Character Driven (24 page)

Because of my attitude and perceptions I have even more respect for NBA officials than I otherwise might. I’ve always been respectful of authority figures in our game and outside it. That’s just how I was raised, but today in the NBA I see a little too much rigid adherence to rules going on. By that, I don’t mean that officials shouldn’t call a foul a foul, but they should also be allowed to find the balance and flexibility they need to perform at their best. I believe that our officials are among the best in sports. They are under such scrutiny by the director of officiating, and with the kinds of critiques and monitoring they are subject to in calling the game, I don’t envy their position at all. It’s as if they are to be computer-controlled robots assigned certain positions on the court, and that limits their ability to really “see” and call the game as they feel it. As players we’re encouraged to let the game come to us, but if the officials are controlling the flow of the game because of some edict handed down from the league office, then we could be waiting a long time for the game to arrive.

Consequently, the game doesn’t unfold as naturally as it possibly could. What troubles me from a player’s perspective is that we each have individual strengths and weakness, and because of the way the game is called today, we end up being forced to play the game as if we all had the same skill set. Big physical players such as Shaq and others need to be subjected to a different set of parameters than smaller, quicker players. That makes sense to me, but it doesn’t fit with the kind of strict-interpretation guidelines that seem to dominate the game. As with the Sloan method, the NBA’s policies do make clear what the expectations are, and I suppose it is up to us to adjust to them, but that feels a little like putting the horse before the cart.

A zero-tolerance, black-and-white assessment is a good thing in the NBA when it comes to illegal conduct by anyone associated with the game. The NBA, and the sports world in general, were rocked by the revelations that NBA game official, Tim Donaghy, had bet on games. When he plead guilty in August 2007 to charges of wirefraud and transmitting betting information, that didn’t put the issue to rest. Just as baseball’s steroids scandal called into question the integrity of the game, Donaghy’s actions made people question the legitimacy of the outcome of some of the NBA’s games.

I’m not about to pass judgment on someone like Donaghy. I can’t put myself into his shoes, but his claims that he was under pressure to comply with the wishes of gamblers because of alleged threats against his family members certainly complicate my feelings about his violating league rules and federal law. I’ve spent more time thinking about the enormous impact one person’s misdeeds can have on so many other people. Donaghy’s decision must have been motivated by self-interest at first, and I can empathize with him as one bad decision spiraled into others and others, but he could still have come forward and notified the authorities and got himself out of the jam and limited the damage to himself and to the league.

Clearly, he crossed a line with his misconduct, and I was deeply troubled by the revelations of his violations and the subsequent aftermath. There is a real difference between knowingly entering into that kind of illegal activity and doing so out of ignorance. In no way do I equate what Donovan McNabb did with Donaghy’s misdeeds, but they do illustrate my point about knowledge and ignorance and understanding the rules. I almost fell into a similar trap to Donovan McNabb’s when I was at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. One day at the start of my freshmen year, Coach Platt called me into his office and said, “Derek, I need to speak with you about some possible NCAA violations.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. I hadn’t even played a game yet, and I was being accused of some kind of infraction?

Coach Platt said someone reported that while I was a senior in high school and playing AAU ball, I had been using a gasoline charge card for personal use. I was shocked and angry. I’d heard of the kinds of recruiting violations that went on at major universities with some athletes receiving cars or their families getting low-interest loans and a whole host of other big-money perks. I explained to coach that I was using a gas credit card that belonged to my AAU team’s owner. He had asked me to pick up various players who couldn’t yet drive or who were coming in on buses from other parts of the state for practices. Sometimes I used his car or my family’s car, and he wanted to make sure that I didn’t incur any out-of-pocket expenses. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a possible violation of NCCA regulations involving illegal inducements. Fortunately, after I explained the situation and Coach Platt worked things out with the NCAA, neither the team nor I were subject to any sanctions. Lesson learned about not knowing all the rules.

Life outside basketball is as filled with as many rules and possible stumbling blocks that can put you out of bounds as is the game. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is one of the most successful men I’ve ever met. I like Mark, and his passionate devotion to his team is admirable. He sometimes runs afoul of NBA management (the commissioner) and other owners because he sometimes allows his emotions to get the better of him, and in the past he’s made comments critical of the league’s officiating and other policies. Mark is his own man, and I would never tell him what to do or how to conduct himself. I offer him up as an example to help illustrate that toeing the line and keeping your emotions in check can pay big dividends. (I’ve not been as successful in business as Mark Cuban has, and he’s someone I would like to emulate in that regard.)

