The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  I showed up for my first workout with Tim at 6:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. I was confident that I could do what needed doing and, even though 6:00 a.m. was a little on the early side, I arrived ready. Grover looked exactly how you would expect a trainer to look: like a fit corporate executive dressed to take his kids out on the weekend. Athletic clothes but not a hair out of place. His T-shirt was tucked into his shorts. Anytime a guy’s giving you drills and his T-shirt is tucked into his athletic shorts, he’s going to give you hell—you can count on it. I took a deep breath and dove in.

  The first drill seemed simple enough. Run around a half circle, pull up, shoot. That was it. And to this day I don’t know what it was—the hour of day, the pace he had me at, or the way it was designed—but literally halfway through the first drill, I honestly felt as though I could not continue. It was like I was five years old and trying to keep up with a grown man. My legs were dead, my arms were Jell-O. I have never before or since doubted my decision to go pro more than I did in that moment, in a cold Chicago gym at 6:15 a.m. I knew that no matter how much I wanted to quit that I could not. It was one of those defining moments in my life. Everything in my body told me that I could not do this. But everything in my will told me that I must do this. There was no choice. I would have to find it somewhere inside me.

  I tried to hide how much I was struggling, but Tim could tell right away.

  “Harder than it looks, huh?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” I could barely get out.

  He said nothing.

  I pushed and pushed until the drill was done. It seemed like it had been forever, but it had been less than five minutes. I put my hands on my knees and realized that sweat was already dripping down my face and back.

  “Good,” he said. “Now let’s get started.”

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know how I made it through that first day with Tim, but somewhere along the way, everything else disappeared. I mean, all other options evaporated. It was just me, my body, and my spirit in this gymnasium. And once I fully accepted the totality of that moment, I became capable. I didn’t have the words for it then, but it was one of the first times I truly learned about settling my mind in order to help my body. Making it through that first day felt like an unimaginable victory. And when the second day came, I walked into that gym without a shred of doubt.

  I lived in Chicago alone for all those weeks and my entire life was basketball. I was within walking distance of Tim Grover’s gym, so my world became very small. And I liked it. After feeling all the pressures of dealing with creepy agents, weird coaches, and dishonest press, there was a peacefulness to being so narrowly focused. Wake up. Walk. Train. Eat. Train. Walk. Eat. Sleep. I wish it could always be so simple.

  My first team workout was with the Chicago Bulls. They were looking at two players: me and a Sudanese kid out of Duke named Luol Deng. Deng was rangy and quick. Skinny but tough. The knock on a lot of players out of Africa at the time was that they were a little soft, a little fragile for the American game, but I didn’t see that at all with Deng.

  I thought my first workout went well. I was feeling energized, sharp. Satisfied. But back then they would make you take a psychological profile. I don’t know how medically accurate it was, but they seemed to take it seriously. It was multiple choice, and then a few short-answer character questions.

  After the workout I sat down in an office with the GM and a few others.

  “You tested pretty well, Andre, but we were wondering . . . what . . . uh . . . what makes you tick? What makes you go? What makes you mad?”

  “Um, well. I just like to play hard. I don’t really get . . . um, mad? I guess.”

  “So, you don’t get angry on the court?”

  “No. I just . . . I just play hard. I push myself and play to win. I mean, I guess if I’m losing, then I’m mad.”

  “Andre, have you ever smoked weed?”

  “No. Not at all.” Which was the truth.

  “You can tell us if you smoke weed, Andre. Everyone’s tried it at least once. We’ve all tried it. We know how it is.”

  “Yeah, no. I really don’t smoke weed. I have no idea at all about weed. No idea. If you put something in front of me I wouldn’t even begin to know what to do with it. I barely even know how to turn on a lighter.”

  “Andre, you can be honest with us. We understand that you might be nervous, but you don’t have to be. A lot of guys smoke. I mean, if you have a problem, we’d like to help with that, but you don’t have to hide it.”

  “I don’t smoke weed, man.”

  They switched tactics.

  “Listen. We think you’re a good player. We think you’re with it. But we wonder if . . . well, if you have enough grit.”

  “I mean . . . you just saw me work out. You just saw me bust my ass out there. You’ve seen all my tapes. So, I don’t really know what else I can tell you.”

  “OK, OK. Thanks, Andre.”

  That’s how it went. It was a very strange interaction and a little discouraging. I felt like they were looking for something very specific, and I simply wasn’t giving it to them.

  After I worked out for a few more teams, the Bulls called me back for a second look. I went alone. This time, there were no other players. It felt this time like they were trying to kill me. I was doing full-court stuff nonstop. Jumps, crawls, sprints. Suicides. They were trying to break me to see if I would quit. But I kept it together. Another good workout, another meeting.

  This time they got straight to the point.

  “We like you. We think you’re a good player. But we don’t know if you have enough . . . grit. We need to see, basically, if you have some . . . killer in you.”

  “What . . . do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve got great grades in school. You did your homework, and we looked at your background in high school. You were an awesome student. If you were my son, I would think I was the perfect dad. I would be an unbelievably happy father. I did my job. But this is the NBA, and it’s like you kill or be killed. We want to know if you’re a killer out there.”

