by Derek Fisher
That off-season, I did the usual thing and went for my physical. The foot felt fine, but the team did another CT scan knowing my history. I was so sure that nothing was wrong that I went to Las Vegas for a charity event. Mitch Kupchak called me the next day. I could hear something in his voice, then he delivered the bad news. Fracture. Same spot. Surgery. The good news was that we’d caught it right away, and a quicker turnaround time was expected. At best I would miss the season’s first few weeks. That was what I set in my mind as a goal. As I was lying in bed following that surgery on July 3, I got a phone call from Jerry West. He sounded more down than me. He told me that he was really sorry about the injury and that he was equally sorry that I wasn’t a free agent at that point in my career. I was confused by that at first, but he went on to say that I had done a lot to reshape the image of my value to a lot of teams. I had showed people what I could really do. As he put it, “Derek Fisher has arrived. Shaq did it. Kobe did it. And now you.” Those words meant so much to me. I couldn’t imagine another general manager telling one of his players that he wished that he were a free agent so that he could go out and get his full market value. And truthfully, it wasn’t really the dollar value, but that kind of respect and recognition that mattered to me. I don’t think the Lakers ever didn’t respect me, but I still desired to play an even more pivotal role in a team’s success.
Even when we won the championship the following season and I put up similar numbers in the seventy games I played after coming back from surgery, I still felt that way. I was still in that I’ll-show-you mode that I had been in for so long, but that was starting to get stale. I loved that we pulled off the three-peat, but in the wake of the celebrations, things were clearly not going to remain the same.
It would take a couple of years and the dismantling of the team with Shaq’s departure and Phil Jackson’s hiatus before I could make a move in the direction I wanted to go.
Losing in the play-offs following our three-peat was hurtful, but my last year with the Lakers prior to my reunion was especially difficult. With the arrival of Gary Payton, my role was clearly going to be reduced. I didn’t realize just how much. I went from starting every game the previous year to starting just three. My minutes were cut from thirty-five to just a little more than twenty. I can say this about that year. It was a learning experience. One thing I realized in seeing how people reacted to our loss was that everyone—Shaq, Kobe, Phil, and everyone else in the organization—had to continue to prove themselves all the time too. We live in a world and played in a profession in which what have you done for me lately is the norm. At times I got so wrapped up in trying to prove to other people what my value was that it became an end in itself and not a means to an end. The end was being satisfied with myself and understanding fully what my value was to myself, to my family, and those closest to me.
I love sports because you keep score and you can measure performance pretty easily with all kinds of statistics. But living your life by someone else’s measuring stick, no matter how objective or subjective it might be, eventually proves unfruitful. In my years in the league, I’ve finally come to understand more fully that the reward is in the effort. Do your job, do what’s expected of you, without expecting anything in return. Find the validation within yourself instead of seeking it from others. For so long before and with the Lakers I had put the game at the apex of my life along with faith and family. Something had to give, and in going somewhere else in the pursuit of what I thought I really wanted and would make a difference in my life, I ultimately realized the value of all my teammates and not just the ones out on the floor.
CHAPTER NINE
Staying Home:
Making Good Choices
One of the fundamental principles of playing good team defense is knowing when to stay home and when to leave your man to help a teammate whose man has either got around him or needs to be double-teamed. You never want to give an opposing player a clean look at the rim or a clear lane to the basket. In time, you develop a kind of sixth sense about what a player driving to the basket might do—pass off or take the shot. Understanding the opposing team’s offensive scheme and having good court vision (being able to see a play develop even before the opposition has fully executed the play) help enormously in developing this kind of extrasensory perception.
I sometimes wish that I had as refined an ability to see things developing off the court as I do on the court. Only sometimes. As I got older, I learned to like surprises, but my failure to see the big picture off the court has sometimes led to my hurting other people and being hurt myself. Writing this book has helped me in lots of ways to see patterns emerging and to better understand how that powerful hand of God has been at work in my life in ways that I could never have imagined at the time and am in awe of now.
For example, I made several decisions right when I joined the Lakers that, completely independently of one another, ultimately made all the difference in my life. I knew that adjusting to life in L.A. and in the NBA was going to require me to draw on resources that I thought I had but wasn’t certain were as refined as they needed to be. That’s why I asked my friend Clarence (we call him Chuckie and that’s how I’ll refer to him here) and my cousin Anthony to come and live with me in Los Angeles. I also mentioned that I moved into an apartment in the Marina City Club, which had two towers. I looked at units in both structures, but ultimately chose one on a high floor in the west tower. I liked the view of the city from that unit and that building.
All of that sounds pretty mundane, but, as a result of that decision, I met the person who came on board what I might once have characterized as “my” team, but who is in all things truly my partner in forming something bigger than each of us individually. I wasn’t the first among the three of us to meet Candace shortly after moving into the building. The strange thing is that Chuckie and Anthony met her at all. The Marina City Club wasn’t the most upscale address, but as far as rentals went, they were fairly pricey. As a result, and because of their location, they were mostly rented by whites. So when Candace noticed Anthony and Chuckie in the parking garage of the building, she said hello. She lived in the same tower as we did, one floor up from us in what were the penthouse apartments. Certain elevator banks served certain sections of the building, and since Candace lived in the same section as we did, she used the same elevator as us.
