Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  I have huge respect for football players at any level. It is a violent and fast-paced game with incredibly skilled guys demonstrating amazing athleticism and sometimes grace. But what I really love about basketball is that you have to make the transition from offense to defense so quickly and so continuously throughout the game. We all know that some players are better on one end of the floor than others. Some notably good offensive players were notoriously weak on defense, and some (far fewer) players who were strong defenders were comparatively weak on offense. But when you look at the list of the game’s greats, you’ll see guys who were outstanding on both ends of the court. High scorers frequently get a bad rap for being too offense-minded, but you won’t last long in the league unless you can at least hold your own on the defensive end.

  Just about every coach I’ve ever played for has emphasized one thing about defense: playing good defense generally comes down to desire. If you want to be a good defender, you can be a good defender by simply (for the most part) expending the necessary energy at that end of the floor. Phil Jackson has repeatedly said that you can have an off night shooting—some quirk in your mechanics shows up or something else goes wrong—but you should never have an off night on defense because good defense isn’t so much about technique as it is about desire and energy. Coach Jackson isn’t the only coach I’ve played for who feels that way. Coach Sloan of the Utah Jazz was a legendarily hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners defender as well as a good offensive player. He brought that same mentality with him to the bench as a coach.

  I’ve always believed in bringing a distinct energy to the floor every night, particularly when coming off the bench or at the start of a game or a quarter. Setting the tempo early with a hustle play is something I pride myself on being able to do. I’ve heard hockey players talk about that same thing—how a hard check into the boards or a hip check at center ice can send a signal to an opposing team that they’re not going to get an easy path to the goal. Some teams are known for their defensive intensity. The Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s cultivated an image and became known as the Motor City Bad Boys for their rough play and emphasis on defense. Part of that was a manipulated image—they wore black jerseys with skull-and-crossbones logos while practicing. Those were given to them by the owner of my dad’s favorite football team—Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders also developed and in a sense marketed a badboy image in their silver and black, appropriate for a kind of blue-collar mentality. Detroit fans ate it up as well, and the regular rough-and-tumble bad boys against the more cultured, softer Los Angeles types got hyped a great deal in the media.

  That reached a climax in the 1988–89 NBA Finals, when the two teams faced each other in a showdown of Showtime versus the Bad Boys. The Lakers were going for a three-peat (a term the savvy Pat Riley had tried to trademark) after having won the previous two seasons. I remember watching the series with my dad, and he was hoping for the three-peat primarily because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at the age of forty-two, had announced his retirement. Talk about longevity and production at both ends of the court. Kareem was also an amazingly gracious and graceful player, an extremely intelligent guy, and someone my dad pointed to as a role model for how to conduct your life. Sentiment was on his side in our household, and though there were a lot of Lakers haters elsewhere, we felt confident that the royal colors of purple and gold would be crowned again.

  Obviously, things didn’t go as planned. Things unraveled pretty quickly for the Lakers, mostly due to injuries. Byron Scott tore up his hamstring in practice before the first game of the series, and Detroit’s guards took advantage of his absence with Joe Dumars, Isiah Thomas, and Vinnie Johnson combing for 65 of the team’s 109 points. For a defense-oriented team that 109 points was a lot of production, and the Pistons showed that they could perform at a high level on both ends of the court. I remember my dad muttering in frustration at the Lakers’ guards inability to shut down the Pistons’ guards. He knew that with a key element missing from the Lakers’ lineup, a high-scoring game wasn’t to the Lakers’ advantage.

  Game two was a heartbreaker. James Worthy went to the line with six seconds left. The Lakers were down 106–104. If he made both shots, the game would likely go into overtime. He missed the first but made the second. That was it. Isiah Thomas hit two free throws to seal it, and the Lakers lost 108–105. Don’t believe for a second that my dad didn’t reinforce what I already knew. If Worthy had hit those foul shots, the outcome could have been different. If Thomas didn’t hit both of his, the Lakers would have had one last shot at winning. My dad wasn’t too down on James Worthy for his miss because the man had done everything he could to bring his shorthanded team to victory. In the third quarter, Detroit was on a fast break. Magic was hustling back on defense; he turned to backpedal and started hopping up and down and punching at the air. He had injured his hamstring and couldn’t return for the rest of the game. He tried in game three, but had to sit down after the first few minutes in the first quarter. That game was painful but instructive to watch. With Byron Scott out, the Lakers had to rely on a backcourt of Michael Cooper and the rookie David Rivers at the point.

  The Pistons tore up those guards with screens, and my dad kept pointing out to me how the Lakers were having so much trouble switching on defense, leaving Dumars and Vinnie Johnson wide open. Of course, the headlines the next day were about Joe Dumars’s 31 points (and his making an incredible 17 consecutive points and a total of 21 in the third quarter) and Thomas’s 26 and Johnson’s 17. They needed every one of those 74 points from the backcourt to squeak by 114–110.

