The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  A few minutes later he showed up and we settled in to watch. We were making small talk, but I got the sense he had something on his mind. I thought he was just nervous watching his fiancée play, so I didn’t think too much about it. Finally, he came out with it.

  “Dude. You getting traded?”

  “No, man. I just talked to Doug today. He said everything’s cool. Told me he couldn’t wait till next year.”

  A pained look came over Jrue’s face. I still didn’t realize what was happening.

  He handed me his phone. He had been texting with Doug Collins too. “We got a big trade,” Doug was saying in his text. “We’re going to get Andrew Bynum.” I knew what this meant. Bynum was, at that time, a very sought-after player who was commanding a lot of money. There was no way Philly could have acquired him unless they were moving some other big contracts—unless they were moving me.

  That was how I found out. I had played eight years for the franchise. That’s 650 games, 24,598 minutes on the floor, 3,468 field goals made from dunks, crashing to the floor for a layup and a foul, driving to the basket at full speed, being known as a player who didn’t miss games. Blood on the court, teeth elbowed, eyes poked, fingers stepped on. Countless jerseys sold, millions of fans booing me and cheering me, five coaches, a gaggle of assistants, and no less than three dozen different teammates in and out of those locker rooms, and the way I found out it was finally coming to an end was because a teammate showed me a text message at the Olympics.

  It was announced the next day.

  I had played for only one team my entire career. It was hard sometimes, it was beautiful sometimes. The fans and press in Philadelphia are like the fans and press nowhere else. And that’s a good thing. None of us could stand it if the whole country was like that. I got to learn so much from the men I played with and under there. And I would never, ever trade a moment of that time for anything. It made me grow up, it taught me how to take care of my career and how to take care of myself. I will always be grateful for Philadelphia.

  A lot about that experience was great, and a lot was painful. But no matter how bad it got, there would always be something to remind you that you can’t take any of this too seriously. One game, I was warming up, stretching on the floor during the pregame, and a player from the other team came over to me. This was a guy I had known for years. He was a great character and a great player. Maybe even a Hall of Famer one day. Time will tell. Anyway, this was toward the end of the season, when the playoff seedings had long been decided, and what we were about to embark on was, essentially, a meaningless game. Situations like this can be hard. You’re either exhausted and wishing you could rest up for the playoffs or you’re already thinking about where you’re going to play golf in the off-season. The main thing you don’t want is anyone to get hurt in a game like this. You want everyone to keep it cool. But sometimes you get a rookie or two in there playing hard, trying to show their worth off the bench, and now all of a sudden guys are banging around for no reason at all. You wish you could skip a game like this, but the tickets have been sold. You have to play. I reached out my hand to dap this guy up and he didn’t take it. Instead he leaned in real close to me, opened his mouth, and exhaled into my nostrils so I could smell his breath. He smelled, honestly, like an entire frat party had taken place in his mouth.

  “What the fuck?” I said, laughing.

  “Yo, I’m drunk as fuck right now.”

  I couldn’t believe it. This dude was wasted. All I could think of was that I was going to have a good game whenever I ended up guarding him, because we were going to win this one going away.

  Tip-off happened and it was a different story entirely. This man turned into Drunken Master. As good as he was sober, he was ridiculous this night. He was lighting the floor entirely up, knocking in threes, scoring from every single direction. Shaking, baking, dunking, really kind of making us look stupid. He torched us plain and simple. I know he’s never done anything like that before or since, but if I played that well drunk, I don’t know if I’d ever stop. I still laugh when I think about that. Sometimes basketball is a real headache. But after it’s all said and done, it’s still just a game.

  06

  Elevation

  In Denver the sun is so bright that on some mornings I would see two or three feet of snow on my way to practice, but by noon, not only would it be gone, but the ground would be bone-dry, as if it had never been there in the first place. And this was exactly what I needed after my increasingly claustrophobic experiences in Philadelphia. This was a place where people were in a more relaxed mood. It was insanely clean and outdoorsy. The fans cared but they weren’t aggravated or negative after a loss. They just, you know, rooted for the home team, which was a concept that I had forgotten even existed.

  When I arrived at the practice facility for the first day, I was amazed. Because they had one. I had gotten so used to the cramped basement facility in Philadelphia that I was genuinely blown away to walk into the situation they had in Denver. Here were brand-new weight machines, massage tables, catered meals. It was a completely different vibe. My first practice was filled with hopefulness about what we could accomplish. Not just because we were such a good team, but because everything to me felt like a fresh start.

  I didn’t know yet how good we could or couldn’t be, although I was familiar with most players on that team and tight with a few of them from basketball circles, including our point guard Ty Lawson. An incredibly bright player who came out of UNC, Ty was part of the ever-shrinking number of true point guards in the league. He had come up under the tutelage of Chauncey Billups and Andre Miller, a guy I played with in Philadelphia, and like his mentors was a passer first and would score only when he felt like he had no other choice. I can still see him bringing the ball up court, scanning left and right, calling out plays. It felt good to be in hands like that, to be on the floor with a guy you knew was primarily concerned with watching the play develop and making sure that everyone got to their spots.

  On our first day of practice, he and I got to talking.

