Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (22 page)

That’s as close as they got. With thirteen seconds left, Kobe hit two free throws to seal the win, 116–111. As he walked off the court, he pointed to his ring finger then waved his index finger in the air, as if to say this was just the first of many championships.

—

After the game, Dr. Buss teased me about my lack of patience. “Why did you have to win in the first year and make it seem so easy?” he joked. “It’s making the rest of us look stupid for not doing it before.”

To be honest, I never expected to win our first ring so quickly. I thought it would take the players at least two years to learn the system and gel into a cohesive unit. But this team was on the fast track to glory. It was gratifying to see that the basic principles we’d developed with the Bulls could be so effective in transforming a very different kind of team into champions. Obviously, Shaq’s dominance was a key factor in our victory, and so was Kobe’s relentless creativity. But what pleased me even more was the synergy the two of them exhibited in the last part of the season, after they realized that they needed each other to achieve the only goal that mattered.

I too had a personal breakthrough that season. I learned to overcome my fear of the unknown and create a new life in a new city without losing what I loved most. This was a time for me to establish new, deeper relationships with my children—not just Brooke, who lived in the house, but also my other children, who visited regularly. It was also a time for me to continue to open up spiritually. During difficult moments, meditation had helped me cope with all the uncertainty and self-doubt that arise when you break from the past and throw yourself into a new life. I felt more alive than I had in years.

What gave me the most pleasure, though, was watching this group of talented but undisciplined players shape themselves into a force to be reckoned with. They still had a lot to learn, but I was impressed by how quickly they had shifted from a me-oriented stage 3 team to a we-focused stage 4. Slowly, ever so slowly, they developed the confidence to bounce back from adversity and tap into a source of inner strength many of them had never experienced before. They faced their demons head-on and didn’t blink.

THE JOY OF DOING NOTHING

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

ZEN PROVERB

S
ometimes when I’m filling out forms, I list my profession as “magician.” I’m not trying to be mischievous. It’s just that when I think of the ego-balancing act NBA coaches have to perform, making magic may be the best way to describe what we do.

That was certainly true in the fall of 2000, when we regrouped in L.A. to start the new season. The year
after
winning a championship is always the hardest. That’s when everybody’s ego rears its head and the uncanny chemistry the team felt just a few months earlier suddenly dissolves into thin air.

Rick Fox compares winning an NBA championship to getting your first Oscar. “It defines who you are,” he says. “For the rest of your life you mean something.” But it also changes your expectations. “You win a championship and you all go away and get patted on the back for several months,” he adds. “Then you return for the new season, and you’re saying, ‘This is what I want to happen for me.’”

Most players try to conceal their personal agendas. But they’re not hard to detect, especially when everybody starts playing together. One of the beauties of the triangle offense is that it exposes each player’s mind-set without his ever having to say a word.

The first thing I noticed was a loss of drive. The players had put their hearts and souls into winning the championship, and now many of them were on cruise control. But I decided not to ride them too hard in the early part of the season. Now that they were champions, I told them, it was time for them to start figuring out how to solve problems on their own.

Still, something was missing. We’d lost some of our savviest players in the off-season: Glen Rice left for New York as a free agent, A.C. Green got picked up by Miami, and John Salley retired. To fill the holes we’d acquired some solid players, including two former Bulls—forward Horace Grant and center Greg Foster—and J.R. Rider, a shooting guard who was capable of hitting 20-plus points a game, if he could stay focused. I also talked Ron Harper into postponing retirement for another year and made Rick Fox a cocaptain as well as the starting small forward. But as we trudged through the first two months of the season, losing more games than I thought we should, I could sense that this one was going to be an emotional roller-coaster ride. The team had lost its esprit de corps.

—

One player whose agenda wasn’t hard to figure out was Kobe Bryant. He had worked hard over the summer—claiming to have taken 2,000 shots a day—and he’d made another quantum leap in performance. The fans loved his spectacular new moves, and his popularity soared, as he threatened to overtake Shaquille O’Neal in the all-important sale-of-eponymous-jerseys statistic. Kobe was off to an exhilarating start, leading the league in scoring and shooting close to 50 percent from the field. In early December he outscored rival Vince Carter 40–31 in a win over the Raptors in Toronto, and a local broadcaster proclaimed, “The Lakers were known last year as Shaq’s team. Not anymore.”

