Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  To all those deserving players and coaches

  who never made it this far

  TOUCHSTONE

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2006 by Jack McCallum

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  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN: 1-4165-4353-8

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  The 2005–2006

  Phoenix Suns

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  Players

  STEVE NASH—#13, point guard; franchise go-to guy in more ways than one; earned second straight MVP award during season; laid-back but as skilled at delivering well-timed insult as he is well-timed assist.

  SHAWN MARION—#31, forward; nicknamed Matrix for special-effects playing style; had several big games in playoffs; has longest tenure with team; sometimes feels underappreciated.

  RAJA BELL—#19, shooting guard; newcomer to team but instantly part of in-crowd; buddies with Nash from time together in Dallas; has combustible temper but good guy; became postseason folk hero.

  BORIS DIAW (DEE-OW)—#3, center-forward; newcomer to team; hails from France; argumentative but upbeat; newcomer to team but change of scenery helped—won league’s Most Improved Player award.

  AMARE’ STOUDEMIRE—#32, center, injured in preseason and played only three games; cast in role of shadowy superstar for most of season; team wasn’t always sure he was working hard on rehab, but future fortunes are tied to his comeback.

  LEANDRO BARBOSA—#10, combination guard; known to everyone as L.B.; hails from Brazil; one of the quickest players in the league.

  TIM THOMAS—#8, forward, picked up on waivers late in season; relentlessly upbeat; hits big shots; doesn’t exactly distinguish himself with hustle.

  EDDIE HOUSE—#50, guard, newcomer; never stops talking and never stops shooting; key for positive team chemistry, though struggled late in the season.

  Coaches

  MIKE D’ANTONI (DAN-TOE-NEE)—the head man; Coach of the Year previous season and finished second in 2005–06; has casual style of leadership but will show temper; playing and coaching legend in Italy; also became general manager late in season.

  MARC IAVARONI (I-VA-RO-NEE)—D’Antoni’s lead assistant; handles defensive strategy; won one NBA title as player; nobody works harder on film study but has a sense of humor.

  ALVIN GENTRY—has more NBA coaching experience than anyone on the staff; a pro’s pro with special knack for offense; keeps everyone loose with stories.

  PHIL WEBER—gets down and dirty with players as clinician; prone to aphorisms; a bachelor whose Peter Pan lifestyle is the subject of gentle derision, as well as envy, among coaches.

  DAN D’ANTONI—older brother of Mike by four years; first year on staff; playing legend at Marshall University; had kind of life they write country songs about but has settled down.

  TODD QUINTER—lead scout so not around much until end of the season; his written observations are respected by the coaches; good guy whose high school hoops career was chronicled by author years ago for small Pennsylvania newspaper.

  Front Office

  JERRY COLANGELO—president and CEO and seminal figure in the organization; sold the team but still involved in big decisions; suffered a personal blow when son left franchise.

  ROBERT SARVER—second on masthead but now running the show as managing partner; made his money in banking; brash and forward, but trying to learn the game.

  BRYAN COLANGELO—son of Jerry; was general manager until he left to run Toronto Raptors in February after dispute with Sarver; widely respected around the league and not just for being Jerry’s son.

  DAVID GRIFFIN—promoted to veep of basketball operations after Colangelo left; savvy talent scout with photographic memory about prospects; also very funny.

  JULIE FIE—head of public relations; been around so long she’s comfortable traveling with mostly males; professional enough not to cheer but slyly pounds the table when things go wrong for Suns.

  Staff

  AARON NELSON—head athletic trainer; Steeler fan who rubbed it in after Super Bowl victory; quick-witted and acerbic enough to be a coach.

  NOEL GILLESPIE—team video guru who sits in on every meeting and is like an assistant coach; he may have screwed up a clip during the season, but the author never saw it.

  The Backstory

  A few weeks before the 2005–06 NBA training camps began, I called Julie Fie, the Phoenix Suns’ ace director of public relations, to propose a story idea for Sports Illustrated. I would be with the team throughout training camp as an “assistant coach” and would then write a story about my experiences. (I may have even said “quote marks around assistant coach” during our conversation.)

  I was looking to do something different, something from the inside. In my twenty-five years at SI, which included two decades of following the NBA, I had covered everything from BASE jumping to the world championship of squash, but had never engaged in participatory journalism, unless you count having Shaquille O’Neal back his 350-pound ass into me to demonstrate how he doesn’t commit offensive fouls.

  Julie said she’d check with the authorities—general manager Bryan Colangelo and coach Mike D’Antoni—and get back to me.

  I homed in on the Suns for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Fie. I had known her for two decades and considered her one of the best in the business, not to mention someone who might actually think it was an idea that would fly. I automatically crossed out a couple dozen or so other PR directors who would either dismiss it out of hand or worked for a head coach who would rather push a mule cart down Broadway while wearing a thong than open a window into the inner workings of his team.

