Can I Keep My Jersey?

by Paul Shirley

  When what I thought to be a moderately successful summer league ended in late July, I returned to Kansas to consider my options. My home was the less-than-glamorous confines of my parents’ basement; I had moved home from college while I awaited the next step in my life. I worked out in Topeka and thought about my future. Keith told me that there were European teams interested. On the opposite end of the career-path spectrum, I had been accepted into the MBA program at the University of Kansas—my default option in case a life in professional basketball did not come calling.

  Just about the time I discovered that the old Nintendo stashed in the utility room was still functional, my life heated up. The Los Angeles Lakers invited me to an individual workout. I flew to LA. When I woke up on the morning of the workout, I was so nervous I could force nothing down my gullet but a piece of Marriott-served honeydew and one-quarter of a cinnamon roll. It proved to be enough food, though, as I became a workout god when I got to the Lakers’ practice facility. If it had been a job interview, the HR guy would have offered over his youngest daughter for abusive sex—I was that impressive. I made shot after shot and picked up exactly what they taught about the ephemeral triangle offense. I left the Healthsouth practice facility on Sepulveda feeling quite good about myself.

  When I got back to Kansas, I learned that my fantastic showing had caused the Lakers to…do absolutely nothing. No training camp invite had been proffered; in fact, the team, for all its on-site affection, seemed lukewarm about my basketball abilities. I was dismayed, mostly because my pre-workout anxiety had caused me to miss out on a free breakfast.

  Fortunately, my other half-assed suitor—the Cleveland Cavaliers—continued to lurk. The team invited me to training camp and, as September wound down, I resigned myself to a trip to Cleveland. I knew that there was very little chance I would make the team, as the Cavaliers had a nearly full roster, leaving little room for interlopers such as myself. Two nights before I was to depart, I got a call from Keith. He told me that the Cavaliers had de-invited me to training camp. He didn’t know why, he only knew that I was now without a basketball destination. I had turned down at least one basketball job in Europe and was getting antsy to begin my “career.” Losing out on my one training camp invite was not the rip-roaring start to the NBA career I had envisioned for myself. I decided to drown my sorrows in a trip, with my family, to my youngest brother’s flag football game. Debaucherous.

  When we got home, a message from Keith was waiting. My fortunes had reversed: the Lakers had called with an eleventh-hour training camp invitation. (Side note: shouldn’t the cliché involve the twelfth hour? The eleventh hour runs from ten to eleven, which makes it a lot less urgent and suspenseful and more just irrelevant.) The Lakers had called without any prodding and had inquired about my availability for their training camp. Because of the Cavaliers’ rejection, Keith was able to tell them that I was, in fact, free to come, and had been so for all of an hour and a half.

  I packed a bag and, once again, got really nervous. I was met at the Los Angeles airport by a limousine. The driver was a nice guy; he told me that he had read my name in the day’s transactions and showed me a copy of the Los Angeles Times sports section. Under “Transactions,” I found the following: “Los Angeles Lakers sign F Paul Shirley.” (F stands for forward.) Of course, my situation looked better to my driver than it did to me. My contract with the Lakers was valid only if I was on the team’s opening-day roster. Since the team was leaving for Hawaii—the location of training camp—the next day, my driver rushed me to the hospital for a physical. After an in-depth examination, I found myself in the team’s locker room, faced with a Lakers jersey with SHIRLEY sewn on the back. Even though it was only a seam ripper away from returning to its normal, uninteresting state, there was something special about the realization that I was the possessor of an official Los Angeles Lakers jersey with my name on it. (Of course, this was all sort of the opposite of the plan. In my childhood vision, the first and only NBA jersey I would ever don would be that of the Boston Celtics. But I wasn’t going to complain.)

  When the mild erection I was nursing subsided, I took note of my surroundings…and a bunch of very large humans who sort of looked like they wanted to kill me. The old version of me would have stood quietly in the corner of the locker room and waited for instructions. But the new edition—the one who had decided that he was going to try to enjoy basketball again—took over. I mustered my courage and walked up to the biggest of the bunch, the most famous active basketball player in the world, Shaquille O’Neal. I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi. My name is Paul Shirley.”

  My whole future seemed to hang in the balance.

  I waited.

  And then he said, with a smile, in that famous gravelly voice, “I know who you are.”

  And I nearly fell to the floor.

  But I didn’t. I said, “Nice to meet you.” And walked back to my locker. The enormousness of the exchange struck me immediately. Shaquille O’Neal, arguably one of the top five most recognizable humans on the planet, had just put me at ease. He didn’t have to. He could have said, “Hi, I’m Shaq,” and it would have sufficed. But he made me feel like I belonged. Maybe he followed college basketball so intently that he actually knew who I was, but I doubt it. It is possible that he had read my name in the transactions page. It could be that he just said it. Whichever it was, I was grateful.

  I lasted three weeks of training camp/preseason with the Lakers. (The term “training camp” is used to denote the time from the beginning of practice until the first regular season game.) Because the Lakers are, well, the Lakers, the team’s first two weeks of training camp were held in Hawaii. I was nearly as completely out of my comfort zone as was possible. I was staying alone in a hotel suite large enough to house my entire family. I rode on the daily bus to workouts with players who will someday be in the Hall of Fame…and their bodyguards.

