Character Driven (29 page)

The 2000–2001 season was like the previous season in reverse. We struggled a bit in the regular season, finishing with “only” fifty-six wins, but we got on a roll in the play-offs that was truly impressive. What was most gratifying was that we swept the first three series against teams we’d struggled with in the past—Portland, Sacramento, and San Antonio. Going 11–0 in the Western Conference play-offs sent a message to everyone: we were not going to be denied. A lot of times that season we could have caved in, but we demonstrated that when we really put our minds to it, when we let go of all the distractions, the injuries, the media calling us out, we could take care of business on the basketball court.

Some of the pressure on us was self-imposed. We’d all grown up and some of us had even been in the league when the Chicago Bulls were thought of as a dynasty for winning six championships in eight years. We were also part of a proud and accomplished organization that had won multiple championships, and as we entered the new millennium, we were determined to be the next great dynasty. In the wake of our game-six victory over the Pacers, Shaq had announced our intention to be back and to win another. It was put-up-or-shut-up time, and we were as focused and determined a group as I’ve ever been a part of. So much was made of Shaq and Kobe and their divergent visions and off-season approaches. Shaq was a veteran coming off an NBA championship, a regular-season and play-off Most Valuable Player selection, and he was told to take it easy and let his body rest. Kobe, on the other hand, had ambitions beyond winning a championship. He didn’t let up for a minute after our 2000 victory, determined to become the best player in the league. At times the two of them seemed to be at odds with each other. Most of that was fueled by the media.

As I saw it, we had two supremely talented players, one whose game focused on the patient execution of the half-court offense that allowed us to get the ball inside to him. The other was a more freelance-type player with an all-court game who thrived in the open court as well as in the half-court game. As we all grew up hearing, there is only one ball and it has to be shared. How that translates into who gets credit for our success is another matter.

The situation seemed to come to head against Golden State in a regular-season game. Kobe scored 51 in the game, but he clearly thought that he could carry the team on his shoulders and was trying to do too much. When he shot an air ball on a three as time expired, Golden State won by 2. In interviews after the game, he talked about how much he had improved and how hard he had worked (which was true), and that he wasn’t going to level off his game and do what he’d done the previous year. Chemistry on a team is a delicate matter, and with the inclusion of new players (Horace Grant, Isaiah Ryder) and the loss of others (A. C. Green and Glenn Rice), it was a tough road in the regular season, especially with the added distraction of the Kobe-vs.-Shaq saga. We’d been successful the year before doing it one way, and now that this new way with Kobe wasn’t working out, everyone (including the rest of the team) focused on that issue instead of on what we could each do to improve as a team. We suffered more than a few embarrassing losses, and as Phil referred to it, the community of our team had broken down.

When I came back after sixty games out, we seemed to settle in. I was given credit for being a steadying influence, but once again, the Lord moved in mysterious ways. In March, Kobe went down with a leg injury, and for the nine games that he was out, we had to figure out a way to win without him. We did. We returned to Shaq as the dominant presence on the floor, and from his position on the bench, Kobe noticed that we were playing as a team and winning. To his great credit, when he returned, he made a conscious decision to trust the rest of us and to become more of a playmaker. We won our last eight in the regular season before that 11-0 play-off run, so in total we won nineteen games in row.

A lot of the reason for that success was our letting go of things and trusting that the ball would come back up to us. We had to let go of ego, let go of the distractions, let go of the heightened expectations, and just do what came naturally to us—winning. When we squared off against Portland in that first game of the play-offs, we faced another test. As the fourth quarter opened, we were only up by 2. Of course, everyone was thinking about the previous year’s game seven and our 15-point comeback. Thanks to Rick Fox and Brian Shaw hitting some key three-pointers, generating some turnovers, and playing with the kind of energy that characterized that series winner, we ran off 15 straight points to start that crucial quarter. We never looked back. We knew that we had the Blazers frustrated when in game two, they were whistled for five technical fouls and two players were ejected. We won every way possible, with Shaq going off, and in the Sacramento series when he was in foul trouble, Kobe took over, scoring 48 in game four of that sweep.

