The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  I would always try to get my mom to come to my varsity games, but she wasn’t having it. Often the JV and varsity games were back-to-back. I’d go from being the man in one game to warming the bench in the next one, and she couldn’t stand that. “Why do we have to stay for the varsity games, Andre? You ain’t playin’! You’re just sitting there.” Mom. “I’m not waiting around two hours just to watch you playing with a towel on the bench.”

  Playing on both teams created another complication. There was this rule in place that a kid could only play in three tournaments a year. But if you played on both teams, there were way more than three tournaments happening. You had the Freshman City Tournament, sophomore and junior tournaments. There were also Christmas and Thanksgiving tournaments. Altogether there could be as many as seven tournaments I was eligible for, which meant I had to make some tough choices.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to play in the varsity tournaments because those are the bigger deal. But Juice, the JV coach, was my man. He’d been looking out for me since I was a kid. It was a tough situation. Do you play varsity, where you could get your name up and maybe get some scarce minutes in front of scouts, or do you stay loyal to the coach who was loyal to you?

  One day I was talking to Lawrence Thomas about it, sort of complaining about how I wasn’t getting varsity minutes because Coach Patton didn’t think I was ready. Coach Thomas just looked at me.

  “Andre, I’ve been telling Patton to put you on all year! It’s Juice who keeps telling him you’re not ready! You should play, man—you been ready. Juice just doesn’t want you to start on varsity because he’s afraid he might lose you on JV.”

  I couldn’t believe it. My own coach had been holding me back so he could win. And it worked. We dominated. We lost only one game that year. But it really flipped the script for me. And it was not the last time this would happen. I would learn later that even at higher levels, coaches would lie to you and everyone else just to keep you where they needed you. That was when I started to see that just because a coach is nice to you doesn’t mean you can trust them to have your best interests at heart. At the end of the day, they’re only looking out for themselves. I never confronted him about that, but it taught me a new level of the game.

  During that year our team was invited to what’s called a shootout. It’s not officially a tournament, but rather a one-game showcase for scouts to see who the talent was. Teams were assembled of the best players from different regions. At that point our main man was Rich, but Illinois had a whole crop of talent who would play in college and the pros. Darius Miles, a senior out of East St. Louis, was maybe the most-talked-about player in the country.

  The point of the shootout was to showcase Rich McBride. But I was able to get a few minutes in the game. I was starting to understand that in games like this the main thing you wanted to do was not mess up on a big stage. Guard your man, grab rebounds, and try not to get beat too badly. My goals were modest. At the end of the game, we were early in an offensive possession. I had the ball, and while I was looking for someone to pass to, I realized that the lane in front of me was completely open. I guess the guy guarding me had gotten lost on a screen or something. I didn’t have time to think about it. I saw an open lane right to the rim and I went for it. All that high-jump work must have added up, because when I dunked, the entire gym felt it. It’s different to get a dunk in a high school game, because everyone there is a student and they’re looking for any reason to get hyped. But this was a professional-type event. There were guys in the stands wearing suits. And when I completed that dunk and heard, even as I ran back on defense, the sound of people still buzzing and tittering, I knew that I had done something. It didn’t feel like a big dunk to me, but it felt like a big dunk in the gym.

  Afterward, I was walking through the tunnel and passed Darius Miles, whose game was long finished. “Yo, nice dunk,” he said to me and kept on walking. I could barely believe it. “That was Darius Miles! And he liked my dunk!!!”

  Our varsity team that year went to sectionals (equivalent to second round in NCAA tourney) and lost. We were in a playoff game against Quincy High, a team about 100 miles due west from Springfield. About a day before the game, we learned that our big man, six-foot-six Montez Slater, had hurt his wrist in a pickup game. This was terrible news. Here we were making a push for a state title, and all of a sudden we were without a center. Coach Patton had to reorder the lineup, which meant that I was no longer going to spend the entire game on the bench. I was going to see my first significant varsity minutes, and it was going to be on the biggest stage I had been on yet.

  I tried not to be nervous, but I was. I kept reminding myself that this was what I’d been training for. I’d been good at every level, and Coach wouldn’t put me in if he didn’t think I was ready. To make matters worse, Quincy High was one of the most dominant programs in the country. It was ranked fourth in the nation in all-time high school victories and had not gone more than a few years without winning at least a regional title. Most of this had to do with the Douglas family, which was this insane collection of kids, nephews, and grandkids who all played basketball. There were like thirteen Douglases who played for Quincy over the years, including Bruce, who was the point guard on the 1981 national championship Quincy team and was named Mr. Basketball, and Dennis, who was an all-state forward. The one I had to guard in that game was Andy Douglas, a sharpshooter who already had like 100 threes in his high school career (which was a lot back then).

