Inside a secret and most sacred NBA summer league tradition: a tribute to 'Jerryoke'
In 2009, longtime Wizards equipment manager Jerry Walter sang karaoke in Las Vegas with team employees. In the years since, it has grown in legend, attended by GMs and coaches alike. After a two-year hiatus, Walter is back in Vegas for one last Jerryoke.
THE MOST UNLIKELY tradition of the NBA's Las Vegas Summer League began in 2009 inside a dingy third-floor ballroom of the Imperial Palace -- a mid-strip casino that has since been renamed.
About eight members of the Washington Wizards' staff -- including Flip Saunders, just starting his tenure as Washington's head coach -- were at dinner nearby when someone mentioned the Imperial Palace had a cheap karaoke bar. Jerry Walter, the team's legendary -- and legendarily quirky -- equipment manager over three decades, let it slip that he enjoyed karaoke.
Tim Connelly, then a Wizards scout and now the president of basketball operations for the Minnesota Timberwolves, hoped karaoke might keep Walter away from blackjack tables.
"He is the world's worst blackjack player," Connelly says. Walter once hit on 18 despite colleagues shouting in dissent, Connelly recalls. "'I feel good about this one, bud,'" Walter assured them. (Everyone is "bud" for Walter.) He busted.
They entered and found a smattering of about 20 people. "I guarantee you Flip Saunders is the only NBA head coach to ever set foot in the third floor of the Imperial Palace," Connelly jokes.
Walter signed up to sing Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." Ryan Saunders, Flip's son and then an assistant coach with the Wizards, recalls Walter scribbling down lyrics. The Wizards' staff riled up a dead crowd. They split into two groups, stood across from each other, touched their hands above their heads, and formed an aisle for Walter to run through on his way to the stage.
Walter is not what you might call a good singer. "You can always count on Jerry messing up a few words," Ryan Saunders says.
He is a showman. "You don't have to have the greatest voice," Walter says. "You have to belt out the song."
To the astonishment of everyone, Walter brought the small crowd to its feet. Some remember him coaxing one or two patrons onto the stage with him. His coworkers held up phones as faux lighters, the signal for an encore; the rest of the crowd joined them.
"My god, he put on a show," says Randy Wittman, then a Wizards assistant who succeeded Saunders as Washington's head coach in 2012.
They wanted to run it back the next year but found poker tables had taken over the ballroom. They were determined to keep the tradition going.
They pulled it off -- creating an event that got its own name (Jerryoke) and eventually grew so large the host venue posted security to turn away would-be attendees once it was over capacity.
It may have wrapped last night with one final blowout -- a twist that Walter, 65, did not anticipate when the Wizards furloughed him at the start of the pandemic and didn't bring him back.
If this was it, Jerryoke ended in spectacular fashion.
Jerry Walter spent four decades with the Washington Wizards, the last 30 as the team's equipment manager. "Jerry is a special person," says Ryan Saunders, a Wizards assistant coach from 2009-2014. "The kind of person who makes an organization great." Courtesy Washington Wizards
WALTER IS ONE of those anonymous characters who keep the NBA running. He worked for the Bullets-slash-Wizards in various capacities for about 40 years, the last 30 as equipment manager. He is 5-10 and skinny, with a gregarious personality that belies his physical stature.
He greets everyone with "top of the morning," no matter what time of day or night it is. He sometimes changes his voicemail greeting daily so that it might say, "Top of the morning! The weather today in our nation's capital is 80 degrees and sunny!" He was relentlessly devoted to the unglamourous parts of the job -- laundry, shoes, travel details, lugging giant trunks of equipment from arena to bus to plane to hotel.
Despite an insurmountable size disadvantage, Walter would sometimes challenge the Wizards' strength coaches to wrestling matches. Before one road game in Atlanta, two players gathered a stack of money and said Walter could have it if he jumped and touched the ceiling of the visitors' locker room. He tried a half-dozen times and did not come close, witnesses recall.
"In our business, you need that kind of consistent positivity with all the ups and down," says Brett Greenberg, the Wizards' assistant general manager.
Players who never suited up for the Wizards often remember the thin, bespectacled equipment guy who said hello and offered extra help.
