Doc Rivers, center, in his fourth year as head coach of the Boston Celtics, is one of the more respected coaches in the league.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

I first saw Glenn “Doc” Rivers back in the ’70s at a basketball tournament at Boston University.

It was at the old Boston Shootout, one of the first events of is kind in the country, a tournament that had all-star teams from various cities across the country. It was a tournament whose alumni list back then had many kids who would later go on to the NBA and basketball fame, and back then Doc Rivers was as good as any of them.

He played for Chicago that year, and I can still see him leaving his feet at the foul line and dunking, one of those freeze-frame moments when you knew you were watching something special.

So it later came as no surprise when he went on to be a star at Marquette, and then later to the NBA where he distinguished himself for years as a smart, dependable guard, someone who was revered both by his coaches and by his teammates.

Now he’s the coach of the Celtics, someone who seemed to seamlessly make the jump from player to NBA coach, to the broadcast booth, and then back to coaching, now in his fourth year in Boston.

That’s the quickie bio, anyway, and in this age of sound bites and talk shows, that’s all I really knew of Rivers, someone who’s always been excellent with the media, both in the good times and bad., and always seemed to make sense when he talked about his team, even last year when it was awful. That, and the fact his son, Jeremiah, plays for Georgetown.

After that?

Not much.

That’s changed.

The book is called Those Who Love The Game, it came out in 1993, and one day I found it buried in the stacks of the Cranston Library. Rest assured it’s a treasure trove about Rivers.

Or did you know that he had an uncle that played in the NBA?

Or that he’s called “Doc” because he once wore a Doctor J shirt to a clinic as a kid.

Or that he took a grammar class when he was an NBA player because “I’m 32 years old and I’m catching up on fifth-grade work.”

I didn’t think so.

The book is part autobiography, part his comments on both the game itself, and the people who play it. It was written when he was still playing in the NBA, though he was near the end of his career, and what comes across as emphatically as a slam dunk is that Rivers is both smart and reflective, someone who knows that his success was a the result of many factors, not merely his physical gifts.

He grew up in Maywood, Ill., right outside of Chicago, the son of a cop, came of age in a playground world that would send 14 kids to the NBA, Isiah Thomas, Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings among them. He says that a game against Isiah’s team in some playground league was one of the most memorable games he ever played in.

Maybe more important, though, was the role of his older brother, Grady. He, too, was a player, a senior in high school when Rivers was a freshman, a kid with his own basketball dreams.

“My brother made a lot of wrong moves,” Rivers writes, “but he wouldn’t let me make them.”

It’s not the only debt he acknowledges.

He remembers the time he was a young player with the Hawks and he was competing for playing time against veteran Johnny Davis. One day Davis came to him and essentially said, you can try to do it your way and find out for yourself, or you can listen to me tell you about all I’ve learned about playing in the NBA, even though Davis knew that he was grooming his successor.

Rivers listened.

“I want to repay, happily, by helping everyone I can the same way,” he writes.

What comes across in his book is that, in the parlance of the game, Rivers “gets it.” That’s why he lasted 13 years in the NBA. That’s why he became the coach of Orlando in 1999. That’s why he worked for ABC for a year after being fired in Orlando. That’s why he’s respected in the league, whether it was the ignominy of last year’s lost season, or this year’s success in the regular season, for he knows it’s two sides of the same coin. He gets it.

“I always came to the game ready to figure out what I needed to do on a particular night,” he says. “Whatever it took, I’ll do it. No flair.”

Call that is theory of life, not just basketball.

Those Who Love The Game also deals with race, with family, with issues that extend beyond the bothers of the court.

He’s learned that being a husband and a father are the things that endure long after the games end. He took some heat in those years when the Celtics were losing for constantly flying back to Orlando to see his family, who had not moved with him to Boston.

But he writes about how he learned as a player that no matter how he played in a game there was a wife and two little kids waiting at home for him and they didn’t care whether he won or lost.

He says how at Marquette, Hank Raymonds made the players take a speech class because he didn’t want them to sound uneducated. And when he was in his 10th year in NBA, making a lot of money, right in the middle of the basketball dream, he decided to “work very hard on my speech and language.”

And to do that he did the same thing he’s done as a kid trying to be a player: he worked at it.

For he’s come to know that sometimes there’s really not a lot of mystery as to who makes it and who doesn’t.

Maybe that’s the enduring lesson his brother taught him.

The lessons that have taken Doc Rivers from the Chicago of his childhood to the glittering arenas of the NBA.

The lessons he tries to impart to this Celtics’ team as it starts its playoff push tonight.

breynold@projo.com