Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  We’d been criticized all year and hung with the label of talented underachievers and immature guys in need of a gut check. L.A. was starved for a title. It had been a dozen years since the last one, and as a group we’d experienced our share of failure. We wanted to experience a kind of redemption together. As someone said, “Before there could be a celebration, there had to be a competition.” The Pacers gave us all we could handle, especially in the early going. We didn’t crumble. We’d been through so much that season, particularly in the play-offs when we won elimination games against Sacramento and Portland, that we knew we could pass the test.

  If the Pacers were going to push us, we’d respond. I could sense a difference in us in the second quarter. Robert Horry came over from the weak side to swat away a sure Jalen Rose layup. The ball ended up in my hands, and I took off down the court. Shaq, as he always did, was running hard downcourt. I found him with a lob pass and he put it in. That’s what I loved about the game, the uncertainty of it all. What looked to be a sure basket on one end turned into 2 points for us. That was my only assist of the game, but knowing that we had guys who would battle like that at both ends of the court gave me even more confidence. Though we ended the first half down by 3 and entered the fourth quarter down by 5, I sensed that we were in a good place mentally—in spite of Mark Jackson’s throwing up a midcourt prayer and having it answered at the end of the half.

  I think what separates a fan from a player is that sense that despite appearances, the game is under control. We were executing the way we wanted to, and though Kobe was having an off night shooting, he was getting good looks. We weren’t forcing anything, and Shaq was doing his thing. In the fourth quarter, when I found myself open at the top of the key for a three, I didn’t hesitate, I took it. A few minutes later, Rick Fox did the same, knocking down a huge three-pointer. Later when I watched a tape of the game, I heard the announcers talking about those unexpected contributions. I can understand classifying those efforts that way, but the truth is, I did expect those things of myself. It seemed as if my entire athletic career had been building toward moments like that—being in the game in the fourth quarter with the team down, knowing that we needed a spark. Sure, it wasn’t a buzzer beater, but it helped ignite our comeback.

  As you might expect, even though we took the lead in that fourth quarter, the Pacers weren’t going to just roll over and let us celebrate. With five minutes left in the game, Jalen Rose hit a three from the corner to tie the game at 103, capping a 7–0 run. We were being tested again, and not just Kobe and Shaq would have to contribute. It would have to be all of us. Robert Horry had 8 in the period, and Kobe and Shaq held fast.

  The ending was magical and abrupt. All of a sudden the game was over, the series was over, and the season was over. As overjoyed as I was and as surreal as it all was, when I did have a moment of clarity, my thoughts were about not having a practice the next day and no game to prepare for. It felt so strange after such a long odyssey. When the buzzer sounded, my joy was replaced for a few moments by a bit of empathy for the Pacers players. I’d been in their shoes before, not having lost in the finals, but having come up short nevertheless. I walked to their end of the court and shook the hand of everyone on their team I could. Then I sprinted to the far end of the court where Lakers family members were seated. My mom was there, and with aid of one of the security guards, I got off the ground high enough that I could wave to her. After that, I went into the locker room and joined A. C. Green for a brief but heartfelt prayer of thanks, a recognition that what we’d accomplished we’d not done alone. We also got to share our victory with the people of Los Angeles with a parade and a rally. I enjoyed those moments so much. I always knew that the vast majority of our fans couldn’t afford tickets to our home games, so being able to see them along the parade route and in the parking lot meant a lot to me. I thought I was happy until I saw some of these folks.

  It took weeks for the reality of it all to set in, but it would only do that in fits and starts. I took a few weeks off, then resumed working out in July. I had been experiencing some pain in my foot throughout most of the 1999–2000 season, and I thought that some off-season rest would help it. I’d had X-rays taken during the season, and only bone spurs showed up. Just about everybody in the league developed them to some degree. I kept playing through the pain with the help of cortisone shots. I basically sat for the last week of the regular season so that I could be ready for the play-offs. Phil, the team doctor, and the rest of the training and medical staff all agreed that was the best approach. The pain got so bad at one point in the Portland series that I sat on the bench and said a prayer asking that God help me find the strength to go on. He did, and I was glad for that. At the end of the season, we all went through physical exams, and to my pleasure and surprise, I now felt no pain at all. X-rays and a general examination couldn’t find anything, so I was cleared to do my thing in the off-season.

