Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  I can still remember sitting in our living room watching videos of my games with my dad. He’d point out my mistakes, and he seemed to always be saying, “You’ve got to be more aggressive. Don’t worry so much about making mistakes.” That last part was hard for me to hear, because the way my dad ran things around the house, if I did make a mistake, I got punished. It’s true that you can’t play the game looking back over your shoulder at the bench wondering what the coach’s reaction is going to be or if you’re going to be replaced. For a long time, even as a professional, I played it safe, hoping to avoid mistakes. Other guys seemed to have more of a “If I screw up, I screw up, so what?” kind of attitude. If the coach said something about what they’d done wrong, they’d listen, then let it go. I hated being told I’d made a mistake and it would drag me down, and I’m sure I let it show, and that made my coaches doubt my toughness.

  In junior high, my coach was Charlie Johnson. He instilled a lot of confidence in me because he praised me, he encouraged me. He didn’t tell me just about what I’d done wrong, but he’d say to me, “Shoot the ball. Do your thing.” I flourished under that kind of treatment. He also had a funny way of critiquing us or correcting us. He could turn it into a kind of joke that took some of the sting out of his remark without losing the point. In some ways, having my dad there as a coach and as someone who had to be critical of me wasn’t the best idea. I know now that when my dad corrected me, he wasn’t making a comment about me as a person. But when I was a kid and he said, “That was a bad play,” I heard, “You are a bad player.” I personalized it too much.

  There’s a fine line between being able to take responsibility for the things you do and taking things too personally. If someone criticized what I did, it was like they were criticizing me as a person. It’s taken me a long time to realize that you have to separate who you are from what you do—not completely, but enough that you don’t beat yourself up over mistakes you make.

  Along with all that soul-searching, I spent some serious time in the weight room and in the gym working on my physical conditioning. While not playing in that championship wasn’t the same as Michael Jordan’s being cut from the squad, it did do something similar for me. It rocked my world. I had never experienced anything like that before, and I didn’t like how it felt. I’d always played regularly, and I had to consider whether I’d done the one thing my father said that I should never do—become complacent. I didn’t think that I had, but I didn’t want anyone to even remotely consider that I had. It’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and I decided that I was going to have to really rededicate myself.

  Though it wasn’t my style, I could easily have gone into pity-party mode, gone into a shell, and shut everyone and everything out and just quit. I’d seen guys do that. It seemed as if every year of AAU ball and school ball some guys got cut or quit, and the squads just kept getting whittled down to fewer and fewer guys. If I felt as bad as I did about sitting out an entire game, then how bad would I feel if I had to sit out an entire season or had my career end? I was not going to let that happen. As angry and resentful as I was at Mr. Finley and possibly at my father for their decision, maybe I should have thanked them. Maybe they were just trying to light a fire under me and they took the opportunity to do it when I was most likely to notice the heat and the smell of my roasted flesh?

  Regardless of their intentions, it obviously had the desired effect. I did make a stronger commitment to the game than I ever had. What’s interesting to me is that it seemed as if everyone had a different vision of who I was. I think that while my dad saw me as a nonaggressive, too cautious player, he always saw that I had a lot of ability. If he didn’t, I don’t think he would have been so critical. Coach Finley shared that vision of my ability, but he took a different approach to getting me to be more aggressive. I saw myself as a talented player who really did have the drive and the desire that others thought I lacked, who were blinded by their preconceptions. Ultimately, whether I had it and they didn’t see it, or I didn’t have it (whatever that it might be), I had to get all the thems in the world to stop seeing what I lacked and focus on what I possessed. I think that for every young person, that struggle to merge your identity with the expectations and demands of peers, parents, and other adults is filled with ups and downs. Mine were taking place on the basketball court in a very public way. That’s continued to be true. Having some of your issues made public adds a dimension that most people don’t have to deal with.

  As I look back, I see definite parallels between what was going on in basketball and in my family life. The two were so intertwined that it was almost impossible to separate them. If I had been able to see the pattern, maybe I could have dealt better with both sides of it. Just as the Sixers/Spirits controversy forced me to choose sides, shortly after that my parents were splitting up. To their credit, neither of them ever put me in the position the Sixers coach did. Neither of them tried to align me with him or her, or to turn me against the other. They always put their children’s interests first. That didn’t mean that it hurt any less. Every kid wants his or her parents to be together, and even though my mom and dad went to all my games and showed collective support—even today they will sometimes attend a Lakers game together—I knew that the division existed and I know that it does now. I appreciate having them both around and active in my life.

  What I haven’t said so far about all this is that my mom was and is a remarkable and steady influence in my life. If I was anxious about pleasing my father and not making mistakes, my mom was the unconditionally devoted mother that we all dream of. She was at every game cheering me on. After every game she praised me or offered her counsel or a shoulder to cry on or was a sounding board. She clipped stories out of newspapers and put together scrapbooks of my exploits. She worked two jobs so that we could eat well and be appropriately and comfortably clothed. She did all the little things necessary to keep the household functioning and her kids on track. I might figuratively have been looking over my shoulder worrying about what my dad thought—good and bad—about how I was doing, but I never did that with my mother. I knew that she was in my corner always and forever. Maybe I didn’t express my appreciation and my love for her as openly as I might have, but beneath all my confusion and upset and worry, she was there as a calming influence, the steady heartbeat that underlay the frenetic pace of my adolescent uncertainty.

