Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  I guess that I’m a lot like Phil in that we both grew up in homes in which adherence to rules was important. We also both grew in a slightly different direction from our roots. Balance and flexibility are more important to us than structure and exactness. While we don’t resort to the shoot-for-it solution to resolve conflicts, we do believe people can have different perspectives, yet put aside some of those differences to execute the shared vision of the team. One approach is somewhat simple and reduces complexity, while the other acknowledges that any human enterprise is complicated and that needs to be accounted for and acknowledged up front. Again, same destination, but different routes.

  Because of my attitude and perceptions I have even more respect for NBA officials than I otherwise might. I’ve always been respectful of authority figures in our game and outside it. That’s just how I was raised, but today in the NBA I see a little too much rigid adherence to rules going on. By that, I don’t mean that officials shouldn’t call a foul a foul, but they should also be allowed to find the balance and flexibility they need to perform at their best. I believe that our officials are among the best in sports. They are under such scrutiny by the director of officiating, and with the kinds of critiques and monitoring they are subject to in calling the game, I don’t envy their position at all. It’s as if they are to be computer-controlled robots assigned certain positions on the court, and that limits their ability to really “see” and call the game as they feel it. As players we’re encouraged to let the game come to us, but if the officials are controlling the flow of the game because of some edict handed down from the league office, then we could be waiting a long time for the game to arrive.

  Consequently, the game doesn’t unfold as naturally as it possibly could. What troubles me from a player’s perspective is that we each have individual strengths and weakness, and because of the way the game is called today, we end up being forced to play the game as if we all had the same skill set. Big physical players such as Shaq and others need to be subjected to a different set of parameters than smaller, quicker players. That makes sense to me, but it doesn’t fit with the kind of strict-interpretation guidelines that seem to dominate the game. As with the Sloan method, the NBA’s policies do make clear what the expectations are, and I suppose it is up to us to adjust to them, but that feels a little like putting the horse before the cart.

  A zero-tolerance, black-and-white assessment is a good thing in the NBA when it comes to illegal conduct by anyone associated with the game. The NBA, and the sports world in general, were rocked by the revelations that NBA game official, Tim Donaghy, had bet on games. When he plead guilty in August 2007 to charges of wirefraud and transmitting betting information, that didn’t put the issue to rest. Just as baseball’s steroids scandal called into question the integrity of the game, Donaghy’s actions made people question the legitimacy of the outcome of some of the NBA’s games.

  I’m not about to pass judgment on someone like Donaghy. I can’t put myself into his shoes, but his claims that he was under pressure to comply with the wishes of gamblers because of alleged threats against his family members certainly complicate my feelings about his violating league rules and federal law. I’ve spent more time thinking about the enormous impact one person’s misdeeds can have on so many other people. Donaghy’s decision must have been motivated by self-interest at first, and I can empathize with him as one bad decision spiraled into others and others, but he could still have come forward and notified the authorities and got himself out of the jam and limited the damage to himself and to the league.

  Clearly, he crossed a line with his misconduct, and I was deeply troubled by the revelations of his violations and the subsequent aftermath. There is a real difference between knowingly entering into that kind of illegal activity and doing so out of ignorance. In no way do I equate what Donovan McNabb did with Donaghy’s misdeeds, but they do illustrate my point about knowledge and ignorance and understanding the rules. I almost fell into a similar trap to Donovan McNabb’s when I was at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. One day at the start of my freshmen year, Coach Platt called me into his office and said, “Derek, I need to speak with you about some possible NCAA violations.”

  I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. I hadn’t even played a game yet, and I was being accused of some kind of infraction?

  Coach Platt said someone reported that while I was a senior in high school and playing AAU ball, I had been using a gasoline charge card for personal use. I was shocked and angry. I’d heard of the kinds of recruiting violations that went on at major universities with some athletes receiving cars or their families getting low-interest loans and a whole host of other big-money perks. I explained to coach that I was using a gas credit card that belonged to my AAU team’s owner. He had asked me to pick up various players who couldn’t yet drive or who were coming in on buses from other parts of the state for practices. Sometimes I used his car or my family’s car, and he wanted to make sure that I didn’t incur any out-of-pocket expenses. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a possible violation of NCCA regulations involving illegal inducements. Fortunately, after I explained the situation and Coach Platt worked things out with the NCAA, neither the team nor I were subject to any sanctions. Lesson learned about not knowing all the rules.

  Life outside basketball is as filled with as many rules and possible stumbling blocks that can put you out of bounds as is the game. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is one of the most successful men I’ve ever met. I like Mark, and his passionate devotion to his team is admirable. He sometimes runs afoul of NBA management (the commissioner) and other owners because he sometimes allows his emotions to get the better of him, and in the past he’s made comments critical of the league’s officiating and other policies. Mark is his own man, and I would never tell him what to do or how to conduct himself. I offer him up as an example to help illustrate that toeing the line and keeping your emotions in check can pay big dividends. (I’ve not been as successful in business as Mark Cuban has, and he’s someone I would like to emulate in that regard.)

