Brown graduated from Long Beach High School, where he was an outstanding basketball player. At the insistence of his future coach, Frank McGuire, Brown spent part of a year at a military academy to learn the discipline and gain maturity, before enrolling at the University of North Carolina (UNC).
There, trained by McGuire and Dean Smith, Brown and his colleagues practiced the fundamentals over and over again. After three seasons of playing on the college basketball team at UNC, Brown graduated in 1963. He was invited to play for the US basketball team.. at the 1964 Olympics, held in Tokyo, Japan.
Brown and the rest of the team won nine games during the Olympics, coming home with the gold medal.
In 1967 Brown began playing professional basketball for the newly formed American Basketball Association (ABA), a league that lasted just nine seasons. Brown played in the ABA on five different teams over five seasons, and in 1968 he was named the MVP.
The following year, Brown helped his team, the Oakland Oaks, win the ABA championship. After leaving the ABA as a player in 1972, Brown returned to the league a year later. as head coach of the Carolina Pumas.
He spent two years coaching the Pumas before moving to Denver to head the Nuggets.
Later, became part of the NBA. In his three seasons as an ABA coach, Brown was named coach of the year. In 1979 he left the Nuggets and professional basketball, and took a job as a college basketball coach.
Brown’s first job with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was a coach for the University of California Los Angeles Bruins. During his first season with the Bruins, Brown led the team to the NCAA championship final.
In 1981, Brown briefly returned to the NBA, coaching the New Jersey Nets having two winning seasons before returning to the NCAA in 1983 to lead the Kansas University (KU) Jayhawks. Brown spent five seasons at the University of Kansas, culminating in an NCAA championship there in 1988.
Brown returned to the NBA for the 1988-89 season to coach the San Antonio Spurs. During their first year in Texas, the Spurs won only twenty-one games. The next two seasons, with Brown at the helm, they won more than fifty.
Brown then moved west to Los Angeles to coach the Clippers for two seasons. In 1993 he became the coach of the Indiana Pacers, leading the team to more wins than any other coach had ever done before.
Brown left Indiana in 1997 to take a job with the Philadelphia 76ers, the worst team in the NBA. Brown spent more time in Philadelphia, taking the team to heights they hadn’t reached in many years.
Brown was named NBA coach one year after the 2000-01 season, and the following year it was included in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He also added another Olympic gold medal to his collection, this time as an assistant coach for the 2000 US team in Sydney, Australia.
When he announced his decision to leave the 76ers in the spring of 2003, Joe Dumars, a former star player and later general manager of the Detroit Pistons, did not hesitate to call Brown. Brown accepted Dumars’ offer and headed to the Detroit suburbs.
In March, the Pistons won eight straight games by fifteen or more points, an NBA record.
At the beginning of the 2003 basketball season, The Sporting News reported the results of an NBA poll. In the categories of best coach for the development of young players and the best head coach, Larry Brown, won the most votes. In thirty-two years as head coach, with the NCAA, the ABA now gone, and the NBA-Brown, he has led his teams to winning seasons, winning more games than losing.