Seven Seconds or Less

by Jack McCallum

  At dinner, D’Antoni is asked what particular referees he doesn’t want to see. He names one. “We just seem to have a personality conflict,” he says. “It’s partly my fault, too. But we just don’t get along.” Not thirty seconds later, that ref walks by, having chosen to dine in the same restaurant. That means he will be working tomorrow night. He and the coach share polite nods. Between clenched lips, D’Antoni says: “Do I have the worst karma in the world, or what?”

  Chapter Ten

  [The Second Season]

  Los Angeles, May 4…………….

  LAKERS LEAD SERIES 3–2

  “Make sure you mention Shawn. We couldn’t have done it without him.”

  Raja Bell, who to everyone’s immense relief has been suspended for only tonight’s game, has decided to attend the morning shootaround. The only restriction on him in Los Angeles is that he must be out of the Staples Center two hours before tip-off.

  “If you think that’s the best thing to do, go for it,” says Iavaroni, gently questioning whether in fact it is the best thing.

  “Nobody told me not to,” says Bell. “I’m not going to talk to the media, though. I did my talking yesterday.”

  Indeed, Bell’s and Bryant’s comments about each other dominate the morning sports pages in Los Angeles, as they do back in Phoenix. But the way the situation was handled by Julie Fie and John Black was absolutely correct. Some NBA teams would’ve kept Bell and Bryant from commenting, a ridiculous alternative. The players are grown men in the public eye, and they should get the chance to express their feelings. And what is the dire consequence if those feelings come out as antagonistic? It’s not like the basketball-watching public isn’t aware of the enmity the players hold toward each other.

  One can only imagine what would’ve happened had this situation involved the clueless Portland Trail Blazers, who weeks earlier had announced a new media policy in which interviews with executives and players might be tape-recorded by the team, with a transcript or audio file of the interview posted on the Blazers’ website. Also, reporters will be asked in some cases to provide a written list of questions before being granted an interview. The Blazers collect a bunch of reprobate players, blame the media when the inevitable negative stories come out, then construct policies that assure continued negative public relations. Today, that is what passes for media relations in some professional cities.

  Besides, somewhere in the NBA offices in New York City, a few executives were silently conceding that a war of words is a good thing. One of the NBA’s biggest problems with the consumer is the perception that the game is passionless, that teammates and opponents are bonded by a feeling of joint entitlement, and that those memorable and venomous team-against-team rivalries, such as the Lakers-Celtics and Pistons-Bulls, have gone the way of the two-handed set shot.

  Bell has read Bryant’s comments about him, and, even if he hadn’t, everyone is quick to relay them to him. “See, to Kobe,” says Bell, “this is like a movie. It isn’t real life. To me, this is real. But one thing I learned is that they’re going to spin everything and make Kobe look good.” Bell doesn’t identify who “they” might be, and his statement is a vast exaggeration anyway. The Kobe haters, and there are legions of them, will continue to hate him, and the Kobe lovers, or loyal Laker fans, will continue to love him. The new development is that Raja Bell—I don’t know this kid. I don’t need to know this kid—is now more than a blip on the NBA radar screen. He has an identity, which he has been looking for throughout his career at the fringes of NBA legitimacy.

  At practice, Barbosa works with the first team, but D’Antoni does call on Bell later. “Raja,” says the coach during a defensive drill, “get in here and be Kobe.” Says D’Antoni: “I couldn’t resist that.”

  The pregame wings meeting is a mixture of chalk talk, handled by Weber, and motivational talk, handled by Gentry. It seems like role reversal, for Weber is the relentless positive thinker and Gentry the old NBA hand who has courted carpal tunnel syndrome by drawing every conceivable X and O during his eighteen years in the league. But Weber has spent hours breaking down game film (even though the Lakers are Iavaroni’s team), and Gentry knows that a game like this, played in the cauldron of pressure, might come down to intangibles.