  As we sat in our living room shaking our heads in disbelief that the defending champs had lost at home to fall behind three games to none, my dad kept saying, “Too many open shots. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad defense.” He went on to say that even at his age, he could at least have put a body on those guys or challenged those jump shots and not let them have such a clean look. Lesson learned. Not to take anything anyway from the remarkable MVP-earning efforts of Joe Dumars, but a little bit of defense would have gone a long way to alter the course of that series for the Lakers. In fact, a little bit of defense did alter the series—except it was a play by Joe Dumars on the defensive end that really capped the win. He blocked a last-second jumper by David Rivers. Not only did he block it, he kept the ball from going out of bounds so that the Pistons retained possession. Many people believe that play convinced writers to vote him the Most Valuable Player of the series.

  What I also remember most is Kareem coming out of the last game. The series was essentially over, and the sweep completed. With just a few seconds left, Pat Riley, a class individual, took Kareem out of the game so that the fans at the Forum could thank “The Big Guy” for all he’d done for the team and the community over the years. Magic hobbled out to center court to greet him, and the rest of the Lakers joined the two, hugging and clapping. As much as the Bad Boys liked their thug image, they revealed themselves for who they really were. They all rose to their feet along their bench and joined in the applause. I sat there thinking about how cool it would be to play in a game like that and wondered how it would feel when everyone was standing and cheering for you, thanking you for all that you’d given.

  “That’s sportsmanship,” my dad said. “Lay it all on the line and then be a man and show the other men the respect they deserve. I hate to see the Pistons win, but I’ve got to respect them for that. Just wish the Lakers could have played a little bit of defense.”

  He got up, snapped off the television, and said to me, “You’ve got some homework to get done, don’t you?”

  I knew that he knew that I’d done all my schoolwork, but I also knew he was giving me a hint that I had a lot of different things to think about. My dad was right about the Lakers and their inability to contain the Pistons’ guards. Every time one of them got loose as a result of a failed attempt to go under or over a screener or when someone failed to help, we talked about what the defender should have done. The Pistons we
ren’t doing anything but playing basic good offense, so it was surprising that the Lakers failed to react properly. I also thought about my dad and how he watched the game. Sure, he was a big fan of the Lakers and did emotionally root for his team, but he was also able to take a step back and analyze what was happening on the court. When the Lakers failed to do something he knew they should have, he called them on it. When the Lakers lost, he didn’t whine and lament about bad calls by the referees or blame sunspot activity or curse the basketball gods for the injuries that had played a crucial role in the Lakers’ falling short. Instead, he talked about the X’s and O’s and the game’s strategic elements.

  Without realizing it, I was sitting in a kind of classroom. This wasn’t Basketball 101, but a slightly more advanced class. In 1989, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school just finishing up that year when the NBA Finals were being played. I’d competed in a number of tournaments on the state and national level by then, so I was pretty far advanced in my understanding of the game. I have to give credit to my dad and to my mom for the basketball schooling they provided me at home. Generally, when coaches were introducing new concepts, talking about the finer points of a defensive scheme or an offensive approach, I was able to pick up pretty quick what they were telling me. As a result of all those tutorial sessions with my dad (I hate to make it sound as if they weren’t fun because they really were a good time), I could recognize what was happening on the court and draw on the bank of the knowledge I had to make adjustments. You always hear on NCAA telecasts the announcers talking about some point guard or another whose father coached him in high school, and coach’s kid is a kind of shorthand for a smart, heads-up type of player. Though my dad didn’t formally coach me in school, he was often an assistant coach on my youth-league teams and helped out the head coaches I had in AAU ball.

  The fundamental skills of defense aren’t all that complicated, but implementing them and learning your responsibilities when you play man-to-man, or one of the many variations on a zone defense, are more complex. They can be reduced to about a half dozen key points. The first is posture. Most coaches don’t use that term, but it’s probably the best one to describe how you hold your body. Coaches are always talking about getting down on defense. They seem to want players to get their butts down closer to the floor than we do. You can’t play defense well by standing straight up—particularly if you’re a guard. A good rule of thumb for how low to go is to make sure that your head is at least lower than that of the man you’re guarding. You also want your weight back—not on your heels but centered over your feet. One frequent mistake I see young players making is waiting back a few feet from their man until he has the ball. They then come up on him with their weight going forward. In the time it takes to shift your weight back so that you can move laterally more easily, your opponent can slip past you, taking advantage of your moving in the wrong direction. You have to keep in mind that your back is to the basket. That’s the goal you’re defending, so keep your weight back.

  One of the toughest things for most young players to master is dribbling the basketball. That takes a lot of concentration initially and good fine-motor skills. Because of that, as a defender you want to be up on your man the majority of the time. From that close position, you can bother his ballhandling. One of the first things we all learn on offense is to keep the ball in the triple-threat position—so that you can shoot, pass, or dribble left or right. As a defender your job is to interfere with your man’s ability to do any of those three things and to also dictate which of the three your man does. Ideally, if nothing else, you should be the one forcing the offensive player to go in the direction you want him to with your defensive positioning. That’s being offensive on defense. Going back to what I said earlier about my skills as a left-handed player, always figure out which is your opponent’s weak hand and try to get him to use that hand—you have a better chance of making a steal or forcing a dribble turnover or even a bad shot if you have him moving in the direction he’d prefer not to go.

