Another no-nonsense guy was Marc Jackson. I’m not talking about the point guard, former Warriors coach, and announcer Mark Jackson. This was Big Marc, the center. This was a guy out of North Philadelphia, and he’d never let you forget it. He put “NP” on his ankle tape, so he could tape his socks up high and make sure he was always representing where he hailed from. He was another one of those guys who gave me a lot of good instructions and advice.
I had my brother and cousin with me a lot that first year. They were something of a small entourage, for lack of a better word. And I mostly stayed on top of my business, but one practice I was fooling around with them and we showed up late. Really, in my whole career I’ve only been late to one practice, and that’s probably because of what happened next. When we walked in that day, Marc Jackson went right at my guys and cussed them out. “Y’all in the house? What y’all doing? Neither one of you got jobs! So if Dre don’t eat, y’all don’t eat. You are his alarm clock. Don’t you ever let him ever be late to practice ever again!”
I was shocked. But the funny thing is, I find myself saying that exact thing to young guys now. Marc influenced me a lot, not so much about basketball but about how to operate your life off the court with the minimum amount of trouble. He would make sure all of us young guys knew how to keep situations well attended to, whether it was business, women, or friends. It was really street smarts that he made sure all of us had. He had something of a sixth sense for how a basketball life should operate. He was like a manager of entourages. He made it clear that it didn’t make sense for me to rush home from practice to get the cable hooked up or have to spend time that I could be in the gym on little errands. Every NBA player has some dudes they grew up with hanging around them, and Marc was really good at seeing that for what it was. A job. Everyone wants to wear a suit and do business deals all the time, but someone has to do the grind work of keeping the operation going so that everyone can eat. Marc helped me understand that.
I also had the good fortune to play with Chris Webber for a couple of those years, and this was a real thrill to me. Chris was really the reason I started watching basketball in the first place. When he played with the Fab Five at Michigan, I was glued to the TV set. So when it all came full circle and we became teammates, it was a surreal moment. He came halfway through the year and took my number (4), I wasn’t fazed. I gladly took the number 9 out of respect for him, and I still wear it to this day. He was coming off an injury then, so he was in that phase of his career where he was just trying to hold on. And the conference did him no favors. He was facing Kevin Garnett, Rasheed Wallace, guys like that, on a nightly basis. I watched him struggle and the toll this game took on his body. He took a beating and it clearly affected his mood. When he had a good game, he was in a good mood, but after a bad game, he took it hard. Chris was a thinking man and a very emotionally intelligent one, and very conscious of the black experience in America. He has a great collection of African American art and artifacts and we had many conversations on the black experience and black wealth in America. He was at the tail end of his career, so he was a little more quiet and reserved. I truly admired our conversations away from the game. C-Webb should really be a Hall of Famer, and he knew that, and I think those games where he struggled impacted him deeply.
Another guy I really learned a lot from was Elton Brand. In my later years, under Coach Eddie Jordan, we signed Elton Brand to a big deal. He came off an Achilles injury but was looking to make a go of it in Philly. I can be honest and say that we didn’t hit it off right away. I’m not sure that he was enjoying the situation with the 76ers. He was not a great fit for the system. They were trying to make him a “stretch four” of the type you’re likely to see nowadays. A big man who can move on the perimeter, guard smaller guys, and knock down jumpers. But that just wasn’t his game. He was an old-school block player. Don’t let him back you up under the basket and get to his left shoulder. He’d toast you every time with that. But Eddie’s system didn’t really allow for a lot of that. So after a while, Elton took matters into his own hands. In the middle of a game he’d just be like, “Fuck that—I’m going on the block,” and he’d get his points that way. Which I understood, but it kind of screwed up our whole set. We’d just be standing around watching him work. I can’t say I enjoyed that at first, but I get that he was in a tough position.
But after about a year and a half, he became one of my favorite teammates. We sat down and had dinner. He was very open and forthright about the mistakes he’d made earlier in his career, especially where money was concerned, and he wanted to make sure I did better than he did. He was another guy, like C-Webb, who knew a great deal about black history and always looked to educate himself and the people around him. I will always treasure those dinners I had with Elton. I grew to respect him a lot. He was very much on point.
In a lot of ways, it was Elton Brand who changed my life. He was deep into black history, a very educated man who was always reading, always studying deeper concepts. He was the first person to really make me understand the difference between money and wealth. Back then, there was Will Smith, Oprah, Michael Jordan, and Bob Johnson, who had just bought the Charlotte franchise, and Chris saw a pattern. He recognized early that we were coming upon a time when black people could begin to seize the means of production, not to just make money for ourselves, but to own stakes in the biggest transactions. Now you see that happening. You see Jay-Z and Diddy moving to own the media companies that make money off black talent. Everyone is thinking bigger these days. Michael Jordan showed us that it could be done for oneself, but Chris Webber was the one who showed me it could be done for the culture. He fundamentally changed the way I thought about my career and my money.
