The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  “Yes,” I said, and let the awkward silence sit.

  “That’s a long ways from out here. What brings you all the way out to Arizona? Hoping to get a suntan?!”

  This guy was firing on all cylinders. I looked over at Hassan again, hoping even harder to catch his eye, but SuperGramps was still talking, now gesturing wildly, telling a story he clearly thought was absolutely hilarious. Hassan was nodding with his eyebrows raised as if it was the craziest thing he’d ever heard in his life. He looked downright uncomfortable. I wondered if I looked that awkward. I didn’t like that idea. I always prided myself on being better than most at dealing with white people. I was never intimidated, nor did I buy their particular brand of bullshit. I’ll put it like this: If I were in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” I’d be the kid who pointed out that it was all fake.

  “No. Coach Olson has such a great program, such a storied tradition, that it made sense to come here and help us compete for a national championship.”

  Despite myself I was starting to talk like this a lot now. I guess in some way I was practicing for press conferences and interviews. It was how I had heard all the greats phrase things when talking to outsiders. Michael Jordan, Penny Hardaway, Jalen Rose, Scottie Pippen—all these guys had mastered a deep, dry, low-volume, and perfectly bland way of declining to reveal anything without actually being rude. I already had to practice it when I was being recruited senior year and reporters from the State Journal-Register called my house asking if I had signed a letter of intent yet. I had to practice it when I was interviewed by the campus paper and whenever I was approached at the grocery store by alumni who wanted to talk X’s and O’s with me.

  I hoped the “storied program” answer would close the subject. I wasn’t really trying to tell this guy the whole reason I came all the way to Arizona, the weirdest, whitest, hottest, driest, most western place a black kid from the Midwest could have gone. I wasn’t trying to tell him about how I’d originally blown off Arizona’s famous coach, Lute Olson, to sign a letter of intent with black Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson. I had decided that I only wanted to go to a program with a black coach because the racial dynamics of all black kids being yelled at by grown white men had always bothered me. Richardson had come to my house, sat in my living room with my mother and stepfather, and denied that there was significant racial tension in Fayetteville. But just a few weeks after I committed, he resigned in an explosive press conference where he’d said flat out that he was “judged by a different standard and we all know why.” I wasn’t trying to tell this guy how much the whole situation had pissed me off, that there were so few programs with black coaches, and that they couldn’t seem to just let a black dude live without some drama. I liked Coach Richardson. I implicitly trusted him. He seemed like someone who had my best interests at heart. With other coaches, you couldn’t be sure if they were just pretending to care so they could exploit players. But with Coach Richardson, you got the sense, from the way he talked to my parents, my brother, and my coaches, and from the time he spent around my neighborhood, that he really understood where I was coming from.

  But it didn’t work out. Coach Richardson was battling his own demons in Fayetteville, and when he left amid a dramatic firestorm, I had nowhere to go. It was hard to do, but I called Lute Olson back and told him I would have to reconsider coming to Arizona. “Fine,” Coach Olson said, “but you have to come out here. I’m not recruiting you twice.”

  He didn’t have to.

  It’s a good thing it worked out. Because there was another thing I really wasn’t trying to have to tell this man here at this golf club. I had to go to Arizona because once I hit senior year, I only had one goal in my life: to get as far away from Springfield as possible.

  Don’t get me wrong. Springfield was a fine place to grow up. It wasn’t overly dangerous or crazy. There was an average amount of crime and gunplay, always some kids acting wild and certainly some dudes dealing drugs, and all that came with that. But I wasn’t really affected by it. Once everyone saw that I had some talent, they kind of protected me. “You can’t come with us,” they’d say. “You’re not about this life.” Even my own brother treated me differently, telling me, “You have a chance—you can’t be caught up in this bullshit.” Even though it made me feel small, it was really their way of looking out for me. I had always been decent at basketball. And I felt like I could hold my own at the playground and in the Boys & Girls Club leagues that were always set up for kids in the summer. I could even play with the project kids who always had a little bit of an extra edge.

