By the time that game was done, I was a different player. I was in an entirely new world, but I knew I belonged there. Starting from that moment, my old world was completely over.
* * *
—
The biggest shock of going to Arizona was dealing with Coach Lute Olson. He had a way of being both remote and exacting—a tough combination. It seemed that I could never do anything right for him. And I mean little things. If my foot was at thirty degrees, he’d be yelling at me to make it thirty-five degrees. It was the kind of thing that drove me crazy. I learned basics and fundamentals at Arizona that I would not get anywhere else. And when I finally did get to the league, it was clear, at least to me, that my time in that program and under Coach Olson had prepared my mind for the game in a way that few other guys’ programs had. Lute Olson had a gift for taking raw guys, untrained talent, and turning them into professionals. But as an incoming freshman, I couldn’t see the big picture. As far as I could tell, he was just a cantankerous old dude who took unusual pleasure in irritating me.
I probably could have handled it better. If you’d asked me then, I would have said I was a player with no ego, but looking back I can see that much of what really got under my skin with Coach Olson was that he didn’t let me think I was good. And without knowing it, I had gotten used to thinking I was good. That’s really the definition of ego right there. I was nineteen years old and I had one. I remember one practice in particular when I was really just screwing around. I don’t know what was going on with me that day, but I was just kind of rolling my eyes whenever he spoke, and Coach was on me bad. It’s hard to know which came first. Was I screwing around because he was on my nerves, or was he on my nerves because I was screwing around? Either way, we were not getting along.
He pulled me over to talk to him, and it was the kindergarten balloon situation all over again. I knew that I was in the wrong somehow, but I didn’t like being controlled when I was in a certain mood. So I just kind of gave him the “whatever, man” treatment and finished the day without further incident.
After practice, an assistant pulled me aside. “Andre, you know we had scouts here today.”
“Yes, OK. Well, who were they here to see? Them two?” I said, gesturing to my teammates.
“What do you mean ‘who are they here to see?’ Dumbass, they were here to see you!”
What? This was insane to me. Why would NBA scouts be coming to see me?
I knew that I was a good all-around player, but I wasn’t even, in my opinion, the best on the team. That honor went to Salim Stoudamire.
Salim was a character and one of my favorite teammates of all time. He was from Portland, Oregon, and was both a Rastafarian and a vegetarian. Salim and I were on the same page as far as education and reading went. We were always exchanging books about black history, race, sociology, African nations. If it had to do with blackness and education, me and Salim were all about it.
We had incredible conversations late into the night about these topics, and it seemed we pushed each other to improve our thinking, our understanding of ourselves, and our pride. It was similar to the way Rich McBride and I had been about basketball, but with Salim it was about politics, revolution, spirituality, and consciousness.
With a guy like that on our team, we were hard to stop. We also had great players like Luke Walton, one of the most fundamentally sound and knowledgeable ball players I’ve ever known. Hassan Adams and Isaiah Fox, who were my dudes. I loved that team. We hung out together tough, especially because we were on a campus in Arizona that felt pretty far away from home for all of us.
We had a successful campaign in my freshman year, 2002. We went 28-4 in the regular season, won our conference, and made it to the Elite Eight in the NCAA tournament before falling to Kansas. And I felt like we were just getting started. We’d come back next year and go even deeper. Maybe all the way to a championship. It would be just that simple. But as it happened, things that seemed simple in my freshman year got very complicated in my sophomore year.
* * *
—
It was a process. Going from believing that I was only good enough to play in college to realizing that I actually had professional potential was a process. It took time. As crazy at it may seem now, it was not obvious to me. But throughout my time at Arizona, little moments began to happen, glimmers of hope, of the possibility of something greater for me.
By the time my sophomore year came, I thought I was playing decently. Not great, not transcendently, but decently. My focus was just to do as well as I possibly could. I considered it my job and responsibility to work as hard as I needed to work to satisfy the demands of being competitive in NCAA basketball. And I took that responsibility seriously. In my mind, however, it was not connected to fame and riches and success. I just wanted to be a really good college player, and to know that no one in any program anywhere would outwork, out-prepare, or out-execute me.
But then there were these internet blogs, some of which had mock drafts. “This is what the top of the board looks like if it starts today.” That kind of thing. NBA general managers talking off the record, scouts offering opinions.
This was not something I watched closely. So I was surprised when, early in my sophomore season, a teammate was looking at his laptop in the locker room one day after practice and called out to me.
“Yo, Dre, you on this draft.”
“What draft?”
He showed me. There I was. Some website had me going in the first round. It was odd. Kind of an out-of-body experience. My first thought was, Are they talking about another Andre Iguodala?
I shrugged it off. The internet, sports guys, media—they never know what they’re talking about. Just a lot of bullshit to get clicks.
