Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  In high school cliques develop, and in lots of places if you belong to one group or another, you’re not supposed to socialize with the others. I kind of cut through that and did my own thing. I like music, so I chose to be part of the concert band. No one ever gave me any grief for it. I think that people respected me because I didn’t always go with the flow. I might have been expected, or people might have assumed I was going to go one way, but I could just as easily go the other. Just as I had to develop shooting and dribbling skills with my right hand, I felt it was important not to be one-dimensional in other areas of my life. I think being in a magnet school helped. For winning state championships in debate, other kids got nearly as much attention as the basketball players. This wasn’t a typical jockdominated place. Sure, basketball games were a big deal, but you were still expected to do your work in the classroom and participate in other activities.

  With concert band, we got to perform at football games—marching band wasn’t a big thing the way it was in some other parts of the state and country. We also traveled to various parts of the state to perform in concerts and competitions. I got to combine my favorite interests in 1991 when I was a sophomore and in my first year at Parkview High School (in Arkansas, junior high was seventh through ninth grades, and senior high school was tenth through twelfth). We went to Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas for a band competition just after the Christmas holidays. That meant that Coach Nolan Richardson and his team were in full swing. I was a huge college-basketball fan. Even though I idolized Magic Johnson and loved the Lakers, college ball was really my thing. I grew up idolizing guys from our local area who were great basketball players, and also guys in the NCAA whom I’d get a chance to see on Saturdays with the game(s) of the week on CBS television. If I wasn’t out doing yard work on a Saturday (fortunately basketball season usually started after the last leaf had been raked), I would come home from my practice or game and sit down in front of the TV to watch Georgetown and Villanova go at it. If I was lucky, I’d be able to watch a second or a third game. It was like the sun moving from east to west across the country. After a Big East or Southeastern Conference game, it was on to the Big 10 or the Big 12—Kansas versus Oklahoma State—and then out west to the Pacific-10 and UCLA against Stanford.

  Naturally, when I got onto the campus of the University of Arkansas that January weekend in 1991, I had to see if the U of A was playing. I was a huge Arkansas fan and by that age was dreaming of being able to play there. Nolan Richardson’s bunch were known for their fanatical devotion to a pressing man-to-man defense and an up-and-down-the-floor game called Forty Minutes of Hell. Somehow, a U of A student who somebody in the band knew got a student ID I could borrow to get into the game. I was almost out of breath from anticipation when I filed in along with thousands of other devoted Razorback fans. This was the last year that the team would be in the Southwest Conference. The following season they were going to join the more competitive Southeastern Conference.

  Interest in the Razorbacks that year was at a fever pitch—and that’s saying something because after Nolan Richardson’s style of play took hold on that program, the results were amazing and almost enough to make everyone forget about football. The previous year, they’d gone 25–7 overall and 13–3 in the conference. They’d lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament, but they were on a roll in the 1990–91 season. They’d eventually make it to the Final Four, losing in the national semifinal to a powerful Duke Devils team. I had no way of knowing that I was seeing a Final Four team that day, but the crowd was totally into it, and those Forty Minutes of Hell were devilish on my ears. One reason I wanted to go to the game so badly was because one of my favorite players, Lee Mayberry, was a starting guard. I idolized him and felt that we had a lot in common in our games. He wasn’t flashy and played with a quiet confidence, a humility I admired. He was also supertalented. After the game, I got a chance to meet him. He shook my hand, and I remember thinking, I’m never going to wash this hand again.

  I don’t remember how we did in that band competition. Eventually I gave up band to concentrate on basketball for my senior year. I wasn’t exactly crushed to give it up. My mom had gone out of her way to provide me with every possible opportunity to succeed in music. To help me catch up to some of my bandmates who had been playing for years before I began, she hired a private teacher for me to supplement my work at school. This private teacher had an honest—and I think too honest—conversation with me. He was critical of my embouchure, the position and formation of my lips. He told me that I’d never be a good trumpet player as a result. That hurt me. It wasn’t as if I thought I was the next incarnation of Miles Davis, but instead of offering me some corrective tips or drills, he just basically said, “You don’t have it.”

  I kind of understand that maybe it was his way to motivate me, to get me into an “I’ll show you you’re wrong about me” mode. That didn’t work. I knew even then that we all have to face harsh criticism in our lives. I knew that I’d only been playing the trumpet for a few years while some of my bandmates had been playing since they were young. Compared to my basketball skills, my musical ability was pretty low. I didn’t get angry, and I didn’t get resentful, but I did feel the sting of those remarks. I loved music and singing in the choir, and playing in the school band helped me to develop a more well-rounded version of myself. Maybe it was a good thing that he didn’t apply different standards to me and my ability on account of my being a basketball player or being relatively new to music. Maybe absolute standards exist in the music world, but instead of spurring me on, his words discouraged me.

