by Derek Fisher
While I didn’t really think of it that way back in the day, I was really preparing myself to be successful when I played in those imaginary games. That’s an important part of being successful at anything. Obviously, the more times you do something, even doing it mentally through visualization, the more you become comfortable at doing it, and the greater your chances to succeed. I can still remember a game from my junior year at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. We were playing Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas, at the Johnson Coliseum. The Bearkats weren’t in our conference, but any win was important, and as the clock wound down under ten seconds, the ball was in my hands. I figured that with good dribble penetration, I could either get up a shot, get fouled, or kick out. The defense converged on me, and I had no way to get the ball to anyone on the wing, so with just a few seconds left in the game, I pulled up for a short jumper. As soon as I left the floor, I knew I was going to get hammered, and sure enough, someone swatted my forearm. I could barely get the shot off, but it didn’t matter. The referee blew the whistle and I got sent to the line with just a fraction over a second left. We were down 69 to 67, and if I made the two shots, chances were really good that we’d go to overtime.
I was always a decent free throw shooter, hovering around the low seventies as a percentage, and stepping up to the line, I was confident. Shooting in those situations, it is impossible to tell yourself and to believe that these are just any old free throws. As a player, you’re always aware of the score and any other circumstances. Instead of that being a burden, I looked at it as an opportunity. I knew my team needed me to make those two foul shots, and I was glad to be in the position where everyone relied on me to do my job. But even though I knew that in a lot of ways these free throws were different, I couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary in my approach.
For years, I had been following the same pre-shot and shot-taking routine. After the foul is called, I’ll hang back from the line, at the top of the key, and wait for everyone to get set on either side of the lane or for any substitutions to be made and players to enter or exit. Once the referee has the ball in his hands and indicates by raising his hand that the game is going to resume, I step up to the line. Back then, most courts we played on were more or less permanent—they weren’t periodically taken up for concerts, ice hockey games, or other uses as in the major venues I play in today. On nearly every wood court I’ve ever played on, there’s something we refer to as the nail. In some cases, that nail is literally a metal fastener in the wood that fixes the court to the subflooring underneath it—whether that’s cement, another layer of wood, or some composite material. The nail is the head of that fastener or sometimes a painted mark on the floor that is lined up with the exact center of the basket. In other words, it is the center point of the court from sideline to sideline and exactly fifteen feet from the baseline. I always looked down to find the nail so that I could put my feet, shoulder width apart, equidistant from that center mark.
Once the official handed me the ball, I would take it, and after eyeing the rim, I would dribble the ball three times while looking down at the floor. While doing that, I would visualize the ball as it dropped through the hoop—not a movie of its flight through the air, but a snapshot of the final result. I would bend my knees slightly while rotating the ball in my hands until the tip of my index finger came in contact with the ball’s air hole. I like it so that the ball’s seams are perpendicular to the rim. With the fingers of my shooting hand comfortably fanned out, I would rise and flex my knees again with my guide hand on the side of the ball approximately in the center. After I’d exhale, I’d flex my knees and hips, trying to limit the amount of side-to-side motion, and raise my arms up into the shot. As much as possible, I’d try to limit the amount of motion in other parts of my arms except from the elbow down to my hand.
Of course, when I was shooting, I couldn’t think of all those fine points. Instead, I would let muscle memory take over completely, or I’d remind myself of one or at most two key points. After my having shot thousands and thousands of free throws, muscle memory has developed, but the key is that my muscles need to remember to do the proper things. I don’t know of too many NBA-caliber players who have had to have their stroke completely rebuilt once they got into high school or college, let alone the pros. I take a more or less textbook approach to foul shooting, but guys such as Reggie Miller and Peja Stojakovic have little quirks in their style that you won’t find in the textbook method. Despite those quirks, those two are great shooters, and the old cliché “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here. Guys develop habits, and it’s impossible for players to be mirror images of one another.
The key to any shot routine is that you repeat it as a way to eliminate thought. You want your body to take over to do what it knows best. By relying on the familiar and on past success, you eliminate negative thinking or distracting thoughts. You enter a weird mental state where you’re not really thinking but reacting. In that game against Sam Houston State, I was aware that my uncle, who lived relatively nearby in Waco, was at the game, but I was not consciously thinking about him. I was grateful that all the practice I’d been doing paid off and I made both shots to get the game into overtime. I was thrilled that my uncle had been there to see me come through in the clutch. I was gratified that I had come through when it really mattered. We went on to win the game, and that was the most special part of the whole experience.
Since then, I’ve drawn on those clutch free throw attempts over and over. Having that past success to recall and to rely on is enormously helpful. Not only have I sunk thousands of free throws in practice, but I’ve come through when it was really needed in game situations. In college, I made between 75 and 76 percent of my free throws. In my first year in the NBA, that fell to 66 percent, but it has climbed steadily since then, until in 2007–8 I shot the best I ever have from the line, making 88 percent of my shots. Seizing 22 percent more of the opportunities to score a point isn’t going to earn me headlines; free throw shooting is more noticeable when it’s done poorly than when it’s done well. Free throws aren’t nearly as exciting as a thunderous jam or a rainbow three from the corner being buried, but I still take some gratification at having improved that much over time.
