Character Driven (6 page)

To that end, Mom didn’t just go to church and attend services, she was a part of the services. She also performed other functions within the church community. My brother was on the basketball team, a valuable and contributing member of the squad and not just someone who bought a ticket or rode the pine and was lucky to see a few minutes of on-court action during what some people refer to derogatorily as “garbage time.” We were active. We were doers.

And just as you conducted yourself a certain way in public while at your mother’s workplace, in church, at Sunday school, and in the neighborhood, you understood certain expectations governed your conduct and performance on and around the basketball court. I was told that as a ball boy I had certain responsibilities. My dad stressed that I shouldn’t look around and make faces or scan the stands for friends. I should watch the game so that when called on, I could go into action immediately and without being asked twice. I wasn’t to dash out there of my own volition either. I could anticipate when I would be called on, but not make those decisions myself.

I don’t want to make too much of those early experiences on the basketball court, but they were formative, and the lessons I learned as a ball boy, while watching the game on TV with my father, and while hanging out with the older kids have never left me. My dad stressed that my mopping up the floor wasn’t just for cosmetic reasons. Someone could slip on that wet spot and be injured. That injured player could have made the difference between winning and losing. My dad wasn’t trying to burden me with worry. He was trying to make clear something that I know a lot of young people struggle with: the relationship between cause and effect. My mother’s yanking me by the arm and tugging me out of the bank lobby and telling me to sit still was just one of many lessons I learned about consequences. Right action earned you a reward. Wrong action earned you a punishment.

That didn’t mean that I was immune from childhood acts of rebellion and indifference to cause and effect. With my friends I built ramps and jumps out of scrap lumber we salvaged from one another’s garages, discard piles, and garbage-day derelicts. I suffered more than my share of scraped knees and scabbed elbows when one of my attempts at turning my regular old bicycle into a BMX or stunt bike went awry and I spilled to the ground while practicing my daring jumps. I was learning lessons about risk and reward in those moments, and they were kinds of extra-credit, outside-the-curriculum activities that supplemented my education. What I learned was something like equations: Ground = hard. Boy = fragile. Pavement = rough. Skin = shreddable. Stupidity = painful.

However much I might have acted out away from my parents’ watchful eyes or away from the basketball court, I can’t recall a time when I didn’t listen to my coaches, act sensibly, and try to put into practice their instructions. I can still remember my first practice with the 76ers and being amazed at how incapable many of my teammates were of even getting into a straight line and performing a simple layup drill. Many of them had to be reprimanded or reminded that they needed to focus. I didn’t. I was intent on learning more about the game and refining my skills. Maybe that early photo of me with the fundamentally sound follow-through is an indication of the genetic link that connected me to my father and mother. More likely it was also a product of osmosis. I was picking up on the current of athleticism and performance and execution that permeated the air.

Parents frequently instruct their children, “Do as you’re told.” In most houses, the emphasis is on the
told.
In mine, it seems to me now, the emphasis was on the
do.
I wasn’t very different from most children in one regard. I wanted to please my parents. Much of the pleasure we took in our family revolved around basketball, so naturally I wanted to excel at it, earn my parents’ attention and praise. That’s not to say that they withheld those things from me; far from it. Neither did they pressure me into playing the game. I developed a passion for the game, but I was also involved in a lot of other activities and sports. Experts tell us that we don’t really choose whom we fall in love with, but that some kind of chemical attraction brings two people together. I can believe that when it comes to basketball; on some subconscious and perhaps chemical level I must have felt a magnetic attraction. The hollow ringing sound of a ball being dribbled on a hardwood floor, the squeak of basketball shoes on a highly polished court, the feel of the pebbled grain of the ball in the grasp of my fingers, and the sight of the ball arcing in the air, its backspin seeming to pull me toward a simpler time in the past, still entice and enthrall me.

I didn’t think about those things then. I’m not even sure I felt them. I had a lot to learn and was an eager and willing student, but I wasn’t ready to fully commit to the game, to declare my abiding love. A sturdy foundation was being laid, but it wasn’t as if my family and I had a blueprint for what the structure would be like. My parents were great believers in our doing things, as I said, and much of that belief was founded in the old line about idle hands being the devil’s workshop. More than that though, my parents believed in the value of sports and how they could contribute to a young person’s development as a human being, a well-rounded and respectful human being who understood sportsmanship and the benefits of hard work and the reliance on self and others. Sounds pretty basic and by the book, but that was our reality back then.

