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We just lost the greatest stiff of all. Doug Moe officially left us Tuesday for That Big Coffee Shop In The Sky, holding Big Jane in one hand and Saint Peter with the other.
“I’d kept in touch with Jane, and she called last week,” former Nuggets assistant “Big” Bill Fricke told me Tuesday, not long after Moe, the Nuggets’ idiosyncratic coach from 1980-90, passed away at the age of 87.
“And when I talked to (Moe’s wife), she said, ‘We’re both at peace. Doug’s at peace with it. He’s ready to go. And I’m at peace with it.’ So it was good to hear that.”
Ficke was Moe’s right-hand man with the Nuggets from 1982-84, the Abbott to his Costello, at the start of one of the most successful — and absolutely bonkers — periods of the team’s history.
Under Moe, the Nuggets made the playoffs nine straight times, reached the Western Conference semis on four occasions and danced it all the way to the conference finals in 1985. The Nuggets wound up losing Alex English to a thumb injury in Game 4 of those finals, and the Lakers took the series in five. Denver wouldn’t reach the Western finals again until 2009.
“I thought he was one of the best coaches in the league,” Ficke continued. “A lot of those college coaches wouldn’t have told you that. They thought all he did was move the ball around and that was it.”
At the surface, everything about Doug Moe — his teams, his manner, his dress sense — seemed to embody complete madness. Yet there was a method. There was always more going on underneath the hood, kicking the way a baby duck’s legs kick through a summer pond.
Although they were both New Yorkers, Ficke reminded me, he didn’t know Moe well until he’d moved to Denver more than four decades ago. In those days, Ficke lived west of I-25. Moe lived east of I-25. Doug’s place wasn’t wired for cable.
So this one afternoon, Bill’s phone rang.
“Hey, Ficke, you got cable?” Moe asked.
“Yeah,” Bill replied.
“You think it would be all right if I came over to watch a game tonight?”
“No problem.”
“Can I bring Jane?”
“Sure, my wife knows Jane.”
And over they came. About a week later, Moe called him again. Same request.
So this goes on a couple more times, well into the spring. One day, Bill thinks it was June of ’82, Moe called again.
“Hey Ficke,” Moe said. “How would you like to be my assistant?”
“Oh, (expletive),” Bill replied. “Don’t ask me twice.”
“He wanted somebody that he knew,” Ficke explained, “who wasn’t going to knife him in the back, that he could rely on. So it was great.”
So were they. Moe was ahead of his time. He’d followed his friend Brown to Denver, the frumpy ying to Brown’s structured yang, as a Nuggets assistant during the dying embers of the ABA. When Moe took over the Nuggets for Donnie Walsh as head coach in ’80, he weaponized altitude, preaching a high-tempo offense with constant motion and no set plays.
Moe and Ficke usually rode together to games. On one of the days they didn’t, Doug had called the Nuggets locker room and asked for Big Bill.
“Ficke, I need you to catch tonight,” Moe said. “Because I’m sick.”
“OK,” Bill said.
“And Ficke, remember this: After two minutes, nobody’s listening. Don’t go into the (huddle), don’t go into the locker room and start talking.”
He knew his players. He knew his business. Moe was the NBA’s Coach of the Year in 1988. Brown helped transition the Nuggets into the NBA. But it was Moe, and his high-tempo attack, that put the franchise on the national map.
“Hey, Doug, don’t you think we should put a couple plays in for Alex or somebody?” Ficke asked him once.
Moe pondered this for half a second.
“Ficke, if you put in one play,” the coach replied, “they’re not going to believe in our running game.”
On good nights, they ran teams ragged. Players were told not to hold the ball for more than two seconds. English and Kiki Vandeweghe ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in NBA scoring in 1982-83.
Moe’s Nuggets ran and dared the rest of the NBA to catch up. Those who saw them would fall in love with an end-to-end blur of rainbow jerseys, games in which no lead was ever safe. And where no parent could sit their kids within 15 feet of the Nuggets’ bench without hearing a torrent of Moe obscenities.
“Everybody has that image of him yelling at the players on the court,” Ficke recalled. “They didn’t realize that he was telling the players what was (about to happen) three steps ahead of them.”
When his teams didn’t entertain, Moe became the show, this cursing, grumbling, rumpled 6-foot-5 firebrand who dressed like a ’70s private detective, a disheveled anti-hero who detested suits and ties. He was Joe Don Baker cast as a basketball player, Columbo with a jump shot.
Moe once got fined for throwing water at an official. When he was fired in 1990, he brought champagne to a news conference to celebrate his axing because he was now being paid to do nothing.
He was a savant. He did five-digit multiplication in his head. Moe was a genius when it came to basketball and personalities. He was an absolute artist with profanities, as blunt as the business end of a sledgehammer.
“The thing was, everything was over with the next game, the next day,” Ficke recalled. “And the players knew that. And that’s why they respected him.”
While Moe painted in four-letter words, he became more renowned for one five-letter sobriquet: stiff. It was his pet phrase for try-hard guys. His pet phrase for athletically-challenged guys. It became his pet phrase for almost everybody.
Bill Hanzlik? Stiff. Danny Schayes? Stiff.
“I gave up trying to explain Doug Moe long ago,” Nuggets icon Dan Issel told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “The thing I like about Doug is, he doesn’t take it personally. If you mess up and he hollers and screams, you had it coming. When the game’s over, it’s forgotten. You can go have dinner with him.”
He laughed easily. He forgave easily. Moe used to joke that he was two guys: Before and after the tilt, a sheer delight. In between, a snarling, barking wolf from pregame until the final horn.
“The most loyal person you’d ever meet,” Ficke said. “They should put his picture next to the word ‘loyal’ in the dictionary. If you’re his friend, you’re his friend for life.”
Doug wouldn’t let his body get him down, although Lord knows his body tried. As a Nuggets assistant for George Karl in 2004, Moe suffered a heart attack and required bypass surgery. The next year, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which led to another procedure in September 2005.
Doug and Big Jane eventually retired down in San Antonio, close to their boys. Ficke visited the Moes down in Texas this past November. He remembers that they hung out for six hours or so. He remembers how they told war stories ’til it hurt. He also remembers a hospice nurse was coming over daily to check on the former Nuggets coach.
“He was weak, don’t get me wrong,” Ficke said. “But he was upbeat.”
He was one of one, real as a hangover. Moe became the face of Denver sports before John Elway, the Nuggets’ Joker before Nikola Jokic. And the NBA still hasn’t quite caught up with him.
Luckily, Saint Peter’s coffee shop never closes, because Moe has more stories to tell, loosening a tie he hates, having tossed aside a jacket that never quite fit. The angels are in for an earful.
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Sean Keeler
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