One reason I became a better foul shooter was a change in my technique. I’d gotten better and better at foul shooting, but in my second season with the Golden State Warriors in 2005–6 I began shooting fouls in games using an adjustment I’d practiced during the off-season. During the 2004–5 season I’d made 86 percent of my foul shots. That was the highest in my career to then. That off-season, I began to experiment with moving just off center of the nail. For my whole basketball career, I’d centered my feet on either side of the nail, but something told me that I could get even better results with this change in my placement. I realized that if I moved a few inches to the right of the nail, so that my left foot was to the right of it, I would place my left elbow (my shooting hand) in line with the center of the basket. That made sense to me logically—aligning myself that way would put me in a position to shoot even straighter at the basket.
When I first started shooting that way, it felt a little awkward, but the results were good. I continued to work on it all that off-season, until even after having shot one way for my first ten years in the league, I was ready to switch. A lot of factors were responsible for my shooting three percentage points lower from the line that first year with my new method, but in the two seasons since then, my percentage has increased over the previous personal best.
Why didn’t I adapt the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality? I felt as if I’d done as much as I could to improve the other way, and as someone who is constantly trying to improve, I saw this as a viable opportunity to do so. I don’t think you should ever be content with how things are going, just as I don’t believe in change for the sake of change. I figured that if it wasn’t working for me as well as I wanted it to, I could always go back t
o shooting as I had before. I’m sure that the change was as much mental as it was physical. I had assessed my strengths and weaknesses as a foul shooter and come up with what I saw as a solution. I believed that it would make a difference, and it did. How much of that had to do with the change in the flight path of the ball, and how much of that had to do with my belief that I had found a better way, is not something that can be measured. That’s how it is in this game, in most games, and in many ways in all other aspects of life.
The important thing to remember is that I wasn’t satisfied even though I’d achieved the best results of my career. I still wanted to get better. I guess that’s just part of my nature to not be satisfied, but I think that most athletes and most successful people are that way.
I can remember that first year of the change facing the Detroit Pistons. I went to the line and made the first of two free throws. Rasheed Wallace, one of the more animated players in the game, looked at me with a startled expression on his face and said, “Fish, you always shoot your free throws that way?”
“No.” I gave him a quick explanation.
I missed the second shot, and as I headed back up court, Rasheed needled me, saying, “Back to the drawing board, professor.”
I framed this chapter around the idea of free throws and opportunity because I have to say, in looking back, if I can point to one thing as a reason for my success and longevity in the game, it’s that nearly every time when an opportunity presented itself, I maximized it. And if I didn’t, I looked back over the situation to learn why I had fallen short of my goal. To me, that’s the definition of success—maximizing opportunity. I think that it’s the rare person who doesn’t get opportunities in life. A lot of people complain about not getting them, but I think that most often the person does not recognize the opportunities that are presented. I’m more than sympathetic to people who are truly downtrodden and denied opportunity, but for the vast majority of us that isn’t the case. I’m sometimes troubled when I hear people say things like “It isn’t what you know, it’s who you know” or “The only way to get X [a job, a promotion, some tangible asset such as a house] is by being connected.” Being connected helps, but the reason that most people are connected somehow is because they took the opportunity to seek out other people. Those connections are rarely just handed out.
I sensed from the very beginning when I succeeded because of my physical attributes (size and handedness) that I could turn those advantages into something else. Quickly, once I advanced to higher levels, those physical gifts I had (and I realize that they aren’t the ones we typically associate with an NBA player) were no longer great advantages. As I progressed in the game, being left-handed wasn’t any real advantage for me, and other players were just as, if not more, physically strong as I was. But that early success gave me a quiet confidence. That I wasn’t the most skilled or physically gifted player on any of my teams made me hungry to prove to people that I was capable of playing the game and playing it well. I could also, briefly, operate in stealth mode. When I played with more physically imposing players or with guys whose reputations exceeded mine, I’d take advantage of having someone or even a whole team focusing on stopping those other guys. I could have looked at my reputation as not being as strong as a disadvantage and whined about lack of press or lack of respect, but I turned that into an advantage. Life is all in how you look at things, and developing that perspective of looking for opportunities to succeed and to make yourself more well-known is an important trait.
