Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  The Lakers are playing well, and Phil Jackson is playing mind games. After two straight L.A. turnovers, the Laker coach asks referee Bernie Fryer to inspect the ball. He rolls it around in his hands a few times, then tosses it back. “Okay, Bernie,” he says.

  Around the league, there is a kind of benign resentment of Jackson, who has won nine championships as a coach. The media endlessly debates whether Jackson is just lucky (having had Michael Jordan for six titles in Chicago and both Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe for the other three in L.A.) or good, or some combination of the two, and even Jackson’s peer group can’t decide. Jackson’s reliance on Zen teachings; his carefully cultivated intellectualism; his sly manipulation of the press; his romantic relationship with Jeannie Buss, the daughter of the Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss; and, yes, his success and reported $9-million-per-year contract, all make him a logical target, not to mention, at six feet eight inches, an easily located one. Jackson seems determined to be looked on not as a coach, but, rather, as some sort of cosmic seer who uses basketball to communicate higher messages. In a gentle spoof of Jackson, D’Antoni had told the all-employees meeting the day before that he was reading Zen for Dummies.

  Almost as if he’s inviting further criticism, Jackson has taken to coaching from a large, high-backed chair, ergonomically suited to his aching back, hips, and God knows what else. (A former player who got by with guile and a willingness to swing an elbow or two, he appears to be a hundred years old when he gets up and starts walking. And in mid-ambulation, he suggests a skyscraper about to crash slowly to earth.) The chair puts Jackson literally above the crowd, which is where his peer group figures he sees himself anyway. Everyone refers to the chair, obviously, as the Throne. D’Antoni could have the health problems of Toulouse-Lautrec and would never sit in an ergonomic throne.

  But the Suns’ coaches respect Jackson’s coaching chops. Several times over the last couple of days, a stark graphic has appeared on the television: Jackson is 14-0 in first-round series. “He’s had great players,” says D’Antoni, “but you don’t win nine rings and do that well in the playoffs unless you know how to coach.” Jackson always selects a ring to wear during the playoffs—this year it’s the 2000 version, the first he won with the Lakers.

  The Suns lead by 58–50 at halftime, but the atmosphere is tense. Nash, in particular, is being throttled on the perimeter by double-teaming. Kwame Brown is not much of a defender in the eyes of the Suns, but he’s a big, agile body, and, when he comes out to help Smush Parker or whoever is guarding Nash, he is effective. The Suns can’t get into their offense, and the game is tied 75–75 after three periods. Bryant isn’t really killing the Suns, but Bell’s offense is worse and Bryant has him in foul trouble with five. The fans try to help out as the inevitable “KOBE SUCKS” erupts. You could pretty much go into any NBA arena outside of Los Angeles during the season and hear the same cheer.

  But Tim Thomas bails out the Suns. At practice the day before, I watched him effortlessly put up three-pointers as Iavaroni tried to distract him. Thomas would get a pass, and Iavaroni would wave a hand in his face or fake a shot toward his nether regions, but Thomas would just smile and launch another, insouciance in a six-foot-ten-inch package. During games, Thomas has begun a ritual by which he waves his own hand directly in front of his face after he makes a jump shot, an indication that nothing can bother him. “I wish he’d take that hand and shove it up his ass,” Alvin Gentry said, almost wistfully, after watching it on film a few dozen times. The gesture doesn’t quite rise to the level of taunting. But it smacks of taunting. Of all the Suns, though, Thomas appears to be the most impervious to playoff pressure, which is good and bad. He is what Weber calls “a low-flame guy,” coasting along at a certain speed, unable or unwilling to shift into a higher gear, but, on the other hand, maintaining almost an eerie calm.

  In the end, Nash, playing a mediocre game by his standards, makes the big play. With 1:07 remaining and the Suns leading 98–95, Diaw rebounds a Bell miss and swings it to Nash in the right corner. As D’Antoni screams for his quarterback to bring it back out and kill some clock, Nash lets fly with a three-pointer that goes in, all but sewing up the win. D’Antoni looks skyward, grabs his heart and says, “Oh, shit.”

