Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  It seems kind of silly to me now, but back then I wasn’t about to break what seemed to me a tradition, an unspoken rule. The enemy was the enemy, and whether on the court or off, as long as at some point they wore a different uniform, you didn’t have anything to do with them. As a professional, it’s rare to play on the same team for your entire career, so you’re frequently going up against former teammates and sometimes guys you consider close friends. I don’t know too many guys at this level who aren’t able to separate their two lives—personal and professional. We don’t have to resort to what we did as kids and not speak to one another. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same competitive spirit, it just means that we’re now better able to compartmentalize. People ask me all the time what it’s like to face former teams or former teammates, and it really is true that we’re able to just flip a switch and go. It’s such a common part of our experience when you’ve been in the league awhile that you don’t even give it much thought. That doesn’t mean that you don’t get special satisfaction from beating a team that traded you, it just means that you can better keep things in perspective.

  That Corliss and I were welcomed on the Spirits (we’d eventually change our name to the Wings) was a good thing despite whatever hard feelings came before. The Wings were by far a better team than the Sixers. They had an aura about them that carried over onto the court. Success breeds success, and in our little world of AAU ball in Little Rock, being on the Wings was like being on the Lakers, Celtics, or any other team with a tradition of winning. Even though it seems like something that the media make up or that people wish were true, I think there is a lot to the notion of being on a team with a long tradition of success. I’ve heard New York Yankees talk about what it’s like to put on Yankee pinstripes or to set foot on the field where Gehrig, Ruth, and some of the other greats played. There is something special about looking up into the rafters and seeing all those championship banners hanging there. There is such a thing as a winning environment, and as players we do feel those effects. Just as my individual success helped me immeasurably and gave me something to draw on throughout the rest of my career, the same is true for team success. Maybe you weren’t there when Magic and Kareem won their championships, but you can still feel that success. It raises your level of play, and surrounding yourself with successful people is one of the crucial steps you need to take to achieve your own success. Just being around them and watching how they conduct themselves is an invaluable education. Seeing how they handle the up times and the down times is also important.

  I still do that. I still feel I have a lot to learn, and I look at guys like Tiger Woods to see how they conduct themselves. Roger Federer is someone I admire for how he plays his game and conducts himself. I wish that I could just stop my life sometimes so that I could study the men and women who’ve attained success but who also seem comfortable with who they are and where they’re at. They seem to be so in control, and I look at people like Oprah Winfrey or President Obama, and they exude this sense that they are exactly where they want to be in their life. I’d imagine that just by being around them some of what they do would have to rub off on you.

  During the 1999–2000 season with the Lakers, the place where we all wanted to be and where everyone else expected us to be was on court celebrating an NBA championship. That season was all about rebounding from the previous years of disappointment in the playoffs. With Phil Jackson and his staff coming to coach and manage our team, there was going to be a new way of doing things. Phil’s was the most successful coaching staff in basketball since the Lakers’ eighties teams coached by Pat Riley. They’d led Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Chicago Bulls to six NBA World Championships in the previous nine seasons.

  I recall stating to the L.A. media immediately after the hiring that Dr. Buss and the Lakers had just shifted the accountability for our success to the players. The whole world knew the pedigree of the coaching staff; they were the best in the business. Now we had no excuses. The players had to set up and get the job done and return the Lakers to NBA dominance. And that we did! It wasn’t easy. We initially struggled as a group to get the principles of the infamous triangle offense down. In practice and early in the preseason, we were bumping into one another as we tried to execute. The triangle offense is a system of ball and player movement that requires all five players to think as one unit. If one person is in the wrong place or not moving the ball to the proper place, the entire system breaks down. The first ten to fifteen games of the regular season we weren’t playing at a particularly high level, and since a 6-6 start to the season before had led to our coach’s being fired, we didn’t have much time before the media would start to give us a hard time.

  I didn’t know this coming in, but Phil likes to let his players think for themselves in a lot of situations out on the floor. Although we have an offensive and a defensive system that we’re trained to follow, he recognizes that things don’t always go according to plan, and you have to be able to read, adjust, and adapt to situations. That being said, Phil is the coach! I found that out the hard way in one of our early regular-season games in 1999–2000. We’d gotten off to a slow start against Portland and they’d jumped out to an early lead. Most coaches call time-outs if they don’t like the way their team is playing, and that’s what most players are accustomed to in the NBA, high school, and college. Our time-out wasn’t coming from the sideline as we fell behind 12–2, so I decided I’d “think for myself” and call a time-out. As we walked toward the bench, Phil was trying to figure out who’d called the time-out because he knew he hadn’t. Everyone else looked around, and I was the only person who knew the truth, so I said, “I called it.” Before I could completely finish my sentence, Phil stepped right up beside me and said with calm irritation in his voice, “Fish, don’t ever do that again.” Including that season, I’ve played almost six full NBA seasons, including play-offs, for Phil, and guess what, I’ve never done that again.

