Character Driven (32 page)

In the huddle, I looked the guys in the eye and could see the fire that had been lacking earlier in the ball game. As much as I’m sure fans are mystified about what happens when a team loses focus or seems to lack the energy or the firepower to do battle in a game, as players we’re equally mystified. Believe me, if we knew that answer on how to turn it on and leave it on, we would do it. We’re human beings playing a game, and as much as it is our skill that carries us, it is our belief in our skill that makes the difference between winning and losing. You could easily ask, “Well, why don’t you believe in yourself all the time?” It’s not as simple as believing. It’s the combination of belief and skill and execution and a little bit of luck. Why do some shots rim out and others roll around the rim, then drop in? I’m not a physicist and I don’t know the scientific answer to that, and I don’t believe that some spiritual agency out there decides who wins or loses. I do know this: the reason we play the games and the reason we watch them and care so much about the outcome is because what goes on on the court mirrors what goes on in our lives. Why does one salesperson get the big account and another doesn’t? Why do we invest in one company that we know has the best staff, the best price-to-earnings ratio, and then it goes into free fall for a while? It’s all a combination of skill, execution, luck, and a whole lot more. Knowing the outcome is not guaranteed is what makes it fun and frustrating.

When we got within 2 at 104–102 with thirty-eight seconds left, none of us stopped believing that it was possible for us to pull the game out. We fouled the Celtics and they hit their shots and we lost by 6. We missed an opportunity to win, but we learned a lot about ourselves and what we were capable of. We put up 41 points in that fourth quarter, but we’d dug ourselves too deep of a hole. Shooting success can come and go, and we knew that we had to play better defense if we were going to get ourselves back in the series by winning all three games in Los Angeles.

The Celtics got a notable contribution in game two from their reserve forward Leon Powe, who scored 21 points in just fifteen minutes of action. He’s a talented player, but no one would have expected that kind of wild-card contribution—another factor in the success or failure of a team. To have a guy like that step up in such a big way was crucial to their victory.

In game three, we limited the production of the Celtics’ so-called Big Three. Paul Pierce had a horrible shooting night, making only 2 of 14 and Kevin Garnett only chipped in 12. With that kind of production, and a more intense defensive effort, those defense-loving fans went home happy, just as we did, with our 89–81 victory. It wasn’t an artistic success, but in Hollywood terms, we opened big. We sustained that first-weekend box-office success in the first quarter of game four. We got out to a 35–14 lead, the largest first-quarter lead in finals history. We were playing nearly flawless basketball in front of one of the most boisterous crowds I’d ever played in front of. L.A. fans are often unfairly criticized for arriving late, leaving early, wanting more to be seen at the scene than to watch the game, but no one could say that about this bunch on that night—or ever as far as I’m concerned.

What happened in game four encapsulated everything that had gone on that season and to that point in the play-offs. I can’t get into the semantics of it. Was it a collapse? Was it a monumental stumble? A great comeback? Whatever it was, it was as surreal to those of us playing the game as it was to those watching. Unfortunately, I was both playing in it and watching it. Being out there on the floor was a role I far preferred to watching it. At least I was out there for a time doing what I could to stem the rising tide of the Celtics’ charge. We were up by 20 midway through the third quarter and still clicking on all cylinders.

What happened next is difficult to say. I’ve thought a lot about it, both because of how historic and important this was, and because I want to make sure it never happens again. Additionally, those kinds of dry spells seemed to plague us, though not to the extent they did in that game. I suppose that one way to look at it is that if it weren’t for their remarkable turnaround, everyone would be asking a similar question of the Celtics. How could everything have gone so wrong for so long in that game? How could they have been outscored in historic numbers in the first quarter? Of course, I understand that how they performed down the stretch was important and remarkable, but the points in the first quarter count for the same value as they do in the fourth. Yet, I also understand that a more intense focus is placed on the last part of the game (and should be) than on the first parts. That’s how you really measure yourself, and in any realistic sense we came up way short at the end of game four.