Among the reasons that I am so respectful of rules and those who enforce them in the NBA is that I truly believe in karma. I’m certain that you get in return what you put out into the universe. That’s not a truly 100 percent idealistic statement as it pertains to basketball. I believe that if I conduct myself respectfully and treat others, in particular referees, with the respect they deserve, I might benefit from that down the line. If there’s a borderline call, it may go my way if I don’t have a reputation for giving out hard fouls needlessly. If I don’t have a history of getting T’ed up by the referees, then I may be able to get in a few words with a referee to possibly influence how the game is called. Earning my team a strategic advantage is a good thing. That my teammates, coaches, fans, the opposition, and the league office know that I’m not a troublemaker puts currency in my bank account that I can earn interest on and withdraw later.

I’m honest enough with myself to know that I’ve stayed in the league because of my talent +. What is that +? Being a guy who knows the game and also respects the game and his teammates and the league. Being a guy who is a good teammate and a reliable, steady presence. There is a big difference between a butt kisser and someone who conducts himself professionally as much as possible all the time. We’re known as
players,
but I think of myself as a
professional
. Just as a doctor, lawyer, teacher, investment banker, etc., has to conduct himself or herself in a specified manner, I believe it’s my responsibility to behave in way that enhances my standing in the eyes of management, fans, and my colleagues on the court.

My mother used to tell me that it was a good idea to treat people kindly, even strangers, because you never knew. Not that you never knew who was watching and judging you, but that you never knew under what circumstances you might meet that person again. In the business world you have to be careful what you say and whom you say it to because as big as this world is, it is also small. That lesson was driven home when I watched the reaction to Mark Cuban’s possible purchase of the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs are one of the storied franchises in sports, and Wrigley Field is considered a kind of national treasure, the way Fenway Park in Boston is. Some people speculated that because of his run-ins with NBA management, baseball’s franchise owners, who have to approve any sale of a franchise, might reject him. They might not want someone in their exclusive circle who might be a troublemaker. I haven’t talked with Mark about this and don’t know if he is even concerned at all about this perception that is out there.

My point is essentially this. Doing the right thing and understanding and conforming to the rules of the game are important morally and also pragmatically. Too often we think that we don’t get rewarded for playing fair and by the rules. We think that we only get punished (sometimes) when we break those rules. What I’ve learned is that when you look long term and see the bigger picture, knowing and playing by the rules has potential benefits that far outweigh any negative consequences. Doing right is its own reward, and if you continue to do right, those rewards may be multiplied. That’s what is written in Derek’s rule book, and it’s one that I don’t need to study because I carry it in my heart and mind all the time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dribbling:

The Ultimate in Ups and Downs

When I quoted the original thirteen rules of basketball, you may have noticed one thing was completely missing—dribbling. In the game’s infancy, players just passed the ball to one another. As soon as a running player caught the ball, he was expected to stop. The only way to advance the ball was to pass it off. What I’ve always thought is cool is that players figured out that a player could pass the ball to himself to advance toward the hoop. The inventor of the game didn’t come up with it; the innovation was born of necessity and ingenuity by the guys who actually played the game. Some people in the early twenties wanted to eliminate passing to yourself, but the National Association of Basketball Coaches was formed to oppose that ban on dribbling. I can’t imagine the game without dribbling. It’s amazing to me that the early act of just bouncing the ball a few inches ahead of yourself, then picking it up and repeating, has evolved into the kinds of ballhandling displays you see every day in the NBA and in the NCAA and elsewhere.

I remember watching as a kid the Harlem Globetrotters on their Saturday-morning cartoon show,
The Super Globetrotters
. They were crime-fighting superheroes who always settled their dispute with the evil villains with a basketball game. I also saw the Globetrotters live and on television and, like nearly everybody else, loved the dazzling displays of dribbling that Curly Neal would put on. Meadowlark Lemon was the big-time clown of the show, but the antics of the shave-headed Curly caught my attention. Because of the kind of training that I had, and the emphasis on the basics and the fundamentals, I never really tried to imitate Curly. Sometimes just messing around with the guys I do a few between-the-legs and behind-the-back things, but more important to me is just being a consistent ball handler who doesn’t turn the ball over and doesn’t get stripped. I have some decent moves and I don’t pound the ball mechanically the way you see some of the big men doing, but dribbling as a show or an art form isn’t a part of my game.

When I do clinics or speak to a group of young guys and girls, I frequently start off with a ball in my hand. I’ll drop it and let it bounce back up. I use that as a demonstration of the ball’s natural resilience and ability to bounce back up. I tell them that that’s how they need to be. A lot of times, we get in the way of our natural ability to move past the inevitable bad things in life. I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t struggled or gone through tough times. Those ups and downs continue to repeat themselves in my life, and I’ve seen people in my profession and in my personal life who have let those down times defeat them. I think that a lot of that has to do with them and their inability to get out of their own way and allow the natural process or their natural ability to recover from those down times.

