The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  So you have to say, “We played a talented team. They’re well coached [which in this case they were]. And we made some mental errors.” What you’re not supposed to say is the truth: We’re better. We are a better team. We won seventy-three games last season. No other team in the history of the NBA has done that. It’s possible that no other team ever will. We have two of the greatest shooters in history. We are not just a good team. We are a great team. We are a smart team and a well-coached team. An experienced team. A championship team. When we’re all in uniform and playing well, there is not a team on this earth that can beat us.

  That’s how it feels inside. Like we are a championship team who lost. And I don’t like it. We can’t win every single game. Obviously. I have to keep reminding myself. We can’t win every single game. I have to say it under my breath during that long, quiet walk back to the visitors’ locker room. My knees will ache in the morning. My jersey is soaked with sweat, but the hallway is drafty and cold and I suddenly feel underdressed. My body doesn’t feel like my own. It feels like some kind of tool that I used to know how to use but suddenly forgot. We can’t win every single game. I hate this. I don’t like admitting it. But I hate this.

  When I get back to the locker room, we don’t have enough time to get dressed, shower, and mope around, trying to hide our anger and disappointment about going onto the floor in someone else’s gym, in front of someone else’s fans, and losing. Because the press is waiting for us. I want to stay in the shower forever. I want to slip out of a trapdoor in the back of the locker room and never speak to anyone again. It’s not the questions, although that can be annoying too. It’s really the way they pile up on you, pin you against the wall or your locker. A whole herd of people climbing over each other shoving mics into your face, shining lights on you, so you can’t even fully see who they are. Dozens of them and one of you. You do it night after night, and it’s fine. It comes with the job. You can’t complain. It’s just that sometimes, sometimes the way they talk to you, look at you, push up on you, you don’t feel completely like a human being.

  I had gotten into it with a ref during the game. Nothing serious, no ejections or technicals, but it had to be clear to anyone watching that something was happening. You can add this to the list of things you’re not supposed to say: You can’t say you’re better than the other team. You can’t say anything is annoying or hard, because you’re getting paid, you’re living the dream. And maybe the thing you really, really can’t say is that the referees are human too. And that just as we players sometimes get caught up in the moment, so do they. You can’t say that sometimes they bring personal bias into their work and make a bad call. You can’t say that they might actually be human beings with thoughts and feelings and prejudices that sometimes cause them to make mistakes or color the way they see things. You actually get fined five figures for saying that in print.

  So I won’t say it here.

  But let’s instead say that there was a reason I was not in a great mood coming off the floor in Minnesota and it had to do with more than the fact that we lost a game we should have won. No matter how you slice it, you can’t deny that the dynamics of race that happen in the world also happen on an NBA floor, given current race relations in the country. There are white referees whose behavior feels uncomfortably like that of overseers. Not everyone is like this. But there are people who are like this. People who seem, no matter how respectfully you talk to them, to take everything you say as a sign of disrespect. People who seem to want to control you and your emotions as though your whole body and mind somehow belonged to them. People who tell you not to look at them, who give you technicals for making eye contact. People who seem to suddenly call the game entirely differently when your team is winning. People who seem to think you’re not smart enough to know exactly what’s happening in the sport that you’ve played almost all your life. People who become impossibly offended and fragile when you call them on their bullshit. People who insult your intelligence. It happens enough that we all notice it. It happens enough that we are no longer doubting what we see. So yes. There was a reason I was not in a great mood when coming off the floor in Minnesota.

  Oftentimes reporters say they like talking to me because I’m “smart”—whatever that means. They say I offer more in-depth analysis of the game and how we played. And on this night they asked me if I was worried. If I thought our team was in trouble. Because of one loss. Our record at this point in the season was 52-13. And they wanted to know if we were worried. I understand why they want to make a story out of it. They need to talk about something, and so everything you do on a team like this is under a microscope. But it also feels like they have a hard time accepting it if you tell them you’re not worried. It’s almost like they don’t want you to be unbothered. They seem to take a certain amount of joy in seeing you suffer. Maybe it’s just that they like the story. Maybe it’s something else.

  So they asked me if I was worried. And I thought about it for a moment. Not long enough, maybe. And I said, “What would a dumb nigga say?” I could feel the air in the room suddenly disappear. The reporter I was talking to was a black guy. The only one in the press scrum that evening. He started to giggle nervously. He was having a moment of double consciousness too. We try to act like race doesn’t matter. We have to in order to get by, but sometimes I just don’t feel like pretending. What would a dumb nigga say? “Just play harder. Figure it out. Ain’t that what we used to say? Thankful for the opportunity.”

  We’re not supposed to say that there are fucked-up things about the way this game is played. We’re supposed to take the money and be quiet. We’re supposed to be grateful that we’ve been given an opportunity to have wealth, to send our kids to private schools. And the exchange is that we aren’t supposed to say anything about anyone. We’re supposed to wait quietly.