When the Celtics went on that 21–3 run to close out the third quarter and pull within 2, I was reminded of times when I would help my mom bring the groceries in. I hated having to make too many trips, so I’d often grab as many bags as I could at one time. It was hard to hold on to them all, but I was confident I could. When one of the bags started to slip or tear, I’d tell myself it was okay. I’d been in that situation before, I was able to get into the house and into the kitchen with them safely. I just needed to keep moving. As the bags slipped and tore even more, I’d pick up the pace and try to run. That put additional stress on the bags, and a few times things had come spilling out of them. I’d had the sense to lower them so the distance they fell wasn’t too great, and that limited the damage.

That’s how it was when I was sitting there or out on the court during that Celtics run. Even as we entered the fourth quarter, our attitude was “Hey, we’re still ahead by two. We had our bad patch. No pressing. Just do your job and we’ll be okay.” No real straw broke the proverbial camel’s back, and as much as has been made of P. J. Brown’s thunderous dunk near the end of the third quarter, or Eddie House’s jumper six minutes into the fourth that gave the Celtics the lead at 84–83, we were still thinking we were very much in the ball game, and we were.

Being a professional athlete requires you to be a realist and an optimist—pessimism can’t play a part in your game—and knowing when to let each of those tendencies take over is an invaluable skill. We knew we weren’t playing well, but we also knew that we had been playing great basketball before that. Who was to say we couldn’t recapture what we’d lost? That’s not an optimistic attitude, that is a realistic one. Yes, momentum factors into a game big-time, but who was to say that the Celtics were going to be able to sustain the energy and success they’d attained. They were playing out of their minds at that point, and we had to figure that they’d come down a notch or two down the stretch. That didn’t quite happen.

I reentered the game with 2:10 left in the fourth quarter. Kevin Garnett had just hit an eight-foot jumper to put them up by 5 at 88–83. Immediately after that, Kobe had gone to the line to make two and made a driving layup. Everyone figured he’d try to take over, and getting to the basket for a foul or layup was to be expected. The teams had been trading baskets, and James Posey’s three had kept their lead at 5 points with just slightly more than a minute to play. As he’d done so many times before, Kobe drove the lane, was met by the collapsing Celtics defense, and kicked the ball out to me beyond the arc. I let it go and sensed the shot was true. We were down by just 3 and the Lakers crowd went nuts. Unfortunately, those were the last points we’d score in the game.

I don’t want to imply that we would have won had I played more minutes down the stretch, or that if I’d got more opportunities to score, we’d have won, but I did want to be out there and I did want those opportunities. I hated being on the bench watching that lead dwindle. Ray Allen had stolen one of my passes and converted a layup to bring the Celtics within 11 with three minutes to go in the third. We were outscored 10 to 1 after that, and I thought that I was being rested for the crucial fourth-quarter minutes. I wish that I could have been out there for more than those last two minutes. We’ll never know how things might have turned out.

I’m proud that we came back in game five to win despite a near repeat of our game four performance. We led 43–24 before the Celtics came back on us to lead 62–60. We were a young team, and we’d learned a valuable lesson in game four, and we didn’t let another horrible third quarter do us in. I knew I had to be more aggressive going to the basket, and it paid off with me making 8 of 11 free throw attempts that contributed to my 15 points. Our 103–98 victory was sweet, and as Coach Jackson said of us, “We’re young enough and dumb enough to do this.” By “this” he meant to be the first team to come back from a 3-1 deficit in the finals to win. It wasn’t to be, and our 131–92 defeat was painful. The Celtics’ Big Three played as advertised, and their vaunted defense took hold. We would all have liked to have put on a better effort, and whether we lost by 1 or by 39 didn’t matter in the end. The Celtics were champs and we weren’t.