  I didn’t have many of those kinds of experiences in school. I had several teachers whom I admired, and who I thought did an outstanding job. One thing that I’ve found about developing skills, especially early on, is that a little positive reinforcement goes a long way. I had a teacher in junior high school, Mr. Baker, who was influential in my development. He radiated such a positive energy and such a love of his subject matter that math became one of my favorites. I can now see why it was. I was always a pretty realistic kind of guy. In math, there were clean-cut answers. You were either right or wrong. There were no “yes, but . . .” responses as there were when I was in English class and someone offered up an opinion or explanation about a story we had read. That was one of the things I liked about basketball. You kept score. You knew who won or lost. Now that I think about it, that was probably one of the other reasons I don’t remember how we did in the band competition. I know that scores were given, but it wasn’t as if some electronic device was measuring the airwaves and determining that Parkview High School’s concert band hit 97 percent of its notes in tune / on key. That was better than the next school’s band, which achieved a score of 94 percent. Music didn’t work that way, and as much as I enjoyed playing it, and still enjoy listening to it, I’m not temperamentally suited for it.

  None of us are one-dimensional. Frequently, people want to know a lot about us professional athletes, and they judge us for things we do off the court as well as on the court. I’ll get into some of those issues later, but I hope that people know that I’m much more than a spin move and dribble drive to the basket.

  My Spanish instructor in high school, Señora Smith, was the very opposite of my private music teacher. I wasn’t the most brilliant student in her class. I was pretty good at studying vocabulary, but then we got into conjugating verbs beyond the present tense and the simple past tense into things like the past perfect and the perfect tenses. Even though I stumbled and got flustered when I couldn’t come up with the correct form of the verb, she never said, “You’ll never be any good at this.” I think she liked that I was generally quiet and respectful.

  Parkview was one of the better schools in Little Rock, but we had our share of knuckleheads—including me at times—who liked nothing better than to cut up in class. I sometimes felt bad for teachers like Señora Smith who had to deal with students acting out. No one was ever really
seriously out of control or violent, and I sometimes think that because she was so nice, students thought that they could take advantage of her. Because I wasn’t any trouble most of the time, she went out of her way to work with me so that I maintained a B average in her class. I wasn’t immune from schoolboy crushes, and Señora Smith’s being so nice to me turned my head a little bit. She wasn’t a young teacher fresh out of college, but her willingness to reach out to me had me feeling secretly affectionate toward her.

  She wasn’t the first female who caught my eye. Back in third grade, I was head over heels for a girl named Sharona. She had long, flowing hair and a really cute smile. I remember one day deciding that instead of admiring her from afar, I would take some action. (Had I told my dad, he would have been proud of me for being so assertive and not sitting back waiting for things to happen.) It took me a while because I was confused since I also had a crush on my third-grade teacher, Miss Leslie. Do you go with the veteran or give the young kid a shot? One of the eternal questions that NBA executives and coaches all have to deal with, and there I was in the third grade faced with this dilemma. After a few weeks of wondering about how Sharona felt about me, I had to do something. I wrote a little note asking, Do you like me? Please check one: yes no.

  I waited until Sharona went up to the pencil sharpener. Only two of us were allowed up there at any time, so I had to act quickly. I hopped out of my chair—all that basketball had given me a quick first step—and dashed up to the sharpener behind Sharona. I waited until she was done and was blowing the shavings off her pencil before I tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the note. She tucked it into her fist and went back to her seat. It took all the discipline I had to keep looking down at the pencil sharpener. I can still remember that engraved on the little dial that you turned depending upon the thickness of your pencil was the word Boston.

  I went back to my seat, and I’m happy to report that eventually I got the note back from Sharona and she had checked the yes box. I sat back feeling really happy with myself. Of course, years later when the social mores and methods of girls had advanced beyond the stage when they had those folded paper clackers (which looked like Venus flytraps) with which they interrogated us with questions and asked us for numbers so that they could peel back the folds of their paper monstrosities to reveal our fate, I would long for those simpler days when a simple yes or no could fill or empty my heart. It was one of those small things, and just as I would have to sharpen my skills on the court, I needed to figure out what to do off the court to keep me in the game. But the foundation was there for success in life, in love, and on the court. Work hard, develop your fundamentals, attack your weaknesses, and always do the right thing. I was fortunate to have parents and coaches who helped me to recognize what I needed to do to develop other parts of my personality and explore other areas of interest besides basketball. And if you ever make it to the big time, don’t buy a house with a lot of pine trees.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Knocking Them Down:

  Free Throws and Seizing Opportunities

  In the old days, sportswriters and announcers sometimes referred to it as the charity stripe. While I’m a great believer in giving back and helping out those in need, in some ways I never liked the basketball free throw line being referred to that way. Charity can sometimes mean a handout, being given something that you haven’t been able to attain for yourself, something that you didn’t work for. I can understand why sportscasters or sportswriters came up with that name for the free throw line. It’s a colorful bit of language, but inaccurate. I don’t think you’ll find a single guy in the NBA, NCAA, or even in high school who’s used the term. When it comes to free throws—or even better, call them foul shots—the inaccuracy of the term charity stripe is about the last thing you want associated with them.