I see young kids learning to dribble and I see parallels between their struggles to maintain control of the ball and the kinds of things we do as adults that prevent us from coming back from a down period. When you’re young and learning to dribble, you tend to keep your hand going down as the ball descends. It’s almost as if you don’t trust that the ball is going to come back up to you. It will. You just have to be willing to let go a little bit and let the ball do its thing. In my life, it took me time to learn that simple principle applies off the court too. I’ve always had a strong faith in God, but like a lot of people I’ve had trouble with the idea of letting go and trusting that the plan He has for me will take me in the most positive direction I could possibly go. I think that when Tatum was diagnosed, some of the illusion that I was in control faded. Candace and I had used in vitro fertilization in an attempt to better control the fate of our child. I’m not suggesting that God gave Tatum eye cancer to teach us a lesson about not messing with His plan. I don’t mean that at all. What I do believe is that in life you receive a series of messages in various forms. Those messages are telling you what you need to work on to achieve the kind of peace of mind and happiness that we all want. I think I needed to learn to control what I could reasonably control and to surrender the rest.

For my whole professional career I’d been trying to position myself to play more minutes, be the coach’s guy in crunch time, fully be the leader of the team out on the court, and all that. I was making my way toward that in fits and starts, getting close to it, then having something come up that set me back. Dealing with Tatum’s illness made me stop, take stock of things, and put things in perspective. I thought that I had before, but this was God, the universe, and everything else telling me that I was deceiving myself. I wasn’t living a lie. I was concerned about being a good husband and father and good citizen of the world. But a lot of those lessons I had learned about working hard had distorted things a bit. I always seemed to feel that if I just exerted more effort, eliminated more distractions, focused more intently on the game, and did all the right things nutritionally, spiritually, and physically, I’d get what I wanted. Funny thing was, as the old Rolling Stones song “Satisfaction” said, sometimes when you try real hard, you get what you need. And what I needed to realize, and what Tatum’s cancer helped me realize, was that God had an idea of what He wanted for me and of me. I learned that I could be of service to others in a way that I had never understood before. And it had just a little bit to do with basketball.

Because of my prominent position (prominent in the sense that I had easy access to the media), when I spoke to TNT sideline reporter Pam Oliver after that play-off game back in 2007, the words I spoke about Tatum’s disease spread worldwide. There was no script, I hadn’t thought out days or weeks in advance what I wanted to say, I simply let go and spoke from the heart. My emotions got the best of me, but I’d say that my revealing my emotions revealed the best in me. Since then, Dr. Abramson has publicly said that my speaking out about retinoblastoma has done more for the field and more for patients and their families than he has, and that the impact has been “enormous and profound.” I think that Dr. Abramson underestimates what he’s contributed over the years and overestimates what I did. I was just the messenger, and the words that came to me were placed in my heart by someone else.

What neither Dr. Abramson nor I can deny is that people from around the world—Germany, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, England, Italy, India, and Israel—have all come to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan to see Dr. Abramson and his colleagues. In an interview in the
New York Times,
Dr. Abramson said that when he asked these people why the had come, they said that it was because of Tatum and the story they’d heard about her. Candace has also told me that when she’s in the waiting room at Sloan-Kettering or at L.A. Children’s Hospital, she invariably gets recognized. At nearly every one of those follow-up visits, other parents have told her that they’ve seen me and heard about Tatum. I’m deeply gratified by that, and thankful that many more families have been able to take advantage of the wonderful work that Dr. Abramson and his people do. Even though at the time we never asked, “Why us?” or “Why Tatum?” I now understand why. When I read the newspaper stories about Dr. Abramson and his work and hear similar stories of the good word being spread, I know God decided that these things should be so.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve dribbled a basketball in my life. Over time I came to do it as unconsciously as breathing. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that I can do it in my sleep, and I can do it with my eyes closed. In looking back over my basketball career and how I got to this place, I believe that in many ways I was living as if my eyes were closed. Now that I no longer live that way as frequently, the difference is clearly noticeable.