Next up, we got the chance to erase the memory of being swept in 1999 by San Antonio in the last games ever played at the Forum. They had the league’s best record going into the play-offs, and they all felt as if our title the previous year had been tainted since their starter Tim Duncan had been injured. They’d won the title in 1999, so this was a matchup of the two previous champions. We’d been embarrassed in 1999, and none of us forgot what that had felt like. We opened the series in San Antonio, and Kobe scored an amazing 93 points in those two road wins. He scored in every conceivable way, and a few that those of us watching could barely believe. In game one, Kobe had the ball at the top of the key. He feinted right, then drove left. As San Antonio’s interior defense closed down on him, he stopped and lofted a high-arcing jumper. How he even got the shot off was amazing, but what had us all jumping up and down and shaking our heads in amazement was that when the ball bounced high off the front rim, Kobe didn’t give up on the play. He followed his shot, rising high above the rim to jam down his own miss. As Shaq said in the postgame press conference, he told Kobe that he was now his idol. Shaq went on to say that he thought that Kobe was the best player in the league.

In game two, Tim Duncan and the Spurs and the thirty-six thousand fans in the Alamodome and Phil’s getting ejected for arguing calls all conspired to present us with our first real challenge of the play-offs. Shortly after Phil left the court, I had the ball on top. I saw an opening and drove the lane. I went up and tried to dunk the ball (I know, I can hear all my coaches asking me, “What is wrong with a simple layup?”), but banged it off the back of the rim. The loose ball was up for grabs, and Shaq fought off two Spurs to corral the rebound. He put up a ten-foot baby hook shot that was long. Shaq and Rick Fox battled for the rebound, with Rick crashing to the floor. Shaq scooped up the loose ball and slammed it home. A few possessions later, Kobe found me open in the right corner as he drove the lane. I got the pass and watched as Avery Johnson came out hard on me. With a quick ball fake, I had him in the air, and he went flying by into the Spurs’ bench. I set my feet and knocked down the three, capping a 9–2 run immediately following Phil’s departure.

We kept the pressure on when we returned to Los Angeles after having taken two on the enemy’s home floor. Wining by 39 and by 29 in the next two games sent the message we’d hoped. The Spurs, not us, were pretenders to the throne. Some people have said that the stretch of basketball we played against the Spurs in that series is unmatched by any other Lakers team ever, including all the Showtime championship teams. I don’t know about that, but we had a lot of fun and executed about as well as we ever had. All that stood in the way of our back-to-back championships was Philadelphia and the league MVP Allen Iverson and their legendary coach, Larry Brown.

We had a chance to be the first team in NBA history to run the table in the play-offs, and L.A. was at a fever pitch expecting, if not demanding, that we sweep. At the beginning of game one, it looked as if that would be the case. We went on a 16–0 run to go up 18–5. We knew that the game was far from over, but the long ten-day layoff didn’t seem to be bothering us—yet. Iverson and the Sixers took over from that point, and though we tried to climb back into the game and did eventually tie it with five minutes to go, we lost 107–101 in overtime.

In the second matchup, I had a much better game, scoring 14 points with 3 assists. We were only up 2 at the half, but surged ahead in the third quarter playing some of our best ball as we had in the first three rounds. We had to withstand a Sixers fourth-quarter run, and when I hit a three from the top of the key to finally put them away, we all felt that we were back in sync. The Sixers proved to be a tougher match for us than most people gave them credit for. With Shaq fouling out in game three, it took Kobe with an assist from Robert Horry’s clutch three-pointer from the corner with under a minute left to seal the deal for us. Going up two games to one meant that even if the Sixers won their next two at home, we’d be going back to L.A. to close out the series. We wouldn’t need to go back.

When we finally put them away in game five, I felt a sense of accomplishment that was different from the first championship. As much as Kobe and Shaq contributed, everyone recognized the contributions of the supporting cast. It was also a vindication. For as much as we’d been through that season, we hadn’t broken. As much as people talked about the Shaq-vs.-Kobe battles, we all pulled together. What people didn’t see was the behind-the-scenes togetherness, the willingness and joy of going to battle for one another that made that season and that spectacular play-off run so fulfilling. Putting all of our individual needs and desires aside for the sake of the team was really what it was all about.