  After the game, Nash is told that D’Antoni wanted him to pull it out and get a new clock. “I couldn’t hear him,” says the point guard, who occasionally likes to good-naturedly stick it to his coach, “but I wasn’t going to listen to him anyway.”

  Thomas, though, is unquestionably the player of the game. He finishes with twenty-two points, including four of five conversions on three-point shots, and also grabs fifteen defensive rebounds, one more than Odom. Bryant also has twenty-two points, his second lowest total since a game on December 23, and is castigated for his passivity; Thomas never seems to be anything but passive, yet, in this game, was the determining factor.

  Thomas also gets props in the locker room for having raised a lump on Bryant’s temple late in the game when the Laker star drove to the basket. Bell had been stopped by a pick, and, as Thomas and Diaw converged to help, Bryant got raked across the face. No call. Immediately after the game, Bryant stalked off the court, glaring at the officials, and later, in the locker room, Bryant showed reporters the lump. Thomas was then asked about it with the assumption that he would deny it. Protocol calls for a guilty party to deny everything, particularly during the playoffs. He’s crazy. I never touched him. If I did, it was incidental contact. But Thomas just chuckles and says, “I definitely got away with fouling him.”

  D’Antoni’s postgame speech is short. “We didn’t play real well,” says the coach. “We’ll play better next time. Keep it on an even keel. We need fifteen more of these.” (Sixteen postseason wins earns you a championship.) There is more a feeling of relief than triumph—the Suns now have a taste of how closely matched the teams might be, and everyone is vaguely wondering why they were not able to dominate a Game 1 at home, normally the surest of victories for a superior team.

  “Well, that wasn’t real easy, was it?” says Gentry, back in the coaches’ office.

  “I’m trying to remember the last time it was easy,” says Iavaroni.

  “Back in training camp?” I say.

  D’Antoni shakes his head. “If you remember,” he says, “it wasn’t easy then either.”

  Full Time-Out

  October 7, 2005

  TRAINING CAMP, TUCSON

  Amare’ Goes Down

  Alvin Gentry is standing outside the Westin Hotel, waiting for his rental car to arrive from valet, when a distracted Suns’ owner Robert Sarver comes wheeling around the circle, practically running over Gentry.

  “That’s okay, Robert,” says Gentry with a smile. “Hit me. I always wanted to own an NBA team.”

  Sarver gets out of the car, looks at Gentry, and says, “Not today you don’t.”

  Word has just come down that Amare’ Stoudemire’s left knee, which has kept him out of the last two days of drills, is much worse than anyone had originally thought, bad enough to require an operation. What it did to the Suns’ plans for winning a championship was one thing. But it also opened up a schism between Sarver, who had just given Stoudemire a five-year $73-million contract extension, and the Suns’ medical and training staffs, as well as between Stoudemire and the team. No one “blamed” him, of course, for having an injured knee. But there was the feeling that part of it was his fault, that the player had let it go too far.

  In early August, Stoudemire had complained to Suns’ athletic trainer Aaron Nelson about knee pain. But the club had trouble getting the notoriously unreliable Stoudemire to have it checked out. He canceled several appointments for MRI scans, and both Nelson and team orthopedist Thomas Carter, a highly respected surgeon, assumed the knee couldn’t have been a major concern for the player. Athletes have aches and pains all the time and have a pretty good sense about which ones are serious. Sarver didn’t even know that Stoudemire had been having knee pain.

>   Stoudemire finally had an MRI scan in mid-September, two weeks before camp began, and it revealed a small lesion in the knee.

  The new deal that Stoudemire received had been a fait accompli since his breakout season in 2004–05. Rarely had one player elevated his game so dramatically, from 13.5 points per game as a rookie, to 20.6 the following season, to 26.0 with Nash dishing him the ball during the 2004–05 season. And he had done it so spectacularly, his rim-rattling dunks, sometimes from a standing, two-legged start, having become SportsCenter staples. Brian Grant, now with the Suns, said that the Los Angeles Lakers, for whom he played last season, called Stoudemire the Mad Hatter for his audacious, almost crazed eruptions of athleticism. Whether or not Stoudemire’s rapid rise from Potential Star to Superstar was due to Nash’s deft passing; D’Antoni’s run-at-all-costs philosophy, which enabled the tireless Stoudemire to leave his opponents breathing his fumes; or the young man’s own limitless athleticism seemed not to matter. He, Nash, and Marion would be the talented troika that would bring Phoenix the championship it had been looking for since Jerry Colangelo brought the franchise into the NBA in 1968.

