Celebrating Sloan as he pursues a coaching milestone

	Only four men have more coaching victories than Utah's Jerry Sloan. John W. McDonough/SI

With one more victory, the Utah Jazz's Jerry Sloan will become only the fifth NBA coach to reach 1,000 wins. He won his first 94 games with the Chicago Bulls, the team for which he played as a tough-minded defensive stopper, but no other coach in history, with the exception of Boston's Red Auerbach, is so identified with a single franchise. So as Sloan looks to join that elite club (Lenny Wilkens, Don Nelson, Pat Riley and Larry Brown are the other members) we salute him in this week's five-pack. Here are some of the many things you gotta love about the NBA's king of constancy.

1. He embraced the challenge after Karl Malone and John Stockton left.

In 2002-03, when that remarkable duo was in its last season together in Utah, I asked Sloan, "Boy, you must want to feel like getting out, too." He was 61 at that time and already a legend.

"Hell, no," Sloan snapped. "The opposite, in fact."

He went on to talk about how amped up he was to take on the challenge of teaching again, of ingraining his possession offense into the heads of players who hadn't been born when Stockton and Malone began running their precision pick-and-rolls. And Sloan went about that task with the eagerness of a first-year coach. After a few seasons of being cursed by injuries, he now seems to have a team ready to once again challenge for a Western Conference title.

2. He cleaned himself up.

Sloan was born a country boy and he lived much of his life like the protagonist in a country song. He drank, he smoked, he stayed out late, and all the time a loyal woman, Bobbye, his high-school sweetheart before she became his wife, was home waiting for him. "We were married 38 years and at least 12 of them were pretty good," Bobbye told me once, laughing.

After she contracted cancer -- Bobbye first felt a stabbing pain in her breast on June 13, 1997, the day the Jazz were eliminated in Game 6 of their first NBA Finals -- Sloan wised up. He stopped drinking and staying out and their last years together were good ones, aside from her suffering, which ended with her death in June 2004. By that time, they had a practiced ritual -- before every game that she was in attendance, Sloan's eyes would find her in the stands before tip-off and they would press two fingers to their lips and hold those fingers aloft for a second or two.

Sloan never wanted his rehab story to become tabloid fodder -- he's as far from being a publicity-seeker as any man I've ever met -- but, when asked, he will credit Bobbye for making him happy, healthy and whole.