Character Driven (20 page)

If not for my father and the lessons he’d taught me about hard work and digging deep, I could easily have given up on basketball after the San Antonio benching. The thought crossed my mind briefly, but was gone in the next instant. One of the reasons for that was simple: I
loved
the game. If anything frustrated me, it was all the people who seemed to think that I was too complacent or not fiery enough on the court, who couldn’t see that I had a passion for basketball that transcended outward displays. To this day, I don’t think I can adequately articulate how I feel about the game and the joy that it brings me. In those rough patches, basketball also became my solace and the court a refuge where I didn’t have to think about my mom and dad, my hopes of playing in college, my worries about my half brother, Duane, or anything else. Sports teach you a lot about living in the moment. You have to be aware, almost subconsciously, of the score, the time on the clock, and your game strategy and how to execute it, but the rest is just existing in that flow and movement and the sheer pleasure that comes from having command over your body. Everything else in life can be swirling around you and feel as if it is totally out of your control, but on the court you can feel powerful and in command.

Bouncing back from the disappointment of San Antonio was going to take some time, but being denied the pleasure of being out on the court and contributing made me come back. As much as I loved the game, being a fan and watching it didn’t feed my needs and desires in the same way that playing it did. Not even close. My mom and dad’s belief that action and activity were important had made an indelible impression on me. I didn’t make any grand announcements or hold a press conference in our kitchen to tell everybody how I felt about the state final. I didn’t lay out a seven-point plan for how I was going to improve my game. I also decided that I wasn’t going to become the person whom they all seemed to want me to become—the rah-rah, overtly emotional, devil-may-care, attention-grabbing guy. That just wasn’t me, and it would have been wrong for me to fake it. I was going to do it on my terms and my way, based on the fundamentals that had been drilled into me from the time I was a young kid. I also realized that as much influence as my parents had on me, this was my life. I’d been the one who would stay at the gym until midnight shooting jumpers. My parents weren’t signing me up to go to clinics or summer camps where I could improve my skills or be exposed to scouts.

If I was going to bounce back from disappointment, I was going to do it not to please anybody else but to do what I had always wanted to do.

My next chance at redeeming myself wouldn’t come until the following season when I was a junior at Parkview. Coach Ripley had built a strong program at the school, and everyone pretty much knew where he stood. You paid your dues as a sophomore and as a junior, then when you were a senior, you got the bulk of your playing time. So, as a junior I played on the junior varsity and also on the varsity. We all respected Coach Johnson, and he did really nurture us. For example, when I was a sophomore, I had a great season, and when it came time for the state play-offs, he allowed me to dress with the varsity guys. Chances are I wouldn’t play a minute, but he thought it was important for the younger guys to experience and learn from that level of play. I’d spent so many years wanting to be a Parkview Patriot that the first time I got to dress with the varsity and go out onto the court and do our pregame ritual—a defensive slide drill with a chant letting everyone know that Parkview was in the house—the adrenaline was pumping so hard I felt I could have jumped right out of that gym.

I’ve seen the movie
Hoosiers,
and even though Little Rock had a population of around 180,000, when it came to Parkview basketball games, it felt like the same small-town atmosphere of tiny Marion, Indiana. Even if you didn’t have kids at the school or on the team, the place to be on a Friday night was Parkview. And unlike a lot of schools, we didn’t have a tiny bandbox of a gymnasium. Our court had two levels of stands and seated about thirty-five hundred people. It could get loud in that joint and had a great atmosphere for high school basketball. With all that focus and attention on the game came high expectations. We seldom let anyone down.

My junior season, we had some strong seniors, but almost everyone agreed that the crop of juniors I was in was a stronger group overall. Nikki Carruthers (who went to play at MIT), Dion Cross (basketball scholarship at Stanford), and I just had to be patient. Finishing third in the state our junior year sounds like a big accomplishment, and I suppose it was, but we had our eyes on a bigger prize for the next season—winning state. Before we could do that, we had one more thing to do—go back and win another national championship in AAU ball.

