Character Driven (18 page)

I didn’t really even think about making the adjustment to the Spirits. Though I’d never played with them before and only faced them a couple times, we didn’t run such sophisticated offenses or defenses that we had to do a lot of chalk talk. We had a couple of practices in Arkansas before we left, but once the tourney got under way, it was play, play, play. We relied on everybody’s having an understanding of the fundamentals, and that worked well for us. Even then I was what sometimes gets called a floor general, which sounds as much like a vacuum cleaner as it does a necessary role on a basketball team. I guess I don’t like
floor general
because it implies a guy who gives orders but doesn’t get involved in the hard work. I liked being in charge, but I also liked being involved in every aspect of the game.

I don’t know if it was my floor leadership or just sheer talent, but we finished third in the nation that year. Losing in the semifinals was tough, but I’m proud that we came back in the third-place game and won. I kind of miss the “consolation final”—a nice euphemism for the third-place game—in the NCAA tournament. I figure if you make the Final Four, you ought to at least know if you finished third or fourth. If you’re going to play, then keep score. I don’t think any kid who when asked what place his team came in would say, “Consolation.” There’s no consolation in losing or not knowing if you were third or fourth. I’m also a believer that finishing second is the same as being first loser—though as I’ve got older and played more and had more experiences, I’m not quite as disconsolate of a loser as I was—just a little bit better, but not much.

Finishing third in the nation was a nice accomplishment, and I was pretty happy that my parents had been able to come down however briefly to see me play. I wasn’t a star, but I contributed substantially to our success. I also was glad to get to know Corliss and his family better. I remember the first time we met when he joined the Sixers. He lived in Russellville, thirty or forty miles outside Little Rock just off Interstate 40. A tall, lanky guy as a grade-schooler, he was like that proverbial young colt on spindly legs that hasn’t quite developed the coordination he’d exhibit when he became a true thoroughbred. When he was thirteen, one of his cousins gave him the name Big Nasty, and it stuck. The NASTY (Not A Sure Thing Yet) nickname would only apply to him for a few more years. Later, his skills and power amazed me just as his awkwardness had before. He played for the University of Arkansas and entered the draft one year before me in 1995. He played in the NBA for twelve years and was a legend in Arkansas.

Many people consider him the finest high school player the state ever produced. He was a three-time all-conference and all-state selection. He was also named Gatorade National Player of the Year in 1991 and 1992. As a senior Corliss averaged 28 points and 9 rebounds per game. His sophomore year at Arkansas, in 1994, he helped the Razorbacks to a 31-3 record. I sat and watched the NCAA tournament that year feeling all kinds of pride and a little bit of envy as he was named its Most Outstanding Player. He led the Razorbacks to their only NCAA basketball championship under Coach Nolan Richardson by defeating the Duke Blue Devils. Corliss earned every bit of the recognition he received. I only wish, and I know that he does too, that they’d been able to repeat as national champions, but they fell just short, losing in the final in 1995.

Corliss is a great guy and a good friend, and the Big Nasty name is kind of funny when you consider that when his high school team won the King Cotton National Holiday Tournament, he blocked Jason Kidd’s last-second shot to seal the win in the final. Corliss was voted the Most Valuable Player of the tournament, but when he was standing on the podium with the rest of the all-tournament team, he gave his medal to Jason in a show of sportsmanship.

It’s too bad our Sixers coach couldn’t have had the same attitude. Whether he was serious about his threat to not let us play on his team didn’t matter. We stuck with the Spirits for the entire season and for every season after that. I wasn’t bitter about it, but either because of our choice or just because we were immature and took the game so seriously, even when I was playing for our school teams with some of the other guys who were still on the Sixers, as soon as the season ended and it became AAU time, we stopped talking to one another. We were fine when we were teammates, but when we were on opposite sides, we just flat out didn’t communicate with one another and barely acknowledged one another’s presence.