  I hit it especially hard that off-season, hoping that I would get a chance to play a more significant role in the team’s success the following year (I already told you what I said to Kevin Garnett that summer), and one day in September I went to the University of California at Los Angeles to play five-on-five with a group of other pros. When I made a move to the basket and planted to do a reverse layup, I felt that familiar pain in my foot. I wanted to keep going, but my body told me this was not the time. I called the team’s medical staff and they got my foot scanned. That CT scan revealed that I had a nondis-placement fracture of the navicular bone. In simple terms, I was going to need surgery, then be on crutches for fifteen weeks before I began full rehab. As a result, I was out for almost the entire 2000–2001 season.

  I’d gone from the high of a championship to being on the injured reserve list for almost the entire season. I was really down, and I hated not being able to play ball. On top of that, to see us struggling a bit that year in the regular season was hard. We never got on a tear the way we had the year before; our longest winning streak was only eight games, but we never lost more than two in a row. Whether it was the hangover from the championship season, or if we thought that the lessons our teacher had taught us no longer applied and we could do it on our own, I’m not sure. Winning fifty-six games is a good year in most everybody’s book, but all the “What’s Wrong with the Lakers?” stories gives you some idea of the kind of expectations we’d created for ourselves. We hadn’t made significant roster moves, but Glen Rice and A. C. Green were gone, and the chemistry just wasn’t there the way it had been.

  I decided that I couldn’t stay away from the game completely, so even when I was on crutches, I’d do some shooting drills, knowing that if I wanted to step up to the next level, I’d have to improve my outside shot. After the crutches went away and I was just wearing a protective boot and was unable to run, I still kept shooting, working to refine my release. Rehab was tough, but I was used to hard work, and I was determined to come back from the injury even stronger and more fit than I had been before going down with the fracture. All that shooting paid off when I came back. It’s a good thing too, because my first game back postsurgery, I should only have played twenty minutes at most. Unfortunately, Ron Harper and Tyronn Lue were both out with injuries. As a result, I started and played the bulk of the minutes. As I had so many times before, I took advantage of the opportunity, this time to the tune of 26 points, 6 assists, and 6 steals. Shaq made a joke that with all those 6s, I hadn’t achieved a triple double but a devil double. Phil caught me on the way off the floor and said to me in the tunnel, “Don’t act like you knew this was going to happen.” We both smiled and laughed. A winner’s reaction.

  What I knew from my reading of the Bible was that when we are down, that’s when His best work is done. That’s when we’re more receptive to His message and guidance. When I was really down about the injury, that’s when my faith really helped me. Anytime I had experienced failure, a similar thing had happened to me. Just like after that AAU championship game wh
en I didn’t play, I knew that I didn’t want to experience that kind of pain again, and I had asked God to help me so that I wouldn’t. That foot injury and that failure had made me even more humble. The injury especially reinforced the idea that I only had control of so much in my life. Later, when Tatum was diagnosed, I was able to draw on that experience. Yes, the injury and her illness were things I couldn’t control, but what I could do in the wake of them was definitely in my hands and God’s.

  The 2000–2001 season was like the previous season in reverse. We struggled a bit in the regular season, finishing with “only” fifty-six wins, but we got on a roll in the play-offs that was truly impressive. What was most gratifying was that we swept the first three series against teams we’d struggled with in the past—Portland, Sacramento, and San Antonio. Going 11–0 in the Western Conference play-offs sent a message to everyone: we were not going to be denied. A lot of times that season we could have caved in, but we demonstrated that when we really put our minds to it, when we let go of all the distractions, the injuries, the media calling us out, we could take care of business on the basketball court.