I had a lot of great players beside me in Philadelphia and I grew close to those guys. Many of them are still in my life today. But for some situations, great guys aren’t enough. The reality is that my time with the 76ers had a will of its own. And no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, things were going to head in a certain direction for me. There was simply no way to resist it. I couldn’t control it. Instead it controlled me.
05
The Most Hated Athlete in Town
Jim O’Brien got bounced after that early exit, and next season we came back to a new coach, Maurice Cheeks. We played with Mo Cheeks for the next three and a half years, but we only made the playoffs with him once. Nevertheless, Philadelphia had a lot of love for him because he was part of the 76ers’ glory years. As a point guard, he played on a team that went to the finals four times and won it all 1983. And he played with Dr. J, Charles Barkley, Moses Malone, all the greats. He and I had a good relationship, but the fact is we struggled under Mo, and I watched the environment in the locker room become more and more difficult the more we lost.
So less than two months into the 2008–9 season, Mo Cheeks was fired. He was in his fourth year as our coach, but we were off to a 9-14 start, and I suppose the front office had seen enough. The assistant GM, Tony DiLeo, was promoted to interim, and we were able to clinch a playoff berth that year. Still, we lost to Orlando in the first round, and the team made a decision to bring in Eddie Jordan to coach. Eddie was a good guy and, to his credit, arrived with a good attitude and ready to work. But from the start, he was in a very tough position. His first order of business was to try to install a Princeton offense, which can, under the right circumstances, be truly great. It’s a four-out, one-in with a lot of backdoor cuts, dribble handoffs, and spacing shooting. It’s not set. You have to make the reads based on what the defense is giving you. Sometimes they call it the “motion offense.” If a player is denying the ball, you dribble at the guy. It’s an automatic backdoor read. If a guy is overplaying one way, you go this way. If he’s underplaying, then you pop back. It has a triangle feel to it—always moving, always cutting, always adjusting.
The problem with it is that you need Princeton players, and we didn’t have them. It takes time and patie
nce to build and install an offense like that. Philadelphia was remarkably short on both. Steve Kerr says it takes two years to install an offense, and if you look at Golden State, that’s exactly what happened. We won seventy-three games the second year of Kerr’s offense. It took us that long to get it fully embodied. These schemes are mental and physical and kinetic. You can’t just learn it off of a whiteboard; you have to learn it in your body, you have to play game after game after game in order to see all the variations, all the wrinkles, all the counterattacks. But Philadelphia didn’t have the patience for it. The fans were booing us after like the twentieth game. Three months in, the front office was ready to scrap the whole project. Eddie did the best he could, but, man, I didn’t envy his position.
Philly fans can be tough. I remember when Elton Brand got hurt one year. He tore, essentially, his entire shoulder out of the socket. It was a gruesome injury. And when he was working his way back, naturally his production wasn’t what it had been. There was this one fan, believe it or not, one guy who would blurt out how much money Elton was making per game. You’d hear him in the middle of the game yelling, “Elton Brand is making four hundred sixty-five thousand dollars tonight, and he only has two points and two rebounds.” The thing is, we never sold out unless it was a big game, so you could just hear this guy as closely as if you were in the same room with him. “Andre Iguodala is shooting thirty percent from three. Why did he just shoot a three?”
Willie Green got it the worst. This guy would heckle Willie nonstop. “Oh, here’s Willie Green with the ball again. Why is Willie handling the ball? I don’t know why you got Willie Green on your team!” Finally, one night I had had enough. I was running by him and I just said, “Yo, man, shut up. Don’t say another word about him, man. Please don’t say another word.” I was back down the court before he could respond, but you have to push an athlete pretty far before he’s ready to bark back at a fan. I’ve actually heard about players having to send a family member over to confront a fan about disrespect.
Once, we were cruising along late in a game up by 15 points. Midway through the fourth quarter, the other team made a little run and cut our lead to 9 points. Our fans started booing! We had to call a time-out. There were boos the whole time-out. I had to look at the scoreboard to make sure I was seeing things correctly. We were up by 9 points and about to win at home and our own fans were booing us?!
Those were the situations that made you grow up quickly. I came to understand players like Allen Iverson a lot more as I grew up in the game. “All of this is on me,” he once confided in me. “If we lose, I’m the person who’s going to get blamed.” At the time I’m not sure I understood, but after a few years of dealing with those fans, I started to get it.
You had to, in a sense, protect yourself from the press too. Allen Iverson always told me to never read the paper, which of course sounded silly to me. I had a newspaper with me all the time when I was a rookie. I hardly even read the sports pages. I was reading current events, maybe knocking out a Sudoku puzzle or two. Until one day Allen saw me doing that and told me, “Don’t read the paper, bro. It’ll mess up your game.” Over time I could see that he was right. Certain players on our team would get branded by the press—this guy can’t shoot, this guy can’t post up—and those parts of their game would slowly deteriorate. They may have struggled with it a little to begin with, but the branding was the nail in the coffin. They didn’t want to even try it in games, because they were worried about what the press would be afterward. It made you a little bit guarded. You have to stay on your p’s and q’s when you deal with the press because these guys’ job is to look for a story, and they don’t really care how it impacts your actual life.