That off-season, I did the usual thing and went for my physical. The foot felt fine, but the team did another CT scan knowing my history. I was so sure that nothing was wrong that I went to Las Vegas for a charity event. Mitch Kupchak called me the next day. I could hear something in his voice, then he delivered the bad news. Fracture. Same spot. Surgery. The good news was that we’d caught it right away, and a quicker turnaround time was expected. At best I would miss the season’s first few weeks. That was what I set in my mind as a goal. As I was lying in bed following that surgery on July 3, I got a phone call from Jerry West. He sounded more down than me. He told me that he was really sorry about the injury and that he was equally sorry that I wasn’t a free agent at that point in my career. I was confused by that at first, but he went on to say that I had done a lot to reshape the image of my value to a lot of teams. I had showed people what I could really do. As he put it, “Derek Fisher has arrived. Shaq did it. Kobe did it. And now you.” Those words meant so much to me. I couldn’t imagine another general manager telling one of his players that he wished that he were a free agent so that he could go out and get his full market value. And truthfully, it wasn’t really the dollar value, but that kind of respect and recognition that mattered to me. I don’t think the Lakers ever didn’t respect me, but I still desired to play an even more pivotal role in a team’s success.

Even when we won the championship the following season and I put up similar numbers in the seventy games I played after coming back from surgery, I still felt that way. I was still in that I’ll-show-you mode that I had been in for so long, but that was starting to get stale. I loved that we pulled off the three-peat, but in the wake of the celebrations, things were clearly not going to remain the same.

It would take a couple of years and the dismantling of the team with Shaq’s departure and Phil Jackson’s hiatus before I could make a move in the direction I wanted to go.

Losing in the play-offs following our three-peat was hurtful, but my last year with the Lakers prior to my reunion was especially difficult. With the arrival of Gary Payton, my role was clearly going to be reduced. I didn’t realize just how much. I went from starting every game the previous year to starting just three. My minutes were cut from thirty-five to just a little more than twenty. I can say this about that year. It was a learning experience. One thing I realized in seeing how people reacted to our loss was that everyone—Shaq, Kobe, Phil, and everyone else in the organization—had to continue to prove themselves all the time too. We live in a world and played in a profession in which what have you done for me lately is the norm. At times I got so wrapped up in trying to prove to other people what my value was that it became an end in itself and not a means to an end. The end was being satisfied with myself and understanding fully what my value was to myself, to my family, and those closest to me.

I love sports because you keep score and you can measure performance pretty easily with all kinds of statistics. But living your life by someone else’s measuring stick, no matter how objective or subjective it might be, eventually proves unfruitful. In my years in the league, I’ve finally come to understand more fully that the reward is in the effort. Do your job, do what’s expected of you, without expecting anything in return. Find the validation within yourself instead of seeking it from others. For so long before and with the Lakers I had put the game at the apex of my life along with faith and family. Something had to give, and in going somewhere else in the pursuit of what I thought I really wanted and would make a difference in my life, I ultimately realized the value of all my teammates and not just the ones out on the floor.

CHAPTER NINE

Staying Home:

Making Good Choices

One of the fundamental principles of playing good team defense is knowing when to stay home and when to leave your man to help a teammate whose man has either got around him or needs to be double-teamed. You never want to give an opposing player a clean look at the rim or a clear lane to the basket. In time, you develop a kind of sixth sense about what a player driving to the basket might do—pass off or take the shot. Understanding the opposing team’s offensive scheme and having good court vision (being able to see a play develop even before the opposition has fully executed the play) help enormously in developing this kind of extrasensory perception.

I sometimes wish that I had as refined an ability to see things developing off the court as I do on the court. Only sometimes. As I got older, I learned to like surprises, but my failure to see the big picture off the court has sometimes led to my hurting other people and being hurt myself. Writing this book has helped me in lots of ways to see patterns emerging and to better understand how that powerful hand of God has been at work in my life in ways that I could never have imagined at the time and am in awe of now.

For example, I made several decisions right when I joined the Lakers that, completely independently of one another, ultimately made all the difference in my life. I knew that adjusting to life in L.A. and in the NBA was going to require me to draw on resources that I thought I had but wasn’t certain were as refined as they needed to be. That’s why I asked my friend Clarence (we call him Chuckie and that’s how I’ll refer to him here) and my cousin Anthony to come and live with me in Los Angeles. I also mentioned that I moved into an apartment in the Marina City Club, which had two towers. I looked at units in both structures, but ultimately chose one on a high floor in the west tower. I liked the view of the city from that unit and that building.