  Hand position is also important. It’s too easy to say that you should play defense with your hands up. I hear youth-league coaches yelling all the time, “Hands up! Hands up!” I feel that’s robbing kids of a better understanding of some of the fundamentals. Instead of hands up all the time, developing players should know that it’s hands down (but palms facing up) at waist or knee level when guarding a player dribbling the ball—so that you can make swipes at it; it’s one hand up and one hand down when a player is within shooting range (both to block his vision and to make an attempt at blocking the shot). One of the last key points is to deny, deny, deny! A lot of players, especially poor defenders, forget this. Your man can only score when he has the ball in his possession. It makes sense then to limit the opportunities he has to possess the ball. Denying a pass is a great way to defend. Remembering to move without the ball is important on both offense and defense. If your man doesn’t have it, make sure he doesn’t get it by strategically positioning yourself on the court.

  Defense is all about protecting your goal. Basketball evolved a great deal when the goaltending rules were adopted—in the early days and even more recently in international basketball, shots could be interfered with while in the so-called cylinder—and that led to players developing even more skills to keep the other team from scoring. A player has to have a certain mentality and personality to really excel as a defender. Sure, some physical attributes can help—long arms and quick feet come immediately to mind—but it is a question of mind-set as much as mechanics or genetics. I take a lot of pride in my defense, and even though we usually think of great defenders as openly defiant, demonstrative kinds of guys (Dikembe Mutombo and his finger-wagging at anyone whose shot he has blocked after that player dared come in his house), you don’t have to be that kind of player to succeed defensively. Shot blocks are great, but the majority of them come from a shot put up in the lane rather than from a jump shot from the perimeter. They thus generally resulted from a defensive lapse. The highest-percentage shots are dunks and layups and other close-in shots. If the ball got inside that close to the basket, something broke down in the defense that required a shot blocker to come in and save the day. A lot of blocks come after an offensive rebound has been gathered—another defensive lapse—when you see players pogo-sticking up and down and the ball ping-ponging off hands, the backboard, the rim, etc. Again, ideally the ball should have been wrapped up as a result of good defensive position on the floor. The block is kind of a last resort, and the guys on the perimeter, the ones guarding the house from the outside, are responsible for not even letting those intruders into the house.

  Off the court, playing defense makes a lot of sense as well. Now that I’m a parent, I’m even more conscious of protecting what’s valuable to me and what’s in my literal and figurative houses. Obviously, all parents want to protect their kids from harm and then do what they can to limit the damage when the seemingly inevitable happens. I don’t mean the inevitable like Tatum’s cancer, though Candace and I felt a fair amount of guilt and anxiety about somehow being responsible for that, but all the other kinds of bumps, bruises, and scrapes that can happen to the ones we love. That’s true whether those hurts are physical, emotional, or spiritual. My parents weren’t the kind to say to us, “You’ll understand when you’re a parent,” in the face of something bad we did or that happened to us. They may have thought it, I don’t know for sure, but at least they didn’t say it much that I remember.

  I feel my own kids’ pain acutely myself. That was one of the things that was so hard about dealing with Tatum’s cancer. She couldn’t express any of the anxiety she felt about all the changes in her routine that were a part of her treatment. I know that we winced every time she got any kind of shot or was stuck with a needle for an IV or anything else. It’s always harder I think to be the one watching or caring for the person who is sick or injured than it is to be that person.

  Fortunately for me, I didn’t p
ut my parents through too many of those “I wish I could trade places with you” moments. However, back in 1981 when I was seven years old, we had a 1976 Mercury Montego sedan that my mom drove to work. We had picked it up used, and it must have been in a wreck of some kind because even though it was only five years old, it had some issues. For one, the passenger-side door latch would intermittently malfunction. We always had trouble getting it to close properly. My dad tried to fix it, but he couldn’t, so we adapted to it. We knew that once that door got properly closed, none of us would use it. Whoever was in the passenger seat just slid over to the driver’s side, and when we all went somewhere and had to use the backseat, we piled in and out from that side as well. It wasn’t efficient, but it was cost-effective. Dad didn’t need to remind us all the time about not using that door, but he did.

  One afternoon, our neighbor Larry was over. A nice enough kid, he was at least five or six years older than me and the rest of my buddies including Clarence Finley, my best friend. Larry didn’t seem to mind playing sports with younger kids, and we didn’t think that much about it either. The only thing that irritated us about Larry was that his parents were strict about his being home in time for dinner, and they ate earlier than the rest of us. That meant that if we were in the middle of a football game or a baseball game or whatever, when Larry’s mother’s voice carried over the housetops calling him to dinner, that meant that the sides would be uneven. Larry’s mother was Hispanic, I think from the Dominican Republic, and I can still hear her lilting voice calling, “Lar-eeeee! Lar-eeee!” Larry also told us that his mom was fanatical about his getting home in time to wash his hands, change his clothes, then get down to the dinner table.