Character Driven (19 page)

Ron Harper had been telling the other guys that he had been open in the corner most of the game. With Steve Smith sagging off him to help on penetration or on Shaq in the post, Ron was left wide open. As the shot clock wound down and we neared half a minute to play, Kobe stood at the top of the key with the ball in what appeared to be a kind of clear-out. He drove to the basket, Smith came over to help, and Kobe fired a pass to Harp. He was eighteen feet from the basket, essentially wide open, and he rose up and fired that sweet, no-nonsense jumper of his. I remember standing on the sideline watching that thing rise, and it seemed to just hang up there for a moment before it completed its flight and put us up by two with just under thirty seconds to play.

Kobe proved that he was more than just an offensive force when he blocked Arvydas Sabonis’s driving shot just before the buzzer. That shot and that block seemed to break Portland’s back. We won games three and four to go up three games to one. Notable in game four was Shaq’s being perfect from the free throw line (9 for 9), seeming to negate whatever ambitions Portland had of Hacking their way to the finals. All we had to do was win one of the three remaining games to move on to the NBA Finals. Game five proved to be my most effective game. I hit a pair of threes and scored 10 points, but we couldn’t overcome Portland’s back-against-the-wall intensity in a 96–88 loss in front of our home crowd. We returned to Portland confident that with two games remaining, all we had to do was win one to close out the Blazers and advance. We had that confidence despite our having a 2-4 record in trying to close a series.

Make that 2-5. Portland took advantage of some matchups and we had no answer for Bonzi Wells in the fourth quarter, and they beat us 103–93 to force a game seven back in L.A. We’d started the play-offs looking pretty invincible, but after our 2-0 start, we’d gone 8-6. We hadn’t lost three games in a row all year, and that was what it would take for Portland to win the series. Momentum was clearly on their side, and it carried through most of game seven.

It’s strange to think that an entire season came down to the last ten minutes of that Western Conference Final game seven. As we would be reminded again and again in the off-season, we were on the verge of the greatest collapse in NBA play-off history, being 15 points down with ten minutes to play. Having just recently been on the other end of one of those kinds of defeats, I can understand what happened from Portland’s perspective. Missing 13 consecutive shots is nearly incomprehensible, but a lot of that had to do with the defensive intensity we brought to those final minutes. We played with an urgency that was never a panic. Like everyone in the arena that day, until Brian Shaw hit a three-pointer at the end of the third quarter, I was wondering if things were ever going to start to go our way. When he stepped up during that fourth-quarter rally and buried two more treys, I could almost see the Trail Blazers physically deflating. I sensed what they were thinking. They’d been doing a good job of holding Kobe and Shaq down to that point, and here comes this other guy putting it to us. Well, in my mind, that’s the way it should always be. That’s not to say that Kobe and Shaq didn’t contribute. With a little more than a minute and a half remaining, Shaq stepped to the foul line with the score tied.

I’m sure you’ve seen it dozens of times. A team fights back to pull close or to tie, and they have expended so much energy that they just can’t go to the next step. Well, if there was any thought that that was going to happen to us, Shaq squashed it by sinking both of those foul shots to finally put us ahead 81–79. I could feel the crowd’s thunderous ovation rattling my rib cage after that, but less than a minute later, Kobe drove toward the basket and Portland’s interior defense collapsed around him and he sent a pass lofting toward the rim. Shaq grabbed the lob and set off some thunder of his own with a powerful jam that put us up by 6. Shaq ran back downcourt with his mouth open in amazement and his index fingers wagging. His expression encapsulated everything we were all feeling—jubilation, relief, astonishment, and to borrow a phrase, shock and awe. We missed a few free throws in that final minute that kept the game close, but won 89–84. We’d managed to overcome Portland’s 21–4 run, we’d managed to overcome the label of underachievers not capable of closing out a series, and we were back on track to being exactly where we wanted to be. We bounced back when it mattered most, and we did a lot of growing up. At various points throughout that series, it would have been easy for either team to give up, but that’s not what professionals and competitors do. You continue to go after it hard, and if you keep working and don’t let the negatives get in the way, ultimately you’re bound to be in possession of the ball and the win.