  And now that vision is on hold.

  D’Antoni, Marc Iavaroni, and Phil Weber are pondering the Stoudemire news during the twenty-minute ride from the Westin to the University of Arizona. Alvin Gentry, Dan D’Antoni, Todd Quinter, and Noel Gillespie, the young video guru, ride in another car. These twice-daily trips have been, for me, one of the highlights of camp. Weber drives; D’Antoni rides shotgun; Iavaroni and I are in the back. A radio station sends out classic rock, just soft enough that we can criticize the tunes while at the same time singing along. Nonstop conversation, pierced with insults, is the real soundtrack.

  But tonight there is a grim, anxious feeling. No Stoudemire for at least four months is the early medical prognosis. No twenty-six points a game for at least four months. No rim-rattling dunks for at least four months. D’Antoni, on whom the major responsibility falls to figure out how to compensate, says: “We just have to make the playoffs.” It becomes his mantra. We just have to make the playoffs. Eighty-two games and six months lie ahead but We just have to make the playoffs.

  “The injury is going to throw kind of a wet blanket over the entire town,” says Iavaroni.

  I ask D’Antoni how he plans to tell the team. He hasn’t really thought about it.

  “I’ll probably talk to each of them individ…nah, I’ll probably tell them together.”

  “Word spreads fast,” says Iavaroni, “so they’ll all know anyway.”

  D’Antoni chuckles when he thinks of Bryan Colangelo, the Suns’ general manager, who drafted Stoudemire and who will undoubtedly be the one to deconstruct the entire situation—repeatedly—to Sarver. Owner and general manager have a tenuous relationship to begin with and this won’t help it. “B’s probably got his feet hanging over a cliff,” says D’Antoni.

  The coaches throw out tidbits about how to deal with the injury.

  “Shawn’s just gotta be a monster,” says D’Antoni. “He has to get out there and get his shots. We have to get three-point shooting from our four spot [power forward]. He’s gotta knock ’em down.”

  “We gotta get one more runner,” says Weber. “One more guy to join the pack.”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of real good fives [centers] walking around,” says D’Antoni. “We more or less got who we got.”

  “Pat Burke can run,” says Weber. “I just wish he’d start making his shot.” Burke is a six-foot-eleven-inch, 250-pound left-hander who signed as a free agent in August. There hasn’t been much thought about him…until now.

  “Training camp four years ago in Miami, Mike, we heard about Zo’s kidney,” says Iavaroni. “Pat Riley got ’em all together and we won 50 games. You can use it as a rallying cry.” Iavaroni was speaking of his time in Miami when the Heat learned that star player Alonzo Mourning was retiring because of kidney disease. He later returned.

  “I still think we can score 108, 109, or 110 points,” says D’Antoni. That is the way he thinks: When trouble hits, outscore the opposition. When all else fails, amp up the offense. When that fails, amp it up again. “If we can hold up emotional-wise and endurance-wise, if Kurt Thomas stays healthy, if Brian Grant stays healthy, we can surprise a lot of people,” says the coach.

  We arrive at the University of Arizona’s McKale Center just as the other coaches get there. “Well, Alvin, you coached the Clippers,” says D’Antoni to Gentry, “what do we do now?”

  D’Antoni has decided to tell the team collectively about Stoudemire. His speech is breezy and direct. “I guess most of you guys know about Amare’. Looks like the best it can be is that he’s out a month. Or he could be out six months. So we don’t know yet and won’t until he has all his opinions in. So we just have to band together right now and get it done another way. I don’t have any doubts whatsoever. Just make sure you take care of yourself. Get in your extra shooting, talk to Aaron right away if something comes up medically. Because you know what? We have to find a way to score 110 points. We have plenty here to do it, but we gotta find a different way than we did last year. So let’s band together and go bust somebody’s ass and get it done.”

