Kenyon Martin got to play under Hall of Fame head coach George Karl on the Denver Nuggets, and it certainly wasn’t an experience he enjoyed. Martin and Karl butted heads during their time together in Denver, and the former was asked during an appearance on Byron Scott’s Fast Break podcast if he thought the latter was a racist.
“I don’t know if it’s racist, but definitely don’t know how to deal and talk with Black people,” Martin said. “It’s that I’m better than you kind of a thing, but they’re not going to say it. So, I ain’t going to say like I said racist because you’ve been around this, you’ve been in this, but some of that energy I could see it. How some people could portray it like the determinant that that’s what it is.
“But for me, I just don’t think you’ve took the time or cared about getting to know us,” Martin continued. “The other side of it. The young Black athlete. We’re different. We think different. We dress different. We behave different. Our language different. The way we come to practice different. We cutting sweats off and making them into shorts.
“So, we doing different things around,” Martin added. “We wear our hair a certain way. We got tattoos. And you just joke with [Chris Anderson]?”
Martin had joined the Nuggets via a sign-and-trade in 2004, and Karl would become the head coach in 2005. It wasn’t long before tensions reached a boiling point between them.
Martin had undergone microfracture surgery on his left knee in May 2005, and tendinitis then led to him missing 26 games in the 2005-06 season. Putting an arm around the forward, who was also dealing with personal issues, would have been the right approach for a coach at the time, but he says Karl would poke him instead.
Then, at the end of the regular season, Martin lost his starting spot to reserve Francisco Elson following another spell on the sidelines. He expected to start in the first round playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers, but Karl went with Elson instead.
The Nuggets would lose Game 1 89-87, and Martin felt that warranted a lineup change. Much to his frustration, Karl stuck with Elson. Now, despite coming off the bench in Game 1, Martin had played 28 minutes. He’d have expected the same in Game 2, but Karl only played him for seven minutes in the first half, and he went off on his coach at halftime.
Martin would unsurprisingly play no further part in that game and was suspended by the Nuggets for the rest of the postseason for conduct detrimental to the team. Despite this incident, these two would somehow co-exist on the team for years. Martin only left the Nuggets in 2011, and Karl was fired in 2013. You’d have thought their story would end once they went their separate ways, but that wasn’t the case.
Karl released a book titled “Furious George” in 2017, in which he was critical of Martin and his former Nuggets teammates Carmelo Anthony and JR Smith. Most notably, he wrote that “Kenyon and Carmelo carried two big burdens: all that money and no father to show them how to act like a man.”
Martin never had a relationship with his father, Paul Roby, while Anthony’s father, Carmelo Iriarte, passed away due to cancer when he was just two years old. To say this was in bad taste would be an understatement.
That book ensured Martin was never going to mend fences with Karl. He has no love for his former head coach, and you certainly can’t blame him for that.
While Martin didn’t call Karl a racist here, Nancy Lieberman, his former assistant coach, has. She couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing during their time with the Sacramento Kings.