  But those AAU tournaments were pivotal moments. They were the first validation I had that I wasn’t just good enough for Springfield but good enough for the country. The same thing happened the summer I got an invite to a Nike Camp. This time the guys were even better, more elite, but I now had reason to believe that my being there wasn’t an accident. When you start to get and seize opportunities like that, the world begins to open up slowly for you. And once it does, it can never close again.

  Looking back on it, I can see now how people seemed to never make it out of Springfield. Take Jeff Walker. He was as close to a celebrity as I knew of growing up. I used to love opening up the newspaper, the Springfield Journal-Register, and seeing a picture of Jeff flying in the air like a superhero, pulling in a rebound or dunking on some poor kid from a neighboring high school. It was better than seeing Michael Jordan or Penny Hardaway, because Jeff Walker was one of us. Those guys weren’t people, they were figures. But Jeff Walker was proof that we could fly too. He was six-five by the time he was a senior and was widely considered one of the best ball players in the country by the time he went off to Iowa. But he was still hanging around with guys who he grew up with. Guys who were not, under any circumstances, good for his career. Maybe he was just too young to see what was at stake. Maybe he had a touch of survivor’s guilt, that feeling that because people in the outside world were now taking you seriously you owed something to everyone you came up with. That you maybe didn’t deserve the shot you got, so you make penance for your good fortune by constantly giving your time and money to dudes who don’t seem to be making it happen like you are. Maybe he just made a mistake. But for whatever reason, he and his homies were trying to run some ATM scam and he ended up dropped from Iowa and facing three years felony probation before he ever played a single minute of basketball for the Hawkeyes. He tried to get himself together at a junior college, but violated his parole by going back to Springfield for Thanksgiving one year. The judge locked him up, and the athletic director dropped him. He bounced around to a few more small programs but ultimately ran out of academic eligibility. You only have so much time to turn a college career into a pro career and Jeff Walker ran out of time. The worst part was that he continued to play at a crazy level. His game didn’t fall off one inch. But he couldn’t get his head around how it needed to be in order to make this whole thing come together. It seemed to me that Jeff Walker had everything. But it still wasn’t enough.

  The idea that someone could be as crazy good as Jeff Walker was and still go out like that has haunted me all my life. Because I saw it happening in slow motion, like he was trapped in quicksand and could never get out. But then, Springfield was full of those stories. Steve Dixon. Rich McBride didn’t seem to go as far as we would have all expected. Even Frank could have played in the league if he had just figured out a way to take academics seriously. But he didn’t. And whenever I went back there, dudes were standing in the same spots, doing the same things they were doing in 1999. They even dressed the same. It freaked me out.

  But these towns have an inertia to them. A dangerous lethargy. You meet someone, you get saddled with kids, money is tight, magnificent opportunities are not exactly knocking at your door. You take a job to make ends meet. You realize you’d save so much if you moved back in with your own mother. You mean for it to be temporary, but one thing leads to another. It’s
insidious. Springfield is a town that if you just let your life naturally occur, you’ll be stuck there until the day you die. I liken it to freezing to death. They say it gets really warm and comfortable at the end. You have to have some kind of extra push, some kind of edge, something explosive inside that makes you break out of your downward momentum. Children fight the battles their parents lose. And my mother passed her battle on to me.

  Now I looked out at the room I was in. It was not a place you could freeze to death. A golf clubhouse in Arizona surrounded by university boosters. Bright green cacti and mountains the color of faded gold outside while the sun blazed in the seemingly endless sky. You could look out that window and see for a hundred miles. It occurred to me that each of the twenty or so white men assembled in this room probably had more money in their savings accounts right this minute than everyone I knew in Springfield would ever have in their whole lives. And for some reason I was standing among them. Sure, I was an oddity for now. I wasn’t dumb—I knew how they saw me: the poor ghetto athlete, probably from a broken home in a crack-infested neighborhood, probably just happy to be in a fancy club with rich people. But I caught myself wondering if someday I’d be not just among these men but equal to them, looking cool and comfortable in crisp golf clothes, an icy drink clinking melodically in my hand and so much money in the bank that I didn’t even have to think about it. It seemed impossible. And yet . . .