  Among the reasons that I am so respectful of rules and those who enforce them in the NBA is that I truly believe in karma. I’m certain that you get in return what you put out into the universe. That’s not a truly 100 percent idealistic statement as it pertains to basketball. I believe that if I conduct myself respectfully and treat others, in particular referees, with the respect they deserve, I might benefit from that down the line. If there’s a borderline call, it may go my way if I don’t have a reputation for giving out hard fouls needlessly. If I don’t have a history of getting T’ed up by the referees, then I may be able to get in a few words with a referee to possibly influence how the game is called. Earning my team a strategic advantage is a good thing. That my teammates, coaches, fans, the opposition, and the league office know that I’m not a troublemaker puts currency in my bank account that I can earn interest on and withdraw later.

  I’m honest enough with myself to know that I’ve stayed in the league because of my talent +. What is that +? Being a guy who knows the game and also respects the game and his teammates and the league. Being a guy who is a good teammate and a reliable, steady presence. There is a big difference between a butt kisser and someone who conducts himself professionally as much as possible all the time. We’re known as players, but I think of myself as a professional. Just as a doctor, lawyer, teacher, investment banker, etc., has to conduct himself or herself in a specified manner, I believe it’s my responsibility to behave in way that enhances my standing in the eyes of management, fans, and my colleagues on the court.

  My mother used to tell me that it was a good idea to treat people kindly, even strangers, because you never knew. Not that you never knew who was watching and judging you, but that you never knew under what circumstances you might meet that person again. In the business world you have to be careful what you say and whom you say it to because as big as this world is, it is
also small. That lesson was driven home when I watched the reaction to Mark Cuban’s possible purchase of the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs are one of the storied franchises in sports, and Wrigley Field is considered a kind of national treasure, the way Fenway Park in Boston is. Some people speculated that because of his run-ins with NBA management, baseball’s franchise owners, who have to approve any sale of a franchise, might reject him. They might not want someone in their exclusive circle who might be a troublemaker. I haven’t talked with Mark about this and don’t know if he is even concerned at all about this perception that is out there.

  My point is essentially this. Doing the right thing and understanding and conforming to the rules of the game are important morally and also pragmatically. Too often we think that we don’t get rewarded for playing fair and by the rules. We think that we only get punished (sometimes) when we break those rules. What I’ve learned is that when you look long term and see the bigger picture, knowing and playing by the rules has potential benefits that far outweigh any negative consequences. Doing right is its own reward, and if you continue to do right, those rewards may be multiplied. That’s what is written in Derek’s rule book, and it’s one that I don’t need to study because I carry it in my heart and mind all the time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dribbling:

  The Ultimate in Ups and Downs

  When I quoted the original thirteen rules of basketball, you may have noticed one thing was completely missing—dribbling. In the game’s infancy, players just passed the ball to one another. As soon as a running player caught the ball, he was expected to stop. The only way to advance the ball was to pass it off. What I’ve always thought is cool is that players figured out that a player could pass the ball to himself to advance toward the hoop. The inventor of the game didn’t come up with it; the innovation was born of necessity and ingenuity by the guys who actually played the game. Some people in the early twenties wanted to eliminate passing to yourself, but the National Association of Basketball Coaches was formed to oppose that ban on dribbling. I can’t imagine the game without dribbling. It’s amazing to me that the early act of just bouncing the ball a few inches ahead of yourself, then picking it up and repeating, has evolved into the kinds of ballhandling displays you see every day in the NBA and in the NCAA and elsewhere.

  I remember watching as a kid the Harlem Globetrotters on their Saturday-morning cartoon show, The Super Globetrotters. They were crime-fighting superheroes who always settled their dispute with the evil villains with a basketball game. I also saw the Globetrotters live and on television and, like nearly everybody else, loved the dazzling displays of dribbling that Curly Neal would put on. Meadowlark Lemon was the big-time clown of the show, but the antics of the shave-headed Curly caught my attention. Because of the kind of training that I had, and the emphasis on the basics and the fundamentals, I never really tried to imitate Curly. Sometimes just messing around with the guys I do a few between-the-legs and behind-the-back things, but more important to me is just being a consistent ball handler who doesn’t turn the ball over and doesn’t get stripped. I have some decent moves and I don’t pound the ball mechanically the way you see some of the big men doing, but dribbling as a show or an art form isn’t a part of my game.

  When I do clinics or speak to a group of young guys and girls, I frequently start off with a ball in my hand. I’ll drop it and let it bounce back up. I use that as a demonstration of the ball’s natural resilience and ability to bounce back up. I tell them that that’s how they need to be. A lot of times, we get in the way of our natural ability to move past the inevitable bad things in life. I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t struggled or gone through tough times. Those ups and downs continue to repeat themselves in my life, and I’ve seen people in my profession and in my personal life who have let those down times defeat them. I think that a lot of that has to do with them and their inability to get out of their own way and allow the natural process or their natural ability to recover from those down times.

