Character Driven
Authors: Derek Fisher,Gary Brozek
Life, Lessons, and Basketball
CHARACTER
DRIVEN
Derek Fisher
WITH GARY BROZEK
TOUCHSTONE and HOWARD BOOKS
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First Touchstone and Howard Books hardcover edition September 2009
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fisher, Derek.
Character driven : life, lessons, and basketball / Derek Fisher ;
with Gary Brozek.—1st Touchstone hardcover ed.
p. cm.
“A Touchstone book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Retinoblastoma—Psychological aspects. 2. Cancer in children—Psychological
aspects. 3. Fisher, Derek. 4. Basketball players—California—Biography.
5. Retinoblastoma—Patients—Family relationships. I. Brozek, Gary. II. Title.
RC280.E9F57 2009
616.99'4840092—dc22
[B] 2009022794
ISBN 978-1-4165-8053-9
ISBN 978-1-4391-4915-7 (eBook)
To my family. To my parents for setting the foundation.
To my wife and children for everyday strength to
keep trying to live a life driven by character.
Contents
Putting Your Skills to the Best Use:
Performing When It Really Matters
Practicing the Fundamentals:
Building a Solid Foundation
Developing Other Skills:
Becoming Multi-Dimensional
Knocking Them Down:
Free Throws and Seizing Opportunities
Defending:
Protecting What’s Important to You
Rebounding:
Bouncing Back from Disappointment
Staying in Bounds:
Understanding the Rules of the Game and of Life
by Earvin “Magic” Johnson
As a member of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers “Showtime” team, I know the kind of success we enjoyed may have looked easy to people on the outside, but we put in a lot of hard work and a lot of practicing. Basketball and Hollywood go hand in hand. There’s the make-believe world that appears on the court or on the screen, and then there’s the reality of what it took to put that show on. I’ve known Derek Fisher for more than a decade, and I can’t think of a better person to take this journey with as he goes behind the scenes to reveal his life in the NBA. Derek is one of the guys who appear to be working backstage while others get the spotlight; but the truth is, he’s a star and has shown it on some of the biggest stages in the league and at the most critical times. His teammates and the fans understand the kinds of contributions Derek has made to the league, and I know more people will understand him and the role he’s played after reading
Character Driven
.
Success is often elusive, because we set these high standards for ourselves as athletes, and the expectations we put on others can sometimes be overwhelming. I’ve come to know Derek Fisher as a skilled and fiercely competitive athlete. He’s one of the good guys in the NBA who has taken an active role in preserving the popularity and integrity of what I consider to be the greatest professional sport in the world. He’s a torchbearer for the legacy of success that is the Los Angeles Lakers, and, more important, Derek’s a thoughtful and compassionate guy who cares deeply about the game and has a vision for what he wants to do once his playing days are over.
In reading about Derek’s youth in Little Rock, Arkansas, in
Character Driven
, it took me back to my days growing up in Lansing, Michigan. We were both blessed with incredibly supportive parents who instilled in us the importance of giving back. It’s part of everything I do with the Magic Johnson Foundation and Magic Johnson Enterprises. Our motto is simple: “We are the communities we serve.” When we take care of our own communities, the ripple effects are far wider than we can imagine. Knowing that the success I enjoyed inspired Derek as a young man means a great deal to me, not only because of what’s he’s meant to the Lakers but also to the league and to the many lives he’s touched off the court.
Derek is one of the most highly regarded players in the game today, and the respect he has earned is richly deserved. He’s built a legacy on and off the court that few in the game today can match.
Whether it’s his floor leadership, his presence in the locker room, or his giving back to the community, Derek Fisher is a guy who plays much larger than his size would indicate. That’s one of the things scouts and coaches are always looking for in players, but in Derek’s case, what he has done off the floor as well as on the court has earned him that distinction. It’s Derek’s quiet example of how to live a good life and achieve success on and off the court that makes him remarkable. This is the heart of Derek Fisher. I’m glad that he’s decided to share more of his life and the lessons that he’s learned along the way. I hope you enjoy getting to know him as much as I have. The league, and the world at large, could use more people like Derek Fisher in it.
Putting Your Skills to the Best Use:
Performing When It Really Matters
When people found out that my wife, Candace, and I were expecting a child, more than a few of them said, “Your life is about to change.” Candace and I each had a child from a previous relationship, so we had some idea of the truth of that statement. What we didn’t know was the extent to which our lives would be altered several months after our twins, Tatum and Drew, were born. I don’t know if having twins changes your life twice as much, but when you find out that one of your newborn children has a serious illness such as cancer, little in your life and your routine remains the same. We suspected that something was wrong with one of Tatum’s eyes; after first dismissing the difference in its appearance as parental paranoia, we took her to a specialist. When we learned that she had a rare but dangerous form of cancer known as retinoblastoma—a tumor of the retina—it was as if someone had sucked all the air out of the doctor’s office.