"He always greeted me as a visiting player," Wittman says. "He likes everyone. Even if there is a player who doesn't treat the equipment guys well -- and that does happen -- Jerry sees the good in them."
When Walter's mother died in 2008, the Wizards rented a bus so staff members could attend her funeral.
"Jerry is a special person," Ryan Saunders says. "The kind of person who makes an organization great."
When Zac Walsh, the Atlanta Hawks' equipment manager, broke into the league, Walter took him to dinner and gave him advice on the job. John Coumoundouros, the Detroit Pistons' longtime equipment manager, leaned on Walter when he had to redesign the Pistons' equipment room.
Decades of goodwill is how that night at the Imperial Palace morphed into Jerryoke -- a cherished NBA insider phenomenon that settled for the past decade at Ellis Island Hotel & Casino, an off-the-strip hole-in-the-wall that hosted again last night. (I am a Jerryoke veteran but was not in Las Vegas this time. Details and video were sent to me by Wizards employees and others in attendance.)
"It's an equipment manager's type of place," Coumoundouros says. "A dive bar."
After one dynamic performance, the audience crowd-surfed Walter to the back of the room, Jerryoke becoming an oasis amid the formality of summer league. "We all saw each other in a different light," he says. "We put aside our egos ... and just have fun."
WIZARDS STAFFERS AND friends made up early Jerryoke crowds. As Wizards employees moved to other teams, word of the event spread.
By 2015, Ellis Island had to hire extra security and some NBA attendees were turned away at the door. (Ryan Saunders once had a friend pull him through security when a guard wasn't looking.)
General managers, media members, and head coaches -- Wittman, Jeff Hornacek, Scott Brooks, current Wizards GM Tommy Sheppard -- dotted the crowd. (Brooks -- Washington's head coach from 2016 to 2021 -- once coerced Walter into performing "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice. "Jerry would have made Vanilla Ice proud!" Brooks says.)
Greenberg, the Wizards' unofficial Jerryoke coordinator, confers with Ellis Island staff several days prior just to make sure they are ready for the onslaught. He might also authorize some greasing of the wheels with the venue's staff to shove Walter's name up the song list -- if only to placate the Jerry Springer-style "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" chants coming from the NBA contingent. (I vaguely recall one year in which the announcer called a woman named -- I think -- Mary as the next performer, only the NBA crowd thought she had said "Jerry" and playfully rained boos upon poor Mary.)
Walter dialed up the showmanship. He tossed dice upon singing the "payin' anything to roll the dice" line in "Don't Stop Believin'." He dedicated each song -- Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" is Walter's second staple -- to "the troops." (Walter served in the U.S. Army before his career in sports.) He points out Pistons employees at Journey's reference to "South Detroit," and smells his armpits at the song's reference to "cheap perfume."
After one peak Jerryoke performance, the audience near the stage picked Walter up and crowd-surfed him to the back of the room.
For lots of people within the NBA, Jerryoke -- and thus Walter himself -- became a touchstone of summer league, emblematic of why Vegas is such a popular trip and so different from the rest of the NBA calendar.
The season is long over, and the main offseason business is usually done. You can feel the break in competition. In a party city, rivals rediscover they are really all colleagues. It is the week the NBA lets its hair down.
"It's a fun place to see everyone," Connelly says. "You're not stressed out. You're not in a rush to catch a plane. You're not in season. And Jerry is so beloved, the whole event just snowballed."
"I've met some of my closest friends through Jerryoke," Greenberg says.
As the summer league schedule filled with formal events -- various committee meetings, buttoned-up team dinners -- Jerryoke became a laid-back oasis. Walter senses it, and is proud of it.
"We all saw each other in a different light," he says. "We put aside our egos and have a club soda, or a beer, or a glass of wine, and just have fun. It was a cool feeling."
AND THEN IT ended. The Wizards furloughed Walter. (Furloughs were typical across sports and other industries after March 2020.) The pandemic tempered summer league nightlife.
When regular travel resumed, equipment managers from other teams would meet Walter for coffee or lunch in Washington. They could feel his hurt.
