If that had happened to Tiger . . . man . . . I can’t even think about it now. It would have been . . . just terrible . . . too terrible to even think about. But it didn’t. We couldn’t take our eyes off the TV, just sat there and watched every shot, and soaked up every moment of it as if it were happening to one of us. What a great day. That set a whole lot of stuff in motion, didn’t it?
If You Don’t Win a
Championship . . .
When Ted Williams passed away in the summer of 2002, it brought about a lot of fascinating reflection and it made me think about how people perceive athletes’ careers.
Obviously, in retirement Ted Williams was simply a very good guy. Even though he retired three years before I was born, I appreciated him because of his support for Negro League players who had been banned from playing with him in the major leagues. I’ve read excerpts of interviews and seen clips of speeches that showed he was about inclusion and integration and recognizing everybody’s talents back when baseball didn’t want any part of black and Latin players. And even beyond that, in recent times, you knew Ted Williams had to be a really good guy because of the way modern-day players embraced him, and the way he embraced them. The way they surrounded him at that All-Star Game in Boston a few years ago told you how much the people in his profession thought of him.
What’s interesting is that in his retirement, when he became the elder statesman of the game, people hardly ever mentioned that he never won a championship with the Red Sox. I had forgotten he hadn’t won one until I started reading and watching the obituaries after he died. I mean, I know the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1918, and Ted’s career went from 1939 to 1960, so obviously he didn’t win a World Series. But I’d forgotten about it because nobody tried to diminish him because he hadn’t won a World Series. I’ve read that people brought it up during his career, when he was perceived by a lot of people as being a bad guy, but since he was clearly a good guy for many, many years, people just let it go. It’s a serious double standard, and it’s silly because it’s not like he was two different players. So if he’s a good guy it doesn’t matter, but if he’s a bad guy it does?
Thing is, if Ted Williams had been traded to the Yankees in his rookie year for Joe DiMaggio, Ted would have all those World Series rings and DiMaggio probably wouldn’t have had any. But would DiMaggio not have been a great ballplayer? Would Ted have been any better? Ted only played in one World Series, 1946, and the Red Sox lost. But nobody has hit .400 since he did it. The guy won two Triple Crowns, which is almost unthinkable these days. But the bigger point to be made is the perception of what kind of player he was as it relates to playing for a championship team.
It’s something that all athletes have to live with, even the guys who win a championship, and it can be frustrating. It obviously hits home with me because I never played on a championship team in my sixteen years in the NBA. Some guy in Los Angeles once wrote that my career wasn’t fulfilled because of that. And that’s absurd.
Dean Smith once relayed to me a conversation he had with Roy Williams after Dean Smith won his first NCAA Championship, the one where North Carolina beat Georgetown in 1982. People had gotten on Dean Smith about coaching at Carolina for twenty years and not winning the NCAA Championship, even though he’d been to the Final Four a bunch of times. Roy, who was his assistant at the time, said to him as the game ended, “Now you can get ’em off your back about not winning a championship.” And Dean Smith said he told Roy, “I’m no better coach now than I was five minutes ago.” And it’s a great story because it’s true, Dean Smith was already a great coach, and because it showed how gracious he was to keep things in perspective even after he won.
But this notion that your career is somehow failed if you don’t win a championship, which I think is completely ridiculous, really started to get out of control the last ten years or so. People have just become so critical, so quick to ridicule. Phil Mickelson is going through that right now and I feel bad for him. I know Phil Mickelson. He’s the second greatest golfer in the world as I’m writing these words. And I know how badly he wants to win. But I think he’s pressing, and unfortunately starting to believe all this stuff about not being able to win a major championship. It’s difficult not to because you can’t escape it, not with all the sports talk radio and twenty-four-hour sports television and people asking him about it every single tournament. David Duval had it until the summer of 2001 when he won the British Open, and Colin Montgomerie has it to a degree, but nobody has it like Phil. Well, Greg Norman had it a while back until he won a couple of majors. But even with that, people look back on Greg Norman’s career now and you hear them say, “Well, he had the talent to win a lot more majors than he did.”