  If not for my father and the lessons he’d taught me about hard work and digging deep, I could easily have given up on basketball after the San Antonio benching. The thought crossed my mind briefly, but was gone in the next instant. One of the reasons for that was simple: I loved the game. If anything frustrated me, it was all the people who seemed to think that I was too complacent or not fiery enough on the court, who couldn’t see that I had a passion for basketball that transcended outward displays. To this day, I don’t think I can adequately articulate how I feel about the game and the joy that it brings me. In those rough patches, basketball also became my solace and the court a refuge where I didn’t have to think about my mom and dad, my hopes of playing in college, my worries about my half brother, Duane, or anything else. Sports teach you a lot about living in the moment. You have to be aware, almost subconsciously, of the score, the time on the clock, and your game strategy and how to execute it, but the rest is just existing in that flow and movement and the sheer pleasure that comes from having command over your body. Everything else in life can be swirling around you and feel as if it is totally out of your control, but on the court you can feel powerful and in command.

  Bouncing back from the disappointment of San Antonio was going to take some time, but being denied the pleasure of being out on the court and contributing made me come back. As much as I loved the game, being a fan and watching it didn’t feed my needs and desires in the same way that playing it did. Not even close. My mom and dad’s belief that action and activity were important had made an indelible impression on me. I didn’t
make any grand announcements or hold a press conference in our kitchen to tell everybody how I felt about the state final. I didn’t lay out a seven-point plan for how I was going to improve my game. I also decided that I wasn’t going to become the person whom they all seemed to want me to become—the rah-rah, overtly emotional, devil-may-care, attention-grabbing guy. That just wasn’t me, and it would have been wrong for me to fake it. I was going to do it on my terms and my way, based on the fundamentals that had been drilled into me from the time I was a young kid. I also realized that as much influence as my parents had on me, this was my life. I’d been the one who would stay at the gym until midnight shooting jumpers. My parents weren’t signing me up to go to clinics or summer camps where I could improve my skills or be exposed to scouts.

  If I was going to bounce back from disappointment, I was going to do it not to please anybody else but to do what I had always wanted to do.

  My next chance at redeeming myself wouldn’t come until the following season when I was a junior at Parkview. Coach Ripley had built a strong program at the school, and everyone pretty much knew where he stood. You paid your dues as a sophomore and as a junior, then when you were a senior, you got the bulk of your playing time. So, as a junior I played on the junior varsity and also on the varsity. We all respected Coach Johnson, and he did really nurture us. For example, when I was a sophomore, I had a great season, and when it came time for the state play-offs, he allowed me to dress with the varsity guys. Chances are I wouldn’t play a minute, but he thought it was important for the younger guys to experience and learn from that level of play. I’d spent so many years wanting to be a Parkview Patriot that the first time I got to dress with the varsity and go out onto the court and do our pregame ritual—a defensive slide drill with a chant letting everyone know that Parkview was in the house—the adrenaline was pumping so hard I felt I could have jumped right out of that gym.

  I’ve seen the movie Hoosiers, and even though Little Rock had a population of around 180,000, when it came to Parkview basketball games, it felt like the same small-town atmosphere of tiny Marion, Indiana. Even if you didn’t have kids at the school or on the team, the place to be on a Friday night was Parkview. And unlike a lot of schools, we didn’t have a tiny bandbox of a gymnasium. Our court had two levels of stands and seated about thirty-five hundred people. It could get loud in that joint and had a great atmosphere for high school basketball. With all that focus and attention on the game came high expectations. We seldom let anyone down.

  My junior season, we had some strong seniors, but almost everyone agreed that the crop of juniors I was in was a stronger group overall. Nikki Carruthers (who went to play at MIT), Dion Cross (basketball scholarship at Stanford), and I just had to be patient. Finishing third in the state our junior year sounds like a big accomplishment, and I suppose it was, but we had our eyes on a bigger prize for the next season—winning state. Before we could do that, we had one more thing to do—go back and win another national championship in AAU ball.

  It seems as if much of my life has gone in cycles, and as a teen I experienced some of the things I would later as a pro. After winning the national title the year before, we returned to the national championship tournament that year as the favorites to win it all. The only thing harder than winning that first championship is repeating. Coach Finley and my dad had guided us to the championship, but they were no longer the coaches. The sponsor of the team decided that he wanted to coach us. We didn’t have much say in any of that, and neither did my dad or Mr. Finley. This guy controlled the team and paid the bills, so he could do whatever he wanted. However, he didn’t have the same kind of relationship with us that Mr. Finley and my father did. I’d eaten dinner at the Finleys’ house probably three times a week since I was in the third grade. I respected him a lot. I didn’t like the decision he’d made the previous year, and coming from him, it hurt maybe more than it would have coming from somebody else, but I still respected and trusted him.