  I also knew Colangelo and his father, Jerry, still the team’s CEO and president. I knew D’Antoni and his assistant coaches, though not all that well, from interviewing them for a story I had written about the Suns during the previous season. I knew assistant coach Todd Quinter well—I even wrote a few stories about him three decades ago when he was a high school basketball star in Nazareth, Pennsylvania—but, as the team’s chief scout, he was away from the team much of the time. I knew Steve Nash and Shawn Marion, the team’s veteran stars, though neither was what I would call a professional confidant. I thought they were good guys who might not mind a notebook-carrying dilettante; obviously, any such project would need the blessing of the team’s superstars, tacit or otherwise.

  The other reasons were purely pragmatic. First, the Suns were probably going to be good; unless a team is profoundly bad, like, say, the expansion New York Mets or the 2005–06 New York Knicks, it is almost always better to write about a winner. Winning teams are happy, happy teams talk, talk makes stories. Further, the Suns were coming off of a positively revolutionary season during which they had become one of the most entertaining shows in sports. D’Antoni, having spent most of his playing and coaching career in Italy, did not subscribe to the prevailing NBA wisdom that a fast-break team cannot succeed, and so he built a team around Nash that ran like hell and tossed up three-point shots like so much wedding confetti. And, though no one suggested that D’Antoni and his staff didn’t work hard, they seemed to be serious about the idea of not taking themselves seriously. In short, they seemed like good guys to hang with.

  Julie called back forty-eight hours later and said, “Buy a pair of sneakers. You’re on
the staff.” So to speak.

  There are certain stories that just work out, that through some weird alchemy present a combination of factors that trigger positive feelings in the reader. The preseason “assistant coach” story in SI was one of them. Judging from the letters, e-mails, and personal comments I received, people enjoyed the inside perspective, the lively interplay (especially the insults) among the coaches, the details of how players and coaches work together, what the coaches say about other teams, and the participatory/Walter Mitty aspect of the story, i.e., the outsider-amateur getting the chance to do what the insider-pro does. Along with allowing me total access to practices, meetings, and meals, the coaches let me participate in drills here and there. On the first day, Marion nailed me in the face as I held the ball during a shell drill, and I felt I belonged.

  Soon after the story ran in Sports Illustrated, I was asked to expand it into a book. I had doubts as to whether it would work. As friendly and open as the coaches had been in early October, when workouts and scrimmages were held far from prying eyes, they were not about to allow me to muck up drills during the regular season. But perhaps they would once again grant me the same unfettered access and that would be the essence of the book. The publisher said, “Give it a try.” I called D’Antoni and he said, “Sure.” It was almost that simple.

  I had written one “season-with” book (Unfinished Business) after spending a considerable part of the 1990–91 season with the Boston Celtics. I rode the team bus, collected stories from players such as Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, and just generally spent a lot of time hanging around. It was “inside” but not in any way, shape, or form like this would be. I didn’t fly with the team when it went charter. Coach Chris Ford didn’t invite me to coaches’ meetings. I was not allowed into the locker room when the rest of the media wasn’t there. I couldn’t attend closed practices. So this would be an entirely different book.

  When I showed up a couple of weeks into the regular season to begin my research, D’Antoni took, literally, ten seconds to brief the team on the colossal significance of my presence. “You remember Jack from the preseason,” D’Antoni said at the beginning of an off-day practice. “He’s going to be with us a lot of the time working on, I don’t know, a book or something.” That was it.

  Rarely was I asked to keep something off-the-record. As the man in charge, D’Antoni would usually be the one to say, with a smile, “I’ll kill you if this is in the book,” or, more seriously, “Don’t put this in.” But considering the hours and hours I spent with the team from November to June, the requests were entirely reasonable. They came to trust me (I think) and further believed that (a) transparency is the best course, and (b) we don’t say that many controversial things anyway.

  The season turned out to be, in a word, memorable. It’s the only word I can come up with. Going into the season, the Suns looked weaker on paper than they did last season because two starters, Quentin Richardson and, most significantly, Joe Johnson, had been traded. Their leading scorer, Amare’ Stoudemire, went down with an injury in training camp and missed all but three games. Their supposed lone defensive presence, Kurt Thomas, missed the last two months of the regular season and played only a few garbage-time minutes in one playoff game. Their instant offense off the bench, Leandro Barbosa, missed twenty-five games with various injuries. Their fire-and-brimstone guard, Raja Bell, managed to get himself suspended for an elimination game against the Los Angeles Lakers. On it went.

  But they always—always—seemed to have something in reserve. Just when it appeared that Nash had played himself into a state of utter fatigue, he would summon up some uncommon effort and hit a shot down the stretch. Just when it appeared that Marion was out of sorts and frustrated by having to guard bigger opponents, he would break loose and win a game almost by himself. And the franchise players were by no means the only source of miracles. Consider: During the playoffs, Phoenix got no fewer than three game-saving or game-winning shots from players (Bell, Tim Thomas, and Boris Diaw) who weren’t even with the team last season.

  More to the point, they did it their way. By returning to the “old” way of playing, they in fact did something very new. By going back, they moved the game forward. By looking to the past, when teams acted instead of reacted, they were revolutionary.