  “Damn, Dre,” he said. “I’m glad you’re finally here because I was getting sick of hearing them talk about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, all last year, all I heard from the coaching staff was ‘When we get Andre . . . when Andre comes.’ They’ve been obsessed with bringing you in here and I’m glad it’s finally happened.”

  That made me feel good, to know that I wasn’t an afterthought or a burden, or someone the fans loved, then hated, then loved. It began to occur to me that I hadn’t really felt trustful of the office in Philadelphia. I wasn’t always sure that they had my back. Just the mere notion of that being different here totally threw into stark relief just how difficult some aspects of my time in Philly had been.

  Fittingly, our first game of the season was against none other than the Philadelphia 76ers. I expected them to boo me when my name was announced, and I was not disappointed. As soon as the announcer said my height, the capacity crowd exploded into a chorus of jeers. I couldn’t even hear my name called. They were booing me like I had personally kicked each of their puppies. I tried not to be rattled, but there was a lot of emotion for me in that game.

  Why were they booing me? It wasn’t as if I was the one who requested a trade. I played there for eight years and had to face trade rumors pretty much nonstop. I would have gladly come back, but instead I was lied to by my own coach. Yet I was the one they were booing? I caught a glimpse of Doug Collins standing on the sideline, himself looking a little apprehensive. He had a lot on the line here too. If I were to come out and put up 35 on them, then he would look like a fool for trading me.

  The wounds for everyone were still fresh. Right from the opening tip I was determined to make an impact, to show them what a mistake they had made in treating me as they did. We won the tip and my first bucket was a step-back mid-range jumper
on an assist from Ty. Boom. The crowd booed some more. I tried to put it out of my head. They missed a jumper on the other end, Jordan Hamilton grabbed the board, and soon the ball was in my hands at the corner. I heaved up a three and missed. Badly. Things started to unravel from that point on. I could feel that I was pressing hard, but I couldn’t control it. I missed a six-foot jumper later, and soon after that turned the ball over on a Jason Richardson steal. The crowd loved that. I was able to get a steal and a dunk off of Lavoy Allen later in the first period, and a few other halfway decent plays, but most of the game I felt like I was trying to push twenty different boulders uphill at the same time. I couldn’t get a rhythm, I was missing reads, committing turnovers, and nothing was coming easy. It was one of the worst games I played. The more I struggled, the more I pushed. And the more I pushed, the worse I played. When the buzzer sounded, we had lost 75–84. I went 5 for 13 from the field, committed 4 turnovers and only scored 11 points. Doug Collins walked off the court with a smile on his face. I did not.

  I was living in a little apartment downtown. I had brought one cousin with me for company and to help with running business-related stuff, and I began to feel for him. He was bored to tears. There seemed to be almost no black people in Denver, no nightlife that we really felt drawn to. For my cousin, that was hard, but for me it was perfect. I loved being able to walk to practice or to games in the crisp, cool Denver air. Just like those few weeks in Chicago when I was preparing for the draft, I was once again treated to a life with a completely single-minded purpose. I had my apartment. I had the sandwich shop that I liked to walk to. And I finally had a practice facility that I could go to anytime of the day or night.

  And that’s what I did. Sleep continued to be a problem for me, as it was at Arizona, and as it was in Philly. It had gotten better, but there were still occasional nights that would turn into morning right before my bleary eyes. Having access to the practice facility and weight room at all times helped me tremendously. I would sometimes go late at night, lift and shoot, lift and shoot. Even though it would have been better to be sleeping, the solitude was nice. But better still was that I was beginning to learn how to channel my attention, to put my sometimes overly active brain toward something useful. In Philly, the obsession was damaging because it was entirely about proving media wrong. I was motivated by resentment, by frustration. There is a self-destructive aspect to that. It almost felt like, “Fine, you want me to kill myself? Watch me kill myself.” But in Denver that element was almost entirely gone. The fans there were just content to have a winning team.

  Our weight trainer in Denver was a genuinely unbelievable person. And what I mean by that is I literally could not believe this guy when I first saw him. His name was Steve Hess. He stood about five foot five and was about as thick with muscle as he was tall. A well-tanned, middle-age white dude with graying dreads pulled back into an ever-present ponytail, he spoke with a thick, raspy voice in what I would later learn was a New Zealand accent. But the thing that I really couldn’t believe about him was how incredibly positive he was. He was happy and ready to work every single day. Whether he was working one-on-one with me or managing half the squad in the weight room, his enthusiasm was infectious. Every sentence he delivered was rapid-fire encouragement mixed with wisdom. “That’s how you do it, Andre. Always pay attention and attention pays off.” I had never seen such spirit combined with such specificity. I have met a lot of athletic trainers who speak in platitudes, who are always saying stuff about pushing yourself and getting better, but Steve showed me what the difference was when you really 100 percent believed in a guy. We believed in him, and he believed in us.