  Coach put me in early, and all I was thinking about was going out there to compete. Nothing fancy. But as the game wore on, it stopped feeling like I was in a big game and was more like I was just doing what I knew how to do. I made some decent plays. I got a few steals and defended my man as well as I could. Mostly I was looking not to score, but to direct traffic and set other guys up. Quincy was a good team. Well coached and very smart. But it occurred to me that we were too. At least, we would be if I had anything to say about it. I felt like it was my job to learn Quincy for the team and to get everyone up to speed as quickly as I could. If I noticed a certain player always went to his left, I was going to share that. If I saw that they were defending our pick-and-roll a certain way, I wanted to make sure our guys knew what to expect. The crowd was incredibly loud, and we could barely hear ourselves think, but I felt like it was my job to keep everyone calm and playing the way we knew how to play.

  Quincy was a better team than we were, and we lost that game. But it changed something in me. It was another point of proof that if you threw me into a situation, I knew enough about the game now to handle it. Maybe that was when I really started trusting myself. The very next day I went to a track meet and jumped six feet, six inches in the high jump. The previous year my highest mark was six feet, one inch. I don’t know what had changed. It seemed like nothing. But it seemed like everything.

  * * *

  —

  The following summer I played all the time in local high school summer leagues and tournaments. Two or three games a week. I was energized and confident. It was all coming together. Now I could catch lobs, posterize guys. It was a blur. But it was amazing.

  Unlike me, who was still basically a high school kid, Rich McBride was operating his career like a mini professional. He was playing with a different AAU team now, and he had basketball connections seemingly all over the state. Plus, the University of Illinois had been recruiting him since he was, like, twelve, so he knew a bunch of players and coaches in that program. The two of us borrowed a car and drove up to Champaign-Urbana to scrimmage with some guys from the university. I didn’t have any real plans or designs for my career out of this. I just thought it’d be cool to see how these guys play. The big name at Illinois basketball that year was Cory Bradford, a six-foot-three guard with a no-nonsense game who could score from anywhere. He was not flashy but he was nice. He could catch-and-shoot, pull up, get to the hole a little bit. He was the team
’s leading scorer with 494 points in his freshman year and led his team in three-pointers made each of the four years he played.

  Somehow in this pickup game, that’s the guy I ended up guarding. The Division I starter and leading scorer was going to be guarded by a high school junior. I was pretty much prepared to be toasted. My only hope was that he would maybe take it easy on me because I was a kid. But as the game went on, I kind of forgot who he was. Not disrespectfully, but because to me he seemed like just a good player. Not some kind of monster like he had been made out to be in my imagination. I really thought this was going to be child versus adult, but for the most part, I felt like I was guarding a regular player. I was even able to block a shot or two of his, which felt satisfying.

  “This dude ain’t that good,” I said to Rich on the way home. “You know what I mean? I mean, he was nice, but the difference between him offensively and me defensively wasn’t as big as I thought it would be.” I would probably never have thought about that game or trip again except for the fact that when I came home, I found out that somehow it had been written up in the paper! To this day I don’t know how it happened, but there it was: Andre Iguodala, Lanphier junior, locked up Cory Bradford in a scrimmage in Champaign. The fact that anyone cared surprised me even more than the fact that I held my own against a ranked Division I school’s leading scorer. It was the first inkling I had that people were maybe going to start paying attention to what I was doing.

  As silly as it seemed to me, that article changed things. My mom started to really see that this basketball thing was for real. My family began to see the big picture. They were much more willing to let me travel, put in extra time, and prioritize ball. And the timing couldn’t have been better, because Rich had been talking to his AAU coaches about me. They had seen me at a tournament and knew who I was, and soon I was invited to play with them in New York City. Mostly these were Chicago kids, so I felt pretty much like a country bumpkin. I was wide-eyed. Now that I fly practically every week and have traveled a bunch, played in London and China, hooped with men from the state of Georgia to the eastern European country of Georgia, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but for all of us on that team, the difference between Chicago and Springfield might as well have been the difference between Earth and Mars. To those guys, I was very much the outsider. Awkward and remote, self-conscious and foreign. I wasn’t up on the new slang, the new music that was happening for them. It was, to put it mildly, an uncomfortable process. They teased me the way any group of teenage boys from Chicago would tease a random kid from a small town. On top of that, this was a group of guys who all could hoop at a very high level. Some of these players were ranked top 10 nationwide. One guy went to Duke, another to Illinois. If I recall correctly, every player on that team eventually went to a Division I program.

  But the best part was seeing top players from all over the country in the flesh. There’s a scene in the movie White Men Can’t Jump where they arrive at a tournament and they’re sizing up all the competition. Well, this was exactly like that. Here were all the guys we had been reading about in magazines assembled in one place. Bracey Wright on the Texas squad. Dajuan Wagner, Kevin Tolbert. All these guys. I saw some white kid knocking down shots like he was buttering bread. I had never seen anything so smooth. “Who’s that?” I asked. Turns out it was JJ Reddick.

  And the competition was at an entirely new level. Guys were playing hard every single possession, and everything felt different. When you played a high school game, it felt like you were basically at home. Your mom and aunties and cousins would be in the crowd. Your teachers were there, as were your classmates. Of course you were trying to win and play hard, but the fact that you were in a high school gym with your whole community made everything a little softer. But here were all these kids from all over in New York City without their families. Everyone seemed so much older. Like we were a bunch of grizzled mercenaries. It was weird to see kids behaving like that, and it took some getting used to. They threw me in for like four to five minutes one game, and I got bumped, pushed around. Everything was just so much faster. At the beginning I was just trying to keep up. These guys weren’t just playing basketball. They were fighting for scholarships. In a sense they were fighting for their lives. And many of them were bigger, older, and more experienced than I was. That first day, my motto was what it always was: just don’t mess up.