  Some of the pressure on us was self-imposed. We’d all grown up and some of us had even been in the league when the Chicago Bulls were thought of as a dynasty for winning six championships in eight years. We were also part of a proud and accomplished organization that had won multiple championships, and as we entered the new millennium, we were determined to be the next great dynasty. In the wake of our game-six victory over the Pacers, Shaq had announced our intention to be back and to win another. It was put-up-or-shut-up time, and we were as focused and determined a group as I’ve ever been a part of. So much was made of Shaq and Kobe and their divergent visions and off-season approaches. Shaq was a veteran coming off an NBA championship, a regular-season and play-off Most Valuable Player selection, and he was told to take it easy and let his body rest. Kobe, on the other hand, had ambitions beyond winning a championship. He didn’t let up for a minute after our 2000 victory, determined to become the best player in the league. At times the two of them seemed to be at odds with each other. Most of that was fueled by the media.

  As I saw it, we had two supremely talented players, one whose game focused on the patient execution of the half-court offense that allowed us to get the ball inside to him. The other was a more freelance-type player with an all-court game who thrived in the open court as well as in the half-court game. As we all grew up hearing, there is only one ball and it has to be shared. How that translates into who gets credit for our success is another matter.

  The situation seemed to come to head against Golden State in a regular-season game. Kobe scored 51 in the game, but he clearly thought that he could carry the team on his shoulders and was trying to do too much. When he shot an air ball on a three as time expired, Golden State won by 2. In interviews after the game, he talked about how much he had improved and how hard he had worked (which was true), and that he wasn’t going to level off his game and do what he’d done the previous year. Chemistry on a team is a delicate matter, and with the inclusion of new players (Horace Grant, Isaiah Ryder) and the loss of others (A. C. Green and Glenn Rice), it was a tough road in the regular season, especially with the added distraction of the Kobe-vs.-Shaq saga. We’d been successful the year before doing it one way, and now that this new way with Kobe wasn’t working out, everyone (including the rest of the team) focused on that issue instead of on what we could each do to improve as a team. We suffered more than a few embarrassing losses, and as Phil referred to it, the community of our team had broken down.

  When I came back after sixty games out, we seemed to settle in. I was given credit for being a steadying influence, but once again, the Lord moved in mysterious ways. In March, Kobe went down with a leg injury, and for the nine games that he was out, we had to figure out a way to win without him. We did. We returned to Shaq as the dominant presence on the floor, and from his position on the bench, Kobe noticed that we were playing as a team and winning. To his great credit, when he returned, he made a conscious decision to trust the rest of us and to become more of a playmaker. We won our last eight in the regular season before that 11-0 play-off run, so in total we won nineteen games in row.

  A lot of the reason for that success was our letting go of things and trusting that the ball would come back up to us. We had to let go of ego, let go of the distractions, let go of the heightened expectations, and just do what came naturally to us—winning. When we squared off against Portland in that first game of the play-offs, we faced another test. As the fourth quarter opened, we were only up by 2. Of course, everyone was thinking about the previous year’s game seven and our 15-point comeback. Thanks to Rick Fox and Brian Shaw hitting some key three-pointers, generating some turnovers, and playing with the kind of energy that characterized that series winner, we ran off 15 straight points to start that crucial quarter. We never looked back. We knew that we had the Blazers frustrated when in game two, they were whistled for five technical fouls and two players were ejected. We won every way possible, with Shaq going off, and in the Sacramento series when he was in foul trouble, Kobe took over, scoring 48 in game four of that sweep.

