Character Driven (21 page)

By the time we went to Las Vegas to play in a holiday tournament, things had settled down. I was still starting, and I began to play more and more minutes, especially after we lost to a team from L.A. in the championship game of that tournament. From that point forward it was smooth sailing for me and the Parkview Patriots. We went the rest of the season without a loss, finishing first in the state tournament and fourth overall in the nation according to
USA Today
. I’d weathered the storm. I’d hated the feeling that my senior season might slip away from me and felt that the right thing had finally been done. Any thoughts of why things always had to be so hard were forgotten in the joy of being able to say that we were the best high school team in Arkansas. One of our big men had been injured in that loss in Las Vegas, and another key player had fouled out. We lost in overtime, and that was all that separated us from a perfect season and likely the number one ranking in the country. That one blemish was, in a lot of ways, a good thing. It demonstrated the lesson that I had learned in San Antonio two summers before—you always have to keep improving. I was gratified that I had bounced back from that low point. It took a long time, but the wait was worth it.

Early in my basketball days, success had come fairly easily. This time, success for me individually had taken more time than I really wanted it to, but it had come. I’d been as persistent and focused as I’d ever been. My parents pitched in with their support, and I was rewarded. I could have been one of those problem players, undermining morale and team unity, but I had taken the right road and arrived at the right destination.

The next thing on my list was settling on a college. Most of my teammates had signed their letters of intent that November. I was still a man-child without a school to play for. With the state championship taken care of, it was time to focus on a personal goal—getting a full-ride scholarship to a NCAA Division I college.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I was never one of those blue-chip prospects, the kind of player who was spotted in junior high, recruited heavily by the who’s who of Division I basketball powerhouses, inundated with phone calls and enough mailings to fill a bedroom, and going to bed each night with the thoughts of eager coaches touting their respective programs. That isn’t to say that I didn’t hear from anyone. Mostly because of my performance in the summer before my junior year in high school (the year we won the AAU championship), I’d attracted some notice from the so-called midmajor schools such as Rice University, Baylor University, Texas A&M, other schools in that region. I even visited Liberty University, which was Jerry Falwell’s school, as well as Samford University, outside Birmingham, Alabama. When I went on my recruiting visit there, it was the same weekend as the Auburn-Alabama college football game. They took me to a local mall, and when we first got there, it was crowded. Then, within thirty minutes, with the game coming on, the mall just cleared out. All of a sudden, we were the only ones in the mall. I was looking around thinking, “Where did everybody go? Oh, yeah, the game’s starting.” The whole place shut down for the Auburn-Alabama football game.

The Division I schools appealed to me the most. They were decent schools in terms of basketball, but outstanding schools academically. I also considered some of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). I even wrote to the legendary Clarence “Big House” Gaines, who ran the program at Winston-Salem State University. I told him how much I admired him and his program, gave him the rundown on my accomplishments, and told him that I would love to hear from him. WSSU was the first HBCU to win an NCAA national championship in Division II, when its basketball team, led by the future first-round pick Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, won it all in 1967.

I’m sure that Coach Gaines (who passed away in 2005) got lots of calls and letters similar to mine, but I was still disappointed that I never received any kind of response. Small schools appealed to me; WSSU was a Division II school with an enrollment of less than five thousand students. That would have suited me academically and socially, but something told me that it would be better to hold out for those Division I schools. Unfortunately, they didn’t want to wait for me to make up my mind. Once I told everybody that I would decide late in the signing period, some of the schools backed away. Rice, Baylor, and Texas A&M all said, “Look, if you don’t want to commit to us during the signing period, we can’t wait.” They were worried that if they waited too long, they might lose out on someone else as well. That was okay with me. I didn’t want to rush the decision, and I hoped that if I had a great senior year, someone might enter the picture at the last minute. I’d always wanted to play for the University of Arkansas, but I knew that was not going to happen.

The coaches at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, had been in contact with me for almost a year. That they expressed interest even when I wasn’t playing full-time mattered a lot to me. But the truth was, Coach Finley was also an assistant coach at UALR. He and assistant coach Dennis White were the ones who really recruited me. Coach Platt, the head coach at UALR, was on the fence about me, but his assistants convinced him that I had some talent and could really help the team. So, as excited as I was about the opportunity to get a scholarship to a Division I school, I wasn’t walking into the best of situations. I wouldn’t find that out until I showed up there for my first season. I got to enjoy what every one of our Parkview starting five did. Coach White came to the school on late signing day in March, and my mom and dad and Coach Ripley were all in the room watching as I signed my NCAA letter of intent. My mom still has a photo of that moment, which ran in the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
. It was official. I was going to college on a basketball scholarship. Signing that letter was one of the highlights of my life, if not the best thing that had ever happened to me until then. I couldn’t know what was to follow, but even then I felt I’d made the right choice. My mom and dad were thrilled. They wanted me to go to college obviously, and knowing that I’d be playing so close to home made them even happier. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to burden them with loans for tuition and housing or any of that. I liked the idea of being able to come home whenever I needed to and to be away whenever I wanted to.

Along with graduating from high school, one of the events that I was most looking forward to as that part of my life was drawing to a close was another chance to win an AAU national championship—this time with me really contributing all the way to the end. Unfortunately, I seemed to be the only one of the guys who felt that way. Our “owner” had decided one year of coaching us was enough. Coach Finley was busy at UALR, and my dad didn’t want to get involved again after a year away. The sour taste of how things had gone down with the coaching change the year before hadn’t gone away. This was the last summer my teammates and I were eligible to play AAU ball, but we’d all earned scholarships, and no one wanted to jeopardize his college career before it began by getting injured. I could understand that, but I hated that there was unfinished business and no one wanted to pitch in to get it done. I also think that I felt a little sentimental about it all. This would have been our last chance to all play together. We’d been through so much and for so long, and I hated that it was going to end, and that our last game together would be that loss to Memphis the year before.