  Unfortunately, our new coach seemed to be more into the spectacle of the tournament and what it might mean for him than he was for us. In my mind, his biggest contribution was getting us brand-new warm-ups and uniforms. Why would a guy invest a lot of his time and money in running an AAU team? Most people do it because they love the game and they want to help out kids, and our “owner” was motivated by that. However, once we won the national title, I think he also saw this as an opportunity to get himself some attention and headlines. AAU ball is a launching pad for a lot of kids. As much as college coaches and the scouting agencies pay attention to the high school season, they pay even more attention to AAU ball in the summer. That’s when you see kids and their potential in a different light. We were playing the cream of the crop. Our AAU team was essentially an all-star team, a kind of All–Little Rock squad composed of some of the best players in the area and then the state. The competition was even more intense in AAU ball than it was in high school. And since we were playing against teams from all over the country, recruiters would naturally be all over the stands at these games.

  Everybody likes to be a part of something successful, and I’m sure a bit of ego was involved in the sponsor’s deciding to come down from the stands and be on the sidelines for that year. College coaches would have to go through him to gain access to us. I’m not accusing him of doing anything unethical, only noting it was good for his ego to have guys like Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, Bobby Knight of Indiana, John Chaney of Temple, or John Thompson of Georgetown talking to him.

  Pressure does funny things to people, and in our case it made the game less fun. I can’t say exactly why it happened, or how it happened, but we weren’t a bunch of kids playing the game because we loved it and had fun doing it at that national tournament. Instead, we became about as businesslike and serious as a tax audit. We were heading into our senior year of high school, and a lot of us wanted to be early “committers”—that is, guys who accepted a scholarship at an NCAA school before our senior season even started. Having that taken care of and out of the way would be one less thing to worry about and really enable you to enjoy that last year. I don’t know if it was the added pressure of the scouts/coaches in the crowd, wanting to impress them so that you could get that scholarship early—which also earned you some respect from your peers, because if you were good enough for a school to want you before you even played your senior season, you really were a sure thing—or if it was just other teams really gunning for us because we were the defending champs, but it was a struggle.

  In the semifinals, we played a team from Memphis featuring Tony Delk. He would go on to win Most Outstanding Player in leading Kentucky to the 1996 NCAA championship title. He was a combination point guard/shooting guard, but in the first half I didn’t guard him. He was relatively quiet while I scored 10 points, but in the second half he just exploded on us, scoring 30. Corliss was our best matchup against them, but he would have had to have played completely out of his mind to match Delk’s output. Unfortunately for us, because of our “owner’s” relative inexperience on the bench, we didn’t make any of the adjustments we needed to slow them down. Our coach seemed to be flustered and incapable of coming up with a plan, and we reflected his demeanor on the court. Things unraveled pretty quickly, and our dream of repeating as champions died. What also didn’t help was that we were seen as the favorites, so when the underdog Memphis team went on a roll, they had the crowd behind them. Even though it was a neutral-site game, you’d have thought we were playing right on Beale Street with Howlin’ Wolf and Junior Wells playing during the time-outs. We were shell-shocked, and when the buzzer sounded and we lost, I could only feel relief that the game was over. Only the next day did it sink in that we weren’t going to repeat as champions. I can say this: we weren’t overconfident, just underprepared. They were the better team on that occasion, but if my dad and Mr. Finley had still been coaching us, I don’t think that would have been the case—they knew how to prepare us for anything and frequently b
rought in adults to scrimmage against us. Not just guys off the street but former college players with real skills.

  So far, my plan at redemption wasn’t off to a great start. I did play significant minutes in all the games, not as many in the second half of the semifinal loss as I would have liked to, but with another season coming up in a few months—the tournament ended in mid-August and the basketball season officially began in November—I could concentrate on getting ready for what I expected to be a terrific senior year. I had played football up until I got into ninth grade, but then my dad said that he didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to play. Basketball was where it was at for me, and that fall of my senior year in particular I didn’t mind not being a part of the football program. Fall meant the homecoming game and the dance that went along with it. To me, the homecoming dance meant that the gym would be closed for a couple of days while it was decorated, the dance was held, and then the decorations came down.

  In other words, I wasn’t the most social of guys. During the season get-togethers were usually held after the games, supervised and unsupervised parties alike, but I never went. I decided though that since this was my senior year and I would be playing a lot, I would mend my ways and hang out a bit more. During preseason practice I noticed something that made me stop and think. When the first team was running plays, I was out there most but not all of the time. That was a departure from how coach usually did things. The guy who played behind me was the son of one of the assistant coaches, and he saw a lot more minutes with the starters than any of the other second-team players. I chalked it up to Coach Ripley’s having faith in me after I’d been in the program so long. No one could deny that I knew my responsibilities as a point guard or could question my basketball intellect. Why make me do all the repetitions when I had already demonstrated that I knew what was up?