  Next up, we got the chance to erase the memory of being swept in 1999 by San Antonio in the last games ever played at the Forum. They had the league’s best record going into the play-offs, and they all felt as if our title the previous year had been tainted since their starter Tim Duncan had been injured. They’d won the title in 1999, so this was a matchup of the two previous champions. We’d been embarrassed in 1999, and none of us forgot what that had felt like. We opened the series in San Antonio, and Kobe scored an amazing 93 points in those two road wins. He scored in every conceivable way, and a few that those of us watching could barely believe. In game one, Kobe had the ball at the top of the key. He feinted right, then drove left. As San Antonio’s interior defense closed down on him, he stopped and lofted a high-arcing jumper. How he even got the shot off was amazing, but what had us all jumping up and down and shaking our heads in amazement was that when the ball bounced high off the front rim, Kobe didn’t give up on the play. He followed his shot, rising high above the rim to jam down his own miss. As Shaq said in the postgame press conference, he told Kobe that he was now his idol. Shaq went on to say that he thought that Kobe was the best player in the league.

  In game two, Tim Duncan and the Spurs and the thirty-six thousand fans in the Alamodome and Phil’s getting ejected for arguing calls all conspired to present us with our first real challenge of the play-offs. Shortly after Phil left the court, I had the ball on top. I saw an opening and drove the lane. I went up and tried to dunk the ball (I know, I can hear all my coaches asking me, “What is wrong with a simple layup?”), but banged it off the back of the rim. The loose ball was up for grabs, and Shaq fought off two Spurs to corral the rebound. He put up a ten-foot baby hook shot that was long. Shaq and Rick Fox battled for the rebound, with Rick crashing to the floor. Shaq scooped up the loose ball and slammed it home. A few possessions later, Kobe found me open in the right corner as he drove the lane. I got the pass and watched as Avery Johnson came out hard on me. With a quick ball fake, I had him in the air, and he went flying by into the Spurs’ bench. I set my feet and knocked down the three, capping a 9–2 run immediately following Phil’s departure.

  We kept the pressure on when we returned to Los Angeles after having taken two on the enemy’s home floor. Wining by 39 and by 29 in the next two games sent the message we’d hoped. The Spurs, not us, were pretenders to the throne. Some people have said that the stretch of basketball we played against the Spurs in that series is unmatched by any other Lakers team ever, including all the Showtime championship teams. I don’t know about that, but we had a lot of fun and executed about as well as we ever had. All that stood in the way of our back-to-back championships was Philadelphia and the league MVP Allen Iverson and their legendary coach, Larry Brown.

  We had a chance to be the first team
in NBA history to run the table in the play-offs, and L.A. was at a fever pitch expecting, if not demanding, that we sweep. At the beginning of game one, it looked as if that would be the case. We went on a 16–0 run to go up 18–5. We knew that the game was far from over, but the long ten-day layoff didn’t seem to be bothering us—yet. Iverson and the Sixers took over from that point, and though we tried to climb back into the game and did eventually tie it with five minutes to go, we lost 107–101 in overtime.

  In the second matchup, I had a much better game, scoring 14 points with 3 assists. We were only up 2 at the half, but surged ahead in the third quarter playing some of our best ball as we had in the first three rounds. We had to withstand a Sixers fourth-quarter run, and when I hit a three from the top of the key to finally put them away, we all felt that we were back in sync. The Sixers proved to be a tougher match for us than most people gave them credit for. With Shaq fouling out in game three, it took Kobe with an assist from Robert Horry’s clutch three-pointer from the corner with under a minute left to seal the deal for us. Going up two games to one meant that even if the Sixers won their next two at home, we’d be going back to L.A. to close out the series. We wouldn’t need to go back.

  When we finally put them away in game five, I felt a sense of accomplishment that was different from the first championship. As much as Kobe and Shaq contributed, everyone recognized the contributions of the supporting cast. It was also a vindication. For as much as we’d been through that season, we hadn’t broken. As much as people talked about the Shaq-vs.-Kobe battles, we all pulled together. What people didn’t see was the behind-the-scenes togetherness, the willingness and joy of going to battle for one another that made that season and that spectacular play-off run so fulfilling. Putting all of our individual needs and desires aside for the sake of the team was really what it was all about.