Even if I hadn’t demonstrated any real competency in the game, I’m pretty certain my parents would have still encouraged me to participate. They wouldn’t have pushed me in a direction I clearly didn’t want to go, but they would have made certain that I found something else to do with my time. I
know
this next point: my parents had no desire to live out their dreams through me. Even when I was in college, we didn’t really discuss a possible NBA career for me. I was in college to get a degree, to do well in the game, and to learn something about how the world operated and how to get along with a wide variety of people. Basketball was a means to an end, not an end in itself. That was true when I first laced up my shoes in a league game in 1980, and it’s just as true today. Fundamentals are fundamentals because they are less likely to change than anything else.

What I like about the idea of boxing out is that it doesn’t really require a tremendous amount of athletic ability to be good at it. All you have to do is understand a few things about your body—to lower your center of gravity and to use the strongest muscles of your body, your legs and your butt—to help you move someone the way you want him to go. To succeed requires mostly focus and desire, a willingness to put the effort into something for which you won’t likely earn attention. Even today, in the sophisticated world of the NBA, with our love of statistics and the endless hours of video players watch, blocking out is mostly noticed only when it doesn’t occur. Just as we sometimes take for granted the love of others and feel its absence more than its presence, the same is true of most of the fundamentals in the game and in our lives.

Paying attention to even the simplest things, the most ordinary of things, can help us reap substantial rewards—first among those is the satisfaction that comes with knowing that you’ve done the right thing. That simple lesson in cause and effect shaped my early experiences in the game and with my family. It has never left me. It helped me to take possession of the things I value most and eased my transition from one level of the game to the next.

While these fundamentals have served me well, some of my most vivid memories are of the times that I failed to put them into practice. Sometimes we learn best from our failures rather than our successes.

That lesson was hammered home at my first varsity basketball practice at Parkview. We were running a basic three-on-two fast-break drill. As we crossed the half-court line, the ball was in my hands. A defender came out on me to cut off the passing lane, so I fired a precise behind-the-back pass to the cutter. The pass was on the mark, but it went right through the guy’s hands and out of bounds. Even before the ball was past him, I could hear Coach Ripley’s shrill whistle echoing in the gym.

“Everybody stop!” he shouted. “Take a knee right where you’re at.”

I’ve since come to know that educators refer to these instances as teachable moments. All I knew back then was that I wished I could have not just taken a knee on the court, but that I could have melted through the floor and crawled right on out of there.

“Everybody but you, Fisher,” coach added.

I knew enough to make certain that I looked coach directly in the eye when he addressed me.

“Look at your jersey, son. Does it say Patriots or Globetrotters on there?”

Coach reminded everyone that there was the Parkview way of doing things, and I’d just demonstrated the way not to do things. As he said to all of us, why make a fancy pass when a good, old-fashioned, tried-and-true bounce pass would have done what was needed? He admitted that the pass was on the mark, but because I’d done it behind the back, done something unexpected, I so surprised the receiver that he missed it. Coach concluded, “It was pretty, but it wasn’t useful.”

The message came through loud and clear. That wasn’t the last behind-the-back pass I threw in my life, but it was the last one I threw at Parkview, where, like at home, I received the kind of grounded training in the fundamentals of the game and of life that have gotten me where I am today. Only when it was the best alternative did I ever resort to a “fancy” pass again, and even then only after giving all my options careful consideration. That’s the benefit of being trained in doing the right thing. You’re more careful, more deliberate, and you “know” when it’s time to think and when it’s time to react and let your training take over.

CHAPTER THREE

Developing Other Skills:

Becoming Multi-Dimensional

From the time I first played the game until now, every coach I ever had has stressed that the little things make a big difference in the success of a basketball team. That’s one of the reasons I started with the fundamentals. As I wrote, I really do believe that everything in my life has happened for a reason. Not only does that help explain why I was able to deal with my daughter’s health crisis so well, but I also believe it answers the question that has been on my mind and is on many people’s tongues: how did I make it into the NBA and have a career that has lasted so long? Certainly, a lot of players out there are taller, stronger, faster, better ball handlers, purer shooters, more tenacious rebounders, and are as astute about the game as I believe I am. Maybe they don’t outperform me in all of those categories, but at least in some of them. So how have I lasted into my thirteenth NBA season? How is it that the average length of a career in the NBA is five years and I’ve more than doubled that number?

What’s funny to me is that I believe something over which I truly had no control initially got me driving down the lane toward success. If I feel special in any way, other than that I’ve reached the top in a select occupation, it’s that I’m left-handed. Estimates vary, but only somewhere between 7 and 13 percent of the people in this world have a dominant left hand.