But Kobe was building his résumé at the expense of the rest of the team. Early in the season I’d asked him to keep playing the way he had the year before, running the offense through Shaq and sticking with the system until the final minutes of the game. Kobe responded by nearly doubling the number of shots he took each game and adopting an erratic style of passing—or more often,
not
passing—that infuriated his teammates, especially Shaq. Kobe’s selfishness and unpredictability gave the other players a sinking feeling that he didn’t trust them anymore, which further eroded team harmony.

The previous year Kobe had embraced the triangle offense. He couldn’t wait to test drive the system that had turned Michael and the Bulls into champions. But at the start of this season he told me he thought the offense was boring and too simple, and it prevented him from displaying his gifts. I understood, but I told him we needed to win the most games with the fewest mishaps, including injuries and end-of-the-season fatigue. I don’t think he bought it.

For me part of the challenge was that the Lakers were a very different team from the Bulls. We hadn’t had a dominant center like Shaq in Chicago, so we’d adjusted the system to make the offense accommodate Jordan. With the Bulls we’d also had a great floor leader, Scottie Pippen, the man I’ve always said helped Michael to become Michael. By default the role of orchestrator on the Lakers fell to Kobe, but he wasn’t interested in becoming Shaq’s Pippen. He wanted to create shots for himself.

Rick Fox describes Kobe during this period as “willful and determined, like a bull in a china shop.” In his first years with the Lakers, Rick often competed with Kobe for playing time. “Kobe’s an alpha male,” he says. “He looks at the world with the eye of someone who says, ‘I know more than you,’ and if you were in his way, he was going to push and push until you pushed back. And if you didn’t push back, he was going to eat you.”

Rick compares Kobe’s competitive drive to that of M.J., whom Fox worked with at Jordan’s basketball camps when he was a college student. Rick says: “There are no other individuals I’ve known who act like they do. To them, winning at all costs is all that matters. And they demand that everyone around them act the same way, regardless of whether they can or not. They say, ‘Find somewhere inside yourself to get better, because that’s what I’m doing every day of the week, every minute of the day.’ They have no tolerance for anything less. None.”

But Fox noticed a difference between Michael and Kobe. “Michael had to win at
everything
,” he recalls. “I mean he couldn’t drive from Chapel Hill to Wilmington without making it a race. Whether you wanted to compete or not, he was competing with you. But I think Kobe competes with
himself
more than anything else. He sets barriers and challenges for himself, and he just happens to need other people to come along with him. He’s playing an individual sport in a team uniform—and dominating it. Once he steps off the court, though, he’s not interested in competing with you in the way you dress or how you drive. He’s obsessed with chasing the goals he set for himself at age 15 or 16.”

Which is exactly what was making Kobe so difficult to coach. In his mind he had it all figured out. His goal was to become the greatest basketball player of all time. And he was certain he knew what he had to do to get there. Why should he listen to anybody else? If he followed my advice and cut back his scoring, he’d fall short of his ultimate goal.

How was I going to get through to this kid?

—

The player who was the most irritated by Kobe’s self-serving style was Shaq.

After the playoffs, I’d told Shaq to have a good time over the summer and come back relaxed and ready to go. He got the first part of the message, but unfortunately he had trouble with the “ready to go” part. He arrived in training camp overweight and out of condition, and it took him almost half the season to get back in fighting shape. He looked exhausted, as if he were still trying to recover from the previous season, when he led the league in scoring and won all three MVP awards.

But early in 2000–2001 his shooting percentage declined, and his free-throw touch—which had never been great—disappeared. In early December Shaq broke Wilt Chamberlain’s futility-at-the-line record by going 0 for 11 against Seattle. It got so bad that fans started sending me amulets and crystals to bring him luck. Even his three-year-old daughter started giving him tips. Tex Winter tried to work with Shaq but gave up after two days, saying that he was “uncoachable on free throws.” So we brought in Ed Palubinskas, an Australian free-throw champion Shaq’s agent had discovered, and his work paid off handily. By the end of the season, Shaq had improved his percentage on the line from 37.2 percent to 65.1 percent.

In late December, after a game against the Suns in which Kobe scored 38 points and Shaq struggled to get 18, O’Neal told general manager Mitch Kupchak and me that he wanted to be traded. Kupchak, who had replaced Jerry West after West had resigned unexpectedly over the summer, didn’t take the request seriously. Mitch believed that Shaq was simply expressing his frustration with Kobe’s attempts to hijack the offense.

This was the start of what evolved into a full-fledged feud between Shaq and Kobe over the question of who would lead the team. Clearly the alliance they’d formed the year before was falling apart.

