Character Driven (28 page)

Always an adept passer, Shaq showed that he could do more than just kick the ball back outside in the face of a double team. We also showed that as valuable as Kobe was to our efforts, the supporting cast could do more than just hold a lead, keep a game close; we could all step up and deliver when needed. Holding our home-court advantage was huge, and having won the second game largely without Kobe gave us the kind of confidence a championship team needs, especially going back to Indiana. I remember greeting Shaq and the rest of the guys at the end of the game and saying, “Two down. Two down. Two to go.” We were halfway to the crown.

As fired up as our fans had been, the Pacers fans were equally boisterous. Walking onto the floor at Conseco Fieldhouse, we were greeted by a deafening throng of blue and yellow. With Kobe unavailable, I knew my minutes would increase, and I played a solid game, going 3 for 5 from the floor with 10 assists. That wasn’t enough to offset Reggie Miller and Jalen Rose, who had solid games for the Pacers, and we lost 100–91. At one point we had been down by 18, and turnovers really hurt us.

Game four was pivotal and lived up to everyone’s expectations. The Pacers knew they could make it a series with a win, and we sensed that a 3-to-1 lead would be huge for us. In a lot of people’s minds, Kobe’s role was the probable key to the outcome. In a pregame interview Kobe was asked if he could think of any circumstances that might keep him from playing that night. He paused, smiled, and asked, “Are there any snipers in the room?” That’s the attitude it takes, and we all shared that feeling that we were going to have to take out the Pacers’ and their fans’ hopes.

The game was a play-off classic, filled with the kind of drama we all imagined as kids. That we were playing out that dream in front of eighteen thousand fans and millions around the world only made our 120–118 overtime victory sweeter. As in game three, the Pacers came out and were more aggressive than we were. Every loose ball went their way, and in one sequence, Mark Jackson dove to knock a ball loose, and Reggie Miller went to the floor, wrestled the ball away, and from his back made a pass for a breakaway layup. The fourth quarter was a classic, with ten lead changes.

With the game tied, the former Laker Sam Perkins launched a three from the wing. The ball hit the rim and bounced about as high as any shot I’d seen. The smallest guy on the floor, the Pacers’ Travis Best, somehow got the rebound from Shaq, Kobe, and Robert Horry. Best passed the ball out to Reggie Miller, who calmly stepped up and knocked down a three, giving the Pacers the lead. That play typified the kind of hustle and cool, dead-eye shooting of Indiana in that game. That play could easily have been a backbreaker; instead, we stayed resilient. We led by 3 in the last minute, then Sam Perkins, whose heavily lidded eyes made people think that he was sleepy, found himself open in the right corner. As he had done so many times for the Lakers, he nailed the three and the game was tied. We each had a shot to win in regulation, and I was almost certain that when Shaq got the ball down on the block and went up with a jump hook, we’d won. Instead, the ball grazed the front of the iron and rolled off. We ended regulation tied at 104.

Early in the overtime, it looked as if this wouldn’t be our night. Jalen Rose put up a jump shot from the wing. The rebound went long to the weak side. Shaq went up for it, but he got tangled with the Pacers’ center, Rik Smits, and was whistled for his sixth foul. He’d played forty-seven minutes and scored 36 points; he was gone and so was, in a lot of people’s minds, our chance of a win. We still had a long way to go, and in that overtime Kobe, at age twenty-one, showed that he didn’t have a long way to go to establish himself as one of the games superstars. Kobe and Reggie Miller traded threes late in the overtime and the game was tied. Conseco Fieldhouse was rocking when Reggie’s three went in. On the next possession, Kobe came downcourt, faked a drive, and pulled up for a twenty-two-footer that was pure. With twenty-two seconds left, we were up by 1. With fourteen seconds left on the shot clock, Brian Shaw slashed across the lane and put up a floater. The shot was just off, but Kobe came over from the weak side, grabbed the rebound out of midair, and put the ball in with a kind of over-the-shoulder reverse hook. With 5.9 seconds left, the Pacers trailing by 2, called a time-out. The crowd was waving towels and chanting, “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!” and we knew that one defensive stop, which likely meant preventing Reggie Miller from scoring, and we would be one game away from a championship. Phil told us in the huddle that he’d been in this situation before and told us what the Pacers had run—a play to free Reggie Miller for a three.