  Kobe Bryant actually had bodyguards at training camp. (Note the plural.) His personnel would exit the hotel before him, with one man maintaining a lookout position from a balcony above. When he was safely stashed on the shuttle to practice, they would retire to a trailing car. If I had remained completely true to my new philosophy, I would have asked him, “Are you serious? You have multiple bodyguards? You really are one pretentious son of a bitch.” My reticence would come back to haunt me in practice one day, when Bryant blocked a poorly executed shot of mine and, in the process, knocked me to the floor. (Probably due to an uncoordinated recovery on my part, not because of a foul on his.) I found my temporary nemesis standing over me, legs straddling my midsection. He began venting his rage at the gall it had taken for me to challenge the area around the basket with my ill-conceived, pathetic attempt at a basketball shot. The sentence(s) he used included the following words: bitch, ever, don’t, weak, shit, bring, and in here. The order in which he used them remains unclear. I was completely taken aback. I was so confused that I froze. I had no idea why he felt so threatened that he was yelling at me, the white guy who would probably be the first player released. Given it to do over again, I’d have punched him, or at least kicked him in the testicles.

  In general, I was out of my element with the Lakers. Soon after we returned to the mainland, I was released. It didn’t come as much of a surprise. I had done nothing of note during training camp

  After my release, I found the Lakers’ equipment manager in his office. Still dazed by the team’s rejection, I asked him if I could take my jersey home with me. I assumed that my request was a mere formality; my surprise was probably obvious when he said, “No, we’re not a club that does that.” Shocked, I couldn’t even come up with the obvious response: “What the hell are you planning to do with a Los Angeles Lakers jersey with SHIRLEY stitched on the back? I don’t think it will bring much in the way of revenue.” Since I had no experience in the matter, I walked numbly out of his office and found my way back to the storage room that had served as the auxiliary locker room for two of my fellow r
ookies and me. I grabbed my backpack, surveyed the room’s cache of shoes, and took the first two pairs that caught my fancy. As retribution goes, it wasn’t much, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

  When I got back to Kansas, it took Keith very little time to parlay my brief stint in the Lakers’ camp into a European job. (Any contact with the NBA is like crack to European coaches. I think it helps with public relations to be able to add “former NBA player” to the back end of a player’s resume, even if it is only true by the loosest definition of what an NBA player is.) I left the United States on Halloween to join my new team in Athens, Greece.

  I had very little access to the Internet in my first weeks in Greece. Actually, access was available—I was just too cheap to buy it. In my defense, I had just graduated from college; ten dollars an hour for use of my hotel’s computer seemed like a steep price. (I was going to be cute and convert that to Greek drachmas, but I can’t remember the exchange rate. Opportunity lost.) But I needed to tell someone about the absurdities I was encountering on a daily basis. So I began writing about my experiences, sending my journals home whenever I felt flush enough to fork over some money to the girl at the front desk.

  Eventually, I moved to an apartment complete with a working Internet connection. I had found that I enjoyed the catharsis of writing about my adventures in Greece, and oddly enough, my friends and family enjoyed reading them. So I continued writing.

  After seven months in Greece, I left a beautiful three-bedroom apartment in one of the most chaotic cities in the world and returned to my parents’ basement in Kansas armed with the cynicism provided by a year of professional basketball. I had made a little money, so I could justify to myself the summer workouts with which I tortured myself.

  I was happy with my first year as a professional basketball player. But playing in Greece had not been my goal as a child. As the second fall of my professional career approached, I was determined to find a place in the NBA.

  What follows is the story of the next three years of my professional basketball career. It isn’t a reproduction of my journals verbatim. (That would have been a lazy move.) But it follows that format.

  At the time, I thought my year in Greece would be my strangest ever. In truth, it was the dullest I’ve had since I graduated from college. The miniature cycle of rejection and rejoicing I endured in year number one would be repeated over and over as my basketball career continued. However, the stakes rose as I got better and more well known. (“More” should be taken to mean “slightly more” or even “infinitesimally more.”)

  In the course of the three years chronicled here, I played for eight different professional teams. I went back to Europe—twice—and found myself in the minor leagues exactly two more times than I would have liked. (In a joke that is only funny to four-year-olds, I of course played for two minor leagues.) More important, I made it to the NBA. (Ruined that surprise.) And I figured out that I could play at that level. I even made a basket or two. But unfortunately, not too many more than that.

  Along the way, I learned what basketball could do for me, what it could do to me, and just how little control I had over which of those actually happened.

  And I learned that writing about it all seemed to help me understand it.

  I dislike confusion when I read. I think some writers strive for it. Since this is my book, I will try to avoid befuddling the reader. Thus, even though it makes me feel like the barker for a nineteenth-century production of King Lear, I will set the stage, as it were.

  We find our hero…

  Wait, that was terrible.

  My second year as a pro started in training camp with the Atlanta Hawks. I had a better chance with the Hawks than I’d had the year before with the Lakers. But I was by no means a shoo-in for a roster spot.