  As much as Lakers fans remember the thrill of that championship series, we almost didn’t get to that point. Sacramento took us to five games in the first round. We won the deciding fifth game, and the sense of accomplishment and relief was palpable in our locker room. In a true win-or-go-home game, we thrashed the Kings 113–86. We’d struggled in situations like that in the past, and I think that every team needs to face a stern test before they can win it all. Unfortunately, or maybe I should fortunately (for NBA fans), we would have to face that test one more time.

  Our Western Conference Finals against the Portland Trail Blazers is about the most dramatic experience I’ve had in a team rebounding from defeat and near-defeat. The previous two seasons, 1997–98 and 1998–99, we’d bounced Portland out of the play-offs in the first round. That season, they’d retooled a bit, just as we had, with some key players coming over—Scottie Pippen for them and Ron Harper for us. The way Shaquille O’Neal dominated in game one of the series, which we won 109–94, few would have believed that we’d end up in game seven fifteen days later. Shaq was a monster, scoring 41 points on 14-of-25 shooting and making 13 of 27 field goal attempts. That last number is important. It showed what Portland was going to do. Along with double- and sometimes triple-teaming Shaq, they were going to send him to the foul line with the “Hack-a-Shaq” strategy. One play that made all the highlight shows was Glen Rice passing the ball from the wing in to Kobe under the basket. With three Blazers surrounding him, he handed the ball off to Shaq, who nearly tore the backboard down with a dunk. If we could get the ball inside that easily, it looked as if the team some had said was the most talented in the league was going to be in big trouble. But we knew better than to write the Blazers off after only one game.

  Whether it was the physical toll that first game took on Shaq or something else, the double and triple teams seemed much more effective in game two. We lost home-court advantage in a 106–77 defeat, and though my minutes increased in the blowout, I was anything but happy. By game three it became clea
r what the Blazers were trying to do. If they could take Shaq out of the game by double- and triple-teaming him, they were daring someone else to step up and beat them. In game two, none of us had. Shaq’s 23 points still led the team, and Kobe Bryant’s 12 was the next highest total. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that we received a wake-up call in that game since we weren’t taking the Blazers lightly at all, but neither game had been close.

  We went up to Portland for game three. The three days in between games gave both teams some time to rest and to strategize, and it paid off in a classic battle. The game didn’t start out looking like a classic with Portland, energized by the home crowd, jumping out to a 15–2 lead. We were down only by 10 at halftime, thanks mostly to Kobe Bryant’s shooting.

  With Rasheed Wallace still hounding Shaq, and Pippen and others coming in to help on defending the big guy, Kobe stepped up and rebounded off his poor performance in game two to contribute 25 points and 7 assists. Kobe had only taken nine shots in each of the first two games, but he took charge in the first half of game three, scoring 18. At halftime, the coaches told Shaq to be more aggressive—he’d been passing out of the double team a lot—and he responded, scoring 13 in the third quarter. We couldn’t shake the Trail Blazers, and as the game wound down to the final few seconds, the score was tied at 91. Shaq and Kobe had essentially carried the scoring load for us throughout that game and the series, and everyone in the arena knew that one of them was going to take the last shot. That’s when veteran leadership took over.

  Ron Harper had been telling the other guys that he had been open in the corner most of the game. With Steve Smith sagging off him to help on penetration or on Shaq in the post, Ron was left wide open. As the shot clock wound down and we neared half a minute to play, Kobe stood at the top of the key with the ball in what appeared to be a kind of clear-out. He drove to the basket, Smith came over to help, and Kobe fired a pass to Harp. He was eighteen feet from the basket, essentially wide open, and he rose up and fired that sweet, no-nonsense jumper of his. I remember standing on the sideline watching that thing rise, and it seemed to just hang up there for a moment before it completed its flight and put us up by two with just under thirty seconds to play.

  Kobe proved that he was more than just an offensive force when he blocked Arvydas Sabonis’s driving shot just before the buzzer. That shot and that block seemed to break Portland’s back. We won games three and four to go up three games to one. Notable in game four was Shaq’s being perfect from the free throw line (9 for 9), seeming to negate whatever ambitions Portland had of Hacking their way to the finals. All we had to do was win one of the three remaining games to move on to the NBA Finals. Game five proved to be my most effective game. I hit a pair of threes and scored 10 points, but we couldn’t overcome Portland’s back-against-the-wall intensity in a 96–88 loss in front of our home crowd. We returned to Portland confident that with two games remaining, all we had to do was win one to close out the Blazers and advance. We had that confidence despite our having a 2-4 record in trying to close a series.

  Make that 2-5. Portland took advantage of some matchups and we had no answer for Bonzi Wells in the fourth quarter, and they beat us 103–93 to force a game seven back in L.A. We’d started the play-offs looking pretty invincible, but after our 2-0 start, we’d gone 8-6. We hadn’t lost three games in a row all year, and that was what it would take for Portland to win the series. Momentum was clearly on their side, and it carried through most of game seven.