  First, in almost all cases, except if the opposing team has been whistled for a technical foul and your team gets to choose who goes to the line, the player shooting free throws has been fouled. You’ve earned the right to get to the “charity stripe,” and if you’ve ever watched an NBA game, you know that sportscasters have also come up with the term hard foul. That’s a more accurate term than charity stripe, since many times, as a result of a hard foul, the fouled player falls to the hard court, is struck hard by an opponent, or runs into a hard body on the other team. I’m not alone in having gone to the free throw line after having been smacked across the bridge of the nose or the back of the head. I was not the first player, nor will I be the last, who went in among the so-called trees and crashed to the floor after having made contact with one of the stout limbs or immovable trunks of the largest members of that species.

  It’s hard to pull yourself together when you’ve had that kind of experience, but you have to. So, I don’t hold with the idea that a free throw is all that “free.” Most of the time you’ve earned your way to the line, and you have to use your shooting skills to make that free throw. Even though you get a “free” opportunity to shoot the ball, you still have to make that fifteen-foot shot (the distance from the free throw line to the plane of the backboard), and in the heat of the battle, especially in an up-and-down-the-court type of game, sinking that shot isn’t as easy as it looks. Even in a relatively “slow” half-court-type game, you’re still moving a lot, running through or around offensive screens, and your heart and respiration rates are climbing. In an up-tempo game, you’re doing a whole series of two-hundred-foot sprints. Gathering yourself and bringing your breathing under control isn’t all that easy.

  The only thing free about a foul shot is that you don’t have a defender guarding you, but that experience, standing alone with the ball in your hands and everyone watching you, is uniquely different, making it either a pleasure or a nightmare for some players. I’ve played with and against some of the greatest and some of the poorest free throw shooters in the game—John Stockton, Ray Allen, and Steve Nash are among the best in the history of the NBA. Shaquille O’Neal’s struggles at the line are legendary as well, but he wasn’t alone in clanging the ball off the rim or the backboard. Ben Wallace has the lowest free throw percentage (41.8%) among NBA players who have played at least five hundred games, and even greats such as Bill Russell (56%) and Wilt Chamberlain (51%) were well below what most people consider a good free throw percentage of 75 percent. Obviously, those last two guys made up for that deficiency in other ways and easily earned their way into the NBA’s Hall of Fame. I’m sure that Shaq will follow them into the hall as soon as he is eligible, and people will remember him more for other parts of his game than his misadventures at the free throw line.

  I think that part of the reason you see so many big men at the bottom of the all-time free throw percentage list is that these guys are so used to banging underneath and have had to develop a body suitable for that kind of pounding that a more fine-motor-skill activity such as shooting free throws is harder for them. Also, the taller you are, the longer your arms tend to be, and the lever you use to shoot with can be harder to control as a result. It doesn’t take much of a mechanical flaw to throw off a shot and make that sweet sound of a swish turn into a thudding clank. Despite his height and build, Karl Malone was one of the NBA’s greatest free throw shooters, leading the league in free throw percentage eight times in his career (five seasons in a row from 1988 to 1993) and sinking 9,787 of them. That leaves me about 8,134 shy of his mark as I write this.

  I’ve attempted just a little more than two thousand free throws in my years in the league, and I’ve heard both the swish and the clang, and let me tell you, it still really gets to me when I miss a free throw. It’s almost as if that sound of a miss, or someone shouting “Off!” at one of my errant attempts, is directly transmitted to my spinal column and I feel those vibrations coursing through my whole body. Other than the obvious—my competitive desire—the reason I feel that sensation so fully is that a free throw represents an opportunity—one that you either seize or let pass you by. In my life, I’ve tried to ta
ke advantage of every opportunity I’ve ever had, and I feel I’ve done a good job.

  Shooting free throws well is a matter of both mental and physical discipline and is one of the fundamentals that every NBA player works on. When we’re working our way up through the ranks from recreation leagues to school teams, to Amateur Athletic Union, to college ball, we probably put more of an emphasis on practicing foul shooting. I’ve seen and heard stories of guys who were really good free throw shooters working on them all the time and demanding as close to perfection from themselves as they could. Calvin Murphy was regarded as one of the greatest free throw shooters of all time. He set an NBA record by making 78 consecutive free throws in 1980 and 1981. That same year, he made an astounding 95.8 percent of his free throws (206 out of 215). He credited his years spent as a baton twirler with helping him become a Hall of Fame basketball player. His free throw record stood for twelve years, before Micheal Williams, guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves out of Baylor University, broke it. Williams’s streak lasted until the 1993–94 season when he finally missed one, ending his streak of 97 consecutive conversions. That kind of precision is pretty amazing.

  Williams practiced his free throws religiously, shooting hundreds at a time. He also played little mind games with himself to keep his focus on the task. If he missed one, he told himself that he had to make ten in a row to make up for his mistake. He made a science of free throw shooting and even studied professional golfers as they putted to see if he could learn something he could apply to his own game. Everybody knows that practice makes perfect, but few of us are really willing to put in the effort it takes to truly practice a skill and not just go through the motions. Today, I admire Jose Calderon and his amazing touch from the line. For the 2008–9 season he hit an astounding 151 out of 154 (98%) from the line.