If you ever watch an NBA game and just follow the ball being dribbled, the hypnotic effect will have you drifting off in no time. Though referees watch our dribbling for rules infractions, most of you probably don’t pay much attention to it. Just as it has become a nearly automatic reflex among us, the same is true for fans. It’s one of those little things, one of those fundamentals, that we don’t notice until something goes wrong with it. As my years in the NBA added up, I found myself sometimes dribbling away unconsciously. Not until Tatum’s health crisis did I get knocked out of my routine. I thought that I had got where I wanted to be in life—I was finally married to the woman I’d loved for a long time, I had children, I was playing again for a top-notch NBA team, I was a respected veteran player, I was the head of the NBA Players Association—and life was very, very good. I can’t say that I was complacent because I was still working as hard as ever to get back to the NBA Finals and to win a championship, I was still exploring new ways to keep my body fit, I was still thinking about and exploring avenues that I might pursue after I was done playing the game—but all those things were about me, my family, my teammates, and my fellow players. Nothing wrong with that, but speaking out in Utah that night and all that has happened since made me realize the truth about ripple effects and just how far out from the impact point they can travel.

So writing this book and thinking back on all those ups and downs is a way for me to learn something about myself and my life, and hopefully for you to learn something about you and your life. I’ve started to think more about the why of these events and what they mean. Sometimes being a professional basketball player can mean that you’re like the Bill Murray character in the movie
Groundhog Day
. We work hard to develop a daily routine—waking at a certain hour, eating many of the same things, going to practice or a shoot-around at a certain time, going back someplace to nap, arriving at the arena a certain number of minutes before game time, going out on the floor at X number of minutes before tip-off. We’re all about routine and consistency and getting to the point where we don’t have to think so much, we just respond and let our body do its thing. It’s a great feeling when our body does what we’ve trained it to do, and when it doesn’t—whether because of injury or whatever—it can shake us up a bit. That’s why I think it’s important for me to have taken the time to reflect on these events and to see the pattern that has emerged.

I sometimes feel like saying, “Not again!” when I have to prove myself capable of being a full-time player, of being the guy to be there when the outcome is on the line, the one whom the coaching staff trusts to help take us all the way. Now instead of asking, “Why me? Why am I in this position again?” and having that be a lament, I ask those questions because I’m wondering, what opportunity is being presented to me? What can I learn about myself, my faith, and my place in the world and not just the lineup? More important, what can I pass on to others? We all want to make strides toward the same or similar goals. If I can pass the ball off to you, maybe you can come up with some innovation, some new way doing things that will get you nearer to where you want to be.

I was fortunate to come into the league and receive similar kinds of “passes” from other Lakers. In particular, Shaquille O’Neal, Byron Scott, and Nick Van Exel helped me out. Shaq came to the Lakers from the Orlando Magic during the same off-season I was drafted, and we had an interesting relationship. We were both new to the Lakers, but Shaq had already been in the league for four years. Two and a half years older than me, Shaq enjoyed thinking of me as his little brother, and I didn’t mind having him as a kind of big brother. Shaq didn’t necessarily like yes-men hanging around him, and the big-brother thing only goes so far. He wasn’t looking for me to be a puppy dog following him around or a puppet whose strings he could pull to get whatever he wanted. He treated me more as an equal, but since he had some experience in the league, he could share some of his insights about the written and unwritten rules of the game and how to conduct yourself as a professional.

We both had an ex-military man who was present in our lives and in our development. I got to know Shaq’s stepfather, and he reminded me in some ways of my father. Shaq and I also shared having a mother who was actively involved in our lives and to whom we were devoted. My move to Los Angeles represented the first time that I was going to be away from Little Rock and friends and family. Most guys had gone to college at a greater distance from home than I had, so the other rookies around the league and on our team (including Kobe Bryant, who was drafted ahead of me straight out of high school) had an advantage on me. True, Kobe hadn’t gone away to college, but he’d lived in Europe. Kobe and I had a more distant relationship. I was twenty-two and he was only eighteen, and I think he was more guarded in lots of ways than I was. I can’t imagine what it was like for him or understand fully what he was going through. Being a top pick, coming out of high school, having people expecting such great things from you, it all had to be even more unreal to him than it was to me.

At twenty-two, I went from having no money to making a really good salary. A lot of that money was going to be eaten up by taxes, but I didn’t have much of a clue about that at the beginning. The NBA recognized that many of the players coming into the league needed help transitioning to adult life. As a result, in September I attended a four- or five-day program before I went to Hawaii for training camp. The Rookie Transition Program provided us with information about all aspects of life as a professional athlete, from health and nutrition to finances, personal relationships, and league policies regarding drugs. It was a lot of information, and not until you bumped up against some of those things could you make sense of it all. As excited as I was about getting a chance to play in the NBA, I was equally excited about living a more independent life. One of the first things I did was to purchase a new car for myself—the first one of my own I’d ever had. I’d always had a thing for the Lexus LX 450 SUV, so that’s what I got. Figures, doesn’t it? A utility vehicle. No Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Porsche for this guy. Still, it was what I wanted, and it was practical, since I’d be driving out to L.A. to find a place to live and I had to take some of my things with me.