All of that sounds pretty mundane, but, as a result of that decision, I met the person who came on board what I might once have characterized as “my” team, but who is in all things truly my partner in forming something bigger than each of us individually. I wasn’t the first among the three of us to meet Candace shortly after moving into the building. The strange thing is that Chuckie and Anthony met her at all. The Marina City Club wasn’t the most upscale address, but as far as rentals went, they were fairly pricey. As a result, and because of their location, they were mostly rented by whites. So when Candace noticed Anthony and Chuckie in the parking garage of the building, she said hello. She lived in the same tower as we did, one floor up from us in what were the penthouse apartments. Certain elevator banks served certain sections of the building, and since Candace lived in the same section as we did, she used the same elevator as us.

Most couples could probably look at all the choices they made that led to their eventually meeting, but in big cities such as L.A. and in areas such as the one we lived in, there seemed to be more to this than merely coincidence. I know about Hollywood and scripts, and this isn’t the kind of meet that you would expect to see in a romantic comedy. Chuckie and Anthony and Candace and one of her friends developed a friendship, mostly based on proximity, and they all hung out casually after a few more of those incidental bumpings into one another.

The first time I met Candace, she saw me in the parking garage and waved. Knowing that not that many African-Americans were in the building, I assumed that the woman who waved was Candace. I stopped walking as she drove by. She rolled her window down, and here’s how charming I am. I stood there a few feet away from the car and didn’t even bend down so I could see her face clearly as she sat behind the wheel. We both kind of felt that we knew each other since we had both heard about the other. Chuckie and Anthony had taken to inviting people up to our place (Chuckie had got a job at an athletic-footwear store and invited coworkers) to watch Lakers games on television. Obviously, I’d never been there for those things, but toward the end of the season, one of the parties ran late and a few people were still hanging out when I got there. My girlfriend was in town and had gone to the game, so a bunch of us were just hanging out for a while. Candace was just one among that crowd.

At the end of my rookie year, I realized that the long-distance thing just wasn’t happening for my college girlfriend and me. I was only twenty-two, I was living in L.A., and the single life was pretty appealing. I didn’t go out a whole lot, but I did know that a lot of beautiful and interesting women were in L.A. I had spent every year of my life to that point in Little Rock, and here I was in a cosmopolitan city with women from all over the country and the world to meet, and I was feeling major guilt if I even talked to any of them. I was direct and honest, and even though it hurt her to hear it, I told her that I just wasn’t ready to settle down and be all serious in a relationship. Part of that was because I wanted to pursue other opportunities and part of it was the distraction. I felt bad because I cared about her, but I had to do what my heart told me to do.

After that, I started to hang out with Chuckie and Anthony and Candace and her friends. We would go out as a group of about ten people, and I’d usually arrange for a limousine so that we could go out and have a few drinks and not worry about anyone having to drive. Also, my face was starting to get known around town, and I could get them into clubs more easily if they were with me as we got out of the car together. Here’s how much of a player I am. This went on for about a year and a half. I noticed Candace and thought she was cute and interesting and fun, but I barely spoke to her during that time. One night toward the end of my second year in the league, the usual group was out at a club in L.A. We were all sitting around a large table. Candace was sitting pretty far away from me, and one of her friends was right next to me. The music was pumping and the lights were flashing, and I knew Candace couldn’t really see me and I knew she couldn’t hear me, so I said to her friend, “What’s her story?” Her girlfriend asked, “Who? Candace? Why? You like her?”

Here’s more evidence of how naive I was when it came to women. I told her girlfriend that yes I did, but I never expected her to go to Candace and tell her what I’d said. Later on we would both laugh about this and how it was almost as if I were back in third grade handing that “Do you like me? Yes or no?” note to the little girl in my class. Candace also told me that she didn’t believe her friend, but her girlfriend was like “What do you mean you don’t see it? Haven’t you noticed how he looks at you?”

After that, I started talking with Candace a bit more, trying to gauge her interest in me, buying her drinks, trying to impress her, but she seemed to just keep treating me as she had for all those months before. Friendly and polite and all that, but definitely not sending any kind of overpowering signals. I knew that Candace had a son from a previous relationship. I didn’t know all the details, but I knew his name was Marshall.

I started to pursue her a little more aggressively, at least for me, by buying roses from the flower girls at the club and asking them to deliver them to Candace without telling her whom they were from. Slick, right? She figured it out of course, and I was glad that she knew. One night I came up with another plan. I tracked down a flower girl and bought her entire supply of flowers. I asked the woman to deliver them three at a time at intervals all night until her supply was gone. That seemed to do the trick. To that point, the two of us had never spent any time alone one-on-one, and it took about another six months before she really was ready to trust me. She had a child and wasn’t into game playing, and she wanted to be sure that I was genuinely interested in a relationship. I was, and we started to date at the end of the season in 1998.