A few days later I was coming out of the arena after a game. It was one of those cool Arizona evenings. The sun was just beginning to disappear. And there was a guy waiting for me. Kind of unassuming, mild-mannered. Black dude. A little square. Didn’t really make much of an impression except for the fact that he stopped me as soon as he saw me.
“Hey, Andre. How you doing?”
“Um. Fine . . .”
“Hey, I’m just letting you know who I am . . .” He told me his name and that he was a sports agent out of Chicago.
I froze. I didn’t quite know what the rules were, but I was worried that even standing next to this dude meant I was violating some type of NCAA something or other. It felt like a sting operation.
He saw my face and chuckled. “Why you looking at me like that, dawg? Don’t worry. I’m not giving you anything. Not breaking any rules. I’m just saying hello. I think you’re a good player.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to agents. I’m not trying to get in trouble.”
He was understanding. “No, of course. Don’t worry. We’re going to do everything the right way. I’m interested in you and I think you’re a good player.”
“Interested in me for what?”
We exchanged phone numbers and started to stay in touch. And I began to warm up to him. After games we would text. He’d tell me what to work on, what I was excelling at from his point of view.
During one of these conversations, he said something like, “The way you played tonight, that’s why teams like you.”
“I’m confused.”
“What are you confused about?”
“I mean . . . Coach has been telling me that I have to get much better. That I have to work on my game.”
“That’s because he doesn’t want you to leave, man. You don’t see that?”
I didn’t. I simply hadn’t thought of it that way. Here I was, just trying to please my coach and match, to the best of my ability, the standards he had set for me. And it never occurred to me that he might have an agenda that was completely self-serving. Even though it had happened before, on my JV squa
d, I still was surprised to have it happening at the college level. I shouldn’t have been. But I was. Apparently, I had a lot to learn. After that, everything changed. A problem began that would plague me for nine or ten years. Sleep deprivation. Insomnia.
It is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced the intensity of insomnia. It is like you are being tortured by time, by something that moves slowly and doesn’t care for you at all. You put your head on the pillow every night with the hope that if you somehow pretend that it’s all going to be OK, you can make it so. Maybe you even get so far as to close your eyes, let the silence fall over you, and drift into a kind of temporary sleep. But then an unwanted thought intrudes. A memory of a bad pass or a missed jumper. You start to think about what Coach would say. You start to remember tough moments from practice and wonder if they’ll hamper your career. You start thinking about what it will mean to your career. To your life. It feels like everything is hinging on doing everything right, and you feel like you’ll never be able to do everything right. And those thoughts, though fleeting, give you just enough adrenaline to shoot your eyes open and accelerate your heart.
And now you are awake. Staring the whole night in the eye. The clock ticking. You watch game film. Play video games and PS2. Try to get quiet enough inside to salvage what’s left of the night. But just as your fear is finally running out of fuel, the morning comes. And you know it’s too late now. You have to get it together, you have to get dressed. You have to face another day.
This began for me once the specter of going pro became a real thing. And it continued intermittently for nearly a decade. Maybe it began then because this was the precise moment that basketball went from being a game to being a business.
It seemed that time sped up after that. Now I had to make a decision about what to do. Should I declare? How do I handle the draft? What about grades? Should I finish college? What if I go to a bad team? What if the scouts are wrong and no one wants me? What if I play badly and lose my chance to go pro? It is one thing to play in order to meet your own expectations, or the expectations of your teammates or coach. But once it feels like every shot can make or break your career, and you’re just nineteen years old? That’s a different kind of pressure. Between that and Lute Olson, my confidence was getting messed up.
And I was starting to feel the difficulty of dealing with the press. In my sophomore year we made it to the Pac-10 tournament in Los Angeles. Tournaments are tricky for a player because everything is different. You’re not just coming from your dorm room or a hotel to play. It’s a little more chaotic. You are staying in a hotel, but you’re back and forth to the arena all different days, and your schedule keeps changing. If this team wins, go here at 11:00; but if this team wins, go there at 10:00. Meanwhile other games are going on all around you, press is there, fans and hangers-on are wandering around everywhere. The whole scene is just kind of crazy. So we were getting ready for a game, there were two more games ahead of us, and I realized that I had somehow forgotten my socks. With so much going on, I had just spaced. I left the locker room and hopped on the phone to my girlfriend to ask if she could go back to the hotel and swing by to give the socks to our equipment manager.
I made the call in this little corridor between the locker room and the court.
She came by with the socks and everything seemed fine. We ended up winning but I did not have my best game. I wasn’t too bent out of shape about it; it happens sometimes. I would get ’em next round. At least we advanced.