  It’s strange to think that an entire season came down to the last ten minutes of that Western Conference Final game seven. As we would be reminded again and again in the off-season, we were on the verge of the greatest collapse in NBA play-off history, being 15 points down with ten minutes to play. Having just recently been on the other end of one of those kinds of defeats, I can understand what happened from Portland’s perspective. Missing 13 consecutive shots is nearly incomprehensible, but a lot of that had to do with the defensive intensity we brought to those final minutes. We played with an urgency that was never a panic. Like everyone in the arena that day, until Brian Shaw hit a three-pointer at the end of the third quarter, I was wondering if things were ever going to start to go our way. When he stepped up during that fourth-quarter rally and buried two more treys, I could almost see the Trail Blazers physically deflating. I sensed what they were thinking. They’d been doing a good job of holding Kobe and Shaq down to that point, and here comes this other guy putting it to us. Well, in my mind, that’s the way it should always be. That’s not to say that Kobe and Shaq didn’t contribute. With a little more than a minute and a half remaining, Shaq stepped to the foul line with the score tied.

  I’m sure you’ve seen it dozens of times. A team fights back to pull close or to tie, and they have expended so much energy that they just can’t go to the next step. Well, if there was any thought that that was going to happen to us, Shaq squashed it by sinking both of those foul shots to finally put us ahead 81–79. I could feel the crowd’s thunderous ovation rattling my rib cage after that, but less than a minute later, Kobe drove toward the basket and Portland’s interior defense collapsed around him and he sent a pass lofting toward the rim. Shaq grabbed the lob and set off some thunder of his own with a powerful jam that put us up by 6. Shaq ran back downcourt with his mouth open in amazement and his index fingers wagging. His expression encapsulated everything we were all feeling—jubilation, relief, astonishment, and to borrow a phrase, shock and awe. We missed a few free throws in that final minute that kept the game close, but won 89–84. We’d managed to overcome Portland’s 21–4 run, we’d managed to overcome the label of underachievers not capable of closing out a series, and we were back on track to being exactly where we wanted to be. We bounced back when it mattered most, and we did a lot of growing up. At various points throughout that series, it would have been easy for either team to give up, but that’s not what professionals and competitors do. You continue to go after it hard, and if you keep working and don’t let the negatives get in the way, ultimately you’re bound to be in possession of the ball and the win.

  Every year from the time I was ten to the time I was sixteen, I went to the AAU National Tournament. From Syracuse to San Antonio, we traveled the country, but we could never break through and win the championship until we finally did in San Antonio, earning the sixteen-and-under title. Playing at the national level was interesting and beneficial in a lot of ways. As the Wings earned a reputation as a strong team, we were able to pick up guys from other areas in the state who wanted to play with us. That was difficult to adjust to because that meant some of the guys you liked and had started out with were cut. The good thing was that we seemed to be getting better and better each year, particularly after my best friend Clarence Finley’s dad took over as head coach. As fifteen-year-olds, we lost in the finals to a team from Baltimore. We seemed to have a lot of trouble with teams from the East Coast urban areas. They played a different brand of basketball from what we were used to. We were as physical and played as hard, but their trash-talking and cursing was something we would never do. It seemed that for years we couldn’t get past one or another of those East Coast teams.

  I was a little disappointed in my play as well. I seemed to have plateaued both physically and with my skills. I was still playing a lot and doing fairly well, but when I looked around at my teammates and my opponents each year, the guys seemed to be getting more aggressive. My dad was an assistant coach, and he and Coach Finley kept trying to figure out what it would take to get us over the hump. In San Antonio, things just seemed to click for us. We ran through all the preliminary games easily. When we got into the late rounds and the championship rounds, it was a lot more difficult, but we rose to the occasion. Before the championship game, we were sitting in our locker room and Coach Finley said, “We’re going to make a change tonight. We think we match up better this way. Kenneth, you’re in for Derek.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. What was goi
ng on here? I’d been a key part of our success the whole season, gotten us to the championship game, and now I wasn’t starting? Coach Finley couldn’t even look at me, and Dad wasn’t in the room. Coach talked some more about our upcoming opponent, but all I could do was look at my hands. I did my best to just deal with it and told myself that I’d probably get in there at some point. I had to be ready. They’d see that they needed me, but as the game played out, I didn’t even touch the floor for the first time in I couldn’t even remember when. When the buzzer sounded and we were national champions at last, I had a mix of emotions. I was happy that we had won, and it was fun to run out on the court and be there for the trophy presentation and to receive our champions’ jackets, but a part of me thought I didn’t do anything to contribute. I’d been a starter all season, I’d been with the team for years, been a part of our gradual development, but I felt empty. Why, at the moment when we were all making that final push to get over the top, was I not asked to be a part of that effort?

  When we got back to Little Rock, I had to do a lot of soul-searching to sort things out. I never went to my dad or Coach Finley to ask why they had decided to make that switch to Kenneth. We’d picked up Kenneth the year before. He was a flashier player than I was, a little more athletic, quicker, and could definitely outjump me. I didn’t think that he ran the team as well as I did, didn’t understand how to play the game to the same degree that I did. I’d heard people comment about other players and how effortless they made the game look, but I never heard anyone say that about me. I was the grinder, the intense guy who looked to be working hard, so even if I performed at the same level as, say, someone like Kenneth, most people would think he was the better player. He was also far more assertive than I was.