Allen understood that better than any of us. He would warn all the players who were starting to find themselves gaining the attention of fans and press. During the Olympics, he told Carmelo, LeBron, and Dwyane Wade, “This shit is sweet now, but y’all boys better be ready for when they turn on you, because it’s definitely going to happen.” He would tell me the same thing. I’ll never forget it. He was like the old guy in a horror movie who warns you at the beginning that there’s something evil in the abandoned house. And of course, he was right. Every single one of those guys got attacked by their own fans at some point in their careers. Even me.
One day I was sitting at home with the TV on in the background. ESPN was playing a segment where they were ranking the most hated athletes in every city. When they got to Philadelphia, guess who it was? Somehow Andre Iguodala had become the most hated athlete in his own city. It was upsetting, and surreal. You think about how much you’ve tried to work and be as professional and successful as you could be. You think about all the times you played hurt, all the times you gave literally everything you physically and emotionally had to get a victory and put on a good show for the fans. You think about those times you drove to the basket, got mauled by some seven-footer, crashed elbows-first to the hardwood, made the bucket, got the foul, and stood up boosted by the fans cheering for you. And here you are, being told you’re the most hated athlete in your town.
I’m sure some of it had to do with my contract. After the first four years, I signed a contract extension: six years for $80 million. And it really changed everything. Those first contract years were great. I was a young guy, and there was very little pressure. I felt spry and free, bouncing around, really just having fun and balling. Allen had all the pressure. My contract was a rookie contract, close to the league minimum. For the team, this is a winning arrangement. The rookie scale is so low that if a team gets a guy who’s really good, it’s like paying the minimum for a superstar.
In the 2015–16 season, Steph Curry made a mockery of the NBA single-season record by making 402 threes. (The last non–Steph Curry to hold the record was Ray Allen with 269. That’s how good Steph was in 2015–16.) That same year, he was a unanimous MVP, went to the NBA Finals, and won it as the best player on his team. Safe to say he balled out that year. But there were fifty-three guys in the NBA making more than him. Including me, to be honest. I had him beat by like $400,000. Paul Millsap was making more than Steph was that year, Khris Middleton was making more. Reggie Jackson was making more. A contract isn’t always tied to how you are currently playing. While Steph was literally rewriting NBA record books, there were guys coming off the bench making more than him. You get paid for how you played on your last contract, not your current one. So when Steph signed his deal in 2017, and it was worth about $201 million over five years, he was being paid for everything he did from 2012 on.
For most athletes, the big contract is when all the struggles with the fans and the press really start. Fans have a weird logic to it. Let’s say you’re on your rookie deal and you’re averaging a solid 15 points, 10 assists, and 10 rebounds. These are good, productive numbers. Once you are up for a new deal, you’re going to get paid. Let’s say your next deal is worth three times as much. By some people’s logic, you’re now supposed to be playing three times as well. You’re supposed to be averaging 45, 30, and 30. What’s not taken into account in this expectation is that the rookie deal was a bargain for the team. You were getting paid way under market value and earning half as much as vets who are producing less. That’s what it means to be a rookie. You can’t suddenly pull numbers out of nowhere. Steph was making $11 million per year when he shot 402 threes. Now he’s making a little over $40 million a year. Would you now expect him to shoot 1,608 three-pointers this season? It makes no sense. But sometimes people do assign this same logic to lesser scenarios. And I know there are some guys who sign a deal and then disappear, but that’s not what I was doing. I remained consistent, a regularly improving player who worked nonstop to get better. My best points-per-game, assists-per-game, and rebounds-per-game seasons were all after I signed my deal. But somehow it wasn’t enough. I’m not going to turn into Michael Jordan meets Kobe Bryant meets Wilt Chamberlain overnight just because I signed a contract. I’m ju
st finally getting paid what the market says my production is worth.
As my time in Philly wore on, the media began to bother me more and more. It was hard to know who the real culprit was: the fans or the press. In a sense, to an athlete they become two sides of the same hypercritical coin. Beat writers and talking heads drum up stories, and in Philadelphia, negative stories simply moved more units than positive ones. Fans then parrot these talking points, and pretty soon you find yourself being criticized from all directions. Even for the most stalwart of players this becomes too much. Especially when combined with the tremendous toll your body takes crashing around for eighty-two games per year.
The experience of being an athlete became more complicated. It was a blessing. By waking up every day, playing basketball, doing what I had loved doing since I was a kid, doing it at the highest level, and getting paid handsomely to do it, I was quite literally living a dream. There are so few people in the world, so few moments when a person can stop and say that the life they have right then is exactly the one they dreamed of having. But that made it much harder to understand why it was that it was so difficult, why I felt so bad sometimes. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Why were there moments when I started to feel unhappy.
The Sixth Man Page 12