"He wanted to go out on his terms," Coumoundouros says. "He wanted to have one last go-round, and see everybody and say goodbye." Connelly, then running basketball operations with the Denver Nuggets, called to offer Walter temporary work supplementing Denver's staff. Walter turned him down, fearing he would struggle moving heavy trunks.
"I didn't want to give a bad performance," he says. "It's a young person's job."
When the Miami Heat played in Washington this season, they arranged for Walter to join their equipment staff for the game.
At the NBA Equipment Managers Association annual May meeting at the pre-draft combine in Chicago, Coumoundouros pitched the association on using some of its funds to fly Walter to Las Vegas for one last Jerryoke. It was a unanimous yes.
"There is not one equipment manager who doesn't love Jerry," says Joe Cuomo, the Brooklyn Nets' equipment manager and immediate past president of the association.
"It really is a fellowship," Walter says, his voice breaking. "I warned them all about my emotions."
His colleagues knew Walter might have trouble keeping it together Monday night. "Oh, he's going to be emotional," Coumoundouros said days before the event. "And we are gonna be there to hold him up."
Walter indeed had to pause and collect himself while dedicating his first song. A woman broke the silence: "We love you, Jerry!"
"I warned you all," Walter told the crowd. He paused again. "But we're gonna make it."
"We're gonna make it!" a man shouted from the audience.
Walter continued: "One more time." And then, the opening piano strokes of "Don't Stop Believin'" swept the audience into a frenzy.
Walter hopped and jumped when the chorus hit; the crowd hopped and sang along with him. The "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" chants broke out during instrumentals. Walter pantomimed the dice throw and smelled his armpits, like always.
When it was over, Connelly and Jared Jeffries yanked Walter off the stage, lifted him above their heads, and began a crowd-surfing wave that carried Walter to the back of the room. As Walter got to his feet, the NBA crowd swarmed him, chanting, "One more year! One more year!"
Walter would be open to coming out for future Jerryokes but realizes that may be unlikely.
"If circumstances allow, I'd love to do it," Walter says, "but it's understandable if, you know, this is the farewell. The older guys are on their way out. It's time, probably."
Inside a secret and most sacred NBA summer league tradition: a tribute to 'Jerryoke'
In 2009, longtime Wizards equipment manager Jerry Walter sang karaoke in Las Vegas with team employees. In the years since, it has grown in legend, attended by GMs and coaches alike. After a two-year hiatus, Walter is back in Vegas for one last Jerryoke.
THE MOST UNLIKELY tradition of the NBA's Las Vegas Summer League began in 2009 inside a dingy third-floor ballroom of the Imperial Palace -- a mid-strip casino that has since been renamed.
About eight members of the Washington Wizards' staff -- including Flip Saunders, just starting his tenure as Washington's head coach -- were at dinner nearby when someone mentioned the Imperial Palace had a cheap karaoke bar. Jerry Walter, the team's legendary -- and legendarily quirky -- equipment manager over three decades, let it slip that he enjoyed karaoke.
Tim Connelly, then a Wizards scout and now the president of basketball operations for the Minnesota Timberwolves, hoped karaoke might keep Walter away from blackjack tables.
"He is the world's worst blackjack player," Connelly says. Walter once hit on 18 despite colleagues shouting in dissent, Connelly recalls. "'I feel good about this one, bud,'" Walter assured them. (Everyone is "bud" for Walter.) He busted.
They entered and found a smattering of about 20 people. "I guarantee you Flip Saunders is the only NBA head coach to ever set foot in the third floor of the Imperial Palace," Connelly jokes.
Walter signed up to sing Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." Ryan Saunders, Flip's son and then an assistant coach with the Wizards, recalls Walter scribbling down lyrics. The Wizards' staff riled up a dead crowd. They split into two groups, stood across from each other, touched their hands above their heads, and formed an aisle for Walter to run through on his way to the stage.
Walter is not what you might call a good singer. "You can always count on Jerry messing up a few words," Ryan Saunders says.
He is a showman. "You don't have to have the greatest voice," Walter says. "You have to belt out the song."
To the astonishment of everyone, Walter brought the small crowd to its feet. Some remember him coaxing one or two patrons onto the stage with him. His coworkers held up phones as faux lighters, the signal for an encore; the rest of the crowd joined them.