Most couples could probably look at all the choices they made that led to their eventually meeting, but in big cities such as L.A. and in areas such as the one we lived in, there seemed to be more to this than merely coincidence. I know about Hollywood and scripts, and this isn’t the kind of meet that you would expect to see in a romantic comedy. Chuckie and Anthony and Candace and one of her friends developed a friendship, mostly based on proximity, and they all hung out casually after a few more of those incidental bumpings into one another.
The first time I met Candace, she saw me in the parking garage and waved. Knowing that not that many African-Americans were in the building, I assumed that the woman who waved was Candace. I stopped walking as she drove by. She rolled her window down, and here’s how charming I am. I stood there a few feet away from the car and didn’t even bend down so I could see her face clearly as she sat behind the wheel. We both kind of felt that we knew each other since we had both heard about the other. Chuckie and Anthony had taken to inviting people up to our place (Chuckie had got a job at an athletic-footwear store and invited coworkers) to watch Lakers games on television. Obviously, I’d never been there for those things, but toward the end of the season, one of the parties ran late and a few people were still hanging out when I got there. My girlfriend was in town and had gone to the game, so a bunch of us were just hanging out for a while. Candace was just one among that crowd.
At the end of my rookie year, I realized that the long-distance thing just wasn’t happening for my college girlfriend and me. I was only twenty-two, I was living in L.A., and the single life was pretty appealing. I didn’t go out a
whole lot, but I did know that a lot of beautiful and interesting women were in L.A. I had spent every year of my life to that point in Little Rock, and here I was in a cosmopolitan city with women from all over the country and the world to meet, and I was feeling major guilt if I even talked to any of them. I was direct and honest, and even though it hurt her to hear it, I told her that I just wasn’t ready to settle down and be all serious in a relationship. Part of that was because I wanted to pursue other opportunities and part of it was the distraction. I felt bad because I cared about her, but I had to do what my heart told me to do.
After that, I started to hang out with Chuckie and Anthony and Candace and her friends. We would go out as a group of about ten people, and I’d usually arrange for a limousine so that we could go out and have a few drinks and not worry about anyone having to drive. Also, my face was starting to get known around town, and I could get them into clubs more easily if they were with me as we got out of the car together. Here’s how much of a player I am. This went on for about a year and a half. I noticed Candace and thought she was cute and interesting and fun, but I barely spoke to her during that time. One night toward the end of my second year in the league, the usual group was out at a club in L.A. We were all sitting around a large table. Candace was sitting pretty far away from me, and one of her friends was right next to me. The music was pumping and the lights were flashing, and I knew Candace couldn’t really see me and I knew she couldn’t hear me, so I said to her friend, “What’s her story?” Her girlfriend asked, “Who? Candace? Why? You like her?”
Here’s more evidence of how naive I was when it came to women. I told her girlfriend that yes I did, but I never expected her to go to Candace and tell her what I’d said. Later on we would both laugh about this and how it was almost as if I were back in third grade handing that “Do you like me? Yes or no?” note to the little girl in my class. Candace also told me that she didn’t believe her friend, but her girlfriend was like “What do you mean you don’t see it? Haven’t you noticed how he looks at you?”
After that, I started talking with Candace a bit more, trying to gauge her interest in me, buying her drinks, trying to impress her, but she seemed to just keep treating me as she had for all those months before. Friendly and polite and all that, but definitely not sending any kind of overpowering signals. I knew that Candace had a son from a previous relationship. I didn’t know all the details, but I knew his name was Marshall.
I started to pursue her a little more aggressively, at least for me, by buying roses from the flower girls at the club and asking them to deliver them to Candace without telling her whom they were from. Slick, right? She figured it out of course, and I was glad that she knew. One night I came up with another plan. I tracked down a flower girl and bought her entire supply of flowers. I asked the woman to deliver them three at a time at intervals all night until her supply was gone. That seemed to do the trick. To that point, the two of us had never spent any time alone one-on-one, and it took about another six months before she really was ready to trust me. She had a child and wasn’t into game playing, and she wanted to be sure that I was genuinely interested in a relationship. I was, and we started to date at the end of the season in 1998.
I was into Candace and getting to know her better, but that she had a son troubled me. I had nothing against Marshall, but all those old-fashioned things I’d been taught about marriage and children and all that made me hesitate somewhat. There were also practical considerations. She had a child and responsibilities to him, and that might sometimes get in the way of our being together. I don’t like that I thought that way back then, but it’s the truth. After a while, I had to get real with myself. I wouldn’t have been alive if my mom and dad had thought the same way that I did. I also knew a number of people, people whom I was close to, who had children outside of a marriage. If I was being so judgmental toward Candace, then what did that mean about what I thought of my sister, who had a baby right after high school? What about my good friend Corliss Williamson, who had a son while in college?