  The relationship between these two coaches is one of the linch-pins of team harmony. While the D’Antonis battle like, well, brothers, neither wanting the other to get the last word, Gentry and Weber find a topic of contention, hit it quickly, then move on to the next thing. They rag each other constantly, enjoy every minute of it, and their interplay frequently defuses tension. Plus, it is highly entertaining. When Robert Sarver sent them off to talk to season ticket–holders before the season began, Iavaroni said, “Well, there goes Sammy and Dean.”

  After an agonizing 109–102 loss in Detroit on April 2—the Suns had blown a seventeen-point lead—the locker room had a certain unreadable atmosphere. Phoenix wasn’t expected to beat the Pistons, then the league’s best team, on their home floor, particularly since the Suns were at the end of an exhausting five-games-in-seven-days road trip. Still, it had been theirs to win, and, demonstrating that penchant for blowing big leads, they let it get away.

  D’Antoni didn’t want to say too much, but neither did he want to let the team forget it. “All right, guys, we probably ran out of a little gas. Look, they’re good. I hope we have another shot at them. If we do, we’ll make the best of it. You played well. Let’s go home.”

  The assistants didn’t want to express too much anger. But neither could they ignore how good it would’ve felt to have beaten the league’s best team on the road. “That five-second call we got at the end of the game?” says Gentry. “That was bullshit. That was just rubbing it in. High school crap. You don’t…Now, what the hell is this?” He holds his dress shirt in front of him. “Water leaked all over it.”

  Weber, dressing next to Gentry, starts laughing.

  “Oh, I get it,” says Gentry. “White Noise here determined which locker was all fucked up and he moved my stuff into it.”

  “I’m innocent,” says Weber.

  “What do you think about a guy who comes in early, scopes out the locker room and make sure he gets the good spot and says, ‘Oh, I’ll leave the leaky locker for the black guy,’ ” says Gentry. He turns to Eddie House. “You believe that, Eddie?”

  “He did you wrong, Alvin,” says House. “But, see, that’s what Phil does.”

  Gentry and Weber reached the NBA by vastly different routes. Weber played at North Carolina State—“The kind of engineering school where they teach you how to wipe a cow’s ass” as Gentry describes it about twice a week—having the misfortune to be red-shirting when Jim Valvano’s Wolfpack memorably won the 1983 NCAA title. Weber became an assistant at the University of Florida, but his real skill was developing players. When Danny Ainge was the Suns’ head coach in the mid-’90s, he happened to watch Weber working out NBA prospects at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. “A perfect workout was always in my mind until today,” Ainge told him, “but you just gave one.” He hired Weber for player development and Weber officially joined the staff as an assistant coach in 1999. He coached then as he coaches now—with a Tony Robbins power-of-

  positive-thinking energy that seems like nonsense until you see how consistent he is with it.

  D’Antoni (and almost everybody else) gives Weber a hard time, endlessly flogging him about his reliance on his positive-thinking gurus and generally setting him up as the whipping boy. It’s become a standing Suns’ joke for D’Antoni to include Weber’s “St. Agnes Drill” on the daily practice schedule, only to announce that time expired before it could be run. “Phil’s drill is like that fifth guest on Carson that Johnny could never get to,” says Gentry. Still, D’Antoni needs Weber’s upbeat disposition and constancy, not to mention his skill at working with players individually. “Mike has to have positive people around him for what he’s trying to do,” says Laurel D’Antoni.

  “Eve
ry single one of the four hundred books I’ve read, whether it be one idea or a couple of concepts, has added something to the way I look at life,” says Weber. “Socrates said it best: ‘The key to living is always to learn how to live.’ That’s what I am always trying to do, always trying to expand my knowledge base and figure out how I can be more helpful or what I can do. What I would really like to leave behind is the thought that I helped others.”

  It’s hard to imagine a guy who thinks like that getting by in the cynical world of pro sports. But Weber is able to laugh when everyone slices and dices him about his beliefs, yet keep on believing them. Plus, Weber is single and some of his choices of female companionship impress even the players.