Why do I attribute some of my success on the basketball court to being left-handed? When I first started playing the game, few of the kids I played against were quick enough to figure out that I dribbled the ball in a different hand than they did. They were so used to seeing other right-handed players that they expected a player they were guarding to go right, shoot with the right hand, etc. I was able to blow past a lot of defenders just because I was doing something they didn’t expect. Anticipation is key in any sport, and my being left-handed gained me the upper hand immediately. In many of my first games, I was the top scorer. I can remember some games when our team had 22 or so points and I had either scored all of them or the vast majority of them. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I was only successful because I was left-handed—my passion for the game, that I was naturally strong and stout for my age, the genetic influence of my parents, also chipped in big-time to help me.

My early success on the court gave me confidence. So much of success in sports and in life generally is a matter of attitude. I had a natural passion for the game, and I had early success at it, so that motivated me to get better. I’m no different from most people. I enjoy doing things I’m good at and avoid things I’m not successful at. I can’t say that if I hadn’t had that early success or that if I were right-handed, I might not have succeeded to the degree that I did, but I sometimes wonder just how large a role that “choice” I made to be left-handed figured in what I see as someone else’s master plan. I put quotation marks around
choice
because, of course, I didn’t choose to be left-handed. That characteristic was handed to me by someone or something other than me.

I never considered myself the da Vinci or Michelangelo of basketball, and though I enjoyed that early success in youth-league games, eventually things mostly evened out. Maybe because I was more conscious of handedness and its effects, I was always aware which was the stronger side of my opponent. If I was hustling back on defense, I anticipated better which direction a player was likely to drive. One of those small things, but I believe that since the majority of players in the league are right-handed, they didn’t think as much as I did about it. When you are the majority, you simply assume that everyone else is like you. Having to think about hand dominance is just one small example of how I had to think differently and more often than kids I was playing against and with. Being more thoughtful on the court could sometimes be a disadvantage of course. In sports you want your body to take over, and in time most of my thinking would submerge into my subconscious, but from the very start, having to think out there, having to pay attention to those little things, paid immediate dividends.

When I say “developing your other, or off, hand,” I mean that in a couple of ways. First, I mean it in the basketball sense of having to learn to use your nondominant hand to dribble and to shoot. That was one of the first things I had to learn and to practice in youth leagues, but don’t think mastery of that comes easily or is a minor element of the game. Going into my senior year in college, when I had more firmly set my sights on a possible NBA career, I devoted a lot of time to refining my right-handed dribbling. I walked to and from classes and practices dribbling with my right hand exclusively. I also use “developing your other hand” to refer to learning other skills and developing interests outside of basketball. I was not just a little basketball-playing machine. I had other interests: other sports, music, video games, television. I was also a good student and eventually attended a fairly progressive arts-oriented high school. Finally, I use “developing your other hand” to refer to working on parts of your character and temperament that don’t seem to be your natural inclination. We all have strengths and weaknesses, but it often takes someone else to help us to refine our personality and to bring out elements that we may not see in ourselves.

Another distinct advantage that I had, though I didn’t always appreciate it, was my father. As an ex-military man, my dad was old-school in a big way. He believed that if you were going to do something, it didn’t matter what, you should put everything you possibly could into doing it well. The work ethic that he and my mom exhibited was instrumental in my development, and my dad also did more than just lead by example. He pushed me in certain ways that I can never forget or thank him enough for. I was a typical kid, and sometimes, if I had been allowed to, I might have chosen to just hang out. Yes, I loved playing basketball, but I wasn’t the most driven person in the world back then. I also wasn’t the toughest kid either, and standing up for myself wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I needed someone to push me to develop the personality traits necessary to succeed at the highest levels.

I use the word
push
, but just as I had a natural inclination to be left-handed, I had a natural inclination toward basketball. My father never demanded that I play. He simply recognized that I had chosen to play that sport, so he wanted to make certain that I did whatever I could to be successful. Some of the ways my father influenced me were subtle. By the time I was playing organized ball, shoe companies such as Adidas, PUMA, and others had come along and transformed the world of athletic footwear, with all kinds of trends and fads and newfangled innovations. To put things into better context, the first Nike Air basketball shoes came out in 1983, when I was nine years old. That groundbreaking achievement represented a refinement in the concept of basketball shoes—a much needed and appreciated advancement.