Man, that’s flat-out unfair. The people making these assessments for the most part don’t have any idea of how difficult it is to win a championship—in golf a major championship—especially if you come along at the same time as the greatest player that sport has ever seen. Of course, I identify with what Phil’s going through because I had something very similar.
There’s really only one thing wrong with Phil Mickelson: he was born at the wrong time. That’s it. He was born too close to Tiger Woods. Same thing happened to me, to Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Reggie Miller, a whole bunch of guys. The guys who dominated at the championship level when I played were Earvin Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. They won fourteen championships in nineteen seasons. They played in twenty NBA Finals between them. If you want to say that those guys were better than me, I’m going to agree with you. Is there any shame in that?
Once when he was being interviewed Michael gave me a backhanded compliment and said I was on the next level down from him, Larry and Magic. And I called him up and told him I had no problem with that. I told him, “If I’m right after you guys, I’m okay with that.” That means I’m with Malone, Stockton, Ewing, Gary Payton. Would I like to have won a championship, several championships? Of course. I played my ass off for sixteen years, trying to win every time out. But don’t expect me to see my career as something unfulfilled because I’m with those other guys.
Somebody took a poll once and the question was “Who’s the greatest team player in professional sports never to win a championship?” and I was voted No. 1. A similar topic came up when I was on Jim Rome’s show once, and I told him, “Jim, you never ask this question of a mediocre player. So I’m taking this as a compliment. When you interview a marginal player who managed to hang in there and last long enough in the league to make himself a ten-year career you tell him, ‘You had such a wonderful career.’ So by asking me this, you must think I’m a helluva player.”
The problem to me is the bar keeps moving. If Phil Mickelson wins a major tournament, but only one, when he retires people will say, “He should have won more.” Well, why is that? How many people making this criticism of Phil are the second-best in the world at what they do? You’ve got a lot of no-talents out there on talk radio running off at the mouth, getting people all riled up when they’re not stopping to assess how difficult it is to win a championship in any sport in this day and age, with all the good athletes out there competing. It’s still a special thing to win, to even compete for a championship. So I’m telling everybody when they ask me about those guys who didn’t win, that it’s an honor to be grouped with them. And it is. We’re talking about Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, Chris Carter and the NBA guys I just mentioned like Patrick and John Stockton and Karl Malone and Gary Payton. One of the most underappreciated NBA players during my time was Dominique Wilkins. How many people have scored 25,000 points in a career? He was No. 8 all-time in points scored when he retired. But it’s not just guys who are my peers who had great careers and didn’t win.
Elgin Baylor’s knees were so bad late in his career, he wound up retiring before the Lakers won a championship. Ernie Banks never won a World Series, never even played in one. Would anybody be stupid enough to make the case that Ernie Banks’s life is unfulfilled, as great an ambassador as he is for the game of baseball? I knew Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers didn’t win a Super Bowl, but I didn’t know until somebody told me recently that those guys didn’t even play a single playoff game in their careers. If you want to make the case that those guys, first-ballot Hall of Fame players, didn’t do everything they could while they wore those uniforms, go ahead and try, but it would be pretty stupid.
I cannot imagine that if I won a championship tomorrow I would lie in bed and think, “Oh, I’m complete now.” I went out there every night and gave my team everything I had, some nights when I was injured and shouldn’t even have been playing. And I know all those other guys did the same thing trying to do whatever they could to help their teams win a championship. We got really close once, in 1993 with Phoenix, and I played on teams that had a chance a couple of other times. I was out there at a little taller than 6-foot-4 battling every night. I think the people I played with and against know that. Only three or four other players retired with more points, rebounds and assists than I had over my career. When I retired, one of my friends wrote me a letter and said, “I’ve stood beside your short ass and you’re only 6-4 but you battled 7-foot guys every night. Congratulations on a wonderful career.” That letter meant a lot to me. It was from Quinn Buckner. At the end of several seasons when I was playing, Michael would call me, knowing how disappointed I was, and say, “Hang in there.”