  I could tell they didn’t know what to say next. I let the silence sit. It was kind of an out-of-body experience. I’d been playing this press game long enough, and I knew that what was coming out of my mouth right now was going to echo forever. There would be reactions and reactions to reactions. Pieces would be written. Sports-talk hosts would deliver lengthy monologues about how offended they were. White guys might burn my jersey. I didn’t care. In that moment, I didn’t care. I would care more later. And still later I would care less. But in that moment, I didn’t care at all.

  “Is it tougher to take losses like this when you come back?” asked a white guy, trying desperately to change the subject. “You guys fight back from seventeen, get ahead by one, and then lose it at the end?”

  “No, losing is losing,” I said. “Losing is losing.” And that’s the god’s honest truth. Maybe I should have stopped there. Maybe I should have called the interview over, said the disingenuous, “Thank you, fellas,” and walked away. But I’ve never been the kind of person to quit while I’m behind. There was one more question from the black guy.

  “Was it planned that you guys would take tomorrow off?” He was talking about the game we had the next night. We were flying to San Antonio right after this presser, arriving at close to 2:00 a.m., getting to the hotel and sleeping a few hours, then practicing and getting ready for a 7:00 p.m. tip. There was talk from Coach of resting a few of us for that game. Of course I had heard about that. He asked me if I was OK with resting.

  “I do what Master say” was how I replied.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. A lot of people really, really thought I shouldn’t have said it. Sometimes now I look back and think maybe I shouldn’t have said it. But I did. You could hear a pin drop in the locker room. Reporters had that look on their faces like they were dogs gathered around a dining room table and I had let a choice piece of meat drop to the floor. They couldn’t believe they were getting this on tape. I held my breath for just a moment. And waited. They complain about athletes always delivering clichés. Well, congratulations. Here’s your non-cliché.

&nbs
p; The interview ended soon after.

  We got on a bus.

  We got on a plane.

  The night was colder than it should have been in March. Just below twenty degrees. We climbed aboard the flight, me feeling tired, defeated, and angry in the dark and cold, with bright airport lights shining in our faces, making silhouettes of our bodies; our breath forming clouds, floating up and disappearing into the night.

  On the plane I thought about why I said what I said. Against my better judgment, I checked Twitter. I was already trending. I read a few comments. Some people thought it was funny, as I did. Most did not. I shut off my phone, put my head back, closed my eyes, and tried to put it out of my mind. Come tomorrow, this was going to be a whole fucking thing. Every black person paid to be in front of a camera for the next seventy-two hours would, by law, have to have an opinion on what I had said.

  Why did I do it?

  There are some young guys on our team. I think of them as little brothers. They are excited and eager and a little wet behind the ears. I love these guys. They know they’ve “made it.” Some of them are just finished cashing their first checks. Some of them are still living in unfurnished apartments, driving rental cars around. That’s how new this all is to them. I feel a great responsibility to these guys. I feel like I have a platform to talk about issues that they don’t hear talked about very often. From the time you’re little, all you hear about is how great it is to play in the NBA. I was talking with a young guy on the Celtics about this very issue. “Playing basketball for a living. You can’t ask for much else,” he told me. It makes sense, but when I think more about it, isn’t this the attitude we’re supposed to have? Just like we’re not supposed to criticize the refs, just like we’re not supposed to say we’re a good team and we’re also not supposed to ask for anything more than being basketball players. It’s a rarified position. I’m one of four hundred or so men on the planet who gets to play in the NBA. I get paid more money than 99 percent of Americans. And a lot more money than 99 percent of black people. You can’t ask for much else.

  But we still have to live on Earth, don’t we? We still have to face challenges. They see us as basketball players and that’s all. But basketball is going to end one day for all of us. And how are we going to adjust to reality? I feel a responsibility to keep my guys, my rookies, and my teammates aware. I feel a responsibility to use my platform to help all of us understand what’s going on.

  I tried to sleep on the plane, but I couldn’t. But it wasn’t because I was thinking about what I’d said or how it would turn into days of bullshit. Though maybe I should have been. Shannon Sharpe would deliver a monologue on First Take the next morning about how I was unacceptable and ignorant. How I was disrespecting slavery and all our ancestors. I liked and respected Shannon. And I understood where he thought he was coming from. But still, it made me sad. He accused me of being “glib” and “cute.” For some reason, it never occurred to him that I was angry. Sage Steele took the opportunity to say that no black person should use the word “nigga,” because it makes us hypocrites. They even trotted out Jadakiss on some show to say that my words were unacceptable. The whole thing was just weird. But on the plane that night, I wasn’t thinking about it.

  I wasn’t thinking about fines or what Coach Kerr might say. I knew he would be vaguely annoyed, but he would understand. I knew he’d have my back publicly. And I wasn’t thinking about my teammates. I knew some of them would shake their heads and probably wouldn’t like having to answer questions about my postgame comments while we had our hands full coming off back-to-back losses on a grueling road trip. I felt bad for putting them in that position, and I would say that, but I knew they would understand. They would laugh, they would get it. And we would be fine.

