FIVE DAYS BEFORE the Oklahoma City Thunder opened training camp following the franchise’s first-ever NBA title, Sam Presti sat down at a table inside the team’s practice facility about 10 miles north of the team’s downtown arena.
“Morning everybody,” the Thunder’s general manager said at 10 a.m. local time as the assembled media settled in on Sept. 25.
Wearing a black button-up shirt, Presti cleared his throat and reached for several sheets of paper in front of him, squaring them up.
Presti read for the next 12 minutes, talking about the growth of the NBA and the challenges ahead for the Thunder’s forthcoming season, which he referred to as Chapter 18, a nod to the team’s 18th season in Oklahoma. The occasion marked Presti’s annual preseason news conference, one of the rare instances in which he publicly addresses the media.
Though he is perhaps the most highly regarded executive in the league, Presti is just as known for his discomfort in the spotlight. He prefers to remain hidden in the background. But he makes these news conferences count, and they often last for two hours.
“As has been the case since the first time I sat in front of the media in Oklahoma City in 2008, I’ll sit here until the last question is asked, until you guys start asking me questions like, ‘What books are you reading?’ and things like that, that’s when I’m probably going to call it,” he said in 2022.
And, despite his protestations, that led to an annual tradition.
It unfolds like this: At the end of the news conference, someone will ask Presti what he has read over the previous several months, and the GM will oblige.
This season, as the news conference reached nearly two hours, that tradition began anew.
Presti sat back and began to catalog. He “dabbled” in a few things, he said, including work from Joan Didion and a 1923 collection of essays by the French architect Le Corbusier called “Toward an Architecture.” He said he’d read “The Science of Hitting” by Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams and the author John Underwood.
The diversity of subjects was typical. In past sessions, he has talked about jazz drummer Art Blakey, Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and Max Perkins, the editor for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.
But there’s one author whose work Presti has repeatedly cited: a legendary historian who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and who since 1974 has been working on an acclaimed, multivolume biography about the life, legacy and impact of former President Lyndon Johnson.
That author is Robert Caro, and Presti has not only referred to his books as inspiration, he has also frequently cited Caro’s iconic philosophy and process as a guiding light for how he has built the Oklahoma City Thunder into a potential dynasty the franchise and its fans hope will also span multiple volumes.
As for his NBA admirer, Caro said he’s honored.
“I am truly touched,” he told ESPN, “if you want to know the truth.”
THE PUBLIC ADMIRATION began in 2020.
On a Zoom call in his hotel room on the Walt Disney World campus inside the NBA’s bubble, Presti said he was beginning his days by working out and then “trying to make a dent into that Robert Caro book,” which at that time was “Master of the Senate,” Caro’s third in his series about Johnson.
“It’s one of those books where my wrist gets tired before my eyes,” Presti said of the 1,167-page tome that focuses on Johnson’s tenure in the U.S. Senate from 1949 to 1960, including his efforts to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Four years later, in his opening statement on Sept. 24, 2024, as the Thunder were about to embark upon their inaugural NBA championship season, Presti cited Caro’s mantra.
“One of my favorite authors, Robert Caro, has a great saying about research, where he says, ‘You have to turn every single page,’ and I really like that relative to what it is that we have to do in order to discover the team,” Presti said.
“We have to really understand and go through every iteration to ensure that we’re not shutting off potential pathways that could really help us or get us to another level, whether it’s now or in the future. … I think by turning every page, you give yourself every opportunity.”
Later, in the same opening statement, as he talked about the admirable depth on the Thunder roster and how he thought the team could leverage it for a long run, Presti repeated Caro’s mantra.
“If we’re turning every page, as we talked about, we’ll find some things out of that, as well, if we stay curious about it.”
Minutes later, he repeated it again. “We recognize that in order to be exceptional, in order to be that team, you have to be willing to be an exception, and for us that means staying curious, staying open, knowing you can’t find it if you’re not looking and turning every page.”
He wasn’t finished.
Later, when asked about midseason additions via trade, Presti stated: “I think we need to turn every page, to use Caro again. We have to see. In order to see that, it’ll take time. I don’t know if we’ll have the ability to do that. But we have to, as I said before, be curious about that.”
Call it executive-speak, call it unnecessary repetition, call it the biggest of clichés, but Presti and the Thunder believe in it — and it informs everything they do.
