This piece was written when Larry Brown was assisting the Japan women’s national team in 2013.

Larry Brown, the Basketball Hall of Fame coach, has never been accused of embracing job stability.

So maybe it’s not surprising that his older brother, Herb, also a basketball lifer, has had a nomadic existence in the coaching business, too.

“They call Larry a vagabond. I’m a vagabond,” Herb Brown said in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. The elder brother didn’t need to rattle off Larry’s long list of employers, including the ABA’s Carolina Cougars, nine NBA head coaching gigs, and man-in-charge roles at UCLA, Kansas, where he guided the Danny Manning-led squad to the 1988 NCAA championship, and, since 2012, at SMU to hammer home that point.

The 72-year-old Larry Brown has garnered widespread recognition in the press and is a well-known coaching figure worldwide (columnist Sam Smith recently listed Larry Brown as one of the top seven coaches in NBA history), but Herb remains unknown to the vast majority of casual followers of the sport.

But his basketball acumen is quite impressive. In fact, his globe-trotting career’s latest stop — believe it or not — is in Japan. And as the recently appointed adviser coach of the Japan women’s national team, the elder Brown, now 77, is coaching national-level female players for the first time.

Teaching fundamentals remains his No. 1 priority, Brown said during a recent interview at Ajinomoto National Training Center in Tokyo. He said that “women always want to do things the right way, and men think they know everything.”

Source: Brown imparting wisdom to Japan squad | The Japan Times