Every year from the time I was ten to the time I was sixteen, I went to the AAU National Tournament. From Syracuse to San Antonio, we traveled the country, but we could never break through and win the championship until we finally did in San Antonio, earning the sixteen-and-under title. Playing at the national level was interesting and beneficial in a lot of ways. As the Wings earned a reputation as a strong team, we were able to pick up guys from other areas in the state who wanted to play with us. That was difficult to adjust to because that meant some of the guys you liked and had started out with were cut. The good thing was that we seemed to be getting better and better each year, particularly after my best friend Clarence Finley’s dad took over as head coach. As fifteen-year-olds, we lost in the finals to a team from Baltimore. We seemed to have a lot of trouble with teams from the East Coast urban areas. They played a different brand of basketball from what we were used to. We were as physical and played as hard, but their trash-talking and cursing was something we would never do. It seemed that for years we couldn’t get past one or another of those East Coast teams.

I was a little disappointed in my play as well. I seemed to have plateaued both physically and with my skills. I was still playing a lot and doing fairly well, but when I looked around at my teammates and my opponents each year, the guys seemed to be getting more aggressive. My dad was an assistant coach, and he and Coach Finley kept trying to figure out what it would take to get us over the hump. In San Antonio, things just seemed to click for us. We ran through all the preliminary games easily. When we got into the late rounds and the championship rounds, it was a lot more difficult, but we rose to the occasion. Before the championship game, we were sitting in our locker room and Coach Finley said, “We’re going to make a change tonight. We think we match up better this way. Kenneth, you’re in for Derek.”

I felt sick to my stomach. What was going on here? I’d been a key part of our success the whole season, gotten us to the championship game, and now I wasn’t starting? Coach Finley couldn’t even look at me, and Dad wasn’t in the room. Coach talked some more about our upcoming opponent, but all I could do was look at my hands. I did my best to just deal with it and told myself that I’d probably get in there at some point. I had to be ready. They’d see that they needed me, but as the game played out, I didn’t even touch the floor for the first time in I couldn’t even remember when. When the buzzer sounded and we were national champions at last, I had a mix of emotions. I was happy that we had won, and it was fun to run out on the court and be there for the trophy presentation and to receive our champions’ jackets, but a part of me thought I didn’t do anything to contribute. I’d been a starter all season, I’d been with the team for years, been a part of our gradual development, but I felt empty. Why, at the moment when we were all making that final push to get over the top, was I not asked to be a part of that effort?

When we got back to Little Rock, I had to do a lot of soul-searching to sort things out. I never went to my dad or Coach Finley to ask why they had decided to make that switch to Kenneth. We’d picked up Kenneth the year before. He was a flashier player than I was, a little more athletic, quicker, and could definitely outjump me. I didn’t think that he ran the team as well as I did, didn’t understand how to play the game to the same degree that I did. I’d heard people comment about other players and how effortless they made the game look, but I never heard anyone say that about me. I was the grinder, the intense guy who looked to be working hard, so even if I performed at the same level as, say, someone like Kenneth, most people would think he was the better player. He was also far more assertive than I was.

I can still remember sitting in our living room watching videos of my games with my dad. He’d point out my mistakes, and he seemed to always be saying, “You’ve got to be more aggressive. Don’t worry so much about making mistakes.” That last part was hard for me to hear, because the way my dad ran things around the house, if I did make a mistake, I got punished. It’s true that you can’t play the game looking back over your shoulder at the bench wondering what the coach’s reaction is going to be or if you’re going to be replaced. For a long time, even as a professional, I played it safe, hoping to avoid mistakes. Other guys seemed to have more of a “If I screw up, I screw up, so what?” kind of attitude. If the coach said something about what they’d done wrong, they’d listen, then let it go. I hated being told I’d made a mistake and it would drag me down, and I’m sure I let it show, and that made my coaches doubt my toughness.

In junior high, my coach was Charlie Johnson. He instilled a lot of confidence in me because he praised me, he encouraged me. He didn’t tell me just about what I’d done wrong, but he’d say to me, “Shoot the ball. Do your thing.” I flourished under that kind of treatment. He also had a funny way of critiquing us or correcting us. He could turn it into a kind of joke that took some of the sting out of his remark without losing the point. In some ways, having my dad there as a coach and as someone who had to be critical of me wasn’t the best idea. I know now that when my dad corrected me, he wasn’t making a comment about me as a person. But when I was a kid and he said, “That was a bad play,” I heard, “You are a bad player.” I personalized it too much.

