Character Driven (13 page)

I’ve stated before that I think our lives have a pattern designed for us. As agonizing as it was to sit there through all those announcements and not hear my name, when it came to round twenty-four and the L.A. Lakers selection, I was holding my breath. It was almost too much to wish for that my favorite team, now led in the front office by my favorite player of all time, Magic Johnson, might pick me. When Commissioner Stern began, “With the twenty-fourth pick, the Los Angeles Lakers select Derek—,” my heart literally skipped a beat. For a second I thought that he said Beattie, my roommate from PIT. But when both rooms exploded in sound and motion, I knew that he’d said Fisher. After that, my mind went blank. I could barely register the sight and sound of everyone in the locker room jumping up and down and screaming and yelling and crying. A surge of adrenaline shot through me, and it felt as if every hair on my body was tingling. I don’t remember this, but a newspaper photo shows me just after the announcement. I must have jumped out of my chair because the picture shows me leaning against one of the chalkboards, staggered by the news.

I do remember the big group hug we all joined in, and a warm feeling of deep satisfaction welling up inside me. I know that basketball is a team game, and I’ve been on teams that won some big championships, but nothing could compare with the moment I got drafted. I’d never been a selfish player, but that moment was all about earning something and taking advantage of opportunities. Yes, other people had contributed enormously to my success, but I was the one who had been drafted. It was the validation of all validations. A stunning recognition that the work I had put in was worth it, that my skills placed me among a rare few, that a dream that so many have had came true for me. As were their drafts moments for so many of the guys I’ve talked to around the league, the moment I heard my name called as a draft choice was the best day of my life to that point. The championships I’d later win as a part of the Lakers were phenomenal. Still June 26, 1996, holds a special place in my heart and in my career. Without it, none of what followed would have taken place. I stepped up to the line and knocked it down. Six months earlier, only the most die-hard fan outside Arkansas would have even recognized my name; now I was going to be a part of one of the most storied franchises in all of sports. In the middle of all that jubilation, we bowed our heads and said a prayer, with much of the eighth Street Baptist Church in attendance. God is indeed good, and the little guy with nothing to lose had stood up and done what it takes to seize the opportunities he’d been fortunate enough to have God put in front of him.

CHAPTER FIVE

Defending:

Protecting What’s Important to You

The winner of any basketball game is the team that scores the most points. You can look at that from a slightly different perspective. The loser of the game is the one that scores fewer points. That gives you two options: concentrate on how to score, or concentrate on how to prevent the other team from scoring. That’s pretty fundamental, but as you know, that’s what we’ve been concentrating on. Just as some of the other basic elements of the game that we’ve talked about—developing your off hand, foul shooting, and boxing out—defense is not the headline-grabbing, glamorous task that offensive scoring is. I haven’t seen many headlines on game stories shouting out, “Fisher’s Steals Seal the Deal” or “Odom’s Blocks Rocks Sonics.” The headline and the lead in most stories about games is about which player led his team to victory with X number of points. I’m not arguing with the priority placed on offensive production. I’m as aware of my contributions on the offensive end as anyone. I know that one of my jobs is to put points on the board.

In basketball, or in nearly any sport I can think of, points aren’t taken off the board for defensive plays. For example, a blocked shot doesn’t result in two points being taken off the offensive team’s score. In baseball, a diving catch doesn’t reduce the number of runs a team has. In football, a goal-line stand or a fourth-down stop doesn’t result in points being deducted. Instead, those things contribute to the ball being awarded to your team so that you can go on offense to try to score. The emphasis in almost all sports is always going to be on offensive play. The great thing about basketball is that every player has to be skilled at both offense and defense. Football is the obvious comparison. In that game, two or even three different teams exist within the whole team. With few exceptions (the defensive back/wide receiver, the defensive lineman inserted as a tight end) today’s football players don’t play on both sides of the ball the way they did back in the day. Football has become so specialized that some defensive players only come into the game in certain situations—on obvious running or passing downs, etc.

I have huge respect for football players at any level. It is a violent and fast-paced game with incredibly skilled guys demonstrating amazing athleticism and sometimes grace. But what I really love about basketball is that you have to make the transition from offense to defense so quickly and so continuously throughout the game. We all know that some players are better on one end of the floor than others. Some notably good offensive players were notoriously weak on defense, and some (far fewer) players who were strong defenders were comparatively weak on offense. But when you look at the list of the game’s greats, you’ll see guys who were outstanding on both ends of the court. High scorers frequently get a bad rap for being too offense-minded, but you won’t last long in the league unless you can at least hold your own on the defensive end.