From there, the mentions have continued, including on June 30, just eight days after the Thunder defeated the Pacers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, when he described how proud he was of what the team had accomplished, and how everyone was consumed with the pursuit of progress, rather than outcomes or adulation.
“I think that is a credit to their maturity and a credit to the leadership that [Thunder coach Mark Daigneault] and his coaching staff demonstrated, not just this year but over the course of time,” Presti said.
“Very much pace-setting and not clock-watching, not looking at timelines or external expectations, really just turning every page.”
PRESTI IS FAR from alone in his admiration for Caro.
Caro’s four-volume series on Johnson has sold more than 1 million copies, and there are museum exhibits devoted to the writer and his work.
All six of his books have been featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and the last one, released in 2012, was reviewed in The Times by former President Bill Clinton. None has gone out of print; last year, “The Power Broker,” which turned 50, sold more than 40,000 copies in its 74th printing.
Late night talk-show host Conan O’Brien, one of Caro’s biggest fans, told The Times of Caro’s work, “The Lyndon Johnson books by Caro, it’s our Harry Potter.”
But it is Presti’s repeated vocal appreciation of Caro’s exhaustive approach that is notable.
Over his 60-year reporting career, Caro has interviewed thousands of people and turned over hundreds of thousands of pages.
Consider his first book, “The Power Broker,” a biography of Robert Moses, an urban planner who wielded extraordinary power over New York City and within the state. Over a seven-year period, Caro conducted 522 interviews and wrote more than 1 million words. He also went broke, and his wife, Ina, was forced to sell their home.
But the 1,296-page tome was groundbreaking. It won a Pulitzer Prize, among numerous other awards, and is considered one of the greatest biographies in history.
The book changed Caro’s life.
Presti isn’t the only Caro fan in the NBA, either; his former boss in San Antonio, Gregg Popovich, is also an admirer.
In the Venn diagram of the NBA and Caro aficionados, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more ardent admirer than Sam Hinkie, the former president and general manager of “The Process” Philadelphia 76ers from 2013 to 2016.
“Robert Caro,” Hinkie told ESPN in 2015, “is my favorite author.”
Such a fan of Caro is Hinkie that, in 2020, Hinkie named the Menlo Park, California-based investment firm he founded 87 Capital, a reference to Caro’s second book on Johnson, “Means of Ascent.”
In Silicon Valley, if someone starts reading Caro’s work, odds are that they’ll be connected to Hinkie. Last year, Hinkie ran a book club where members read 100 pages of “The Power Broker” each month, then gathered to talk about it.
Hinkie first encountered Caro’s books in his late 20s. He devoured them quickly.
“I’m drawn to the doggedness and the duration of what he did,” Hinkie said.
To Hinkie, Caro is singular — a “one-in-a-million writer, and a one-in-a-billion researcher — in the same person,” Hinkie said. “Then you get this nonfiction that reads like literature, which he purposely trained himself to do, which makes it more interesting and more memorable and makes the 1,200-page book not as daunting as it otherwise might be.”
As it relates to the NBA, team-building and the role of a general manager, Hinkie said Caro’s “turn every page” mantra — the one of which Presti is so fond — could be translated to simply staying open-minded to what can be learned.
Or, as Presti often says, to remaining curious.
But just as Presti holds Caro in high regard, Caro feels the same about basketball.
The game, he says, has long served as an undercurrent to his life and his work.
IT’S EARLY ON May 24, and the night before, Caro’s beloved New York Knicks had lost another close Eastern Conference finals game at home against the Indiana Pacers. He’d watched at home as the Pacers won 114-109, taking a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.
“That was a bad night,” the then-89-year-old told ESPN. “It’s really worse than the first game, because you felt they’re just faster than us, younger than us.”
These days, stories about Caro focus on his efforts to finish the fifth and final volume of his series about Johnson. Today, Caro says he’s on page 982.
“I’m not nearly done yet,” he adds. “It’s going to be another very long book. Part of the reason is when I did the research, I tried to turn every page.”
He is taking a rare break, though, to discuss a passion outside his decades-long examination of power.
“I love basketball,” Caro says. “I’m not very good at it, but I love it.”