  Now let’s pick it up with me in Atlanta, as I wrote about it back then.

  But more clearly, and with editing.

  YEAR 1

  September 15

  My home here in Atlanta is a hotel connected to the CNN Center—the epicenter of the world of cable television. As such, one would think that I have a plethora of televisionary options to fill my non-basketballing time. Not so. I think I have two channels that are not somehow related to CNN. And I doubt that either of them is going to show the Kansas City Chiefs game that I am fixated on watching, if only because it would breathe some normalcy into my current existence.

  I’m here trying to make the Atlanta Hawks. My days are filled with basketball workouts, obsession about the repercussions of those workouts, and avoidance of the out-of-doors—strangely, it’s really hot in the South. My chances of success in this endeavor weren’t great to start with. (Chances of making the team, that is. I’m pretty good at staying inside.) However, I’d feel better about my odds of making the team if I had the use of all of my digits.

  I should explain.

  My brother Dan volunteered (was coerced) to take me to the Kansas City airport. As I robustly tossed my duffel bag into the trunk of his teal Grand Am, an as-yet-unidentified metal protrusion in that trunk nearly tore off the top of my right index finger. I said, “Darn it,” and went back inside to patch myself up before he drove me to the airport. Obviously, worse events could have befallen me—a car accident, a tornado, or a raging case of syphilis each would have caused me far more strife. Nonetheless, I could have done without an additional hurdle in an already uphill climb.

  My seemingly insignificant injury resulted in a condition wherein I now occasionally have no idea where a basketball will go when it leaves my hand. Which would have been fine had I not been bound for an NBA training camp. (Additionally, I am struggling to type the letters Y, U, H, J, N, and M. So perhaps I should amend the previous statement—stenographer’s boot camp would have been a challenge as well.)

  Most players in the NBA do not fight for their jobs each year. Generally, they have guaranteed contracts—often for multiple years. For one of those players, training camp is merely the season’s beginning. That player endures the twice-daily practices safe in the knowledge that he will be on the team for the entire year. Because the team has already committed to paying him a salary for the season, it would make no sense to release him. I have never been the player in the example.

  Most teams maintain one or two open roster spots and allow players like me, who will jump at the chance to make an NBA team, to fight among like-minded souls for the remaining slots. (Note: it is not an actual fight…although that would make camp more interesting. I envision gladiator-style arena battles for the final roster spot, audience participation, a vote at the end…it could work.) The team guarantees the combatants nothing more than a per diem and a fair shot. It is debatable how fair that shot really is, but at least the per diem isn’t bad—$95.

  The difficulty in wrangling even an unpaid NBA training camp invitation amazes me. Last year—my rookie season—I had to fly to Los Angeles for a two-day tryout with the Lakers before they would commit exactly zero dollars for my training camp services. This year, I needed to impress the Atlanta Hawks coaches in yet another tryout setting. To this end, I went early in the fall to a two-day workout with the Hawks in order to fight for a position as low man on the proverbial totem pole. While I was there I played well enough that the team invited me to training camp, starting October 1.

  Camp with the Hawks will be populated by several players in a like situation—guaranteed nothing and hoping to remain on the team through the madness that is two-a-days, preseason games and practices that seem—and might be—make-or-break. If I manage to survive the laid-back atmosphere and find a roster spot on the Atlanta Hawks when the first game of the actual season finally arrives, I will have accomplished the most outlandish goal I’ve ever had—to play in the NBA. Not that I’m taking this too seriously or anything.

  I spent the summer loosely affiliated with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Again. The NBA holds a brief summer league each year. Although summer league teams play under the banner of NBA teams, o
nly a few of the players on each squad wind up playing for the team in the winter. The summer league is a chance for a team’s personnel to get an early look at players they drafted, young players who may be in line for a longer contract, and jackasses like me who are hoping that someone watching might take a liking to what they see. I played quite well in the NBA’s summer league in Salt Lake City, but Cleveland wasn’t interested in paying me to play for them during the season. (Such is my assumption, anyway; I think I would have noticed the six-year contract if it had arrived in the mail.) I surprised the Cavaliers’ coaching staff by keeping pace with one of the team’s new toys—their first-round draft pick, Carlos Boozer, of Duke fame. As I displayed my basketball wares alongside fellow free agents, rookies, and near-rookies, it was apparent that I belonged on the court. But the team drafted Boozer and so has a vested interest in his future success. Consequently, he returned to Cleveland safe in the knowledge that he had a shiny two-year contract that would pay him roughly $1 million. I returned to Meriden, Kansas, safe in the knowledge that I had a lopsided bed in my parents’ basement and access to my old high school gym from ten to eleven every morning. I played far better this summer than last but—as seems to be the trend in my life—had nothing more to show for it.

  When I went to training camp with the Lakers last year, I thought there was a 5 percent chance that I would make the team—odds similar to the survival rate after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This year with the Hawks, that probability has improved to 20 percent. (Lymphoma.) Neither number is sufficient to warrant heavy action in Las Vegas, but it is encouraging that the trend is not the opposite one. (Source: my own warped view. I have no evidence to back up my statistical claims.)