After we were initially told that there was little hope of saving Tatum’s eye, we were momentarily stunned, and that pit-of-the-stomach sinking feeling could have overwhelmed us. I don’t want to trivialize the situation by comparing my daughter’s dire diagnosis to the game of basketball, because truth be told, thoughts of my career, the Utah Jazz’s prospects for the play-offs, and any thoughts of winning a championship were very, very far from my mind. My energies were concentrated on doing whatever I could to help my daughter and support my wife, who was understandably upset and fearful. I was experiencing a lot of the same emotions as Candace, but I could sense that this was particularly hard on her. Her maternal instincts were running at their highest level, and they had been for some time prior to the diagnosis and prior to her pregnancy. Before her getting pregnant with the twins, we’d experienced a miscarriage. Losing that child was a blow to both of us, one that we’d recovered from to a certain degree, but not something we had by any means forgotten.
In the wake of that sad event, we’d decided to explore medical options to ensure a safe and full-term pregnancy. As a result, we’d seen a few fertility specialists, and we’d decided on what we were told would most likely be a safer alternative—in vitro fertilization. My whole life, I’ve been someone who looks at all the alternatives and choices before making a decision based on a careful risk/reward analysis. If the doctors we were dealing with felt that in vitro fertilization offered us the best chances of having a child, then that’s what we were going to do. I can still remember sitting in that doctor’s office talking about everything that needed to be done. I was able to block out all thoughts that in vitro wasn’t normal or natural and that the procedure would be done in a lab instead of in the privacy of our home. What mattered were the results. Candace and I both were eager to have a family together, and so we were going to do whatever it took to make that dream come true.
I do have to admit to trepidation in regard to one part of the procedure. To increase the chances of having a viable fetus develop and to avoid having to repeat the painful procedure of harvesting one of Candace’s eggs, we were told that it would be a good idea to fertilize and then implant more than one ovum at a time. If they “took,” we could decide if we wanted to bring those ova to full term. Candace and I knew that we would of course not destroy one or more of the eggs, so we had to decide just how much we wanted to increase the odds of our successfully producing a child together. I was cool with the idea of having twins, but when the doctor said that we could go for three if we wanted to, I had to call a time-out. I looked at Candace and she looked at me. We each did some elementary-school math and came to the same conclusion. There were two of us, and if God willing Candace would get pregnant with twins, we could each handle one of the twins at a time. Two parents, two hands/arms each, two children. That would work. Any number of children above that would make the math, and the amount of work we’d have to do, that much harder. If circumstances were different and we didn’t have any kind of control over the situation and God willed that we would have triplets or even more children, then we’d have accepted that also.
We looked at the doctor and said, “Two, please.”
When Tatum was diagnosed, my career as a basketball player came into play in the way I handled the situation. Like many people, I believe that God never puts on our plates more than we can handle, and that everything that happens in our lives fits into a pattern of His creation. When you are faced with challenges the way Candace and I were, all the choices and decisions and experiences you have had leading up to the specific moment of having a seriously ill child fall into place. Because I’d dedicated my life to basketball, because I had been in pressure-packed situations, and because to succeed in basketball I had to understand the role of focus, tenacious diligence, teamwork, and sacrifice, we were all able to do what it took to secure a successful outcome for Tatum. Ultimately, whether Tatum’s eye would be saved was out of our hands and in the hands of God. I truly believe that, but a lot of other human beings made that possible. Looking back at all those choices I made that led us to those wonderfully skilled individuals who did save her eye, I see ample evidence of the guiding hand of God at work. We asked Him to lead us and were comfortable with knowing that His will would be done, and we put the power of prayer to use.
Let me give you one example of how a choice I made in my life paid unexpected dividends down the line. We were fortunate to have a family friend who worked in a medical-school library and was familiar with all kinds of print and electronic resources. When Tatum was diagnosed and we were essentially told that our only option was to have Tatum’s eye removed so that the cancer would not spread, my basketball training and God’s intervention combined to make me realize that I needed to pass the ball off. This was not a shot I could take independent of the team; I needed to turn to forces greater than my own. I really believe that God put this friend in my life to be more than just someone to socialize with. He put him there because with his medical background and training, I could turn to him to do the necessary research and study to find an alternative to surgically removing my precious daughter’s eye. He was able to quickly sift through much of the medical literature and report back to Candace and me.
We knew that time was running out, and the longer it took us to find alternatives, the riskier those procedures might be. Cancer has unflagging energy, and we knew that with each passing day, the tumor was growing. Candace and I could have tried to do all the research on our own, but poring through medical journals to try to understand all the complications and even just the possible approaches to treatment would have cost us precious time. Even developing a basic understanding of the options and then trying to track down doctors who either did those alternative procedures or who might be able to better explain their potential risks was not something we could do either. The clock was winding down, and we knew we needed to rely on someone who could quickly cut through the lingo and technical aspects of the treatment options and feed us the information as quickly as humanly possible. As a point guard, I have always had to assess the situation on court and distribute the ball to those who are in the best position to score. Evaluating time on the clock, the score, the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses, and a dozen more factors are things I’ve spent nearly a lifetime doing. I had some idea those skills would transfer to life off the court, but being able to assess situations and make decisions quickly under such extreme, nonbasketball circumstances put those skills to the test in ways I had never anticipated.