  How exactly are you supposed to prove to a roomful of white men that you have some “killer” in you? Grab a knife and start shanking people in the office?

  “Yeah, I don’t know. I let my play do the talking.”

  In the end they went with Luol Deng and a point guard out of Mount Vernon, New York, named Ben Gordon, both of whom were good players and both of whom had very nice careers.

  But another team would find exactly what they were looking for in me. And the next eight years of my life would be spent in Philadelphia.

  * * *

  —

  It all started well enough. When I met with the 76ers team before the draft, it was as easy as it could be. It helped that they were drafting relatively late, at the number nine spot, so they weren’t even sure if they would get me. So they spoke with me candidly. “If you’re still there,” they said, “we’re taking you.” It was straightforward. My meeting with them didn’t feel like an interrogation, possibly because they weren’t sure they’d even have a shot at me. It was very basic: here’s our scheme, here’s what we’d want you to do, and hopefully we’ll see you.

  This was good. It meant that I would not arrive in Philadelphia with a lot of pressure. When you go high in the draft, you get a lot of team-savior expectations placed on you right out of the gate. You’re going to a bad team. You’re the big star. You’re supposed to come out on the first night and single-handedly change the fortunes of an entire geographical region. This is hard for players, and it’s not great for teams either. Picking first or second in the lottery can make a front office go haywire. Now they have to analyze every single thing about a player. Psychology, background, etc. When a front office is picking high, they really have to get it right, otherwise fans turn on them, owners turn on
them, and they could be out of a job. High draft picks are a lot of pressure. But the 76ers were picking ninth, so they could afford to just draft for the best talent. If it didn’t work out, and they had to trade the player or something, no one was going to storm the office with pitchforks.

  But there were warning signs. One of my closest friends was from Philly. And once I got drafted, he told me, “Yo, Philly’s kind of a different type of place. You know, the media’s kind of crazy a little bit. They can be a little rough.” I heard him, but I can’t say it really landed for me. I had gone to school in Arizona, where the press is more or less on your side. In high school I hardly saw any critical press coverage at all. I could hear his words, but it would be a while before I knew what he really meant.

  You would think that draft night is something you’d never forget as long as you live, but the reality is that it’s such a circus that you don’t really fully understand what’s happening. It’s a blur in my memory. There is such an unusual feeling of fear and excitement. I was trying to keep it together, because the reality is that none of it made sense to me. Here I was at Madison Square Garden, twenty years old, just a handful of weeks off a college campus, months away from thinking that I was going to play college ball for four years. It was a lot. I could feel my hands tingling, my body stiff. I tried to eat but the food tasted like cardboard.

  I was clearly going to get drafted, so why the fear? It’s just butterflies brought on by the grandeur of the moment, the production of it. There are a million assistants and network people and NBA officials running around, tech crews and caterers. There are families and friends, loved ones and little brothers and sisters, and everything seems to be happening all at once. You’re waiting in a room with all these other guys, and it can be uncomfortable for some people.

  Eventually we figured out that the camera comes toward your table, and that’s how you know you’re getting picked. There was a moment when I saw them walking toward me, and I thought this was going to be it. I sat up straight, adjusted my tie, and prepared myself to meet my future. But I was mistaken. They were coming to talk to the guy whose table was next to mine: Rafael Araujo out of Brigham Young.

  But a few minutes later they came for me. I was led away from the waiting area and to the side of the stage. From the wings I could see how many people were in the audience. It was overwhelming. And then I heard those words, the ones you dream of for your entire life. “With the ninth pick in the NBA draft, the Philadelphia 76ers select . . . Andre Iguodala, University of Arizona.”

  I walked onto the stage and was blinded by a rash of cameras. I shook David Stern’s hand and received my 76ers hat. My life changed instantly. I really mean it. I was whisked off right away to do a press blitz that lasted nearly two hours. I didn’t get to see my family or my friends. Suddenly there’s this entire world set up, all these reporters and fans and officials. I went from not being a part of something to instantly being at the dead center of something very huge, an entire organization with a staff and a history. I went from being my own to belonging to an entire city. The next day, they sent me to Philadelphia to do press there, and the first interview I did, I was chewing gum during it. It had never even occurred to me not to do that until Lester Conner, one of the assistant coaches, pulled me aside and told me not to. I realized that I had a lot to learn about the press.

  Despite this hoopla, I didn’t expect to mean a whole lot to the fans in Philadelphia. My vision for myself was never to be the face of the franchise; it was just to be a nice piece for a team that wanted to contend. And I expected that because the Sixers had a player named Allen Iverson. It’s true that the Sixers and Allen, specifically, weren’t coming off a great year, but he was still the man in that town. He had the franchise on his back, and as I would learn later, he was expected to carry the success or failure of that team all on his shoulders. I wasn’t even expected to start. They already had Glenn Robinson installed as the small forward, and he was coming off a good season.