  At each break in practice, the coaches gather together and discuss the Stoudemire injury, always facing the stark mathematical reality of replacing twenty-six points per game. (And the secret hope was that Stoudemire would up his average to near thirty without becoming more of a gunner.) Should Marion be more of a post-up player? Should Nash increase his scoring as he did in the previous season’s playoffs when, against Dallas, he went for forty-nine points in a single game? Should they work on getting more offense out of Raja Bell, a shooting guard, who was brought in mostly for defense and overall toughness?

  Practice is spirited but ragged, and the question hangs in the air: How do we get to 110 without Amare’?

  A general atmosphere of optimism permeates the franchise on a surface level. Stoudemire’s return date of “sometime around the All-Star Game,” which is on February 18, is never confirmed by the medical staff (they know too much can happen) but it seems to be the going gospel anyway. The athlete is presented as a “tireless worker” who, as Nelson says, “would be down here all the time unless we watch him.” Doc Carter says the defect in Stoudemire’s knee is a centimeter, “which in the realm of things is very small.”

  But no matter what everyone says, dark thoughts creep in. Similar knee injuries, to NBA stars such as Penny Hardaway and Chris Webber, are dire precedents since neither player was the same after his procedure. And everyone wonders how Stoudemire will react to such a setback early in his career, one that calls for mental toughness. Stoudemire has come very far, very fast. But considering where he came from, doubts about where he is going are always present.

  Yes, he is gifted with physical abilities that 99 percent of the world’s population can only dream about—a six-foot-ten-inch body, strength, endurance, quickness, a thirty-six-inch vertical leap—but those gifts can’t erase the heartache and shame he must’ve felt at least some of the time when he was growing up. There is so much that he missed, so many things that he’ll never know.

  His father, Hazell, died when he was twelve. He grew up hand-to-mouth poor, raised by his mother, Carrie, in a drug-infested neighborhood in Lake Wales, just south of Orlando. An older brother, Hazell Jr., ended up in prison on drug and sexual abuse charges. Amare’ attended six high schools in five years. It would take two pages to cover Carrie Stoudemire’s legal troubles—and should carry the caveat that at least some of the time she was trying to provide for her family—but they include arrests for drugs, prostitution, probation violation, and DUI.

  Stoudemire seems almost desperate in his attempt to be a good person and has turned to scripture. He reads the Bible (“Proverbs,” he said, “it’s my favorite”), and the tattoos that compete for space on his body include Matthew 20:16 (“God bless the child”) and the painting of Jesus and the footprints
. (“That took four hours,” he says, “and it hurt.”) On the other hand, the tat that runs in script on his left arm bears a more secular message: “I was raised in this society and this is how you can expect me to be. I do what I want to do.” He wrote that passage himself. And to a large extent, Stoudemire does do what he wants to do. If you rented a large ballroom and invited in all the professional athletes for whom self-absorption is the default sensibility, you wouldn’t have room for a card table. But space would have to be found for Stoudemire. He wants the Suns to win, of course, but he needs to be the star.

  Even last season, when he was tearing up the league, his teammates wondered about his commitment to team ball, and their affection for Stoudemire is not of a set piece. But there is a certain collective feeling that, hey, none of us made it here real easily, either, dude, so get your shit together. Marion had some of the same physical gifts, but he, too, overcame a hard life with a single mother who worked her hands to the bone trying to make it right for Shawn and his siblings. He told me one day that he almost never laces up a new pair of sneakers when he doesn’t conjure up a memory of going to school in old hand-me-downs, “ratty, worn through, socks all wet, sneakers all wet, feet all wet.” Eddie House grew up in a two-parent family, but nobody gave him anything, either. “I knew from early on that I needed a college scholarship to get anywhere,” House says, “so I worked my butt off to get better at this game.” Nash had domestic stability, but he had to work ten times harder—maybe a hundred times harder—than Stoudemire did. The odds on a normal-sized Canadian Caucasian becoming a two-time MVP aren’t even calculable. On it goes. No one gets a pass into the NBA.