  Truth be told, the Suns advanced further than I thought they would. When you’re close to a team, you see not only their strengths but also their weaknesses, of which the Suns had many. You see the process at work, how long and difficult it is, how many mini dramas have to play out, how many extraordinary moments have to be coaxed out of players, who, like everybody else on this planet, suffer crises of confidence from time to time. Off the court, the players and coaches were pretty ordinary guys; on it, they did some pretty extraordinary things.

  The parameters of my access were simple: I went where the coaches did. I attended their meetings, accompanied them to practice, and sat in the coaches sections of the plane and the bus on road trips, usually next to Dan D’Antoni, the older brother Mike had brought aboard as an assistant. But for me, a journalist who for four decades has been on the outside looking in, nose pressed to the glass, it wasn’t that simple suddenly becoming an insider.

  I never walked through the Suns’ training room, verboten to anyone except team personnel (more than once I saw a player’s agent chased out of there), without feeling that I didn’t belong, even though everyone welcomed me. I set all kinds of rules for myself. I wouldn’t accept an employee pass, and, instead, spent a considerable amount of time snaking my way by any means possible into US Airways Center (which, before January 6, was known as America West Arena) for early-morning coaches’ meetings. Yes, I ate the food on the team plane (but not too much), drank the bottled water in the coaches office, and plucked grapes from the pregame fruit plate. But I tried not to avail myself of the postgame buffet that sat, appetizingly, on a table in the locker room.

  I went to great lengths to prevent my fellow journalists from seeing me step off a bus or get into a locker room before the prescribed press time. I literally dove for cover when NBA-TV filmed practices at which journalists were not supposed to be in attendance. I was able to insinuate myself behind the bench for many games but refused to adopt what Phil Weber, an assistant coach, calls “the State of the Union look” (white shirt, red tie) to help sell the idea to security guards and other arena personnel that I was actually a coach.

  During the season, I wrote about the Suns for Sports Illustrated only once—a long piece about Steve Nash, in which he came across glowingly but no more so than if I hadn’t been with the team. (I hope that’s the case anyway.) When it came time to vote for end-of-the-season awards, I thought of recusing myself but finally decided I could vote fairly. I put Nash in third place (behind Detroit’s Chauncey Billups and Cleveland’s LeBron James) in the voting for MVP and put D’Antoni second behind San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich for coach of the year. Nash won anyway. D’Antoni finished second, jokingly making the claim, whenever I was in earshot, that “one vote for Popovich spun the whole process upside down in some weird way,” preventing him from winning for the second straight year.

  I didn’t hang out with the players much when the coaches weren’t around. For one thing, it’s not like their first thought was, “Man, we really want some fifty-six-year-old interloper dude going clubbing with us.” But there is also a precise line of demarcation between players and coaches. You can’t sit in on all the coaches meetings, then try to pass yourself off as some sort of special-exempt player. There were many times, however, when I would just sit in the locker room and listen to Eddie House’s nonstop rap or chat with Shawn Marion, Kurt Thomas, James Jones, or Pat Burke about nothing at all. They are good people, and I enjoyed our conversations.

  I had a good enough relationship with a couple players, Nash and Raja Bell in particular, that I could give them a gentle amount of grief, and they could certainly give it back. On the day the team photo was taken, the coaches i
nsisted that I get into one just for posterity’s sake, and, as I stood there, silently urging the photographer to hurry up and snap, Nash said, “Okay, be careful. The spy’s in the picture.” On the one occasion that I did pilfer a chicken finger from that postgame buffet, Nash caught me. “Jack, I hope you’re paying for that,” he said with a couple of other reporters around.

  In the interest of full disclosure, I did two things that I wouldn’t normally do as a journalist: I got Nash to autograph a jersey for a charity auction and Raja Bell to autograph for my sister-in-law. She thinks he’s hot.

  Going into the project, I was curious about one thing in particular—how do professional coaches deal with losing? I had coached an eighth-grade team for several years, and, though I don’t consider myself a particularly competitive person, the losses would gnaw at my insides, keep me up nights, and have me on the phone for hours with my assistant coach trying to deconstruct what went wrong…with a bunch of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. What must it be like when the stakes are high? A basketball coach makes so many decisions during a game—substitutions, out-of-bounds plays, defensive alterations, time-outs—that any single one of them can have an impact on the result.

  The answer turns out to be: The losses do indeed take a heavy toll. Coaches don’t sleep well. They beat themselves up. They look terrible in the morning. They catch colds. They suck on candy. They drink too much caffeine. They snap at each other. Sometimes they order onion rings and French fries together. Then they come in the next day and do it again.

  I flew back to Phoenix with the team after it had lost a 140–133 triple-overtime game to the Knicks in New York on January 2. The referees that night had suffered from a case of Madison Square Garden–itis. The Knicks shot fifty-four free throws compared to just sixteen for the Suns. Had Kurt Thomas not been called for a phantom foul with eight seconds left, the Suns would’ve won in regulation. It could hardly have been a more agonizing loss, especially since it came to an inferior team. Security at the private airstrip in Newark took forever. It was raining. The plane didn’t take off until 1:15 a.m. Some players had brought along their families (they do that on a few road trips per year) and babies were wailing. I felt like wailing, too, and couldn’t imagine how badly I would’ve felt had I been the one presiding over this godforsaken evening.