"My god, he put on a show," says Randy Wittman, then a Wizards assistant who succeeded Saunders as Washington's head coach in 2012.
They wanted to run it back the next year but found poker tables had taken over the ballroom. They were determined to keep the tradition going.
They pulled it off -- creating an event that got its own name (Jerryoke) and eventually grew so large the host venue posted security to turn away would-be attendees once it was over capacity.
It may have wrapped last night with one final blowout -- a twist that Walter, 65, did not anticipate when the Wizards furloughed him at the start of the pandemic and didn't bring him back.
If this was it, Jerryoke ended in spectacular fashion.
Jerry Walter spent four decades with the Washington Wizards, the last 30 as the team's equipment manager. "Jerry is a special person," says Ryan Saunders, a Wizards assistant coach from 2009-2014. "The kind of person who makes an organization great." Courtesy Washington Wizards
WALTER IS ONE of those anonymous characters who keep the NBA running. He worked for the Bullets-slash-Wizards in various capacities for about 40 years, the last 30 as equipment manager. He is 5-10 and skinny, with a gregarious personality that belies his physical stature.
He greets everyone with "top of the morning," no matter what time of day or night it is. He sometimes changes his voicemail greeting daily so that it might say, "Top of the morning! The weather today in our nation's capital is 80 degrees and sunny!" He was relentlessly devoted to the unglamourous parts of the job -- laundry, shoes, travel details, lugging giant trunks of equipment from arena to bus to plane to hotel.
Despite an insurmountable size disadvantage, Walter would sometimes challenge the Wizards' strength coaches to wrestling matches. Before one road game in Atlanta, two players gathered a stack of money and said Walter could have it if he jumped and touched the ceiling of the visitors' locker room. He tried a half-dozen times and did not come close, witnesses recall.
"In our business, you need that kind of consistent positivity with all the ups and down," says Brett Greenberg, the Wizards' assistant general manager.
Players who never suited up for the Wizards often remember the thin, bespectacled equipment guy who said hello and offered extra help.
"He always greeted me as a visiting player," Wittman says. "He likes everyone. Even if there is a player who doesn't treat the equipment guys well -- and that does happen -- Jerry sees the good in them."
When Walter's mother died in 2008, the Wizards rented a bus so staff members could attend her funeral.
"Jerry is a special person," Ryan Saunders says. "The kind of person who makes an organization great."
When Zac Walsh, the Atlanta Hawks' equipment manager, broke into the league, Walter took him to dinner and gave him advice on the job. John Coumoundouros, the Detroit Pistons' longtime equipment manager, leaned on Walter when he had to redesign the Pistons' equipment room.
Decades of goodwill is how that night at the Imperial Palace morphed into Jerryoke -- a cherished NBA insider phenomenon that settled for the past decade at Ellis Island Hotel & Casino, an off-the-strip hole-in-the-wall that hosted again last night. (I am a Jerryoke veteran but was not in Las Vegas this time. Details and video were sent to me by Wizards employees and others in attendance.)
"It's an equipment manager's type of place," Coumoundouros says. "A dive bar."
After one dynamic performance, the audience crowd-surfed Walter to the back of the room, Jerryoke becoming an oasis amid the formality of summer league. "We all saw each other in a different light," he says. "We put aside our egos ... and just have fun."
WIZARDS STAFFERS AND friends made up early Jerryoke crowds. As Wizards employees moved to other teams, word of the event spread.
By 2015, Ellis Island had to hire extra security and some NBA attendees were turned away at the door. (Ryan Saunders once had a friend pull him through security when a guard wasn't looking.)
General managers, media members, and head coaches -- Wittman, Jeff Hornacek, Scott Brooks, current Wizards GM Tommy Sheppard -- dotted the crowd. (Brooks -- Washington's head coach from 2016 to 2021 -- once coerced Walter into performing "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice. "Jerry would have made Vanilla Ice proud!" Brooks says.)