That our friend found two doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York who had experimented with a radical new treatment, one they’d only performed on fourteen patients, without publishing the results, is in my mind nothing short of a miracle. Those doctors had just begun the treatment in 2006—a year before Tatum was diagnosed. Another stroke of good fortune we could add to our score: When Candace and I sat in an office speaking with Dr. David Abramson and Dr. Pierre Gobin, they at first told us that the only real choice we had was to have Tatum’s eye removed. I’m sure that they figured that we were parents doing our due-diligence work, getting a second and third opinion, hoping against hope that we could avoid surgically removing our daughter’s eye. Of course, if removal of the eye meant preventing the possible spread of the cancer, and that was truly our only option, we would have agreed with that treatment. Something had told us, in the face of all the other opinions that lined up with Dr. Abramson and Dr. Gobin’s initial assessment, that we had to dig deeper. If nothing else, we wanted to hear that dire prognosis from the best doctors in the field, and Dr. Abramson was considered the go-to guy in retinoblastoma.
Like most people, I’d heard of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (though I knew it simply as Sloan-Kettering), even if I’d been fortunate not ever to have had any firsthand experience with the place for myself or any of my family members and friends. I knew that this cutting-edge facility was recognized worldwide as one of the most advanced cancer-treatment and research facilities out there. What I learned as we pursued a potential treatment for Tatum was that the doctors at Sloan-Kettering had a long history of advancing treatment of the rare cancer affecting our baby girl’s eye. In the 1930s, doctors there had come up with the first treatments that successfully managed the disease. Prior to that, I learned, being diagnosed with retinoblastoma was essentially a death sentence. Survival rates for the disease were incredibly low. Fortunately, thanks to the work of many doctors and researchers, the odds have significantly increased, though in most cases the patient ends up losing the afflicted eye.
The cancer is rare; only about 350 children in the United States are diagnosed with retinoblastoma each year, but it is the most common type of eye cancer among children. Worldwide, approximately five thousand children are afflicted with this cancer each year, and about half that number eventually die from it. I say “only” in regard to the number of children in the United States with the disease (compared to almost three thousand kids with leukemia for example), but for every child and every parent of a child diagnosed with the disease, that number is far too large. In most cases, the disease is the result of a randomly occurring mutation in chromosome thirteen. Most often, the affected child is the first in the family to have the disease, and only in about 10 percent of the cases is the mutation inherited from one of the parents. Candace and I weren’t so concerned at that point about the cause of Tatum’s cancer; we were mainly concerned with treatment options. We were fortunate to find Dr. Abramson. He was the chief of the Ophthalmic Oncology Service at Sloan-Kettering and had in the seventies trained under one of the leading experts in the field of eye-cancer treatment, Dr. Algernon Reese at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Dr. Reese, an ophthalmologist, and Dr. Hayes Martin, a surgeon, had pioneered the use of radiation treatments in eye cancer in the forties and fifties. Dr. Abramson and his team continued to advance treatment options, including the type of chemoeradication (shrinking the tumor with chemotherapy) technique our friend had learned about.
When I asked them about their experimental treatment, intraarterial chemotherapy, they seemed surprised. As Dr. Abramson later said in a
New York Times
interview, “I’m not sure how he knew about that. . . . He must have done a lot of homework.” Thanks to my friend, I had been able to copy someone else’s homework. Spreading the ball around, and trusting that a teammate would execute under pressure, proved to be a wise move. Dr. Abramson and Dr. Gobin stepped up for us and agreed that if Candace and I were willing to take the risk, they were willing to do the procedure. We knew that we had to do everything we could to save Tatum’s eye. The decision was in that way easy. Subjecting your infant daughter to anything, even a regularly scheduled immunization, is hard. Sitting in that office, floors above the growl and hum of midtown Manhattan, we took a deep breath, trusted that the Lord had led us to this place for a good reason, and signed the consent forms and did all the other necessary paperwork.
Obviously, there is never a good time to have anyone in your life become sick, but the circumstances of Tatum’s diagnosis were marked by all kinds of potential pitfalls. That spring we had only recently moved from the Bay Area to Salt Lake City. I had been traded during the off-season, but with the kids still infants and lots of loose ends to tie up, it hadn’t made sense to move right away that summer. I’m sure a lot of you can relate to the problems of moving and having to find new doctors, plus deal with health insurance companies (we were fortunate to have good coverage) and all the issues of who’s in network and who’s not. Candace had been concerned that something wasn’t quite right with Tatum’s eye, but had been assured by our pediatrician that nothing was wrong. Only when we finally settled in Salt Lake City and Candace pursued second and third opinions did Dr. Katie McElligott confirm my wife’s suspicions. I was at practice when the voicemail message came in telling me that we needed to get to a pediatric ophthalmologist that afternoon. I joined them there, and I was glad that we had been persistent and followed Candace’s gut instinct that something was wrong. If we had waited and if we’d let the red tape of insurance companies deter us, I don’t know what the outcome would have been.