Los Angeles Lakers legend Michael Cooper is known for his defense, toughness, and championship pedigree, but few knew the deep pain behind the resilience that defined his career. In a recent interview with VladTV, Cooper opened up about his traumatic childhood, revealing how violence, abandonment, and tragedy shaped his early life long before basketball gave him stability.
“Well, my dad was a woman beater, and see, my mom had four brothers, and they weren’t allowing that. So when he started hitting on her, putting his hands on her, they told him, ‘Yeah, that ain’t happening.’ My mom wasn’t taking it either.”
“So, he ended up leaving when I was like five. That was the last time I saw him. It was two days before Christmas, and he told me he was going to get me these cowboy guns and a hat and a little sheriff vest, and I sat by this big picture window, man. Waited for him, and he never came, and that was the last time I saw him in two days until I actually got drafted in the NBA.”
For a child, that broken promise carried a pain that lingered for years. Cooper’s mother tried to move on and rebuild her life. She remarried a man named Phil, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian and, as Cooper described, ‘the son of a chief.’ But that relationship soon spiraled into chaos as well.
“My mom remarried. She divorced him and then she married a guy named Phil, full-blooded Cherokee Indian, and he was the son of a chief. He used to drink alcohol and walk around the house dressed up like an Indian.”
“I mean, Phil was about 6’4, very attractive guy, and he’d walk around getting drunk and he’s, you know, woo woo woo woo and all of that. And then when he and my mom broke up, he was trying to get her back. He was so upset and so in love that he tried to kill her.”
“And my mom was dating. She was, you know how they say papa was a rolling stone? My mom was a rolling stone. She had a lot of love for us. She was a woman that was dedicated. She was an RN nurse, and she was all about making it happen.”
“So, she worked here in Los Angeles at LA Memorial Hospital, and then when that situation happened where he tried to kill her, she had left and come back to LA, and she ended up going back to San Francisco and staying up there.”
The nightmare didn’t end there. When Cooper’s mother began seeing another man named Joe, a large, gentle man from Monrovia, tragedy struck.
“He killed my mom’s boyfriend. Because she had divorced him or was in the process of it, and he didn’t want her to divorce. He wanted her back. So, she was dating this guy named Joe, who lived out in Monrovia. And Joe was about 6’3, 350 lbs.”
“I don’t think there was anything intimate, but they were having a relationship. And she went over his house. Somehow he found out, and I’m hearing all this from my grandmother, because they hid all this from us. That’s how I know. But then when I eventually got back with my mom, when I was probably about 15 or 16, she came back and then kind of told me the whole story.”
After the killing, Cooper’s mother was forced to flee to escape her ex-husband’s wrath. Cooper wouldn’t reconnect with his mother until he was a teenager.
Listening to him recount it, it’s easy to understand where Michael Cooper’s inner strength came from. The grit that made him a five-time NBA champion and Defensive Player of the Year was born not just from competition but from surviving a childhood where love and danger often lived side by side.