That’s what really made me angry when Scottie Pippen insulted me and said Michael agreed with him. Michael had just retired and was in Monte Carlo with his family. It was about 2:00 a.m. one night; the story had just broken with Scottie saying all this BS about me. And Michael said, “You know I’d never say that about you. And if I wanted to say it, I’d say it to your face.” He didn’t need to call me, but it was nice of him to do it.
We all want to win, but not everybody could win, especially not when they had to go through Michael Jordan in the NBA, not when they have to go through the Yankees most of the time in baseball, not when they have to go through Tiger Woods in professional golf. But you go out there and fight the best fight you can fight. It’s shameful if you cheat the fans, if you go out there and fail to give everything you’ve got when they’re paying good money to see you. But if you’re going to tell me that the twelfth man on one of Magic’s teams or Larry’s teams or Michael’s teams who played three minutes a night had a more fulfilling career than I did, that’s crazy to me. You can’t convince me that a guy who caught two passes the whole season on a Super Bowl–winning team had a more fulfilling career than Cris Carter had, or that the third-string quarterback holding a clipboard for a Super Bowl championship team had a more fulfilling career than Dan Marino or Jim Kelly. What you’d be saying then is that there is dishonor in giving your best, being one of the very top guys in your sport, coming close but losing. That’s crazy. Those guys didn’t win championships either, but they’re great at what they did and it’s an honor to be mentioned with them.
“I Am Not a
Role Model”
Nike didn’t come to me with the idea to do a commercial about role models—I went to Nike with that idea. I talked to my friend the Nike executive Howard White about it, called him after thinking about it for a while, and said, “Howard, people have this role model thing completely screwed up. Is a role model just a celebrity that parents turn their kids over to? Damn, can’t we do better than that? Is the best we can do for kids pointing them to celebrities they have no real chance of ever knowing?” I just thought we as a society need to do better in that area. So I asked, and Nike said, cool. And I thought it turned out great.
Remember, the main theme was “I am not a role model.”
And for that, I got ripped. I’d been criticized before, of course, for having my own take on social issues. But the first time I got hit really hard was for taking that stance. There were some columnists who defended me, but mostly I got killed. I’m okay with it, though, because nobody in all this time has been able to convince me that it’s wrong to tell kids to listen to their parents and not a basketball player they’ve never met. How crazy is it to get slammed for saying, “Listen to your parents, listen to your teachers, listen to the responsible adults in your neighborhood or people who have done something with their lives.” I know it’s hard to get an entire message across in less than a minute. But I still believe the message was clear enough that I thought kids need to be able to look up to folks right there around them who can teach them hard work and right from wrong.
Celebrities can’t teach ’em that from television. People are crazy. Or maybe they’re just lazy, they don’t want to do the hard work, and it’s easier to just turn their kids over to somebody ’cause he’s famous. How stupid is that? How can you make somebody your role model when you don’t know the person? All they’ve got most of the time is a perception of somebody off in the distance that might be totally distorted . . . or it could be the person is just misunderstood. One thing I hate is that all the general public knows about an athlete or a celebrity is what they know from the media, which is often inaccurate or incomplete. I know cases where a guy is labeled a bad guy and he’s really a good guy, maybe worthy of being a role model for kids he’s close to. And I know of way too many instances where the guy comes off as a good guy in the media and he’s not a good guy at all. And that’s a huge problem. Either way, how could that person be a legitimate role model for a kid? Because he’s famous? Because he’s on TV? Can he help get questions answered for you or do anything that’s specific to what you need?
Television is entertainment. I love television. And in this second stage of my life it pays me well. But television is entertainment, television is celebrity. And with so few people to emulate in their neighborhoods, black kids started fantasizing about being athletes. And having dreams is great, but how can somebody on TV help give you any direction? That’s a one-way relationship. A ballplayer you can only see on TV may inspire you to do great things in athletics, sure. You can look at sports all day and want to try and do things on a court or a field like that player. But that can’t help you with your homework, or with real aspirations, or help you if you’re having problems at home. How does an athlete help you if you’re a terrible athlete but a decent student and you need encouragement to compete academically?