While it was important for me to have had early success and earned the praise of some of my coaches, having a father who didn’t lavish praise on me, and having parents who made certain that my hat size never got too big, were also advantages. I may not have known, but I had a fire in me that wanted to prove to people that even though it didn’t look as if I would grow to be six feet six or that I’d have 4.4 forty-yard dash or that I’d be able to grab a quarter off the top of the backboard, I did have something. Sportswriters and sports people in general sometimes refer to those things as “the intangibles,” and we have all kinds of clichés such as “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog that matters.” Call it good fortune, call it intuition, call it a knack, a talent, or whatever, but I have been able to turn opportunity into success.
Even when I made the transition from high school to college ball, I had my doubters. Including my first college coach, Jim Platt. Even though he’d recruited me, he still seemed to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out to lead his team. With all of the AAU ball and high school ball I’d been playing throughout my teens, I’d competed against the best players in the nation in my age group. I felt I could compete against any of them. Everyone said that when you went to the next level (from high school to the NCAA), everyone was going to be faster, stronger, and more skilled. I wasn’t intimidated by that possibility. I thought I’d done what I could to prepare myself to win the job as starting point guard. I also knew that I couldn’t rest on my accomplishments in high school. I’d been an Honorable Mention McDonald’s High School American, an AAU All-American, my high school team had won the state championship, my AAU team had won the national championship. Those team triumphs were most important. But I quickly realized none of that mattered. When I arrived in the summer to work out at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, Coach Platt told me immediately, “I can’t guarantee you any playing time. None at all. I just expect you to work hard and do the things you need to do.”
I had no idea if he gave that speech to every incoming freshman, but it sure made an impact on me. I didn’t expect to be handed anything, but I also didn’t expect to be told that I might not play at all. What the coach said wasn’t nearly as bad as the attitude with which he delivered those words. He seemed almost angry and a little bit dismissive, as if he couldn’t wait to get out of the room and move on to something else. I felt that I was just one more piece of paper on his desk that was linked to a lengthy to-do list. Now that he’d done what he needed to do, it was off to the shredder for me. I felt as if I should go to a nearby washroom and check my forehead for a giant check mark.
I wasn’t expecting him to roll out the red carpet for me. I was smart enough to know that coaches made all kinds of statements to high school kids that might not be true. During recruiting (more on that later) he’d never made it seem that he really wanted me to sign a letter of intent, that I figured in his plans for improving the team the next year. His assistants, Coach Finley and Coach White, were the ones who really pushed for him to offer me a scholarship. Every one of the starting five on my high school team earned a Division I scholarship—with guys going to such places as Florida State, Stanford, Oklahoma State, and Auburn. I knew that among us I’d gone to the smallest of the schools, but I didn’t think that meant I’d get the smallest amount of playing time. I’d had other schools interested in me, but I’d considered things carefully and decided UALR was the place to be. Had the coach changed his mind?
I had all summer to think about that. I enrolled in school early so that I could work out with the school’s strength-and-conditioning coach. One thing proved to be true about Division I ball—strength and conditioning workouts were a lot harder than what I’d experienced in high school. Parkview had one of the best strength training and conditioning programs of any high school, but that Arkansas, Little Rock, coach Ken Coggins put me through the workout of my life that first day—and all he was really doing was showing me each of the lifts I was going to have to do with free weights and what I would do on the various machines. All I can remember is feeling that I wanted to crawl out of that gym and drag my sorry butt to my car. I knew better than to let it show that I was hurting, so I casually strolled out. When I got to the car, I sat there for what seemed like twenty minutes. It felt as if someone had put a tourniquet around my triceps and biceps. Reaching for the steering wheel was sheer agony. The next few days were worse, but I persevered and actually looked forward to th
e workouts after a while.
I was also eager for the season to begin so that we could start practices in earnest. I found a group of guys to play with informally, but that was only making me hungrier to get out in front of the coaches and other players to really prove what I could do. Finally, in late November of 1992 we had a couple of exhibition games in anticipation of the season opener—a tournament at South West Missouri State University in Springfield. The Basketball Traveler’s Tip-off Tournament was our first real test of the season, and as predicted, Coach Platt had me sitting on the bench when the game began. During that tournament, in the first two games, our starting guard got into early foul trouble. The rotation had not been completely set, but coach waved me into the game.
I can’t say that I remember feeling any extra sense of pressure, but I must have known somewhere inside me that something was on the line other than just the game. When the whistle blew to stop play and I went into the game, I simply took a deep breath, said a quick prayer of thanks to God for this opportunity, then went into tunnel-vision mode. It’s hard to describe what that mode looks and sounds like. Basically I was aware of my environment but only fully aware of a small part of it—the ninety-four-by-fifty-foot court. I also operated within a limited mental space—I couldn’t consciously think, “Oh, this is an opportunity that I’ve worked so hard for. The coach hasn’t demonstrated a lot of faith in me. This is a make-or-break moment for me.” After having played the game for so many years, it was almost as if every cell in my body had that message encoded in it. I didn’t need to think through all those thoughts and their associated feelings. Instead, I just let the instrument that I’d worked so hard to refine—my body—take over and do its thing.