Just about every coach I’ve ever played for has emphasized one thing about defense: playing good defense generally comes down to desire. If you want to be a good defender, you can be a good defender by simply (for the most part) expending the necessary energy at that end of the floor. Phil Jackson has repeatedly said that you can have an off night shooting—some quirk in your mechanics shows up or something else goes wrong—but you should never have an off night on defense because good defense isn’t so much about technique as it is about desire and energy. Coach Jackson isn’t the only coach I’ve played for who feels that way. Coach Sloan of the Utah Jazz was a legendarily hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners defender as well as a good offensive player. He brought that same mentality with him to the bench as a coach.

I’ve always believed in bringing a distinct energy to the floor every night, particularly when coming off the bench or at the start of a game or a quarter. Setting the tempo early with a hustle play is something I pride myself on being able to do. I’ve heard hockey players talk about that same thing—how a hard check into the boards or a hip check at center ice can send a signal to an opposing team that they’re not going to get an easy path to the goal. Some teams are known for their defensive intensity. The Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s cultivated an image and became known as the Motor City Bad Boys for their rough play and emphasis on defense. Part of that was a manipulated image—they wore black jerseys with skull-and-crossbones logos while practicing. Those were given to them by the owner of my dad’s favorite football team—Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders also developed and in a sense marketed a badboy image in their silver and black, appropriate for a kind of blue-collar mentality. Detroit fans ate it up as well, and the regular rough-and-tumble bad boys against the more cultured, softer Los Angeles types got hyped a great deal in the media.

That reached a climax in the 1988–89 NBA Finals, when the two teams faced each other in a showdown of Showtime versus the Bad Boys. The Lakers were going for a three-peat (a term the savvy Pat Riley had tried to trademark) after having won the previous two seasons. I remember watching the series with my dad, and he was hoping for the three-peat primarily because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at the age of forty-two, had announced his retirement. Talk about longevity and production at both ends of the court. Kareem was also an amazingly gracious and graceful player, an extremely intelligent guy, and someone my dad pointed to as a role model for how to conduct your life. Sentiment was on his side in our household, and though there were a lot of Lakers haters elsewhere, we felt confident that the royal colors of purple and gold would be crowned again.

Obviously, things didn’t go as planned. Things unraveled pretty quickly for the Lakers, mostly due to injuries. Byron Scott tore up his hamstring in practice before the first game of the series, and Detroit’s guards took advantage of his absence with Joe Dumars, Isiah Thomas, and Vinnie Johnson combing for 65 of the team’s 109 points. For a defense-oriented team that 109 points was a lot of production, and the Pistons showed that they could perform at a high level on both ends of the court. I remember my dad muttering in frustration at the Lakers’ guards inability to shut down the Pistons’ guards. He knew that with a key element missing from the Lakers’ lineup, a high-scoring game wasn’t to the Lakers’ advantage.

Game two was a heartbreaker. James Worthy went to the line with six seconds left. The Lakers were down 106–104. If he made both shots, the game would likely go into overtime. He missed the first but made the second. That was it. Isiah Thomas hit two free throws to seal it, and the Lakers lost 108–105. Don’t believe for a second that my dad didn’t reinforce what I already knew. If Worthy had hit those foul shots, the outcome could have been different. If Thomas didn’t hit both of his, the Lakers would have had one last shot at winning. My dad wasn’t too down on James Worthy for his miss because the man had done everything he could to bring his shorthanded team to victory. In the third quarter, Detroit was on a fast break. Magic was hustling back on defense; he turned to backpedal and started hopping up and down and punching at the air. He had injured his hamstring and couldn’t return for the rest of the game. He tried in game three, but had to sit down after the first few minutes in the first quarter. That game was painful but instructive to watch. With Byron Scott out, the Lakers had to rely on a backcourt of Michael Cooper and the rookie David Rivers at the point.

The Pistons tore up those guards with screens, and my dad kept pointing out to me how the Lakers were having so much trouble switching on defense, leaving Dumars and Vinnie Johnson wide open. Of course, the headlines the next day were about Joe Dumars’s 31 points (and his making an incredible 17 consecutive points and a total of 21 in the third quarter) and Thomas’s 26 and Johnson’s 17. They needed every one of those 74 points from the backcourt to squeak by 114–110.