A role model should be among the people who can influence your direction in a real-life way. The best scenario is if they can be actually in your life. My mother and grandmother were my two biggest role models; my dad wasn’t there. It was my mother and grandmother. A role model, in my way of thinking, is somebody who can help shape your life and what you believe in. And it can’t be somebody on television, somebody you can’t touch or go to for advice, or cuss you out when it’s necessary or sit and listen to you. It may be more important to have mentors than role models anyway, maybe somebody you can talk to about stuff you may not feel comfortable talking to your parents about. It needs to be somebody who’s not going to tell you exactly what you want to hear all the time.
At the time, I felt I needed to attack the subject because on the whole I don’t think athletics are good for black kids. I really don’t. I got to this point because every single time I go and talk to black children or teenagers at a school or at an event, they only want to play sports. I’ll ask them what they want to do after high school or about their plans in the next few years and it’s always “I want to play pro basketball” or “I want to play in the NFL.” Every single one, it seems to me, wants to play sports for a living. It’s like there’s some mental block, or they’ve been conditioned or brainwashed to feel they can’t do anything but play sports. And it’s scary to me. It bothers me. Obviously, I’m not against sports; I’m thankful for everything a career in professional sports has given me. But I don’t know of any other culture where the children all want to do the same thing. I’ve never heard of any other situation like that.
I know this is complex and there are some real contradictions here because the most really influential group of black people in America is made up of a lot of athletes. There aren’t any Martin Luther Kings or Malcolm Xs or Medgar Everses leading the black community right now. Almost everybody, among the most prominent people in our communities right now, who has achieved any status the past twenty-five years has done so through athletics, which in a way is really a shame. We have a lot of hardworking people, folks doing backbreaking work. But we still don’t see the doctors and lawyers and engineers we need to see and need to have portrayed and need to treat as role models. And the ones we do have don’t have any real platform. They’re not doing anything controversial enough or scandalous enough to get profiles in the mainstream magazines. Athletes and entertainers are the only ones among us who have the platform, mostly because they’re on television every day.
So when you seriously start to think about it, our kids are so limited in the number of successful black people they can see or be exposed to. They see athletes and entertainers and what else? How often do they see scientists and engineers and writers? They don’t. I know in my own neighborhood, I didn’t know any black doctors or lawyers or professional black folks. They weren’t in the projects where I grew up. I know a whole lot of these kids I’m talking to come from neighborhoods that ain’t all that different from mine.
I’m not saying that poor white kids and Hispanic kids don’t have similar issues with this, because I suspect they do, too. And I’m not saying that only professional people can be role models. A guy working the nine-to-five cleaning the streets or running the grocery store on the corner could be a great role model. You need to see honest, hardworking people and appreciate what they’re doing with their lives. And just because somebody doesn’t have a college degree doesn’t mean he or she can’t help give some direction to a kid who can’t get it anywhere else. But we also need our kids to see some professional people they can aspire to be like, and they don’t see enough. Every kid can’t be Michael Jordan or Will Smith, and shouldn’t want to be. But this is what they see in their lives every day, because for so many of them they ain’t got anything positive going on at home.
Anyway, this had been bothering me for a while and I wanted to use my own platform to address it. And I never thought so many people would miss the bigger message. I found it interesting in the spring of 2002 that somebody came up with this TV campaign: “Parents, the anti-drug.” Isn’t that the same point I was making in the role model commercial? That campaign is a damn good reminder. But it’s nothing different from what I was saying in the role model commercial. What’s different about it? It doesn’t say, “Athletes and celebrities, the anti-drug,” does it? I wasn’t supposed to have any ideas of my own or talk about anything serious?
All I was saying was your parents and your teachers, people you ought to be listening to, need to be your role models. Charles Barkley the basketball player should not be your role model. Yeah, I can be a role model to my daughter and to kids I have some contact with. But that’s not only Charles Barkley the basketball player, that’s me as a father, or a parental figure. Those kids don’t see me only on TV, there’s an actual relationship there, or at least some association. How many people on TV do these kids have an association with? We all know the answer is “None.”
But if it took me getting slammed to get some dialogue started on this issue, then it was worth it. I’d do it again in a second.