It seems as if much of my life has gone in cycles, and as a teen I experienced some of the things I would later as a pro. After winning the national title the year before, we returned to the national championship tournament that year as the favorites to win it all. The only thing harder than winning that first championship is repeating. Coach Finley and my dad had guided us to the championship, but they were no longer the coaches. The sponsor of the team decided that he wanted to coach us. We didn’t have much say in any of that, and neither did my dad or Mr. Finley. This guy controlled the team and paid the bills, so he could do whatever he wanted. However, he didn’t have the same kind of relationship with us that Mr. Finley and my father did. I’d eaten dinner at the Finleys’ house probably three times a week since I was in the third grade. I respected him a lot. I didn’t like the decision he’d made the previous year, and coming from him, it hurt maybe more than it would have coming from somebody else, but I still respected and trusted him.

Unfortunately, our new coach seemed to be more into the spectacle of the tournament and what it might mean for him than he was for us. In my mind, his biggest contribution was getting us brand-new warm-ups and uniforms. Why would a guy invest a lot of his time and money in running an AAU team? Most people do it because they love the game and they want to help out kids, and our “owner” was motivated by that. However, once we won the national title, I think he also saw this as an opportunity to get himself some attention and headlines. AAU ball is a launching pad for a lot of kids. As much as college coaches and the scouting agencies pay attention to the high school season, they pay even more attention to AAU ball in the summer. That’s when you see kids and their potential in a different light. We were playing the cream of the crop. Our AAU team was essentially an all-star team, a kind of All–Little Rock squad composed of some of the best players in the area and then the state. The competition was even more intense in AAU ball than it was in high school. And since we were playing against teams from all over the country, recruiters would naturally be all over the stands at these games.

Everybody likes to be a part of something successful, and I’m sure a bit of ego was involved in the sponsor’s deciding to come down from the stands and be on the sidelines for that year. College coaches would have to go through him to gain access to us. I’m not accusing him of doing anything unethical, only noting it was good for his ego to have guys like Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, Bobby Knight of Indiana, John Chaney of Temple, or John Thompson of Georgetown talking to him.

Pressure does funny things to people, and in our case it made the game less fun. I can’t say exactly why it happened, or how it happened, but we weren’t a bunch of kids playing the game because we loved it and had fun doing it at that national tournament. Instead, we became about as businesslike and serious as a tax audit. We were heading into our senior year of high school, and a lot of us wanted to be early “committers”—that is, guys who accepted a scholarship at an NCAA school before our senior season even started. Having that taken care of and out of the way would be one less thing to worry about and really enable you to enjoy that last year. I don’t know if it was the added pressure of the scouts/coaches in the crowd, wanting to impress them so that you could get that scholarship early—which also earned you some respect from your peers, because if you were good enough for a school to want you before you even played your senior season, you really were a sure thing—or if it was just other teams really gunning for us because we were the defending champs, but it was a struggle.

In the semifinals, we played a team from Memphis featuring Tony Delk. He would go on to win Most Outstanding Player in leading Kentucky to the 1996 NCAA championship title. He was a combination point guard/shooting guard, but in the first half I didn’t guard him. He was relatively quiet while I scored 10 points, but in the second half he just exploded on us, scoring 30. Corliss was our best matchup against them, but he would have had to have played completely out of his mind to match Delk’s output. Unfortunately for us, because of our “owner’s” relative inexperience on the bench, we didn’t make any of the adjustments we needed to slow them down. Our coach seemed to be flustered and incapable of coming up with a plan, and we reflected his demeanor on the court. Things unraveled pretty quickly, and our dream of repeating as champions died. What also didn’t help was that we were seen as the favorites, so when the underdog Memphis team went on a roll, they had the crowd behind them. Even though it was a neutral-site game, you’d have thought we were playing right on Beale Street with Howlin’ Wolf and Junior Wells playing during the time-outs. We were shell-shocked, and when the buzzer sounded and we lost, I could only feel relief that the game was over. Only the next day did it sink in that we weren’t going to repeat as champions. I can say this: we weren’t overconfident, just underprepared. They were the better team on that occasion, but if my dad and Mr. Finley had still been coaching us, I don’t think that would have been the case—they knew how to prepare us for anything and frequently brought in adults to scrimmage against us. Not just guys off the street but former college players with real skills.