What ultimately made me decide that I was way off base was when I saw how judgmental I was being and how un-Christian my ideas were. Who was I to hold those kinds of beliefs? I was glad that I came to that reversal because Candace really was a great person, and she added so much to my life. She was raised in Los Angeles, and her parents split like mine, but she retained a great relationship with both of them. She was also a lot more worldly than I was. She laughed when I told her that to that point I had only been on public transportation once in my life. I couldn’t believe that she took a city bus to school. She’d been in L.A. through the Rodney King riots, had endured earthquakes, had traveled around the country with her family and independently, and not just to play in basketball games as I had. She’d been to museums, to dance performances, and the theater; she’d gone to college and lived on her own and had to budget money and pay bills and do all the things that made me realize that in a lot of ways I had been sheltered from the everyday reality of life that most people experienced.
She is almost two years older, but was far more mature than I was. Having responsibility for a child will do that to you. She knew that life was about more than playing a game and having fun and hanging out. Truth is, I didn’t. I also thought that at the age of twenty-four or twenty-five I had it all figured out, but I really didn’t. I wanted the responsibilities that come with being a man, but I wasn’t doing the work that was necessary to really say that I was a man in all facets of my life. I wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted to run around all night and chase and bed a different woman all the time. Those kinds of temptations are out there when you’re a young, fit guy making a lot of money and playing a sport. People assume a lot of guys gave in to all that temptation, and quite a few of them looked at Wilt Chamberlain and his claim regarding all the women he’d been with and thought, “I could do that.” I couldn’t. I was a serial-monogamy kind of guy, and just because I was, I sometimes thought I was ready for the commitment of marriage and family. Other times I thought that was the last thing I wanted at that point in my life. I also knew that the last thing I wanted to do was to get really, really serious with Candace and develop a close relationship with Marshall and then not be able to follow through and be a presence in his life for the long run. I also knew that I had responsibilities beyond Candace and Marshall to my family, including my daughter Chloe. Supporting financially, partly and in full, a number of people I really cared about was something I took seriously. I was happy and proud to be able to do it, but would getting married and having a family of my own interfere with my ability to do that?
A lot of those questions were running through my mind while I was dealing with all the ups and downs of my career. My relationship with Candace, if I were to create a line graph of it, had similar if not identical high and low points to those of my career. That was because I took my work home with me. I suffered with every loss and agonized over them, and every coach’s decision and injury and feeling that I wasn’t where I wanted to be in my career weighed so heavily on me. I wasn’t the best communicator, and when I knew that Candace was bearing the brunt of some of my disillusion or disappointment, instead of letting her in and allowing her to help me figure things out, I pushed her away. I didn’t like feeling that I was hurting someone or disappointing someone, so for the next few years Candace and I were very much an on-again, off-again couple.
I’m not proud that I didn’t adequately take into account what that must have done to her and to Marshall. I beat myself up plenty, but I didn’t want to fully face what I was doing to her and how I was hurting her. Sometimes the split lasted a few months, but during the 2004 season, it seemed as if the breakup would be permanent. I was at a crossroads in a lot of ways. My contract was up with the Lakers, and I was back in the free-agency world. The team was in turmoil, and it seemed as if everything was going in different directions. Shaq went to Miami, Coach Jackson went into hiatus, and the great run that we had wa
s clearly over. I figured it was best to clear out and pursue what I’d always wanted. Several teams expressed an interest in me, and a couple told me what I’d always wanted to hear: “You can be our guy here. We’ll put you at the point and let you run the team. You’ll be the guy to help us close out games.”
Ultimately, I decided that I would go to Golden State and accept the challenge of being a leader there. That almost didn’t happen. After all the upheaval of that summer, I was ready to sign and eliminate a few of the many unknowns in my life. When my agent called me to outline the details of their offer, I told him I was good to go. He let the ownership know that a deal was in place. A few hours after that, I got a voice-mail message from Kobe Bryant. He said that he wanted to talk to me and that he hoped that I would come back to the Lakers. I tried to call him back, but couldn’t reach him. He might have been able to persuade me to stay except for one thing. I’d given my word that I was going to the Bay Area to sign with Golden State. I couldn’t back out on that, and I didn’t.
It would be an understatement to say that things didn’t work out with the Warriors the way any of us hoped they would. For various reasons I started fewer than half the games the two seasons I was there. My numbers were decent and I averaged more points per game than I did in L.A., playing fewer minutes in some cases. It was good to be one of the offensive options, but something wasn’t right. I could tell from the start. I’d signed a big contract, I was making more money than ever, I was supposed to be in the position that I always wanted to be in, but I was really, really not happy. The old line about being careful what you wish for was ringing in my head. I felt empty in a way I hadn’t before in my adult life. What was the point of working so hard if I felt so unfulfilled?