Greenberg, the Wizards' unofficial Jerryoke coordinator, confers with Ellis Island staff several days prior just to make sure they are ready for the onslaught. He might also authorize some greasing of the wheels with the venue's staff to shove Walter's name up the song list -- if only to placate the Jerry Springer-style "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" chants coming from the NBA contingent. (I vaguely recall one year in which the announcer called a woman named -- I think -- Mary as the next performer, only the NBA crowd thought she had said "Jerry" and playfully rained boos upon poor Mary.)
Walter dialed up the showmanship. He tossed dice upon singing the "payin' anything to roll the dice" line in "Don't Stop Believin'." He dedicated each song -- Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" is Walter's second staple -- to "the troops." (Walter served in the U.S. Army before his career in sports.) He points out Pistons employees at Journey's reference to "South Detroit," and smells his armpits at the song's reference to "cheap perfume."
After one peak Jerryoke performance, the audience near the stage picked Walter up and crowd-surfed him to the back of the room.
For lots of people within the NBA, Jerryoke -- and thus Walter himself -- became a touchstone of summer league, emblematic of why Vegas is such a popular trip and so different from the rest of the NBA calendar.
The season is long over, and the main offseason business is usually done. You can feel the break in competition. In a party city, rivals rediscover they are really all colleagues. It is the week the NBA lets its hair down.
"It's a fun place to see everyone," Connelly says. "You're not stressed out. You're not in a rush to catch a plane. You're not in season. And Jerry is so beloved, the whole event just snowballed."
"I've met some of my closest friends through Jerryoke," Greenberg says.
As the summer league schedule filled with formal events -- various committee meetings, buttoned-up team dinners -- Jerryoke became a laid-back oasis. Walter senses it, and is proud of it.
"We all saw each other in a different light," he says. "We put aside our egos and have a club soda, or a beer, or a glass of wine, and just have fun. It was a cool feeling."
AND THEN IT ended. The Wizards furloughed Walter. (Furloughs were typical across sports and other industries after March 2020.) The pandemic tempered summer league nightlife.
When regular travel resumed, equipment managers from other teams would meet Walter for coffee or lunch in Washington. They could feel his hurt.
"He wanted to go out on his terms," Coumoundouros says. "He wanted to have one last go-round, and see everybody and say goodbye." Connelly, then running basketball operations with the Denver Nuggets, called to offer Walter temporary work supplementing Denver's staff. Walter turned him down, fearing he would struggle moving heavy trunks.
"I didn't want to give a bad performance," he says. "It's a young person's job."
When the Miami Heat played in Washington this season, they arranged for Walter to join their equipment staff for the game.
At the NBA Equipment Managers Association annual May meeting at the pre-draft combine in Chicago, Coumoundouros pitched the association on using some of its funds to fly Walter to Las Vegas for one last Jerryoke. It was a unanimous yes.
"There is not one equipment manager who doesn't love Jerry," says Joe Cuomo, the Brooklyn Nets' equipment manager and immediate past president of the association.
"It really is a fellowship," Walter says, his voice breaking. "I warned them all about my emotions."
His colleagues knew Walter might have trouble keeping it together Monday night. "Oh, he's going to be emotional," Coumoundouros said days before the event. "And we are gonna be there to hold him up."
Walter indeed had to pause and collect himself while dedicating his first song. A woman broke the silence: "We love you, Jerry!"
"I warned you all," Walter told the crowd. He paused again. "But we're gonna make it."
"We're gonna make it!" a man shouted from the audience.
Walter continued: "One more time." And then, the opening piano strokes of "Don't Stop Believin'" swept the audience into a frenzy.
Walter hopped and jumped when the chorus hit; the crowd hopped and sang along with him. The "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" chants broke out during instrumentals. Walter pantomimed the dice throw and smelled his armpits, like always.
When it was over, Connelly and Jared Jeffries yanked Walter off the stage, lifted him above their heads, and began a crowd-surfing wave that carried Walter to the back of the room. As Walter got to his feet, the NBA crowd swarmed him, chanting, "One more year! One more year!"
Walter would be open to coming out for future Jerryokes but realizes that may be unlikely.
"If circumstances allow, I'd love to do it," Walter says, "but it's understandable if, you know, this is the farewell. The older guys are on their way out. It's time, probably."