When the teams left the bench to play it out, Reggie went to the scores’ table and applied talcum to his hands. I know that I wasn’t the only one with my eyes on him. Jalen Rose inbounded the ball to Mark Jackson at the top of the key. He took a few dribbles to his right, then found Reggie a few yards above the right baseline just inside the arc. He stepped back and put up a high-arcing jump shot. I remember that the ball didn’t have a lot of spin on it, and it kind of knuckled up there and fell just short, bouncing high off the iron as time expired. Game four was ours.

We suffered a huge letdown in game five, and the Pacers smacked us 120–87, forcing a game six back in Los Angeles. Phil told us in the locker room before the game that it was important to stay focused and not get too giddy with the prospect of being one game away from realizing a dream. Easier said than done. We’d had trouble closing out series throughout the play-offs, and with Reggie Miller raining down threes on us (and even a 4-point play when he was fouled on a trey), Phil was not happy. He called us out by saying that he didn’t like that a championship team could suffer its worst defeat of the season and lose by 33 points in a game in which the title was ours for the taking. He didn’t need to say it since we all knew it ourselves. Nothing was going to be handed to us, and we had to prove to ourselves and to everyone else that we did indeed have what it took to win it all.

We’d been criticized all year and hung with the label of talented underachievers and immature guys in need of a gut check. L.A. was starved for a title. It had been a dozen years since the last one, and as a group we’d experienced our share of failure. We wanted to experience a kind of redemption together. As someone said, “Before there could be a celebration, there had to be a competition.” The Pacers gave us all we could handle, especially in the early going. We didn’t crumble. We’d been through so much that season, particularly in the play-offs when we won elimination games against Sacramento and Portland, that we knew we could pass the test.

If the Pacers were going to push us, we’d respond. I could sense a difference in us in the second quarter. Robert Horry came over from the weak side to swat away a sure Jalen Rose layup. The ball ended up in my hands, and I took off down the court. Shaq, as he always did, was running hard downcourt. I found him with a lob pass and he put it in. That’s what I loved about the game, the uncertainty of it all. What looked to be a sure basket on one end turned into 2 points for us. That was my only assist of the game, but knowing that we had guys who would battle like that at both ends of the court gave me even more confidence. Though we ended the first half down by 3 and entered the fourth quarter down by 5, I sensed that we were in a good place mentally—in spite of Mark Jackson’s throwing up a midcourt prayer and having it answered at the end of the half.

I think what separates a fan from a player is that sense that despite appearances, the game is under control. We were executing the way we wanted to, and though Kobe was having an off night shooting, he was getting good looks. We weren’t forcing anything, and Shaq was doing his thing. In the fourth quarter, when I found myself open at the top of the key for a three, I didn’t hesitate, I took it. A few minutes later, Rick Fox did the same, knocking down a huge three-pointer. Later when I watched a tape of the game, I heard the announcers talking about those unexpected contributions. I can understand classifying those efforts that way, but the truth is, I did expect those things of myself. It seemed as if my entire athletic career had been building toward moments like that—being in the game in the fourth quarter with the team down, knowing that we needed a spark. Sure, it wasn’t a buzzer beater, but it helped ignite our comeback.

As you might expect, even though we took the lead in that fourth quarter, the Pacers weren’t going to just roll over and let us celebrate. With five minutes left in the game, Jalen Rose hit a three from the corner to tie the game at 103, capping a 7–0 run. We were being tested again, and not just Kobe and Shaq would have to contribute. It would have to be all of us. Robert Horry had 8 in the period, and Kobe and Shaq held fast.

The ending was magical and abrupt. All of a sudden the game was over, the series was over, and the season was over. As overjoyed as I was and as surreal as it all was, when I did have a moment of clarity, my thoughts were about not having a practice the next day and no game to prepare for. It felt so strange after such a long odyssey. When the buzzer sounded, my joy was replaced for a few moments by a bit of empathy for the Pacers players. I’d been in their shoes before, not having lost in the finals, but having come up short nevertheless. I walked to their end of the court and shook the hand of everyone on their team I could. Then I sprinted to the far end of the court where Lakers family members were seated. My mom was there, and with aid of one of the security guards, I got off the ground high enough that I could wave to her. After that, I went into the locker room and joined A. C. Green for a brief but heartfelt prayer of thanks, a recognition that what we’d accomplished we’d not done alone. We also got to share our victory with the people of Los Angeles with a parade and a rally. I enjoyed those moments so much. I always knew that the vast majority of our fans couldn’t afford tickets to our home games, so being able to see them along the parade route and in the parking lot meant a lot to me. I thought I was happy until I saw some of these folks.