It seems kind of silly to me now, but back then I wasn’t about to break what seemed to me a tradition, an unspoken rule. The enemy was the enemy, and whether on the court or off, as long as at some point they wore a different uniform, you didn’t have anything to do with them. As a professional, it’s rare to play on the same team for your entire career, so you’re frequently going up against former teammates and sometimes guys you consider close friends. I don’t know too many guys at this level who aren’t able to separate their two lives—personal and professional. We don’t have to resort to what we did as kids and not speak to one another. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same competitive spirit, it just means that we’re now better able to compartmentalize. People ask me all the time what it’s like to face former teams or former teammates, and it really is true that we’re able to just flip a switch and go. It’s such a common part of our experience when you’ve been in the league awhile that you don’t even give it much thought. That doesn’t mean that you don’t get special satisfaction from beating a team that traded you, it just means that you can better keep things in perspective.

That Corliss and I were welcomed on the Spirits (we’d eventually change our name to the Wings) was a good thing despite whatever hard feelings came before. The Wings were by far a better team than the Sixers. They had an aura about them that carried over onto the court. Success breeds success, and in our little world of AAU ball in Little Rock, being on the Wings was like being on the Lakers, Celtics, or any other team with a tradition of winning. Even though it seems like something that the media make up or that people wish were true, I think there is a lot to the notion of being on a team with a long tradition of success. I’ve heard New York Yankees talk about what it’s like to put on Yankee pinstripes or to set foot on the field where Gehrig, Ruth, and some of the other greats played. There is something special about looking up into the rafters and seeing all those championship banners hanging there. There is such a thing as a winning environment, and as players we do feel those effects. Just as my individual success helped me immeasurably and gave me something to draw on throughout the rest of my career, the same is true for team success. Maybe you weren’t there when Magic and Kareem won their championships, but you can still feel that success. It raises your level of play, and surrounding yourself with successful people is one of the crucial steps you need to take to achieve your own success. Just being around them and watching how they conduct themselves is an invaluable education. Seeing how they handle the up times and the down times is also important.

I still do that. I still feel I have a lot to learn, and I look at guys like Tiger Woods to see how they conduct themselves. Roger Federer is someone I admire for how he plays his game and conducts himself. I wish that I could just stop my life sometimes so that I could study the men and women who’ve attained success but who also seem comfortable with who they are and where they’re at. They seem to be so in control, and I look at people like Oprah Winfrey or President Obama, and they exude this sense that they are exactly where they want to be in their life. I’d imagine that just by being around them some of what they do would have to rub off on you.

During the 1999–2000 season with the Lakers, the place where we all wanted to be and where everyone else expected us to be was on court celebrating an NBA championship. That season was all about rebounding from the previous years of disappointment in the playoffs. With Phil Jackson and his staff coming to coach and manage our team, there was going to be a new way of doing things. Phil’s was the most successful coaching staff in basketball since the Lakers’ eighties teams coached by Pat Riley. They’d led Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Chicago Bulls to six NBA World Championships in the previous nine seasons.

I recall stating to the L.A. media immediately after the hiring that Dr. Buss and the Lakers had just shifted the accountability for our success to the players. The whole world knew the pedigree of the coaching staff; they were the best in the business. Now we had no excuses. The players had to set up and get the job done and return the Lakers to NBA dominance. And that we did! It wasn’t easy. We initially struggled as a group to get the principles of the infamous triangle offense down. In practice and early in the preseason, we were bumping into one another as we tried to execute. The triangle offense is a system of ball and player movement that requires all five players to think as one unit. If one person is in the wrong place or not moving the ball to the proper place, the entire system breaks down. The first ten to fifteen games of the regular season we weren’t playing at a particularly high level, and since a 6-6 start to the season before had led to our coach’s being fired, we didn’t have much time before the media would start to give us a hard time.