  During times that may have otherwise been difficult, Steve’s steady, almost hilariously cheery encouragement kept me afloat and started to slowly have an effect on me. I began to see my body as something that had limitations and needed to be treated as such. “People have this misconception that because they’re professional athletes,” Steve once said, “their bodies adhere differently. But here’s the thing. They’re still human bodies. They go through a ton of stress. So if you’re not appropriate in every aspect of it, they’re still gonna break down.” That was the kind of attitude that pushed my training and game to the next level. It was intentional but gentle. In Philadelphia, I had thought that all I needed was more will, more pushing, more determination. I had thought that the cost of it didn’t matter. But working with Steve, I began to see things more holistically. I could not push myself against my body. I had to align my will and the will of my body into one seamless machine.

  We tried to bounce back from that awful first game in Philly, but twenty-two of our first thirty-two contests were on the road and the season began with a very middling 17-15 record. It was not looking good on paper, but I could see that we were feeling each other out. Danilo Gallinari was the big name on that team, and he was a lot of what he was cracked up to be. I really liked his game. He was incredibly versatile and a sneaky-hard worker. He was relentless on the boards, a truly gifted shooter, and, having come from the European game, where there was such emphasis on X’s and O’s, he—like Ty Lawson—had a real IQ on the floor.

  I remember a game not too long after Christmas 2012 when we played the Dallas Mavericks. Danilo started off kind of cold in that game, if I recall correctly. A few misses, a few turnovers. Dallas wasn’t known as an especially defensive team, but they were making some nice, disciplined switches on us in the first half. This was around the point in the season, three or so months in, when teams were starting to have to decide who was the guy they were going to have to shut down. Was it me or was it Danilo? You could feel teams trying different approaches to us defensively—sometimes a double-team, sometimes a switch—and that’s how you knew they were struggling to handle the one-two punch we presented. It gave us confidence.

  Right at the end of the first half of that game, Danilo drained a big three. On the ensuing play, Andre Miller stole the ball on a bad pass inbound from Vince Carter and kicked it to Ty Lawson, who tried a last-second three. Ty missed, but Danilo came crashing in for a putback dunk literally right at the buzzer. It was so close they had to review it to make sure it was good. From that point on, I was just so hyped for the kid—I guess I was really feeling the experience of being a part of this new team—that I started hyping him up at halftime and continued into the third quarter. I was cheering for him crazy and I could see it was getting to him. Every time he made a shot and I was on the bench, I’d be the one jumping up the highest and yelling the loudest. “Man, bust they fuckin’ ass!!!” He was trying to keep from smiling, but he was having a hard time playing it cool. I guess they don’t do it like that in Europe, because he was looking at me like he had never had a teammate cheer for him like that. He ended that game with 39 points, including seven threes on 63 percent shooting from beyond the arc. Things like that strengthened the bond between us. They made the vibe workable even though we weren’t really a “tight-knit” team. I barely ever saw Danilo off the court. But I was learning that if a team doesn’t hang tough off the court, then part of my job was to help us have the chemistry we needed on the court.

  I was close to a handful of players from that squad though. Corey Brewer was a guy I would hang out with off court, as was Ty Lawson. But one of the teammates I connected with most was Wilson Chandler. To this day, he is one of the men I respect most in the league. Wilson is a very quiet man. Unassuming, but smart. And like most of the players I gravitate toward, Wilson is a thinker. He and I would occasionally talk after games until late into the night. Sometimes about politics, sometimes about the game or about the business of the game. But it was often about spirituality. He was always searching for answers to the bigger questions. What is our purpose? What can we do with our positions of power? What is real power?

  As basketball players, we find ourselves in this complicated position. We are extremely fortunate to be able to earn a living doing something we love. We are granted s
omething of an exalted status because of the fact that we’re on TV, and in this country, we believe that anyone on TV is somehow special. And we earn money. In some cases, lots of it. For most of us, this grants access and gifts a thousand times more extravagant than we had growing up in our neighborhoods.

  As Americans, we are led to believe that this in and of itself should be the path toward complete satisfaction. If we make enough money, have enough success, then we should be free from all struggles—or more accurately, our struggles are no longer valid. But what most of us find after a while, and much to our surprise, is that even with all the cash and prizes, the question of purpose remains. Pain and suffering still remain. Anger and frustration still remain. It would seem that most people who gain some measure of what we think of as material success have experienced this truth, but the effect is amplified for black people. Because of our shared destiny, it is not possible for one of us to be completely free and happy while our collective people are subject to violence, oppression, and dehumanization. Or rather, the only way for such a thing to be possible is if that person makes a conscious decision to turn their back entirely on their people. And that cannot be me. I have always had a sense of race consciousness. It came first from growing up in a place where racial violence was literally in the DNA of the town, and it continued as I sought out learning and education in high school and college. My talks with Salim Stoudamire at Arizona and Chris Webber and Elton Brand in Philly gave me further motivation to seek knowledge and understanding of history, politics, and finance. But in Denver a new thing was happening, especially through those conversations with Wilson Chandler. It was a next-leveling of my consciousness. I was just beginning to understand how spiritual fitness was intertwined with everything. I was becoming aware of a new kind of discipline, an internal mental and emotional clarity that was, on the one hand, an extension of what I’d learned in all the years of working out and pushing myself, but also was something wholly different. I wasn’t learning it yet. I was just learning that it existed and that I could be rising toward it.