  Gentry took a more conventional route to the NBA. After playing point guard at Appalachian State, he coached at the University of Colorado and the University of Kansas, then came into the NBA in 1988 as a San Antonio assistant via Larry Brown, under whom he had worked (and won an NCAA title) at Kansas. He got his first head-coaching opportunity as an interim with the Miami Heat and was then a head coach with both the Clippers and the Pistons. He got fired twice, but almost everybody gets fired in the NBA. (D’Antoni had been fired after one season as the Denver Nuggets head coach in 1999.) Gentry is, like D’Antoni, more of an offensive-oriented coach, but when D’Antoni hired him last season he wanted to tap into what he called “Alvin’s big-picture skills.” Perhaps because he’s been a head coach and felt the sting of being fired, yet is confident in his abilities, Gentry just seems utterly comfortable doing what he’s doing, as comfortable as any coach I’ve ever been around.

  Thus, he’s able to walk the line between telling it like it is and still managing to be a trusted confidante to the players. In the preseason story I wrote for Sports Illustrated, I had quoted Gentry as referring to Michael Olowokandi (a center who at the time was with the Minnesota Timberwolves) as “a pussy.” It made some news stories and was the only item from the piece that could be construed as even mildly controversial. I included it for a number of reasons, the first being that it is classic Gentry, funny, perceptive, straight-from-the-gut, and second because the perception of Olowokandi as a soft and timid player is widespread. (After the quote appeared, someone from the league office called me and said, jokingly: “Publicly, we deplore the use of such language to describe one of our players; privately, we agree with the characterization.”)

  I found out later that Gentry did take grief for saying it, both within and without the organization. “Alvin,” Bryan Colangelo would say when he left a coaches meeting, “try not to call anybody a pussy today.” When the Suns went to Minnesota to face Olowokandi for the first time in December, Gentry stayed in the locker room before the game so he wouldn’t have to confront Olowokandi or answer questions about the comment. (Olowokandi didn’t play that night due to a minor injury, and, when Gentry came out for the game, a Minnesota fan behind him shouted: “Hey, Gentry, you were right; he is a pussy.”) Gentry truly felt bad about having made the comment, and, though he never told me directly, he wished that I hadn’t printed it. But he’s a stand-up guy. He never said he didn’t say it and never said he told me it was off-the-record.

  Gentry manages to be both a student and a fan of the game. He’s on top of every rumor—he tells you stuff a day or two before you read it on HoopsHype—and knows a story about everyone and everything. There is no meeting without a Gentry story. He tells the story of Doug Collins’s college coach at Illinois State, Will Robinson, putting Collins in front of a mirror and saying, “Now, that’s an ugly motherfucker.” Then Robinson gets a basketball, hands it to Collins, and says, “Now you’re a handsome motherfucker.”

  He tells the story of Kevin Loughery (under whom he coached at Miami), who rose from the bench to protest a call with one referee, only to have the other two back the call. They were all African-American officials and Loughery looks at them and says, “What is this, the Temptations?” Gentry laughs. “It was probably racist,” he says, “but damn, it was funny.”

  Gentry, who is black, is comfortable making jokes across color lines, but it bothers him that reporters invariably come to him looking for the black-man-with-a-hard-life story (“My father kicked our ass if we didn’t do well in school and my mother cooked breakfast for my brothers, sisters, and I every day of our life when we were growing up”) and angers him when he and other African-Americans are described as “articulate.” “It’s like a surprise we can talk,” he says. “White people are never described as articulate.”

  He and Dan D’Antoni share a special bond because both are in mixed-race marriages, Gentry’s wife, Suzanne, being white, and D’Antoni’s wife, Vanessa, being black. “I got a movie for you, Danny,” Gentry said one day. “It’s called Something New. Black female CPA meets a white landscaper. Hell, it’s your life story.”

  Stories get into Gentry’s head and never leave. He tells another one from Miami, about a player named Ladell Eckles who stood up during a team meeting and wrote on the board: “No Your roll.” Glen Rice said, “Sit down, dumb ass.”

  He tells the story of B. J. Armstrong coming to Charlotte and being greeted by Anthony Mason, a noted thug on the court. Gentry really rolls on this one.

  “So, Anthony Mason tells B. J., ‘Yo man, we all get together and pray after the game.’

