TWO WELL-SUITED representatives of a detail-crazed and consistently top-tier French institution are getting set to fly to Texas to dine with the longtime leader of a detail-crazed and consistently top-tier NBA institution. They help oversee the rarest of commodities, one that dates back to the Middle Ages and is the same color as the five championship trophies that fill the résumé of their soon-to-be host, who, on this early March 2022 night, is one regular-season win shy from becoming the NBA's all-time winningest coach.
For now, Lorenzo Pasquini and Mathieu Jullien ease into their seats at the Terrace Restaurant at the Maybourne Hotel in Beverly Hills. Soft piano music fills the air, overlaid with the cacophony of the busy restaurant. It's a warm night at the end of a long day; each of them had spent the day making the rounds at various respected establishments in Los Angeles to showcase the release of the 2019 vintage of Chateau d'Yquem (pronounced: d-kem), a historic dessert wine from the Sauternes region of Bordeaux. Pasquini is the estate manager at d'Yquem, and Jullien is a marketing and sales director at LVMH, which bought d'Yquem in 1999.
The two men have spent the past several hours describing the wine and answering questions, but now they have some questions of their own, largely about the coach they're en route to see that next night, thanks to an invitation from the man himself. They're certainly familiar with the longtime coach, who is known in France not only for coaching some of its greatest players, such as Tony Parker (and, soon, Victor Wembanyama), but also for being a passionate connoisseur of perhaps its greatest export: wine.
Namely, though, they want to know how Gregg Popovich, who will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday, has achieved success so often throughout his nearly two-decade run in San Antonio. How does he motivate players? How does he lead?
"For us, truly, managers like him are very much an inspiration," Pasquini tells ESPN. He describes his team at d'Yquem, where dozens of skilled staffers work the famed vineyards to help create the notoriously challenging wine: guiding the growth of branches; trimming overgrown leaves; positioning budding grape clusters for sunlight or shade; accommodating for heat spikes or sudden frosts or excess wind or rain; identifying (and eliminating) any insects or powdery mildew that could threaten a harvest.
Pasquini has never visited San Antonio, and Jullien has never even been to Texas. Their visit will be brief, a midday arrival with plans to depart after dinner to New York. But they're excited, not only because of the man they're visiting but also because of the gift they've brought for him: a bottle of 1949 d'Yquem -- an acclaimed vintage from the same year Popovich was born.
Soon after they land, they join about a dozen attendees at a San Antonio restaurant, featuring Popovich and other Spurs staffers. Topflight wines are shared, and by the end of the meal, glasses cover the table. Popovich, per usual, shares what he has long shared with chefs and others in the hospitality industry -- or any industry -- who seek his counsel about leadership, explaining his long-held philosophy that it's important to build chemistry outside the workplace, especially at the dinner table, where his history of chemistry-forging meals for the Spurs is the stuff of NBA legend.
But as special as the evening is for the two men, it is equally so for Popovich, whose obsession with d'Yquem is almost as prolific as his obsession with food and wine itself.
Indeed, for decades, the occasionally sour head coach has called upon the world's most highly regarded sweet wine. And for many who have poured it for him, and for even some of his players and staff who have noted his affection for it, Popovich's love affair with d'Yquem is especially fitting; the parallels between what he and the winemakers try to achieve year after year align in a way that speaks to deep mutual respect -- of game recognizing game.