  I was nineteen years old. I didn’t know at that point if I was good enough to play in the league. I didn’t know that I would be a first-round NBA draft pick and become the face of a franchise and a regular on SportsCenter’s “Top Ten” plays. I didn’t know that my professional career would span more than a decade. I didn’t know that I’d win an Olympic gold medal and be the first player to ever win Finals MVP without even starting. I didn’t know that I’d win a championship ring by locking down the greatest player of all time, that I’d play on a team that won seventy-three games in the regular season and then follow it up by playing on what many think might be the greatest basketball team ever assembled. I didn’t know that I’d move to the Bay Area, make tens of millions, and be perfectly comfortable playing golf and talking deals with tech billionaires and some of the richest men on the planet.

  In fact, in that moment I only knew three things: (1) It was as hot as hell in that clubhouse; (2) this guy I was talking to would not stop asking stupid questions; and (3) this was my only shot. I had to make it work. I had to learn to talk small, for one. But it also meant practice, and study and film sessions, skipping parties, staying away from drugs. Staying up late working and getting up early to do weights and take runs. It meant doing everything it would require to make sure I never had to go back to Springfield. No matter what.

  Finally, from across the room, Hassan looked over at me. The two of us held eye contact for a brief moment before we both burst into a full and sudden laughter that we immediately stifled. The athletic director had been clear. We had been warned not to act like fools around these boosters. So we both looked away from each other and pretended to be very serious and engaged. We went back to playing grown-ups.

  * * *

  —

  Stepping onto campus for the first time in Tucson was like entering a completely different world. I had never seen so many white people assembled in one place. It was culture shock of the highest order. It seemed every other kid was driving a BMW 3 or 5 Series. They were everywhere. One girl I was making small talk with casually told me that her father owned like half the gas stations on the West Coast. It was a world unlike anything I had ever seen.

  The first place I went on campus was Lute Olson’s office. He was in there receiving all the incoming freshmen. His guys. Lute was a real wholesome-looking old white dude with silver hair perfectly arranged on his face and red Santa Claus cheeks. His face looked like it should be on a bag of gingerbread cookies. But underneath all that, there was something ruthless about him. I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily. Just that he was an old-school basketball coach from the John Wooden tradition. He was all business and definitely expected you to be all business too. I would work under his tutelage for two years, and when I was done, I still wouldn’t be clear on whether I liked him. One thing, however, was very certain: he taught me the game of basketball like no one else ever had.

  But that was to come later. That first meeting was all handshakes and good vibes. The season hadn’t started yet and so the staff was still buttering us up like they were recruiting. It was all the platitudes: “Just thrilled to have you aboard. It’s going to be a fantastic year! Can’t wait to get started!” A couple of goodbyes and it was over. For now. We were given three items of clothing—shorts, a shirt, and a pair of tights—and sent on our way. Just like boot camp, but with Nikes. That afternoon I got a call from a team manager. “Andre, there’s a pickup game tomorrow at the practice facility. One p.m.”

  This, finally, was something I understood. I was excited to get myself situated with the program and show what I could do. For months it had been all this talk about basketball, all this thinking and interviewing about basketball, all this choosing which basketball programs to go to. I was excited to simply go play basketball. At 12:40 the next day, we started trickling into the facility in our practice gear. A lot of the guys were players I had seen at various tournaments and AAU events, so there was no real nervousness about that. We started to make small talk and shoot around. And that’s when I noticed that I was in a completely different environment.