  “B.J. says, ‘Well, that’s cool, but it’s not my style. I got my own beliefs and stuff.’

  “But, see, this isn’t good enough for Anthony. ‘Nah, man, we do it after games. As a team.’ And B.J. still says, ‘Sorry, man.’

  “So Anthony’s getting more and more angry, and he says, ‘So, you ain’t going to pray with us?’ And B.J. says, ‘Sorry, but…’

  “So now, Mason cuts him off. ‘Well, fuck you, motherfucker, if you ain’t going to pray with us.’ ”

  D’Antoni laughs. “Now, there’s the Christian spirit at work.”

  Gentry reaches beyond the NBA, too. One day the conversation turned to Al Gore, and, within two minutes, Gentry had gone to his computer and fetched from his extensive files the video clip of the speech in which Gore suggested that he invented the Internet. He recites endless dialogue from endless movies. Sometimes it seems like he has met everyone. We were talking about the space program one morning, and Gentry conjures up a story about meeting moon-walking astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a party at the Malibu home of Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling.

  “So it’s a full moon, beautiful night,” says Gentry, “and I’m trying to think of something to say to this famous guy, and finally I say, ‘Buzz, damn, you ever look up and see the moon and think to yourself how people stare at it all the time and write poems about it, and you walked on it? You walked on it.’

  “And Buzz looks at me and shrugs and says, ‘No. Fuck no.’ ”

  Gentry shakes his head. “Damn, you can even be cynical if you walked on the moon,” he says. “Isn’t that something?”

  Cynical is exactly what Gentry and Weber are not. Neither is Iavaroni. He is a little more dour and can wrap himself up in celluloid gloom once in a while, particularly after watching three hours of bad defense. But all three of them come to work every day ready to be convinced that the world is a pretty good place. So does D’Antoni’s brother and so does Todd Quinter when he’s around.

  “Whatever you ask of assistants,” says D’Antoni, “the most important thing is that they’re upbeat. Otherwise, it can be drudgery. Win or lose, around here, it’s never drudgery.”

  The pregame checklist that Dan D’Antoni has given Barbosa includes this tip.

  No silly fouls. Deny when possible. You have to start to become less aggressive. Work Kobie when he fights back.

  “Kobe would be very upset, Dan,” I tell him, “if he knew you spelled his first name wrong.”

  “Spelling was never my strong suit,” says Dan, “but, frankly, I don’t give a damn how Kobe spells his name.”

  If Barbosa is nervous about doing battle with Bryant, he doesn’t show it. �
�I am thinking about your backyard,” Barbosa says to Dan. The older D’Antoni had jokingly told Barbosa that he desperately needs the extra $60,000 that players and coaches earn for reaching the second round so he can make pool and landscaping improvements to his new home in Scottsdale. “That’s the way to think, L.B.,” says Dan. “Every time Kobe makes a move, just remember he’s trying to reduce the size of my pool and take away a shrub.”

  D’Antoni’s pregame speech is brief and to the point. He goes over the matchups, reminds them to corral Bryant in transition, warns against early fouls, and says, “Run ’em out of the gym.”

  On the way out of the locker room, a few players point to the number 19 jersey that Jay Gaspar has hung in an empty locker. “That’s for Raja,” says the equipment man.

  As D’Antoni walks to his seat on the bench, he gets a hello from Seinfeld creator Larry David and comedian Ray Romano. They are seated just to the left of the Suns’ bench. Jack Nicholson is in his customary seat to the right.

  “Hey, you guys are great,” D’Antoni says to them. “I like both of your shows.” It reminds me of the time that I heard Kevin McHale, when he was a Boston Celtic, tell Kevin Costner in the locker room, “Hey, man, I saw Dances with Wolves. It was really great.” Costner looked like he had just won an Oscar. Later, McHale told me, “Nah, I never saw it. It just seemed like the Hollywood thing to say.” But this isn’t Hollywood nonsense—D’Antoni really is a fan of Romano’s Everybody Loves Raymond and David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  “We like your team, too,” says David. “The way you play.”