So far, my plan at redemption wasn’t off to a great start. I did play significant minutes in all the games, not as many in the second half of the semifinal loss as I would have liked to, but with another season coming up in a few months—the tournament ended in mid-August and the basketball season officially began in November—I could concentrate on getting ready for what I expected to be a terrific senior year. I had played football up until I got into ninth grade, but then my dad said that he didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to play. Basketball was where it was at for me, and that fall of my senior year in particular I didn’t mind not being a part of the football program. Fall meant the homecoming game and the dance that went along with it. To me, the homecoming dance meant that the gym would be closed for a couple of days while it was decorated, the dance was held, and then the decorations came down.

In other words, I wasn’t the most social of guys. During the season get-togethers were usually held after the games, supervised and unsupervised parties alike, but I never went. I decided though that since this was my senior year and I would be playing a lot, I would mend my ways and hang out a bit more. During preseason practice I noticed something that made me stop and think. When the first team was running plays, I was out there most but not all of the time. That was a departure from how coach usually did things. The guy who played behind me was the son of one of the assistant coaches, and he saw a lot more minutes with the starters than any of the other second-team players. I chalked it up to Coach Ripley’s having faith in me after I’d been in the program so long. No one could deny that I knew my responsibilities as a point guard or could question my basketball intellect. Why make me do all the repetitions when I had already demonstrated that I knew what was up?

Our opening game of the season, I was in the starting lineup, but about halfway through the first quarter I was taken out. It was early in the season and none of us had our fitness level up to midseason form yet, so I figured I was just going to be on the bench long enough to catch my breath, then I’d head back on out. That didn’t happen. Instead, my replacement played the rest of the quarter and well into the second. I went back in, and the two of us had just about shared the minutes. The same thing happened in the second half. I played well, took a few more shots than I might have the year before under similar circumstances, and was pleased that we won big. I tried not to think too much about it, and I noted the look of surprise on my mother’s face when I said that I was going to the postgame party. Everyone was jacked up about the game and the blowout win. I hung out with a couple of teammates, drinking soda and eating chips. We were checking out all the girls, but I was way too shy to talk to any of them. Eventually that would change and I would have a girlfriend for most of that year, but that was going to have to wait until after the season. I was wondering about my playing time, but I tried to just let go of it and figured that it was just one game.

Unfortunately, that pattern continued in the first few weeks of the season. I had been taught to always respect a coach’s decisions and not question them, so I didn’t talk to Coach Ripley about what was going on. I wasn’t the only one who noticed that his senior preference wasn’t being applied to me. The starting five were all seniors and noticed what was going on and talked to me about it privately. My parents were at the games, and they saw what was up and didn’t like it. I believe that even if it hadn’t been happening to me, my parents would have spoken up. After all, what was fair was fair and what was right was right. I was producing and the team was on a tear, winning every game out of the gate. My dad had a talk with Coach Ripley to express his frustration that the senior policy was not being upheld in my case.

My dad had been involved in enough basketball in town and with me and Duane that he felt comfortable taking that step. He didn’t ask me if I thought he should, he just went ahead and did it, and that was fine with me. Because of how I’d been raised and because of my shyness, I would probably have wound up sounding like a whiner instead of talking to coach logically and dispassionately. Today, I have no problems discussing concerns I have with the coaching staff. It’s very different as an adult going to another adult to talk about something. No one ever teased me or otherwise gave me a hard time about my parents intervening on my behalf. I think that’s because of the respect they had for my parents and also because they knew that what my father was saying was correct.