I didn’t know this coming in, but Phil likes to let his players think for themselves in a lot of situations out on the floor. Although we have an offensive and a defensive system that we’re trained to follow, he recognizes that things don’t always go according to plan, and you have to be able to read, adjust, and adapt to situations. That being said, Phil is the coach! I found that out the hard way in one of our early regular-season games in 1999–2000. We’d gotten off to a slow start against Portland and they’d jumped out to an early lead. Most coaches call time-outs if they don’t like the way their team is playing, and that’s what most players are accustomed to in the NBA, high school, and college. Our time-out wasn’t coming from the sideline as we fell behind 12–2, so I decided I’d “think for myself” and call a time-out. As we walked toward the bench, Phil was trying to figure out who’d called the time-out because he knew he hadn’t. Everyone else looked around, and I was the only person who knew the truth, so I said, “I called it.” Before I could completely finish my sentence, Phil stepped right up beside me and said with calm irritation in his voice, “Fish, don’t ever do that again.” Including that season, I’ve played almost six full NBA seasons, including play-offs, for Phil, and guess what, I’ve never done that again.

As much as Lakers fans remember the thrill of that championship series, we almost didn’t get to that point. Sacramento took us to five games in the first round. We won the deciding fifth game, and the sense of accomplishment and relief was palpable in our locker room. In a true win-or-go-home game, we thrashed the Kings 113–86. We’d struggled in situations like that in the past, and I think that every team needs to face a stern test before they can win it all. Unfortunately, or maybe I should fortunately (for NBA fans), we would have to face that test one more time.

Our Western Conference Finals against the Portland Trail Blazers is about the most dramatic experience I’ve had in a team rebounding from defeat and near-defeat. The previous two seasons, 1997–98 and 1998–99, we’d bounced Portland out of the play-offs in the first round. That season, they’d retooled a bit, just as we had, with some key players coming over—Scottie Pippen for them and Ron Harper for us. The way Shaquille O’Neal dominated in game one of the series, which we won 109–94, few would have believed that we’d end up in game seven fifteen days later. Shaq was a monster, scoring 41 points on 14-of-25 shooting and making 13 of 27 field goal attempts. That last number is important. It showed what Portland was going to do. Along with double- and sometimes triple-teaming Shaq, they were going to send him to the foul line with the “Hack-a-Shaq” strategy. One play that made all the highlight shows was Glen Rice passing the ball from the wing in to Kobe under the basket. With three Blazers surrounding him, he handed the ball off to Shaq, who nearly tore the backboard down with a dunk. If we could get the ball inside that easily, it looked as if the team some had said was the most talented in the league was going to be in big trouble. But we knew better than to write the Blazers off after only one game.

Whether it was the physical toll that first game took on Shaq or something else, the double and triple teams seemed much more effective in game two. We lost home-court advantage in a 106–77 defeat, and though my minutes increased in the blowout, I was anything but happy. By game three it became clear what the Blazers were trying to do. If they could take Shaq out of the game by double- and triple-teaming him, they were daring someone else to step up and beat them. In game two, none of us had. Shaq’s 23 points still led the team, and Kobe Bryant’s 12 was the next highest total. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that we received a wake-up call in that game since we weren’t taking the Blazers lightly at all, but neither game had been close.

We went up to Portland for game three. The three days in between games gave both teams some time to rest and to strategize, and it paid off in a classic battle. The game didn’t start out looking like a classic with Portland, energized by the home crowd, jumping out to a 15–2 lead. We were down only by 10 at halftime, thanks mostly to Kobe Bryant’s shooting.

With Rasheed Wallace still hounding Shaq, and Pippen and others coming in to help on defending the big guy, Kobe stepped up and rebounded off his poor performance in game two to contribute 25 points and 7 assists. Kobe had only taken nine shots in each of the first two games, but he took charge in the first half of game three, scoring 18. At halftime, the coaches told Shaq to be more aggressive—he’d been passing out of the double team a lot—and he responded, scoring 13 in the third quarter. We couldn’t shake the Trail Blazers, and as the game wound down to the final few seconds, the score was tied at 91. Shaq and Kobe had essentially carried the scoring load for us throughout that game and the series, and everyone in the arena
knew
that one of them was going to take the last shot. That’s when veteran leadership took over.