  Pressure was also low for me because of a general East Coast bias. Most national sports media are based on the East Coast, so it’s easier for them to follow East Coast players. Out west, we might be tipping off a college game at 7:00 p.m., while it’s already 10:00 on the East Coast. These sportswriters are half asleep by then—they’re not staying up till 1:00 a.m. to watch you play. You hear a lot about the ACC, the Big East and Big 10 Conferences, so out west you’re kind of under the radar. Nobody in New York was checking for a player in Tucson, Arizona. Basketball people knew who I was, but for the average fan, Andre Iguodala was not a household name. This was a good thing. No mythology around me, no expectations.

  With this in mind, I arrived at training camp in North Carolina. We were working out at Cameron Indoor Stadium on the Duke University campus. Being back in a college gym helped me feel even more at home, and I knew what to do. Play hard, play defense, and try to relax. I knew the fundamentals of the game, and I was going to put them to good use.

  In scrimmages I was facing Robinson, the starting forward we called Big Dog. He had been a standout at Purdue in the 1990s. I remember watching him play when I was growing up, and he was a real beast. He was a big, solidly built man who talked in a slow, patient way. Almost like a southern grandfather. And he was incredibly strong, could finish at the rim, and had a real nice sense of the game. I felt humbled to be in his presence, and he was incredibly nice to me. A lot of players want to haze rookies, and when that rookie is at your position, sometimes the hazing can become cruel. But Big Dog never had that vibe. Like me, he was an even-tempered Midwest guy, and he treated me well throughout that whole camp.

  I was trying to learn everything I could from facing him. And he was good. Very good. Crafty. Some of his moves reminded me of what I had seen in Luke Walton at Arizona. He would do little things that frustrated me, rubbing off on screens, knowing how to stick his hip out just enough to disrupt you when you were trying to go over top. It was occurring to me that veterans played this game completely differently than rookies did. They seemed to get more done with less movement. I wanted to learn that.

  Glenn could score, but as camp progressed, I saw that I could score too at this level. My attitude against him defensively was to let the coaching staff and my teammates know that I came here to make a difference. I think for the coaching staff they saw that I was not going to be an offensive liability. And this was important because it meant teams couldn’t cheat off of me by doubling Allen Iverson. This was a good strength to add to my defensive skills, which I could demonstrate right away. Team defense is about attention, but individual defense is about attention plus effort. And while I was still learning the ins and outs of his particular game, I knew effort very well.

  I had first learned how to play defense at a young age playing against my brother. I told you what he was like on the court. Ruthless. Playing against him for all those years forced me to defend aggressively and quickly. But I was also motivated by a desire to set myself apart from every other kid on the floor. Whether it was at school, camp, the Boys & Girls Club, whatever, I always wanted to win. I wanted to be the best at everything. If we were running sprints, I wanted to be first. Who had the most points? Who had the most rebounds? In my mind, it should always be me. And I wanted to be the best defender too. It’s just competing.

  That’s why Scottie Pippen was one of my favorite players growing up. I loved Michael Jordan, of course, but Scottie was the guy I watched most closely. He could do everything, and he was all business and effort. Very little flash and magic. But he made the whole thing work. He had a swagger that came from confidence, from knowing you’re just going to outwork everybody else on that floor. In a lot of ways I modeled my game after his and Penny Hardaway’s. Especially in those high school years when I was tall but bringing the ball down the court to initiate the offense. Guys would shout, “There goes Pippen!” I can’t say I minded the comparison. I loved Michael Jordan just as much as
everyone else, but Scottie Pippen was the guy I related to.

  At the end of training camp, Jim O’Brien, the head coach, called me over to him. “Andre, we want you to start,” he said. I couldn’t believe it. He had barely looked up from his clipboard, but the words landed on me like a ton of bricks. I played it cool. “OK. Let’s go play.”

  This is really when I learned what the NBA was all about. The next thing I knew, Glenn just wasn’t on the team anymore. I didn’t come in trying to take a guy’s job. I was just trying to hoop. He had been kind to me, never showed any animosity, never any sense of ego. It really felt weird to come in here at twenty years old and put a grown man and a veteran out of work. It’s not something I celebrated. It was a difficult situation for him: “We don’t need you anymore.” He was essentially told, “You can go find another team, or you can wait until February and we’ll buy you out.”

  The whole situation grew awkward after that. We were back in Philadelphia practicing at the College of Medicine, where our training facility was. If you could call it that. It was one of the lesser facilities in the league. We’d come into practice, head downstairs to the locker room, and Big Dog would be lifting weights there. But he was not on the team anymore. I didn’t know if we were supposed to say, “What’s up?” to him or what. It was incredibly weird. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t even come off the bench, but he didn’t. They just told him to beat it. We saw him around the facility for like a week, and then he was gone. That’s when I learned that this business was ruthless.

  * * *

  —

  My first regular-season NBA game was against Boston at the Boston Garden. November 3, 2004. A lot of people might say it was overwhelming to be in such a hallowed place, to hear your name over the PA system, but I wasn’t really thinking about it. I just remember reminding myself that I came to play, and play is what I was going to do. This was going to be the culmination of everything I had worked for. I was prepared. I had spent the summer working out with Tim Grover, so not only was I in shape, but I had been banging around with NBA guys for months before I stepped on that floor.