<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">The hole in his heart hurts more than the pain of coaching a team that doesn't always do what he wants. Jerry Sloan Deseret Morning News Archives Losing stings but is nothing compared to the loneliness. So if you think Jerry Sloan is giving up ? ready to retire, like he was until his wife talked him out of it early last year ? you are as sadly mistaken as a 7-footer jacking up trey tries early in the shot clock. Other veteran coaches like him already have succumbed to stress this season, exiting on their own accord. Hubie Brown did it in Memphis. Rudy Tomjanovich recently left the Los Angeles Lakers. The farmer from McLeansboro, Ill., however, isn't about to leave his Jazz, not even in a miserable season barely more than half done. "I'm not going to quit," Sloan said Thursday, 36 hours after his 15-31 club blew an 11-point fourth-quarter lead to an NBA expansion team, the Charlotte Bobcats, for its fifth loss in six games. "If people think I'm going to quit, they've got the wrong guy." Jerry Sloan nearly quit last season. Bobbye Sloan, her bout with pancreatic cancer just beginning, insisted he should not. "My wife wanted me to come back (then). She wanted me to come back this year," he said, retelling a tale. "She knew a lot about me as a person, knew what was probably best for me." Sloan did return, both times. "I have no idea if she was right," he said. "She usually was." Not anymore. Bobbye is gone now. Cancer won, last June. It was a loss that makes the Jazz's 31 seem so meaningless, so ridiculously pale. But it also makes every shortcoming this season difficult to handle, because Bobbye is no longer there "to knock it off the wall with." "I don't have that anymore," Sloan said. "But that's not something that is anybody else's worry. That's mine, and that's one I have to deal with." The Jazz? They cause consternation for many ? including Sloan, though he handles it with a perspective others cannot. "Hey, I went through a lot more last year than this. This isn't even close," he said. "Last year was as tough anything I'll ever deal with. . . . There's not that much emotion involved in this. "There's feelings, yeah. But there's not 41 years of feelings that you have. That's the tough part."</div> Source