As we sat in our living room shaking our heads in disbelief that the defending champs had lost at home to fall behind three games to none, my dad kept saying, “Too many open shots. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad defense.” He went on to say that even at his age, he could at least have put a body on those guys or challenged those jump shots and not let them have such a clean look. Lesson learned. Not to take anything anyway from the remarkable MVP-earning efforts of Joe Dumars, but a little bit of defense would have gone a long way to alter the course of that series for the Lakers. In fact, a little bit of defense did alter the series—except it was a play by Joe Dumars on the defensive end that really capped the win. He blocked a last-second jumper by David Rivers. Not only did he block it, he kept the ball from going out of bounds so that the Pistons retained possession. Many people believe that play convinced writers to vote him the Most Valuable Player of the series.

What I also remember most is Kareem coming out of the last game. The series was essentially over, and the sweep completed. With just a few seconds left, Pat Riley, a class individual, took Kareem out of the game so that the fans at the Forum could thank “The Big Guy” for all he’d done for the team and the community over the years. Magic hobbled out to center court to greet him, and the rest of the Lakers joined the two, hugging and clapping. As much as the Bad Boys liked their thug image, they revealed themselves for who they really were. They all rose to their feet along their bench and joined in the applause. I sat there thinking about how cool it would be to play in a game like that and wondered how it would feel when everyone was standing and cheering for you, thanking you for all that you’d given.

“That’s sportsmanship,” my dad said. “Lay it all on the line and then be a man and show the other men the respect they deserve. I hate to see the Pistons win, but I’ve got to respect them for that. Just wish the Lakers could have played a little bit of defense.”

He got up, snapped off the television, and said to me, “You’ve got some homework to get done, don’t you?”

I knew that he knew that I’d done all my schoolwork, but I also knew he was giving me a hint that I had a lot of different things to think about. My dad was right about the Lakers and their inability to contain the Pistons’ guards. Every time one of them got loose as a result of a failed attempt to go under or over a screener or when someone failed to help, we talked about what the defender should have done. The Pistons weren’t doing anything but playing basic good offense, so it was surprising that the Lakers failed to react properly. I also thought about my dad and how he watched the game. Sure, he was a big fan of the Lakers and did emotionally root for his team, but he was also able to take a step back and analyze what was happening on the court. When the Lakers failed to do something he knew they should have, he called them on it. When the Lakers lost, he didn’t whine and lament about bad calls by the referees or blame sunspot activity or curse the basketball gods for the injuries that had played a crucial role in the Lakers’ falling short. Instead, he talked about the X’s and O’s and the game’s strategic elements.

Without realizing it, I was sitting in a kind of classroom. This wasn’t Basketball 101, but a slightly more advanced class. In 1989, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school just finishing up that year when the NBA Finals were being played. I’d competed in a number of tournaments on the state and national level by then, so I was pretty far advanced in my understanding of the game. I have to give credit to my dad and to my mom for the basketball schooling they provided me at home. Generally, when coaches were introducing new concepts, talking about the finer points of a defensive scheme or an offensive approach, I was able to pick up pretty quick what they were telling me. As a result of all those tutorial sessions with my dad (I hate to make it sound as if they weren’t fun because they really were a good time), I could recognize what was happening on the court and draw on the bank of the knowledge I had to make adjustments. You always hear on NCAA telecasts the announcers talking about some point guard or another whose father coached him in high school, and
coach’s kid
is a kind of shorthand for a smart, heads-up type of player. Though my dad didn’t formally coach me in school, he was often an assistant coach on my youth-league teams and helped out the head coaches I had in AAU ball.

The fundamental skills of defense aren’t all that complicated, but implementing them and learning your responsibilities when you play man-to-man, or one of the many variations on a zone defense, are more complex. They can be reduced to about a half dozen key points. The first is posture. Most coaches don’t use that term, but it’s probably the best one to describe how you hold your body. Coaches are always talking about getting down on defense. They seem to want players to get their butts down closer to the floor than we do. You can’t play defense well by standing straight up—particularly if you’re a guard. A good rule of thumb for how low to go is to make sure that your head is at least lower than that of the man you’re guarding. You also want your weight back—not on your heels but centered over your feet. One frequent mistake I see young players making is waiting back a few feet from their man until he has the ball. They then come up on him with their weight going forward. In the time it takes to shift your weight back so that you can move laterally more easily, your opponent can slip past you, taking advantage of your moving in the wrong direction. You have to keep in mind that your back is to the basket. That’s the goal you’re defending, so keep your weight back.