  Arizona prides itself on its team management. The team managers are sometimes seniors on scholarship, sometimes graduates who want to break into coaching, and it’s their job to take care of everything a player needs. If you need a ride somewhere, you call the team manager. If you need someone to keep or find stats for you, you call the team manager. But their most important job was rebounding. It sounds like a little thing, but it’s the biggest thing there is. If you wanted to get some shots up, it was the team manager’s job to make sure that you didn’t have to chase the ball all over the floor. And at practice it was even more serious. There was a self-regulated rule in place that no ball could bounce out of bounds more than one time, or else the manager would be in trouble. So even as we were shooting around, there were these guys almost fighting each other for loose balls, running top speed to retrieve them as if they were playing tennis in the US Open. I had never seen anything even remotely close to that. That’s when I knew it was all about basketball here.

  There were two guys I had never seen before, although I had heard of them. Jason Gardner and Will Bynum. Bynum, especially, was a god in Illinois, as a five-foot-eight dude who could dunk on people. His legend definitely preceded him. Even though it was a pickup game, there were about forty or so people in the stands. Family members who had come for drop-off, others in the athletic program. The seniors Luke Walton and Jason picked the squads, and we were off and running.

  I was guarding Luke Walton at first. I thought I was going to be able to contain him with little trouble because, and I’m only being honest here, I took one look at him and thought, “Slow white guy.” I was, however, in for a rude awakening. Luke had moves on top of moves. He wasn’t going to face you up and cross over that much, but he could get all kinds of shots if you didn’t know how to guard him. There were turnaround jumpers, fadeaways, hooks—he had it all. He would wiggle loose on a screen and spot up before I even knew what was happening. Guarding Luke that first game was the strangest experience. You thought he was moving slowly but he was always still one step ahead of you. Even when you knew what was happening, you couldn’t stop it. Like when he dribbled hard at you, that meant there was a player doing a backdoor cut. Theoretically you should be able to block the pass, but Luke understood angles so well that he could still slip it by you. He had an answer for your athleticism, but you didn’t have an answer for his strength and smarts. He managed to both exhaust me and humble me. And it made me want to
learn everything that he had to teach.

  The other thing I learned in that game was this: Salim Stoudamire is the greatest three-point shooter in college history. It is a fact you can argue all you want. He did not miss a single shot in that first pickup afternoon. Probably half the time I was losing Luke was because I was distracted trying to understand how it was that Salim still hadn’t missed. But it wasn’t just that game. It was his whole career. He shot over 50 percent from three in his senior year, and that’s volume shooting, that’s making 120 threes that season. Only three players in history have made over 100 threes at a 50 percent clip, and Salim Stoudamire is one of those three. And his true shooting percentage—that’s field goal, free throw, and three-pointers combined—for that senior season was 68.9 percent. That’s insane. By comparison, Steph Curry’s true shooting percentage in his best college season was 64 percent. Search the numbers all you want. There has never been, and there may never be, another shooter as purely good as Salim in college.

  As the afternoon wore on, everyone got looser. We had made all the jokes, we had shaken all the nerves, and now we were just down to basketball. There was a simplicity to it. It was a game that meant nothing. And that’s what made it mean everything. Later I was guarding Hassan Adams. Hassan would be my roommate freshman year, and we would become so inseparable that everyone on campus, including our own coach, would get us confused. But we played the same position, so there was natural competition between us. As soon as we faced each other that afternoon, there was a clear understanding. We were going to push each other as hard as we could. At one point I was guarding him, maybe the third or fourth time we ran it back, and he put a move on me that I still remember. A hesitation, an abrupt little in and out, just enough to get me going the other way, and then he was gone. I was toasted. He drove in to pearl it at the rim, and without thinking I just reacted. I tracked him down from behind and blocked that layup into the tenth row. I just remember somebody saying, “Goddamn!” at the top of their lungs. I didn’t need to block it that hard. But I did need to block it that hard. Because that moment set the tone for us, and maybe for that whole squad. We had too much talent and we were going to use all of it.