.

This past summer, Casey was invited back to Morganfield to join the athletic hall of fame at Union County, the whites-only school that only accepted him because it was forced to do so by law.

“I was very honoured. I’d like to do that,” Casey says. “I’d like to take my kids and show them where I’m from.”

But he couldn’t do it this summer. He was too busy working.

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