  I see young kids learning to dribble and I see parallels between their struggles to maintain control of the ball and the kinds of things we do as adults that prevent us from coming back from a down period. When you’re young and learning to dribble, you tend to keep your hand going down as the ball descends. It’s almost as if you don’t trust that the ball is going to come back up to you. It will. You just have to be willing to let go a little bit and let the ball do its thing. In my life, it took me time to learn that simple principle applies off the court too. I’ve always had a strong faith in God, but like a lot of people I’ve had trouble with the idea of letting go and trusting that the plan He has for me will take me in the most positive direction I could possibly go. I think that when Tatum was diagnosed, some of the illusion that I was in control faded. Candace and I had used in vitro fertilization in an attempt to better control the fate of our child. I’m not suggesting that God gave Tatum eye cancer to teach us a lesson about not messing with His plan. I don’t mean that at all. What I do believe is that in life you receive a series of messages in various forms. Those messages are telling you what you need to work on to achieve the kind of peace of mind and happiness that we all want. I think I needed to learn to control what I could reasonably control and to surrender the rest.

  For my whole professional career I’d been trying to position myself to play more minutes, be the coach’s guy in crunch time, fully be the leader of the team out on the court, and all that. I was making my way toward that in fits and starts, getting close to it, then having something come up that set me back. Dealing with Tatum’s illness made me stop, take stock of things, and put things in perspective. I thought that I had before, but this was God, the universe, and everything else telling me that I was deceiving myself. I wasn’t living a lie. I was concerned about being a good husband and father and good citizen of the world. But a lot of those lessons I had learned about working hard had distorted things a bit. I always seemed to feel that if I just exerted more effort, eliminated more distractions, focused more intently on the game, and did all the right things nutritionally, spiritually, and physically, I’d get what I wanted. Funny thing was, as the old Rolling Stones song “Satisfaction” said, sometimes when you try real hard, you get what you need. And what I needed to realize, and what Tatum’s cancer helped me realize, was that God had an idea of what He wanted for me and of me. I learned that I could be of service to others in a way that I had never understood before. And it had just a little bit to do with basketball.

  Because of my prominent position (prominent in the sense that I had easy access to the media), when I spoke to TNT sideline reporter Pam Oliver after that play-off game back in 2007, the words I spoke about Tatum’s disease spread worldwide. There was no script, I hadn’t thought out days or weeks in advance what I wanted to say, I simply let go and spoke from the heart. My emotions got the best of me, but I’d say that my revealing my emotions revealed the best in me. Since then, Dr. Abramson has publicly said that my speaking out about retinoblastoma has done more for the field and more for patients and their families than he has, and that the impact has been “enormous and profound.” I think that Dr. Abramson underestimates what he’s contributed over the years and overestimates what I did. I was just the messenger, and the words that came to me were placed in my heart by someone else.

  What neither Dr. Abramson nor I can deny is that people from around the world—Germany, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, England, Italy, India, and Israel—have all come to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan to see Dr. Abramson and his colleagues. In an interview in the New York Times, Dr. Abramson said that when he asked these people why the had come, they said that it was because of Tatum and the story they’d heard about her. Candace has also told me that when she’s in the waiting room at Sloan-Kettering or at L.A. Children’s Hospital, she invariably gets recognized. At nearly every one of those follow-up visits, other parents have told her that they’ve seen me and heard about Tatum. I’m
deeply gratified by that, and thankful that many more families have been able to take advantage of the wonderful work that Dr. Abramson and his people do. Even though at the time we never asked, “Why us?” or “Why Tatum?” I now understand why. When I read the newspaper stories about Dr. Abramson and his work and hear similar stories of the good word being spread, I know God decided that these things should be so.

  I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve dribbled a basketball in my life. Over time I came to do it as unconsciously as breathing. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that I can do it in my sleep, and I can do it with my eyes closed. In looking back over my basketball career and how I got to this place, I believe that in many ways I was living as if my eyes were closed. Now that I no longer live that way as frequently, the difference is clearly noticeable.

  If you ever watch an NBA game and just follow the ball being dribbled, the hypnotic effect will have you drifting off in no time. Though referees watch our dribbling for rules infractions, most of you probably don’t pay much attention to it. Just as it has become a nearly automatic reflex among us, the same is true for fans. It’s one of those little things, one of those fundamentals, that we don’t notice until something goes wrong with it. As my years in the NBA added up, I found myself sometimes dribbling away unconsciously. Not until Tatum’s health crisis did I get knocked out of my routine. I thought that I had got where I wanted to be in life—I was finally married to the woman I’d loved for a long time, I had children, I was playing again for a top-notch NBA team, I was a respected veteran player, I was the head of the NBA Players Association—and life was very, very good. I can’t say that I was complacent because I was still working as hard as ever to get back to the NBA Finals and to win a championship, I was still exploring new ways to keep my body fit, I was still thinking about and exploring avenues that I might pursue after I was done playing the game—but all those things were about me, my family, my teammates, and my fellow players. Nothing wrong with that, but speaking out in Utah that night and all that has happened since made me realize the truth about ripple effects and just how far out from the impact point they can travel.