The very next day on the front page of the sports section there’s a photo of me talking on the phone with a caption implying that I was distracted and making personal phone calls seconds before taking to the court. Now, this was a good ninety minutes before our tip-off. And I was on the phone for all of forty-five seconds. But somehow the impression was made that I was on the phone only thinking about myself at the team’s most critical moment. What did people think I was doing? Making shoe deals? Agreeing to appear in a rap video? I was just trying to get some socks.
The next day Coach Olson was pissed and yelling at me. And that’s when it clicked. That photographer, those reporters, they were doing their jobs. They were just trying to make their money and I just happened to be standing in the right place to be a target. They’re literally looking for any story at all. And I unwittingly had given them one. And now Coach could use that against me. “See, he’s not ready!” Then the word gets out to teams. “Iguodala? Yeah, he’s a good player but is he mature enough? You heard he was on the phone distracted right before he played in the tournament, right?”
It was too much, and I started asking myself why. Why was I facing this pressure? What was the point? I was learning how to play, but I was also getting yelled at by my coach, low-key hounded by agents. I was starting to feel trapped, like other people owned me. Even though I was not big man on campus, and I wasn’t on the cover of every magazine, my sophomore year saw me spreading out a little bit. Gaining a little bit of a name. Students I didn’t know were beginning to come up to me. “Hey, Andre. Please stay a little longer.” At one point the athletic director, with whom I had never exchanged a word in my life, walked right up to me like we were best friends. “Hey, Andre. I hear you’re thinking about leaving,” he said. I didn’t understand how we suddenly got on a first-name basis.
After a while it starts to wear on you. It’s subtle but insulting. Kids on campus were wearing my number and the school was getting forty to fifty dollars for each jersey sold, but I still was playing in exchange for “tuition, room, and board.”
I began to think about what it all meant. One of my favorite things growing up was to look at old Fab Five tapes. People routinely underestimate how much impact those five young men had on the game of basketball, and how we, as young players, viewed ourselves within the system at large.
We felt like Juwan, Jalen, Chris, Jimmy, and Ray represented us. They represented the possibility of black people having a voice in college basketball: a billion-dollar market where our bodies were the labor but our personhoods were unwelcome. They were Blackness against the Machine. We loved their style, their swagger, and their phenomenal success. We loved how much certain people hated them, said they “didn’t play the right way” and were “disrespecting the game” by wearing black socks or baggy shorts, or having the nerve to believe in themselves. White fans at home might have bought that argument. But I can assure you that every broke and struggling black ball player from Tallahassee to New Haven, from Virginia Beach to Compton, saw that for what it really was. A lot of people simply don’t like it when black kids feel powerful. It threatens them. Once a black person exhibits that they have no need for white approval, then suddenly all manner of hate and insults and threats come in. It’s always masked by terms like “respect” and “tradition.” But the way we saw it was that it was about power. The power to achieve your maximum greatness on your own terms. The power that comes with not giving a fuck about white establishments.
The other piece of media I was obsessed with that year was the film Blue Chips. Sure it’s a little campy, but to be quite honest, Blue Chips was dope to me when I was nineteen years old. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a basketball movie starring Shaq, Penny Hardaway, and Nick Nolte. There’s also plenty of cameos by basketball legends like Larry Bird, Bobby Knight, Jerry Tarkanian, and Rick Pitino. And lots of drama. High-speed real-game sequences, moral dilemmas—what more could a nineteen-year-old obsessed with the game possibly ask for? The story revolves around a fictional college team in Los Angeles that is struggling. The coach, played by Nolte, is on the hot seat after his first losing season. Encouraged by a shady booster, and despite his own moral doubts, he pays three top high school prospects to commit to the following season. He ends up with the best freshman class in the country, but the guilt is too much for him. After their season-opening victory over Indiana (with actual footage of Bobby Knight on the sideline), Coach admits that he c
heated and quits his job. The way the movie is told, it’s all about Nick Nolte’s character. But the way I saw it, it’s about the recruits. And, besides Spike Lee’s He Got Game, it was the only film I had seen up until that point that truly showed how dirty the collegiate athletic business could be, and also the only one where anyone makes a real argument for why you should pay kids that play in college. A booster makes a point to the coach early in the film that colleges owe this money to kids. Sure, the moral of the story is that you should follow the rules. But I’ve noticed over the years that the people screaming the loudest about following the rules are always the people who benefit from them. I took another moral from the movie. I saw myself in these kids and I gained a greater understanding about the game.
That movie got me thinking about how much the programs were making. Not just in ticket sales, but in TV rights, jerseys, concessions. And that’s not even mentioning how much sports helps with enrollment, tuition, and branding. We were literally wearing the school’s logo on us every time we walked in front of a camera. We’re one step from being branded with the school name. I was also being asked to help Arizona with recruiting. I was responsible for showing guys around campus and convincing them that this was the right place to be. So in addition to playing for the school and working in the marketing department, I was on the admissions staff?
The Sixth Man Page 8