As disappointed as I was at not winning the championship, I can’t say that I was devastated by the loss as I would have been earlier in my career. Professionally, it was difficult to deal with, but personally, I didn’t take losses to heart in the way that I had for so many years before. It may be hard to understand this, but as much as I enjoyed winning game five at home on Father’s Day, I also enjoyed that my kids were at the game and came down onto the court afterward to be with me. That was the real victory, and even if we’d won games six and seven, I’d still say that. I take my job seriously, and I do everything I can to be a success at it, but keeping an eye out for what I need to do at home and how I can help the Lakers win has kept me in much better balance than ever before. In the past, I might have moped around and been miserable for weeks after the series ended. In this case, I had to put my mind on another goal immediately—Tatum’s ongoing treatment. In the back of my mind, somewhere on the periphery instead of at the forefront, was the thought that the Lakers still had another mountain to climb and I wanted to be there with them, at the summit, looking down to see just how far we’d all come.

I couldn’t dwell on our loss for too long. I still had family matters to attend to. Just as I do at the end of every season when I meet with the Lakers and review the season and preview the upcoming one, here’s a bit about where the Fishers stood heading into 2008–09 season.

Since her procedure, Tatum has done remarkably well. Through the diligence of her doctors and the grace of God, the tumor has receded and she has approximately 50 percent of her vision in the affected eye. Later on as she gets older, she will have to do some therapy and training of the weaker eye so that the unaffected one won’t dominate too much. Her prognosis is excellent, and she and her brother are getting to be even more of a handful each day. I haven’t checked out their jump shots yet, but there’s still plenty of time for all that.

My mother continues to be a strong and active and positive influence in my life. I sometimes kid her that I wish that she would retire. It seems no matter where I travel in the league, people ask me to give my mom their best. Recently, on a road trip to New York, David Stern, the NBA commissioner, asked me to send my mother his greeting. My mother is active in the Mothers of Professional Basketball Players Association doing charity work. The organization introduces new players and their families to the NBA life and eases their transition. She’s made some good friends and recently flew to Denver to hang out with Chauncey Billup’s mom while I was there with the team. We talk at least once or twice a week, and lately she’s even got into sending text messages.

From what my male friends tell me, my dad and I are pretty typical of most fathers and sons. We don’t speak as often as Mom and I do, but that doesn’t seem to trouble either of us. We say far less, but when we do speak, it really matters. At my wedding, my dad spoke to me before the ceremony. I was glad that he didn’t give me the birds-and-bees talk, especially since what he said was so heartfelt and meaningful. He told me how proud he was of me, and that he was so glad that I was going to be a family man. That meant so much to me. He remarried about a year ago, and I’m happy that he seems happy and more settled than he had been for a while. Candace encourages me to ask about some of those issues from the past with my mom, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

As for me, I’m enjoying life on and off the court so much, but I’ve got a few thoughts about my next steps. Nothing definite, but I have no immediate plans to retire. As long as I keep improving, as long as my body holds out, I don’t see any reason that I should hang it up other than a desire to spend more time with my family. I sometimes feel guilty about not being there full-time for Marshall. He’s about to head into high school, and because of my busy schedule, I’m kind of a “special events” presence in his life—attending some football games, birthday parties, graduation, and so on. I check in on him every day, whether it’s seeing that his homework is done or just to talk with him or to play a video game or two. Candace, Marshall’s father, and I easily manage a respectful relationship with one another, but I still wonder if Marshall has been shortchanged by not having someone in the home full-time and as fully involved as my dad was.

When I do retire, I’ve done some planning ahead of time. I’ve done some color commentary for the Women’s National Basketball Association team in Los Angeles—the Sparks—and enjoyed that. I have some friends in the broadcasting industry, and they’ve told me that they see that as a natural fit for me. I’m not certain of what I want to do, but it will have to be fulfilling on a deep level. One reason I wanted to be the president of the Players Association is to leave the game in better shape than it was when I got here. Whatever is next for me in this life will have to fulfill that same mission—to better the lives of others. That was the important fundamental my mother and father taught me.