  But by the second day, something dawned on me. Thinking about how I had played the day before, I realized that I hadn’t felt like myself. In the Quincy game there was a moment when I started to feel like myself. In the Illinois scrimmage, there was a moment when I started to feel like myself. What I mean is that there was a moment when my mind was completely on the game in front of me. Not on if I’m playing well, or if I’m good enough, or did Coach see that mistake. But simply on the game. But that wasn’t happening here. So why? Was it because I was trying not to mess up? Because I felt like my normal game wouldn’t be good enough for this court so I had to keep from playing my normal game? But was that right? I looked around the floor during warm-ups. The same kids were talking, shooting, stretching. But they no longer looked like mercenaries or little basketball soldiers. They looked like what they were—kids. With parents or grandmothers at home. Kids who really loved playing or were at least good enough at it that they had been flown out to New York City to do it. Which was the case with me. I had watched them all play yesterday, and there just wasn’t anyone here I felt like I should be afraid of. I mean, there were probably kids who were better than me at certain things. But they were all here because they were good enough. And wasn’t I here because I was good enough? So, I decided to tell myself that I belonged here. I don’t care if this kid is a McDonald’s All American. I don’t care if that kid was in Sports Illustrated. I can hoop with these guys because I can hoop with anyone.

  And as soon as the ball tipped off for our game, I felt, again, like myself. I don’t even remember if we won or lost. I just know that I was no longer afraid.

  That night me and a bunch of my teammates took a ferry to Times Square. It was early fall and the city was buzzing. We were drunk with excitement and with energy. I felt like there were a million lights in my body, just blinking and shining. I was young, I felt like a winner. It seemed the whole world was just there for us to take. I took my little money that my mom had given me and bought myself a fake Rolex and some fake gold chains. I knew they weren’t real, but I didn’t care. They were beautiful. I took those things with me back to Springfield, clutching them to my chest like gold medals.

  My senior year was a blur. I played, I studied, I worked. But everything was changing. Not just about basketball but about life. I had realized that there was a whole outside world and that I was going to go as far away as I possibly could. Basketball was transforming right in front of me. It was still a game, but it was becoming something else. A life. A dream. A business. A way forward. And soon, it would be a way to college.

  03

  When the Sun Is Too Hot

  There are moments where something in us changes, something happens that determines the direction of our lives. Sometimes we know it plainly at the time. The night I was drafted, for one. Hearing my name called, ninth overall, I knew that all the times I stayed up late watching film, missed parties, got up early to run or lift, all the times I pushed myself far beyond my threshold of pain to get stronger or faster, were about to pay off handsomely.

  But sometimes these moments are mundane and quiet. They are nothing special. You don’t know what they mean until years later. Like this one, from when I was a kid. Just a sophomore in college. All the way out in Arizona.

  I was standing awkwardly in the clubhouse of a luxury golf and country club. The room was packed with bodies. I was nineteen years old and sweating through my white polyester golf shirt. It had been an entirely exhausting day. First I had to make small talk in the clubhouse with the gaggle of university boosters who showed up f
or this event. I watched them downing drinks while I sipped on a soda water. I stood awkwardly between them trying to look relaxed in my six-foot-six frame while they joked about business deals and real estate situations and a host of other things I didn’t have any relationship to. Occasionally I’d look across the room, hoping to make fleeting eye contact with a teammate, another member of my Arizona Wildcats basketball squad who’d been dragged out for these awkward booster meet and greets. Maybe it would be Hassan Adams, the six-four guard out of Inglewood who looked like he was faring no better over by the bar, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, a forced smile pasted on his face. Hassan was trapped too. A skinny white guy with an alarmingly red face and a crown of hilariously perfect silver hair was talking excitedly to Hassan, probably offering up an opinion on how to best defend the UCLA backcourt or something. Hassan was nodding earnestly with his forehead wrinkled up in an extreme display of caring, like he was listening to the guy describing how his wife died or something.

  Meanwhile, in my conversation, a booster was asking me where I was from.

  “Oh. Um, Springfield, Illinois.”

  “Springfield! Birthplace of Lincoln!”

  Birthplace of Lincoln. Every time someone asked me where I was from, they would respond, “Birthplace of Lincoln!” as though that had something to do with him. What in the hell was I supposed to say to that? Yes, I was born in the same place as a guy who became president when I would have been a slave. Amazing coincidence, right? That’s something I thought about a lot actually: Why was it that white people always mentioned that I was born in the same city as Lincoln? I could never remember a black person bringing up a president who had been dead for almost 150 years right after asking me that question. Black people ask me different things. “What’s it like there? Is it wild? Do you have siblings? Who do they listen to out there?” Questions that have to do with my actual life. Not some random factoid about a state. But this, I would learn, is small talk, a hilarious phrase if you think about it.