I was into Candace and getting to know her better, but that she had a son troubled me. I had nothing against Marshall, but all those old-fashioned things I’d been taught about marriage and children and all that made me hesitate somewhat. There were also practical considerations. She had a child and responsibilities to him, and that might sometimes get in the way of our being together. I don’t like that I thought that way back then, but it’s the truth. After a while, I had to get real with myself. I wouldn’t have been alive if my mom and dad had thought the same way that I did. I also knew a number of people, people whom I was close to, who had children outside of a marriage. If I was being so judgmental toward Candace, then what did that mean about what I thought of my sister, who had a baby right after high school? What about my good friend Corliss Williamson, who had a son while in college?

What ultimately made me decide that I was way off base was when I saw how judgmental I was being and how un-Christian my ideas were. Who was I to hold those kinds of beliefs? I was glad that I came to that reversal because Candace really was a great person, and she added so much to my life. She was raised in Los Angeles, and her parents split like mine, but she retained a great relationship with both of them. She was also a lot more worldly than I was. She laughed when I told her that to that point I had only been on public transportation once in my life. I couldn’t believe that she took a city bus to school. She’d been in L.A. through the Rodney King riots, had endured earthquakes, had traveled around the country with her family and independently, and not just to play in basketball games as I had. She’d been to museums, to dance performances, and the theater; she’d gone to college and lived on her own and had to budget money and pay bills and do all the things that made me realize that in a lot of ways I had been sheltered from the everyday reality of life that most people experienced.

She is almost two years older, but was far more mature than I was. Having responsibility for a child will do that to you. She knew that life was about more than playing a game and having fun and hanging out. Truth is, I didn’t. I also thought that at the age of twenty-four or twenty-five I had it all figured out, but I really didn’t. I wanted the responsibilities that come with being a man, but I wasn’t doing the work that was necessary to really say that I was a man in all facets of my life. I wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted to run around all night and chase and bed a different woman all the time. Those kinds of temptations are out there when you’re a young, fit guy making a lot of money and playing a sport. People assume a lot of guys gave in to all that temptation, and quite a few of them looked at Wilt Chamberlain and his claim regarding all the women he’d been with and thought, “I could do that.” I couldn’t. I was a serial-monogamy kind of guy, and just because I was, I sometimes thought I was ready for the commitment of marriage and family. Other times I thought that was the last thing I wanted at that point in my life. I also knew that the last thing I wanted to do was to get really, really serious with Candace and develop a close relationship with Marshall and then not be able to follow through and be a presence in his life for the long run. I also knew that I had responsibilities beyond Candace and Marshall to my family, including my daughter Chloe. Supporting financially, partly and in full, a number of people I really cared about was something I took seriously. I was happy and proud to be able to do it, but would getting married and having a family of my own interfere with my ability to do that?

A lot of those questions were running through my mind while I was dealing with all the ups and downs of my career. My relationship with Candace, if I were to create a line graph of it, had similar if not identical high and low points to those of my career. That was because I took my work home with me. I suffered with every loss and agonized over them, and every coach’s decision and injury and feeling that I wasn’t where I wanted to be in my career weighed so heavily on me. I wasn’t the best communicator, and when I knew that Candace was bearing the brunt of some of my disillusion or disappointment, instead of letting her in and allowing her to help me figure things out, I pushed her away. I didn’t like feeling that I was hurting someone or disappointing someone, so for the next few years Candace and I were very much an on-again, off-again couple.

I’m not proud that I didn’t adequately take into account what that must have done to her and to Marshall. I beat myself up plenty, but I didn’t want to fully face what I was doing to her and how I was hurting her. Sometimes the split lasted a few months, but during the 2004 season, it seemed as if the breakup would be permanent. I was at a crossroads in a lot of ways. My contract was up with the Lakers, and I was back in the free-agency world. The team was in turmoil, and it seemed as if everything was going in different directions. Shaq went to Miami, Coach Jackson went into hiatus, and the great run that we had was clearly over. I figured it was best to clear out and pursue what I’d always wanted. Several teams expressed an interest in me, and a couple told me what I’d always wanted to hear: “You can be our guy here. We’ll put you at the point and let you run the team. You’ll be the guy to help us close out games.”