  But when I closed my eyes on the plane, what I kept thinking about was one referee. And how he had looked at me at one moment during the game. Like I was nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Trying to keep it light. Trying not to let that darkness take over me. Maybe we get into conspiracy theories too much, especially on the road. But maybe it’s just part of human nature. Kevin Durant was averaging eight or nine free throws a game in Oklahoma City. In his first year with us, he averaged six. Steph, over his career, all with the Warriors, has averaged between four and five free throws per game, and I’ve watched him come into practice the next day with quarter-inch-deep gashes on his arms from plays that were not called. It’s hard to imagine a back-to-back MVP, unanimous the second time, only getting to the line a handful of times per game like that. Most guys who average 30 points a game shoot way more free throws.

  I recently had an assistant coach from another team text me after we played them. He and I went way back to my teenage years. He wanted to congratulate us on keeping our composure during the game. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Our game plan,” he said, “is just to foul the shit out of you. We tell our guys every time-out, just foul the ball handler every time. We know they’re not going to call it.”

  Even though this had been my sense all along, it was still surprising to hear it so obviously stated by someone else in the league. Why would this even be the case? Does the league feel like we’re too good? Like we could just blow teams out, which would drive down viewership? Do they counter that by making us look beatable, like every team has a shot every night? It’s crazy stuff. You can’t call it a conspiracy. Still, when you love this game like I do, and you’ve watched it for as long as I have, it not only seems obvious, but it’s maddening. When you think about the fans flipping you off, yelling at you in remote mountain towns while Trump is president. When the referees tell you not to make eye contact, and when you talk about it publicly and the response is a resounding “Quit whining. Take the money and shut up.” It’s maddening. You try to keep it light. You try not to get lost in all of it. It’s crazy stuff, you tell yourself over and over again. Over and over again.

  You also know that, as a team, many of your problems are of your own making. Just as a player might have a reputation that causes a referee to react more quickly to him than to someone else, we sometimes enter into a game with preconceived ideas about a particular referee. We may have had a history with him, or may have watched how he handled a particular situation in another game, and we may be bringing all that into the game as well. So the first time we disagree on a call, we are overreacting because we are putting it in context of everything else we think we know about him.

  I can’t tell if that was an easy season or a hard one. We breezed through the playoffs and beat Cleveland in five games.

  09

  Riding Home

  It’s game day. We are playing the Milwaukee Bucks, stumbling gracelessly, it feels, to the end of a long and bumpy season. Our record today is 58-17, which is good. But we’re still the second seed in the West. Houston is the name on everyone’s lips. They’ve added Chris Paul, and James Harden is, per usual, balling out of control. It looks like things are clicking for them. They’re unified and motivated. There was in incident early in the season when they apparently tried to go to another team’s locker room and fight them after the game. It’s funny. We all had a good laugh over it because all of us have wanted to do that once or twice at least. It’s playground stuff, but on a more serious note, it shows that this is a team that feels they can battle anyone, and when you combine that with talent, experience, and good coaching, then you have a team that can do some damage.

  Nevertheless, we’re not scared of Houston or anyone else. It’s just that you can’t go three feet this season without someone asking you if they’re going to beat you in the conference finals. It gets old after a while. It’s not that we mind the question, but we definitely mind what’s underneath the question. People are discounting us. We’ve won the championship two out of the last three years. And the year we didn’t win, we still went 73-9 and lost in the final minutes of game 7 of the finals. When y
ou have that kind of success, two things happen. One is that you get really pissed when people discount you. We didn’t win those trophies in a raffle. We won them by being the best team in the NBA. We won them by playing through injuries, showing up at 8:00 a.m. to look at film and lift, and going out on the floor and beating everyone that you put in front of us. So yes, we take it personally when people start talking about how it’s over for us when we’re still—last time I checked—reigning NBA champs.

  The second thing that happens when you have that kind of success is that people start hoping for you to stumble. They start trying to make you stumble. Everyone loves a winner right up until they start winning too much. Just look at the New England Patriots. When Tom Brady was an underdog, a backup who took this long-losing team to a championship, it was the feel-good story of the year. Now, five championships later, they’re the most hated team in the NFL. What did they do, other than win and keep winning? It’s a tale as old as the written word: people like to build you up, and then they like to take you down. I don’t know why it’s like this, but it is. It didn’t take long for the ground beneath us to change once we won that first championship in 2016. The narrative has been written that the Warriors are bad for the NBA because they are too good and create a competitive imbalance. You can see it in the way the press has changed the story on us over the past few years. Draymond used to be feisty, the heartbeat of the team. Now he’s a loudmouth and a dirty player. Steph used to be everyone’s perfect angel, the guy you want your kid to marry. Now he’s cocky and needs to learn a lesson. The Warriors used to be the Little Team That Could, and now we’re the Evil Empire. It makes sense. Writers can make a name off of trashing us, and teams can make a name off of beating us. This comes with the territory of winning. It’s a good problem to have. We’re the biggest story in basketball over the past three seasons, and now maybe the best part about it is that we get to be underdogs again. We get to have something to prove.