It took weeks for the reality of it all to set in, but it would only do that in fits and starts. I took a few weeks off, then resumed working out in July. I had been experiencing some pain in my foot throughout most of the 1999–2000 season, and I thought that some off-season rest would help it. I’d had X-rays taken during the season, and only bone spurs showed up. Just about everybody in the league developed them to some degree. I kept playing through the pain with the help of cortisone shots. I basically sat for the last week of the regular season so that I could be ready for the play-offs. Phil, the team doctor, and the rest of the training and medical staff all agreed that was the best approach. The pain got so bad at one point in the Portland series that I sat on the bench and said a prayer asking that God help me find the strength to go on. He did, and I was glad for that. At the end of the season, we all went through physical exams, and to my pleasure and surprise, I now felt no pain at all. X-rays and a general examination couldn’t find anything, so I was cleared to do my thing in the off-season.

I hit it especially hard that off-season, hoping that I would get a chance to play a more significant role in the team’s success the following year (I already told you what I said to Kevin Garnett that summer), and one day in September I went to the University of California at Los Angeles to play five-on-five with a group of other pros. When I made a move to the basket and planted to do a reverse layup, I felt that familiar pain in my foot. I wanted to keep going, but my body told me this was not the time. I called the team’s medical staff and they got my foot scanned. That CT scan revealed that I had a nondis-placement fracture of the navicular bone. In simple terms, I was going to need surgery, then be on crutches for fifteen weeks before I began full rehab. As a result, I was out for almost the entire 2000–2001 season.

I’d gone from the high of a championship to being on the injured reserve list for almost the entire season. I was really down, and I hated not being able to play ball. On top of that, to see us struggling a bit that year in the regular season was hard. We never got on a tear the way we had the year before; our longest winning streak was only eight games, but we never lost more than two in a row. Whether it was the hangover from the championship season, or if we thought that the lessons our teacher had taught us no longer applied and we could do it on our own, I’m not sure. Winning fifty-six games is a good year in most everybody’s book, but all the “What’s Wrong with the Lakers?” stories gives you some idea of the kind of expectations we’d created for ourselves. We hadn’t made significant roster moves, but Glen Rice and A. C. Green were gone, and the chemistry just wasn’t there the way it had been.

I decided that I couldn’t stay away from the game completely, so even when I was on crutches, I’d do some shooting drills, knowing that if I wanted to step up to the next level, I’d have to improve my outside shot. After the crutches went away and I was just wearing a protective boot and was unable to run, I still kept shooting, working to refine my release. Rehab was tough, but I was used to hard work, and I was determined to come back from the injury even stronger and more fit than I had been before going down with the fracture. All that shooting paid off when I came back. It’s a good thing too, because my first game back postsurgery, I should only have played twenty minutes at most. Unfortunately, Ron Harper and Tyronn Lue were both out with injuries. As a result, I started and played the bulk of the minutes. As I had so many times before, I took advantage of the opportunity, this time to the tune of 26 points, 6 assists, and 6 steals. Shaq made a joke that with all those 6s, I hadn’t achieved a triple double but a devil double. Phil caught me on the way off the floor and said to me in the tunnel, “Don’t act like you knew this was going to happen.” We both smiled and laughed. A winner’s reaction.

What I knew from my reading of the Bible was that when we are down, that’s when His best work is done. That’s when we’re more receptive to His message and guidance. When I was really down about the injury, that’s when my faith really helped me. Anytime I had experienced failure, a similar thing had happened to me. Just like after that AAU championship game when I didn’t play, I knew that I didn’t want to experience that kind of pain again, and I had asked God to help me so that I wouldn’t. That foot injury and that failure had made me even more humble. The injury especially reinforced the idea that I only had control of so much in my life. Later, when Tatum was diagnosed, I was able to draw on that experience. Yes, the injury and her illness were things I couldn’t control, but what I could do in the wake of them was definitely in my hands and God’s.