There’s a fine line between being able to take responsibility for the things you do and taking things too personally. If someone criticized what I did, it was like they were criticizing me as a person. It’s taken me a long time to realize that you have to separate who you are from what you do—not completely, but enough that you don’t beat yourself up over mistakes you make.

Along with all that soul-searching, I spent some serious time in the weight room and in the gym working on my physical conditioning. While not playing in that championship wasn’t the same as Michael Jordan’s being cut from the squad, it did do something similar for me. It rocked my world. I had never experienced anything like that before, and I didn’t like how it felt. I’d always played regularly, and I had to consider whether I’d done the one thing my father said that I should never do—become complacent. I didn’t think that I had, but I didn’t want anyone to even remotely consider that I had. It’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and I decided that I was going to have to really rededicate myself.

Though it wasn’t my style, I could easily have gone into pity-party mode, gone into a shell, and shut everyone and everything out and just quit. I’d seen guys do that. It seemed as if every year of AAU ball and school ball some guys got cut or quit, and the squads just kept getting whittled down to fewer and fewer guys. If I felt as bad as I did about sitting out an entire game, then how bad would I feel if I had to sit out an entire season or had my career end? I was not going to let that happen. As angry and resentful as I was at Mr. Finley and possibly at my father for their decision, maybe I should have thanked them. Maybe they were just trying to light a fire under me and they took the opportunity to do it when I was most likely to notice the heat and the smell of my roasted flesh?

Regardless of their intentions, it obviously had the desired effect. I did make a stronger commitment to the game than I ever had. What’s interesting to me is that it seemed as if everyone had a different vision of who I was. I think that while my dad saw me as a nonaggressive, too cautious player, he always saw that I had a lot of ability. If he didn’t, I don’t think he would have been so critical. Coach Finley shared that vision of my ability, but he took a different approach to getting me to be more aggressive. I saw myself as a talented player who really did have the drive and the desire that others thought I lacked, who were blinded by their preconceptions. Ultimately, whether I had it and they didn’t see it, or I didn’t have it (whatever that it might be), I had to get all the thems in the world to stop seeing what I lacked and focus on what I possessed. I think that for every young person, that struggle to merge your identity with the expectations and demands of peers, parents, and other adults is filled with ups and downs. Mine were taking place on the basketball court in a very public way. That’s continued to be true. Having some of your issues made public adds a dimension that most people don’t have to deal with.

As I look back, I see definite parallels between what was going on in basketball and in my family life. The two were so intertwined that it was almost impossible to separate them. If I had been able to see the pattern, maybe I could have dealt better with both sides of it. Just as the Sixers/Spirits controversy forced me to choose sides, shortly after that my parents were splitting up. To their credit, neither of them ever put me in the position the Sixers coach did. Neither of them tried to align me with him or her, or to turn me against the other. They always put their children’s interests first. That didn’t mean that it hurt any less. Every kid wants his or her parents to be together, and even though my mom and dad went to all my games and showed collective support—even today they will sometimes attend a Lakers game together—I knew that the division existed and I know that it does now. I appreciate having them both around and active in my life.

What I haven’t said so far about all this is that my mom was and is a remarkable and steady influence in my life. If I was anxious about pleasing my father and not making mistakes, my mom was the unconditionally devoted mother that we all dream of. She was at every game cheering me on. After every game she praised me or offered her counsel or a shoulder to cry on or was a sounding board. She clipped stories out of newspapers and put together scrapbooks of my exploits. She worked two jobs so that we could eat well and be appropriately and comfortably clothed. She did all the little things necessary to keep the household functioning and her kids on track. I might figuratively have been looking over my shoulder worrying about what my dad thought—good and bad—about how I was doing, but I never did that with my mother. I knew that she was in my corner always and forever. Maybe I didn’t express my appreciation and my love for her as openly as I might have, but beneath all my confusion and upset and worry, she was there as a calming influence, the steady heartbeat that underlay the frenetic pace of my adolescent uncertainty.