Soon I found myself growing mistrustful of the media. I hated press availability, that period before and after games where you had to be present for interviews. I started to gain a little bit of an edge, to answer questions in as few words as possible. You can see press fatigue in an athlete’s eyes in a postgame interview. Even the way it’s physically set up can feel dehumanizing. You’ve just played an entire forty-eight minutes of basketball. It is late and you are tired. Your body aches, your knees and joints burn, and you’ve just suffered a loss. Your frustration is at an all-time high, and that’s the precise moment in which seventeen reporters pin you against a wall in the locker room, with no escape, surround you with cameras and microphones, and start picking apart your best efforts. So you, understandably, feel frustrated. You start to give one-word answers and speak entirely in platitudes. After a while you just want to play ball.
Each media market has its idiosyncrasies in terms of what kinds of stories and characters they fall in love with. Philly, as a perpetual underdog city, a cold concrete and brick city, a city always in the shadow of New York, has a certain soft spot for those gritty guys, those longshot guys who go against the odds. Think Rocky training for a championship fight by punching raw meat in a walk-in freezer. This, in large part, is why Allen was such a star, at least initially. Here was this skinny six-foot-one pit bull of a player who wouldn’t back down from anything at any time. They really liked that. He had a personality fans could easily attach a compelling story to. But simply put, that was not my deal. I was not going to do and say dramatic things publicly. I was maybe a little quieter, a little more focused on production. But I also wasn’t going to sing and dance, shake hands with and smile for the press. I respect the way AI did things. He was true to himself. And I tried to be true to myself. We were different personalities. And soon I was being labeled “distant” and “aloof.”
In that way, Allen’s time as the reigning athlete in Philadelphia cast a long shadow on my own experience. He had a complex, contentious relationship with the press. It was very much a love-hate thing with him. When they loved him, he was the second coming of Christ. But when he went rogue, they killed him. The press and fans were primed for a dramatic relationship from the moment he left and I took over as the face of the franchise. It felt as though they were looking for a drama with me that wasn’t there. And eventually, the fact that it wasn’t there became the drama. In 2012, I woke up one morning to find that the Philadelphia Inquirer had written an entire article comparing me to Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. Like him, I was called “aloof”—I wasn’t as engaging with the crowd.
I tried to not let this stuff affect me, but that’s nearly impossible. Some guys become contentious and want to quit on their teams and fans. Some guys want to do stuff to ingratiate themselves to the fans, because they have a hard time with anyone thinking badly of them. In a situation like this, everyone goes deeper into what they know. What I knew was work. And work became the container, the vehicle, for all the energy, frustration, resentment, and ambition these events triggered in me. I found myself trying to prove myself every single day, playing extra hard, putting in a tremendous amount of effort. I had been criticized for not being the leading scorer even though I was supposed to be team leader, so I started to occasionally break a play, exert myself to get extra points, or to rack up extra rebounds so I didn’t have to hear the next day about how I wasn’t earning my paycheck. But I would still be going extra hard on defense because this is what I prided myself on. Sometimes my teammates were like, “Dog, you alright? You’re overexerting yourself. Let us help you.” And I’m saying, “Let me help you!”
There was a darkness to my situation, to my thinking during these years. What began as a court situation ultimately became a life situation. I became obsessed with working out to nearly unhealthy levels. I threw myself into lifting weights. Normally you lift two days a week; I was doing it five. All I cared about was getting shots up, spending every day in the gym. Going as hard as I could at all times. I wasn’t talking about it in the press, but I felt compelled to push myself as hard as I possibly could. It was just what I thought I had to do to prove my worth. I was killing myself mentally. I wasn’t taking breaks. I was always tense, always pushing. My whole life became about proving wrong the people who doubted me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to be a part of anything that didn’t involve a gym. I shut myself down. My life became very small, and I had a hard time finding any kind of joy in anything.
In those dark hours when I couldn’t sleep, I would lie awake in the glow of a television or a computer screen and turn plays over and over in my head, thinking about what would have happened if I had made this pass or taken this shot. I became as familiar with the night as I was with the day. I knew what time certain sounds happened. A dog barking, the newspaper landing on a neighbor’s steps. The silence that surrounded it was deafening. All I wanted was to enjoy the game of basketball again. Now I felt like I had grown old enough to feel the weight of an entire world on my shoulders, but still without the power to manage it.
During the day I tried to make a good show of it. When I look at interviews from that time, I can see that I was smiling more, trying to sound more upbeat. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was going through. I thought that if I could manage it well, if I could will and work my way out of it, then everything would be alright.
But you could tell. I was growing my hair out and avoiding almost all social engagements. All I cared about was being at the gym. It was wake up, work out, get shot after shot after shot up, go to practice, lift again, take more shots, then go home to sit alone, or invite one of my friends over to just shoot the shit. I sincerely thought that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. This is what I had learned. Work hard, keep your head down, don’t complain. But I was in a situation where that advice was no longer good enough.