During his teenage years at the Horace Mann School in New York, Caro also loved football, but he says he wasn’t very good at that either, so he became a sportswriter.
He maintained that tradition at Princeton, where he filed an 800-word sports column titled Ivy Inklings three times a week for The Daily Princetonian newspaper. (“It was always running too long,” he says of his column.)
In the mid-1960s, Caro began a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where he kept a small office on campus while playing on a local basketball team.
“I have a tip for your readers: At the age of 30, don’t play basketball,” Caro said. “I hurt my back [and] my Nieman year was brought to an end. Friends of mine had to bring me home lying in the back of a car. That was sort of the end. I do want to say, though, that I had a terrific jump shot. I’m not sure everybody appreciated it, but I did, anyway.”
Caro’s love of the game continued in New York in the early 1970s when he attended games during the Knicks’ championship seasons in 1970 and 1973.
“Walt Frazier, to me, was something so special,” Caro said before digging into the particulars of Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals, when the Knicks beat the Lakers to win their first NBA title.
“You know, in that game the numbers that came out — I’ll never forget — are 36 and 19. Walt Frazier scored 36 points and had 19 assists. I can remember to this day. Between the 36 points of his own and the 38 points that he got for other guys, that’s 74 points! And he would come down the court and almost deliberately go along the baseline and, very slowly, as if he had a whole half court laid out in front of him, he would make the pass or score.
“It’s one of the memorable nights of my life.”
Caro’s philosophy, he said, began in 1959, when he worked as a young reporter at Newsday on Long Island.
“One weekend, because everyone else was on vacation, I got to do an investigative story,” he said.
The paper’s managing editor was a veteran journalist from Chicago named Alan Hathaway. Caro told him he didn’t know anything about investigative reporting.
“And he looked up at me [and said], ‘Just remember one thing — turn every page, never assume anything, turn every goddamn page,’” Caro said.
That principle would shape Caro’s approach and his career.
“And there are times in my life when I hear his voice saying that, like when you’re down at the Lyndon Johnson Library [in Austin, Texas], and you call for the files on something and they bring you out 8 million pieces of paper that you’re going to go through,” Caro said. “And you say, ‘Oh, I’m going to skip this box.’ And then you suddenly hear Alan’s voice — ‘Turn every page, do everything.’ And I can’t tell you how many times by doing that I found stuff that helped my work, helped me understand Lyndon Johnson.”
Over the years, Caro has repeatedly heard from people in all walks of life who have conveyed how much his research process has meant to them.
“I have to tell you, without exaggerating, I get a lot of letters from people saying they’ve adopted that as their motto or they understand what it meant. So to have [Presti], who is a great basketball executive, say that, I’m very touched by it.”
And regarding his mantra’s place in the Thunder’s 2025 championship?
“It’s flattering to think my motto played a role,” Caro said, “but it’s players and coaches that win championships — not authors.”
AS THE THUNDER were in the midst of their postseason run to a championship, a man named Steven Taylor enjoyed breakfast at a diner in downtown Oklahoma City.
Taylor, a former Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, is the father of Wilson Taylor, the Thunder’s director of logistics.
He’s also close friends with Presti and loves Presti’s hourslong news conferences. A couple of years ago, Taylor told him someone ought to have the transcripts printed and bound into a book of their own, perhaps one that could help teach management or leadership.
In September, as Presti sat before the media, his opening statement referenced a specific theme — that the team’s success from the previous season wouldn’t carry over.
Here, he used a play on the Caro philosophy.
The Thunder, Presti said, needed this time to turn the page.
“Effectively turning the page allows us the necessary renewal to treat this coming season with the respect it deserves. To maximize this coming season, we have to voluntarily divorce ourselves from the success of last season or it will hold us back.”
As he finished his opening salvo, after finding the miniscule space between turning every page and turning the page, and repeating it again and again, he outlined his expectations for the coming season and the Caro-inspired process he believed the Thunder would need to undertake to meet them.
“If we want to pursue excellence, we have to let go of last year and start again, turning every page, stacking every day with no guarantees, and of course, no silver platters,” he said, adding, “Chapter 18 is yet to be written. Last season we talked about nothing being expected but anything being possible, and that’s how we feel again this year.”
Then he thanked everyone and opened it up to questions, saying he’d stay there as long as they wanted.
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