Epilogue

Mission Accomplished

Winning a championship is what it’s all about. I’ve won them at nearly every level, and believe me, the feeling never gets old. Having won four of them in the NBA, I’ve been asked after each of them how it feels. After winning the second and the subsequent championships, I’ve been asked where the 2008–9 one ranks. That’s a very difficult question. In the moment, just after the final buzzer has gone off and you and your teammates are awash in an overwhelming sensation of relief, joy, amazement, and vindication, it’s hard to put it all in perspective. All I can say to those who’ve never won any kind of championship, those victories are like your children, and they are each special in their own way. That said, because we are talking about games and not children, when asked, I have said that this fourth championship was the most special to me. The reason is simple: When I look back at all the things that have taken place in my life—both personally and professionally—since winning that third championship back in 2001–2, this one is especially gratifying. I guess that the longer and tougher the road, the more grateful you are when you arrive at the destination, particularly when that destination puts you at the top.

I purposely use the word
vindication
in describing those feelings above because after having lost in the finals the year before, we had a lot of doubters who were convinced that we didn’t have what it took to go all the way. That was another of the reasons that this one was so special. None of those doubters were in our locker room or in our front office, but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t aware of their presence in the media and out there in “fandom.” I don’t think anyone can go through life without having people who doubt your abilities, your commitment, your mental strength, and in my case in this year’s run to the championship, my age, my quickness, my shooting ability. Based on the results, and what I was able to contribute personally to the Lakers’ winning the championship, that V word fits.

Along with being aware of what’s being said about the Lakers and me on various media outlets, fan sites, blogs, and all the other ways that people are able to communicate these days, I was also made aware of another factor that was being discussed widely—the officiating in the games and to a lesser extent the idea put forth by conspiracy theorists that the NBA had a vested interest in seeing the finals come down to LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers taking on Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers. That was the marquee matchup the NBA wanted, and David Stern had issued orders to the league’s officials to make sure that much desired pairing took place. Or so the crazy thinking went. That’s like saying that I masterminded a conspiracy of my own. Some people could say that I knew that this book was in the works, and so, using my considerable powers of persuasion, I engineered a one-man conspiracy to make certain that all the points about the fundamentals I was making played a large role in the outcome of individual games and ultimately the championship.

I’m kidding about the conspiracy, but as I’ve said several times in this book, it seems as though there were larger forces at work in my life. The events of the 2008–9 season, but more specifically the playoff series, all seemed to fit into a larger plan for my life and also for this book. Ifs, buts, would haves, should haves, and could haves are all a part of sports and our fascination with them, and no one can ever say how things might have turned out if such and such didn’t happen. What I find ironic is that in the game that will go down in a lot of people’s minds as the most pivotal in our series against the Orlando Magic, game four, I hit a three-pointer with 4.5 seconds to go to tie the game and to get us into overtime. While I’m really proud of that contribution and what it meant for our team, something happened prior to that shot that illustrates one of the points that I’ve been trying to make throughout this book. I’m referring, obviously to those of you who watched the game, about Dwight Howard missing two free throws just prior to our last possession when we tied it up. I mean no disrespect to Dwight. He’s one of the bright young stars in the game and a terrific competitor. But—and here we go with those speculative what ifs, might haves, and could haves—if he had hit one or both of those foul shots, our task would have been immensely more difficult. I’m not a gambling man, but I would say that the odds of us tying that game with so little time left on the clock would have been considerably longer than they were with us down by three instead of by four or five. I’ll talk more about that sequence in a bit, but for now let’s just focus on the missed opportunity those unmade free throws represent.