I was averaging nearly forty minutes per game for those final seasons in Philadelphia. I’ve always been someone who said I don’t believe in minutes per game. You play when you need to play, you try to win. It doesn’t matter if you go twelve minutes or forty-eight. But that’s a lot of minutes. I guess I’m willing to admit that now. It is a lot of minutes. I thought the way I played and practiced, the pressure I put on myself, the way I woke up and went to sleep thinking about how to get better stats, just so I could go outside my house the next day without being yelled at by strangers, was normal at the time. I didn’t know any better. I just ran into a wall.
Adding to the darkness was the feeling that I shouldn’t be suffering this way at all. I was literally living not only my dream but the dreams of millions of people. I was a professional basketball player with a very lucrative contract. What right did I have to feel anything other than complete satisfaction? Like a lot of athletes and entertainers who came from humble beginnings, I’ve had a chance to look at it from both sides. Many of us came from $12-per-hour jobs. Many of us used to be broke, used to share a bedroom with multiple family members sleeping on the floor, hoping there was enough money for food or clothes, knowing that sometimes it couldn’t be both. That is why we worked so hard in the first place. Sacrificed our bodies, ran the gym until our knees busted and our ligaments tore. Basketball is often for people who have no other choice. If you genuinely have other options, you wouldn’t go as far and face as much. You play for fun, but once it gets serious, once it becomes life-or-death, most people will, if they can, find something a little more stable and a little less critical to do with their lives.
The reality is that this system of professional sports is set up to squeeze literally every last thing it can out of the horses. When that much money is at stake, for that many people, your personal health and well-being is going to take a back seat to their bottom line. This is why guys are on the sideline getting pain pills and injections, going to surgeries, getting cartilage and bones and ligaments rebuilt, trying every random, weird, experime
ntal treatment under the sun just to get back out there and play. The human body was not naturally meant to bang up and down a court for eighty-two games. It just wasn’t. You have to break yourself in order to do that. You have to, in a sense, break nature.
And that’s where, for me, the experience takes on a darker tone. These franchises are worth billions. Your salary may be a lot in the context of what you’d make working at McDonald’s, but once you start to think about how much is being made overall, and how small the percentage of that you’re seeing is, it feels different. When you stop to think about how you’re literally trading your body for cash, not just cash for yourself, but cash to line the pockets of other already wealthy, almost all-white, male owners, when you stop to think about how everything is designed to push you past your physical limits, make you nearly kill yourself, and how the whole time you’re getting yelled at by fans, criticized by the press, and booed in your home arena, and you go to sleep and wake up every night aching, you really have to wonder if it’s worth it. I’m going to have to have a knee replacement at some point. A hip replacement probably. How much money is your hip worth to you? What is the actual dollar amount you would take if you knew that it would cost you a knee and a hip? It’s not as simple a question as it first appears. But the thing was, those difficult moments, those dark nights and painful days, I didn’t think I was doing them in exchange for money. I still don’t. I was doing them in exchange for playing a sport that I loved. Truly and deeply loved.
While I was struggling with these feelings, I was still doing battle with the sports media. There were times when I didn’t really understand or appreciate their agenda. At some point in about 2008, I gave an interview to Sports Illustrated. We talked about many things in that interview, and it ended up being about a four-thousand-word piece, but in one small section some comments I made about my teammate Lou Williams were taken entirely out of context by the Philly sports media. I thought the Sports Illustrated writer had gotten it right, but in one of those story-about-a-story situations, the local media made it out like I had insulted a teammate and just ran with it. It was hard to understand. And after a while I gave up trying.
Instead, I just started learning how they operate. I started learning how to tell if a reporter is coming with a side angle. You have to pay really close attention to the person asking the question. What do you know about them? What else have they written? How are they looking at you when they ask it? What are the pitfalls you need to be careful of when you’re talking? Then you have to make sure not to lose your temper or take it personally. You also need to make sure to keep your answers brief. Because if you get to rambling, you’ll start bringing in things that have nothing to do with the conversation, and next thing you know, you’re on an entertainment blog with a quote taken all out of context and people calling for you to be suspended. We get criticized for speaking in clichés: “We just wanna go out there and give 110 percent.” “We’re struggling, and we just need to focus on the game in front of us.” And a lot of times that is attributed to what people think is a lack of intellect on our part. But the reality is that we’re just trying to make it through the next twenty-four hours without a scandal that causes three million complete strangers to start screaming about how we should be fired. We simply don’t have time for it.
If athletes are selfish, it is because there starts to become a point in which you have to be selfish in order to protect yourself. These people are ready to throw your ass under the bus the first chance they get, so why are you about to kill yourself to keep them happy? It’s funny. I had an assistant coach at Philly who I won’t name but who told me point blank, “Man, you gotta shoot the fucking ball. Stop fucking passing to these dudes. These dudes ain’t no good. If you ain’t scoring, we ain’t gonna win. Stop passing.”
This was hard for me to hear. If my teammate is open, I’m going to pass. It’s just natural for me. But this guy wouldn’t let me stay with that.