I had encouraged the two of them to get to know each other better, in the hope that this would strengthen their bond. But Kobe balked at the idea of getting too close to Shaq and was appalled by the big guy’s attempts to turn him into his “little brother.” As Kobe explained, they came from different cultures and had little in common. Shaq was an army brat from the South by way of Newark, New Jersey, and Kobe was the worldly son of a former NBA player from Philadelphia by way of Italy.

They also had strikingly different personalities. Shaq was a generous, fun-loving guy who was more interested in getting you to laugh at his jokes than in winning the scoring title. He couldn’t understand why Kobe always wanted to make everything so hard. “That’s what drove Kobe crazy about Shaq,” says Fox. “In the most serious moments, Shaq had to have fun. If he wasn’t having fun, he didn’t want to be there.”

Kobe, on the other hand, was cool and introverted and could be bitingly sarcastic. Even though he was six years younger than Shaq, he seemed older and more mature. As former Lakers coach Del Harris said, “You ask what Kobe was like as a kid. That’s just it, he was never a kid.” But I think it was easy to mistake Kobe’s worldliness and intense focus for maturity. As far as I could see, he still had a lot of growing up to do—and because of his nature, he’d have to do it the hard way.

—

Shortly after Shaq made his halfhearted trade appeal, a cover story on Kobe by Ric Bucher appeared in
ESPN the Magazine
in which Kobe hinted at being interested in moving to another team. The article referred to a conversation I’d had with him early in the season, asking him to turn down his game. Kobe’s answer to me, in the story, was “Turn my game down? I need to turn it up. I’ve improved. How are you going to bottle me up? I’d be better off playing somewhere else.” He also took a shot at Shaq. “If Shaq were a 70 percent free throw shooter,” Kobe said, “it would make things so much easier. We have to know our strengths and weaknesses. I trust the team. I just trust myself more. Yeah, we won last year with the offense going through Shaq. But instead of winning the series in five and seven games, this year we’ll have sweeps.”

Recognizing how inflammatory these remarks might be to his teammates, Kobe tried to soften the blow by giving them a heads-up before the article appeared. But that didn’t keep Shaq from going ballistic. “I don’t know why anybody would want to change except for selfish reasons,” he told reporters after our next practice. “Last year we were 67-15 playing with enthusiasm. The city was jumping up and down. We had a parade and everything. Now we’re 23-11, so you figure it out.” Then he dropped the bomb. “Clearly if the offense doesn’t run through me,” he said, “the house doesn’t get guarded. Period.”

It was tempting to inject my own ego into this dispute. In fact, that’s what most of the media pundits thought I should do. But I was wary of turning what I considered a ridiculous sandbox fight into something more serious. I’d seen that happen too many times in Chicago when Jerry Krause would bluster his way into a volatile situation and end up making things worse. I generally prefer taking a page from the playbook of the other Chicago Jerry—Jerry Reinsdorf. He once said that the best way to handle most flare-ups is to sleep on them. The point is to avoid acting out of anger and creating an even stickier mess. And if you’re lucky, the problem may resolve itself.

I’m not averse to taking direct action if that’s what is called for, but like Reinsdorf, I’ve discovered that you can solve many difficulties with what Lao-tzu called non-action. This approach is often misinterpreted as passivity, but actually it’s just the reverse. Non-action involves being attuned to what’s happening with the group and acting—or non-acting—accordingly. In the foreword to his adaptation of Lao-tzu’s
Tao Te Ching
, Stephen Mitchell compares non-action to athletic performance. “A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will,” he writes. “This is the paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.” Or as Lao-tzu proclaims in Mitchell’s work:

Less and less do you need to force things,

until finally you arrive at non-action.

When nothing is done,

nothing is left undone.

With Shaq and Kobe I decided not to force the issue. Rather than try to strong-arm them into making nice, I let their conflict play itself out over the next few weeks. I didn’t think it was worth escalating the fight and distracting the team from what I saw as the real problem: getting the players to regain the focus and self-discipline they’d had during our first championship run.

The day after the
ESPN the Magazine
article appeared I asked the media to back off the story. “This is our business,” I said. “It isn’t your business.” Of course, I knew even as I said it that this was a futile request. We were in L.A., after all, the storytelling capital of the world. How could reporters resist a story about two young superstars clashing over who was going to be top dog?

At the same time, I didn’t try to suppress the story or pretend it didn’t exist. As Brian Shaw says, I let it “manifest” itself. “Phil allowed Shaq to be who he was and he allowed Kobe to be who he was,” says Brian, “but at the same time, he let it be known that he was driving the bus. So when it got off course, he was going to be the one to steer it back in place. But as long as we stayed on the road, we could go ahead and take it wherever we wanted to.”