The first basketball shoes I wore were Converse All Stars, the basic Chuck Taylor high-tops. Canvas uppers and rubber soles. White. No stripes. No swoosh. Unadorned classics as plain as white bread, and now that I know better, about as supportive as that sandwich staple. I still laugh a bit whenever I see old photos from those days. I look as if I’d stepped out of a photo shoot with Elgin Baylor and Bill Russell—which had interrupted my practicing my set shot. At the time, I didn’t think much about it. I was just glad to have a new pair of kicks and to be out on the court. Those shoes are representative of where we were as we entered the 1980s. Baby boomers were really coming into their own in the 1980s, and the “me generation” label that had been applied to them didn’t really fit my dad. I also realize now that he was also probably concerned about some of the influences that preyed on urban African-American young people. I’m not talking just about the gang violence and the number of kids killed for their Starter jackets, but the number of young people who felt a sense of entitlement. My dad was part of the “me-ager” generation. He had grown up, by some standards, poor in Louisiana, and while we were never deprived of anything we needed, I cannot imagine him warming up to spending lots of hard-earned cash on trendy basketball shoes. The only thing that would have got warm was my behind if I had so much as got five notes of a whining song out of my mouth about what the other kids were wearing and then launched into a “Why can’t I?” refrain.

I played with and against plenty of kids who looked the part with the most expensive shoes. My dad knew that it wasn’t how good you looked out on the court but how well you played. Those shoes were one of the reminders that the old-school ways—mastering the fundamentals, playing unselfishly, not drawing attention to yourself through playground flamboyance—were the real path to achievement. There were no shortcuts, and lacing up the latest pair of Nikes or whatever was not going to have me magically transported.

As I’ve said, my dad was a great believer in doing, and he seemed to think that when we kids weren’t actively engaged in something, we should have been. That didn’t just mean sports. I came of age when computers were just starting to be in schools. Learning how to use them meant learning how to type. My mom and dad took education seriously. They knew that to get anywhere in life, we were going to have to do well in school. As much as they supported me in my various sports activities, they made sure that I developed my off hand by involving me in lots of other activities—at school as well as outside of it.

I learned early on that I was supposed to be busy and productive—not just mindlessly or foolishly engaged in some activity, but doing something that could eventually benefit me. I had plenty of time to mess around and play, but an equal amount of time at home was devoted to developing my skills off the court. My parents understood that school meant using a computer, so they got one for the house. The school had these nice Apple II computers and monitors, but they were pretty pricey, so we ended up with some generic desktop PC clone. We were just glad to have it. The novelty of having a computer wore off quickly, especially when my dad got involved. To help us with our typing skills, we had software called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

I remember that the box the disks came in featured a photograph of a nice-looking black woman—I assumed it was Mavis Beacon—and she was all smiles. Working on a computer at school was fun, and learning to type wasn’t so bad. Being left-handed, I wanted to use my left thumb to hit the space bar, and the teacher at school kept admonishing me to use my right thumb. I didn’t see why it mattered, but I worked at it as hard as I could. After school, my dad would make sure that in addition to doing all my homework, I also spent time working on my Mavis Beacon lessons. After a while, that smile on her face seemed to transform in my mind to an evil, sadistic grin as she watched me working away. I wanted to be outside with my friends, not pecking away at the keyboard. I wanted to be the quick brown fox out jumping around and not the lazy dog tied to his computer.

In time, I suspected that my father had his doubts about my ability to fully commit to things. I don’t think he thought that I was lazy, but I was fairly reserved, not prone to showing the enthusiasm I felt for things. I loved basketball, but I wasn’t going to jump around and act fired up about it all the time. I quietly went about my business without drawing much attention to myself. I figured that if I produced on the court and did the things my coaches asked of me, I should be rewarded with their praise and their attention. I didn’t need to go out of my way to get it by either acting out negatively or being too much of a rah-rah, over-the-top kind of guy. Eventually, I was going to have to learn to develop that side of my personality and become more outgoing, but that would take a lot of years.

I got good grades, was mostly well-behaved, but definitely was not one of those butt-out-of-my-seat, hand-waving-in-the-air, please-call-on-me, please-call-on-me kind of kids. Being asked to read out loud didn’t paralyze me with fear, but I wasn’t going to be one of the first to volunteer. The same with going up to the board to solve a math problem. I figured that getting it right on my own was enough. No need to go up there and show everybody else what I had done. I think that part of my reluctance to call attention to myself reflected my parents’ instilling in us kids respect for adults and others. They weren’t overly into the idea that children should be seen and not heard, but we definitely knew our place.

Churchgoing also shaped me. I was not about to act out there. Church was not a place where you went to mess around with your friends. I’d occasionally take a look around the congregation and spot a buddy of mine, but though I was tempted to make a face at him to get him to crack up, I was there to worship the Lord. At mealtimes at home or when the family gathered for Sunday dinners or holidays, we kids behaved. We weren’t little robots and we did our fair share of messing around, but it was usually outside the hearing and the sight of our parents. I developed some close and lasting relationships with several of my cousins, and being able to let loose a bit among one another helped forge those bonds.