“Fuck that, man,” he said. “Get your money. Go get your next contract, man. Go get your fucking money. Fuck that passing shit. Man, we ain’t winning. Are we going to the playoffs?”
“Hell, yeah, we’re going to the playoffs!”
“Alright, maybe we’re going to the playoffs. OK. Maybe we might go, but are we going to win the championship? Be fucking realistic.”
“No, we’re not there yet.”
“You’re fucking right we ain’t there yet. So just shoot the rock and get your money.”
I often think of that as the best bad advice anyone ever gave me. Because the truth is, he was looking out for me. He had been in this game a long time and he wanted me to see what he saw. And in some situations, it’s not entirely bad advice. If you are a young guy coming up on a team that really isn’t there, and you’re the only piece your team has, then yes. You kind of have to go get yours. If you want a career in this league, you want to get a decent-size extension, maybe get a trade to a contender, or at least a situation where you aren’t entirely responsible for a whole franchise, then yes. You need to put up numbers. You need to keep your stat line in good shape. It’s strategic and it’s job security.
But it all depends on how you go about it. You can do this in a way that doesn’t show disrespect to your teammates. If you’re just out there inflating your numbers and your team isn’t getting any better, you’re not a winner. Simple as that. That’s a loser’s mentality, and I’ve always hated that. There are certain guys who are trying to score for their teams. You can tell because they’re playing hard on defense. Making that extra dive for the ball, that extra play. Defense doesn’t get you shoe contracts or TV commercials. So when a guy is really trying on defense, you know he’s really trying for his team.
But you have to be honest. Don’t sugarcoat the reality with a lot of junk about dreams and selflessness and teamwork that no one even abides by in the first place. You never know when this thing is going to be over. It’s a miracle we’re here in the first place. I tell young guys, “Look, get your money while you can. Don’t leave nothing on the table.”
* * *
—
Doug Collins was my final coach in Philadelphia. He had come back to the sidelines out of the broadcast booth, and I played under him for the last two years. We made it to the playoffs both times. He had a tremendous grasp of the game and really understood all the movements on a level deeper than other coaches I had known. But he had an Achilles’ heel: he wanted to win at any cost. His own background story in the league probably had an impact on how he saw the world. His career was cut short by a rash of injuries to his feet and knees, and of course, he was screwed out of a gold medal in the infamous 1972 Munich Games. The undefeated US team was playing Russia when, late in the game, a “clock malfunction” gave Russia the ball back after the game was effectively over, allowing them three separate tries to get a quick layup and win. The US team declined to take the silver medals, and they were right to do so.
Doug really could have been a Hall of Famer when it was all said and done, but injuries ultimately did him in, and he could never get back to himself. Possibly as a result of this, he had remarkably little tolerance for injuries. You got hurt under Doug and he was basically like, “Fuck that. You gotta play.” My own doctor, my trainer, everyone was telling me that I needed rest, that I was playing too many minutes. But Doug was deaf to all that. I played through injuries, he’d say, so you can do the same.
He was really good in the first year, really great at making you buy in. You’d be ready to run through a wall. He used to come to us at the beginning of practice and tell us that Michael Jordan had watched us play the night before. “Dre,” he would say, “MJ said way to attack last night. He was impressed.” That would fire us up. Wow, Michael Jordan is watching our games! We have to leave it all out there tonight! That really worked until I realized that I had a teammate who knew MJ personally. “Man, MJ ain’t watching our games!” he told me. I couldn
’t believe it. Coach Collins really had me running out there thinking Michael Jordan was tuning in. But that was the Doug Collins genius. He could motivate you like no one else.
But around the second or third year, you begin to pick up on it. You realize that the way he’s driving you isn’t right. It isn’t normal, and teams begin to shift away from him. And if you look at his coaching record, that’s what happens. Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Philly—always the same thing. In the third year, things go sideways.
But much of my opinion of Doug Collins is colored by what happened on the last day I spent as a Philadelphia 76er.
It was during the Olympics. One of the most meaningful and special experiences of my life. We were playing for a gold medal, and I was incredibly honored to be there and to be with those guys. I was the seventh man, coming off the bench in London. A nice position to be in. You get good minutes, you get a chance to contribute, and you really feel like that gold medal belongs to you.
We had an off night, and I went to see the US women’s soccer team play. I was able to watch the game from a suite with a few people. It was a wonderful game, great view, just overall a very nice vibe. And the women won gold. We were all excited.
Doug was in London as well, calling the games for NBC, so he and I were bumping into each other all over the place. We had even texted earlier that day and he’d told me how excited he was for the next year. Those words exactly. He had texted me, “You played great this year. I can’t wait until next year!” The overall vibes were so good that I really appreciated it. It was really the first time in a long time that I felt some level of relief from the situation going on so many miles away back home. My teammate Jrue Holiday was engaged to one of the women’s soccer players. I knew he had to be around the stadium somewhere watching the game, so I texted him: “Hey, I’m in a suite, come watch from up here!”
The Sixth Man Page 13