I hope that by now you see my point. Who knows what would have happened in the series if we had lost that game four. I believe that we would have still won it all, but who knows what could have happened in terms of injuries, etc. The point I want to make is that as much as series and games and life turn on critical moments, as much as people will remember LeBron James hitting a buzzer-beating three against Orlando or my three to get us into overtime, it really is about those fundamentals. The reason we won the championship is because we executed when it mattered the most. Execution and fundamentals go hand in hand. You can’t talk about the one without the other. Ask fans of the Denver Nuggets and the failure of their team to successfully inbound the ball on a couple of occasions. They’re likely to point out the team’s inability to successfully perform one of the most basic plays in basketball as a reason for their missing out on a championship parade. Too often, fundamentals are noticed when they aren’t executed than when they are. That’s just how it is in life, and you likely won’t get a whole lot of individual attention for being fundamentally sound, but as is true in my case, you will get the ring eventually. You will feel the enormous sense of accomplishment that comes from knowing that your contributions lead to a team victory.

I can’t put myself in Tiger Woods’s shoes. I wish I could and hit a golf ball the way he does, and this is only speculation on my part. I believe that winning an individual championship like Tiger has must feel very different from what it feels like to win a team championship. One is not better, of course, just different. One of the challenges every team in every sport faces, and not just the Lakers, is how you blend different personalities, skills, and desires into a winning effort. Much was made of Kobe winning his first Shaq-less championship. To be honest, that wasn’t something that Kobe and I ever discussed, even though we were in the same situation. Much was also made of Kobe’s scowling focus and the ferocity and fatigue that marked the incredibly long journey he (longer for him because of the 2008 Olympics) and the rest of us undertook. Ultimately, motivation mattered less than our collective ability to do what it took to get the job done. As I said following game four and the two key three-pointers I hit, when I am out there on the court, I know that my teammates are counting on me to contribute in some way. One of the reasons I was so exultant after that game was that I knew that not only had we won, but I’d solidified the faith that my teammates and my coaches and the Lakers organization had in me. I never doubted myself, I never wondered whether my teammates had lost their faith in me, but I still felt an obligation toward them to do what it took to win.

Coming downcourt as the seconds ticked away, I didn’t have time to think about anything other than the game. As I crossed the half-court line, my focus was as tight as the 2,350 or so square feet of floor on either side and in front of me. As I dribbled toward the three-point arc, and just before I let the ball go, my field of vision narrowed down to that rim. I’ve shot thousands of jump shots, been in that position mentally probably thousands of more times since I was a kid shooting hoops at Chuckie’s house or at the Penick Boys Club or out on the playground. None of that mattered. It all came down to that moment, and the reason that shot was good was because I was in that moment exclusively. I put my faith in myself, my ability, and the countless hours of preparation I’d put into the game. I let go of the shot and was fully prepared to accept the consequences, good or bad, of my action. That’s all you can ever hope to be able to do in this life. Give it your best shot, take the result, and move on. Fortunately, things went my way. I’m grateful and humbled by the fact that the result was positive. I’m enormously grateful and humbled by the fact that we went on to win the championship. I’m thrilled and ecstatic. I know what it feels like to be on the other side of that experience and I’ll take winning over losing every time. That’s why we play the game.

Truth is that the high I’ve experienced since we closed out the Magic hasn’t worn off. But in another version of the if, could have, would have scenario, I can confidently say that if we hadn’t have won the championship, I’d have experienced a different kind of postfinals high. I would have been home with my family spending more time with them than I can during the season. I’d have experienced a different kind of satisfaction. I’d not have had the sense of vindication that I experienced, and that would be just fine with me. The thing about family is that there are no doubters. They believe in you, trust in you, and love you unconditionally, win or lose, swish or brick. That’s the most fundamental truth I know, and I’m glad that I get to live it everyday. Holding my wife and my kids in my arms is a better feeling than hoisting any kind of championship trophy. No, no one holds a parade in my honor for being a good husband and father, and I know that our priorities as a culture need some shifting so that maybe we can honor parents who do the right thing and bring home the championship for their families the same as we do for athletes. Let’s just say that off-the-court success and on-the-court success aren’t necessarily better or worse than the other. Let’s just say that they are different in some ways, but the skills and values you need are the same. I’m going to keep striving for more victories in both places. This is no if, could have, or should have kind of a thing. I’m driven and I see no sign of that changing. My eye is firmly fixed on the rim, and no opportunity is going to pass me by.