Ultimately our owner left it up to us: “If you guys want to play nineteen and under this year, it’s on you. I’ll support whatever decision you make.” He said that he could find us another coach, a lawyer in town who’d coached AAU teams. We ended up playing together, but after we won the state tournament, the same questions and objections came up about our continuing to play. Also, at the end of July our coach had a trial that was going to go on for some time. He couldn’t just tell his client, “Sorry,” so we were out a coach as well. To complicate things further, the Arkansas state high school all-star game was coming up, and guys wanted to play in that. It wasn’t a direct conflict with the national tournament, but the dates were close enough that they’d have to do some hustling to get from the all-star game to the national tournament in Rochester, Minnesota. Things were not looking good. Normally, after we won the state tournament, we’d get airline tickets booked, hotel reservations made, and we’d be synchronizing our watches to make sure that we were all where we needed to be on time. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many shoulders being shrugged in my life.

Finally, with just a few days to go before the national tournament, everybody made his decision. Three of our starting five, Dion Cross, Jabali Barrett, and I, would play. Our owner’s disinterest was a bit frustrating, but he did have some cash for us. It took some of the parents, including my mom and dad, to get things organized. We didn’t have enough cash to fly out there, so they rented a couple of vans and we loaded up and headed for Rochester. In some ways, going by van was cool. It was as if we were taking a step back into the past. I can say that because at six feet one inch, I could at least get semicomfortable in the vans. The taller guys had to struggle more with the cramped quarters—which they would have had to do just for a short period if we’d flown. Eight hundred and twenty-seven miles and nearly fourteen hours later, we arrived at our hotel. We had just a few hours to get some sleep before our first game. I remember waking up to the sound of Kurtis Blow’s song “Basketball” blaring down the hallway. It had always been one of my favorite songs growing up, and hearing it again took me all the way back to 1984, when I first heard it. We all staggered out of our rooms bleary-eyed and had breakfast as a team before going to the gym. We won that day, but eventually our fatigue and lack of preparedness caught up to us. We lost one game in pool play but got into the championship round.

Once again a team out of Baltimore had been our nemesis, and losing to them wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. Dante Bright was on that team, and he eventually went to the University of Massachusetts and had a good career, and they had a couple of other Division I guys. Losing to them in pool play seemed to fire us all up. We adopted a kind of “if we’re here, we might as well bust our tails” mentality. Unfortunately for us, Dion Cross, who was Stanford-bound, dislocated his shoulder in the last game of pool play. I’d been coming off the bench and doing well, but with Dion out, that meant that I’d be inserted in the starting lineup. I always seemed to be able to take advantage of opportunities, and I played extremely well and we advanced to the national semifinals to face Dante’s crew again.

I suppose it might have been more dramatic if we’d played them in the final, but just getting a chance to go up against the kind of team that had dogged us so frequently in the past was fitting enough. We rose to the challenge and beat them, advancing to the finals after having fallen short of that the year before. I went on a tear in all three of those championship-round games, and we ended up winning it all and I was named an AAU All-American. I was as surprised as I was pleased by the recognition. I’d only started the last three games of the tournament, but I think I was being recognized for my overall contribution to AAU ball. I’d played for nine years and had been a good citizen the whole time. I think the other coaches understood and wanted to reward that and to set me up as an example of how persistence can pay off.

Most gratifying to me was winning the championship. It seemed as if every possible obstacle to our success had been placed in our way: losing our coach (his father agreed to take over, but we essentially coached ourselves), guys either not wanting to play or then getting hurt, making a last-minute decision to play. I’d also played a key role in our winning in our last shot at it all, and in way it was as if we’d presented a thank-you gift to our parents. They had saved the day for us by organizing the trip and making certain we had that opportunity to shine. During the awards presentation, I stood there looking into the half-darkness of the stands, and I could see my mom waving her arms and jumping up and down, still as enthusiastic and supportive as ever. Afterward, my dad took me aside and looked at the trophy and the medallion I’d got as national champion and as an All-American. He didn’t say a lot; I remember him patting me on the heart and saying, “Hard-earned. Hard-earned.” He didn’t need to say a whole lot more; the look on his face spoke as eloquently as anyone could. All I could manage to say back was a quick thank-you. The vans were packed and we needed to get on the road. With the “We love that basketball” song lyric bouncing around in my head, I walked out of that arena feeling really satisfied.

Almost eight years to the day that we won that national championship, I was in a television studio in Hollywood. I’d just won my first NBA championship with the Lakers. I was doing a cameo on a FOX sitcom along with Kevin Garnett. During the setup for a new scene, Kevin asked me how it felt to be world champion and what was next. I told him the feeling was great, but the thing I most wanted was to be out there on the floor at the end—and not just because the game was at hand. I wanted to be one of the go-to guys, an essential component of the team’s success. After Kevin walked away to get some water from the craft-services table, I thought back to that tournament in Rochester. It had felt different, immeasurably different, to own the floor and feel as if I’d really helped push us to the title. I wanted that feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction to wash over me like a tidal wave again. There would be still more work to do, but that was more than okay with me.

I was gratified that my decision to refocus and to refine my game had paid off. All the work I did in the weight room, all the extra time I spent in the gym post–San Antonio, paid off. It took a while, almost two years, but the results showed: a high school state championship, a college scholarship, and an AAU national championship. Even if I had visions of having arrived somewhere, the truth was that the “where” was just a waypoint—one more mark on the longer journey. If I had any fantasy that college ball was going to be different since I had “made it” and wouldn’t need to prove myself all over again, I checked back into the reality hotel immediately. The person who showed me to my room was my coach at UALR, Jim Platt.