The owners say they don’t want it. They say that they prefer not having these high school kids and the guys who play maybe one year in college in the draft. But most owners do want it. Why? Because it’s an effective way to keep salaries down long term. Teams can let some high-priced veteran go, but keep a kid who for three years is making chump change comparatively because of the current collective bargaining agreement that has predetermined his salary. And in most cases, that kid can’t become a good enough player sitting on the bench to make the maximum after three years. As good as Jermaine O’Neal is now, he’s an excellent example of what I’m talking about. He wasn’t good enough after his first contract to sign for the maximum because he’d been sitting on the bench in Portland for four years. So he signs a contract, he’s tied up in his second contract for six or seven years, making money based on what he had shown in Portland, which wasn’t much. So now he’s behind the earning curve. For some guys, that translates into making $5 million a year instead of $9 million or $11 million, which is why I believe despite what they say a lot of owners are in favor of letting these high school kids come into the league. They’re saving money. That’s how you make it so fewer guys will make the maximum amounts allowed by the bargaining agreement.
It’s not like every owner is making all his decisions based on trying to win a championship. I’m serious about this; there are only about five or six teams that are seriously trying to win a championship every year. The rest of ’em keep recycling young guys they get in the lottery every year, then they keep letting ’em go just when they become eligible for big contracts. The Clippers are the best example of that in the NBA. They’ve perfected it. They get these guys relatively cheap in the draft, take all that season ticket money while the guys are young and developing, then when it’s time to pay these guys and put a decent team on the floor, the Clippers let ’em go. Just look at the players they’ve gotten rid of just when those guys have gotten to be good players, as far back as World B. Free, Tom Chambers and Terry Cummings. Every time it’s time for them to pay somebody big money and really start to build a team, they let him go. They get back in the lottery, get some new hope through the draft, and the fans don’t know, they’re getting all excited. Let’s see what the Clippers do now. They’ve got a chance to pay Elton Brand, Lamar Odom and Michael Olowokandi. Two of them, I believe, will wind up being let go by the Clippers.
I think players always underestimate how smart and how savvy the owners are about money and about business in general. They’re megamillionaires for a reason. When we had those meetings before the management lockout of labor in 1999, which led the league to cancel half the season, I said, “Hey guys, we’re going to lose. Those guys are billionaires. We’re millionaires. They’re smarter than we are on monetary issues.” I told ’em, “We’re gonna have guys killing themselves before they can outlast the owners.” And there we were a few weeks later, could have had the same deal we wound up taking without losing three months’ pay. Hell, we probably could have gotten that deal two years earlier.
People have been made to think these owners have to win to make money, that all they’re concerned about is winning. Don’t believe that. They’re making money without winning, which is why they’re not selling these teams. These guys didn’t get to be as rich as they are by being stupid. If they weren’t making money, they wouldn’t be in the business. And in the process, the fans get screwed because you know when you draft a high school player he’s not going to help your team for three years—if at all.
People will say that I’m against the young boys, but it’s just the opposite. We older guys want these young boys to do well. But they don’t look at the situation critically. Becoming a free agent before you have a chance to become as good a player as you can be doesn’t help you make more money. In some cases it limits what you can make.
But guys think if we offer advice or try to get them to see the big picture that we’re against them. There’s definitely a large generation gap right now. My last couple of years in the league I was trying to work with Steve Francis. I was trying to teach him some of the right ways to do certain things, and while I think he understood what I was trying to do in the end, it was a struggle the whole way. For the longest time, he didn’t look at me as a player who’d already experienced life in the NBA trying to help him. I think he looked at me as an old guy criticizing him while trying to still be The Man.
There are things I just think young players don’t need, and probably hurt them professionally and financially. For example, I’m trying to figure out how entourages, which you only used to see in boxing, became such a big part of pro basketball. Nobody ever in the old days had an entourage. This is all new crap, New Jack stuff. I’m still trying to figure out what you need them for. Guys have drivers and all this crap. They’re essentially just guys on payroll, draining your money. Is there a white player in professional sports with an entourage? I don’t think so.
If somebody in your entourage does something stupid or negative, it’s the player who’s going to get the blame because he’s the guy in the public eye. He’s the guy whose name everybody knows and the guy with everything at stake. I’ve never had an entourage, but it seems to me it’s just a bunch of people hanging around, spending your money, putting you in jeopardy. What’s the point of that?
When I was young, I had older guys on their way out take me aside and offer advice. Some of it might have been critical, but I listened because it was obvious to me they had been there and done that and they had my best interests at heart. It’s the same now, we older guys have the interests of the young guys at heart when we make a critical observation. But they don’t see it that way and we all wish they would.
God Doesn’t Have a
Favorite Team
Athletic competition is emotional enough without bringing religion into it. More wars have been fought over religious conflict than anything else, so clearly it’s an explosive issue.
I don’t think religion and sports should mix. There are so many different religions, and for the most part we only understand our own. People might want to be tolerant of views different from their own, but from what I’ve observed we don’t understand other people’s religions. Even a lot of smart people who deal with complex things in their lives every day can’t understand the rituals or the philosophies of other religions. And that ignorance often just opens up a huge box of problems and issues.
Look at professional sports nowadays. A team is a lot like most other workplaces, just smaller. People are from every part of the globe, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a hundred different religions. And most of the time we haven’t even been exposed to even half the religions being practiced by guys who are our teammates or the guys we’re playing against. So how can you have a couple of guys who may be practicing one form of religion dictating to the whole team, telling a team full of guys practicing different religions to do one thing? Look at any NBA team. It’s very possible you can have Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and atheists represented on one team. And now guys are coming in from China and bringing their religions with them. You’re not going to get everybody to agree on anything. You’re not going to get a consensus as it relates to religion.
And it’s just wrong, in my opinion, to act as if your religion is more important than somebody else’s. Just because one player is outnumbered doesn’t mean his religion is less important. That would cause resentment and all kinds of problems within a team.
And that’s not even the biggest problem with religion in sports in my opinion. You know what else bothers me about religion in sports? God doesn’t have a favorite team. I don’t like to hear guys after they win a match or a game or a fight go into an interview and say, “God was on my side.” How stupid is it to presume that God has a favorite team, or that he would take your side against your opponent? Where did that stuff come from? How religious are you really if you think God doesn’t care about the guy on the other side of the fie
ld, or the other side of the court, or in the other corner?
I just don’t think it’s fair that people assume they can determine the actions of others because of religion. Kevin Johnson, my teammate in Phoenix, is really religious. And before one of the Game 7s of a playoff series we played during my time with the Suns he and a couple of other guys talked the whole team into going to a prayer meeting. And I told them, “No, I’m not going.” I said, “Number one, God doesn’t have a favorite team. And number two, doesn’t it seem like we’re praying to God to win us a game when he must have more important things to worry about than this basketball game?” I hope and I pray God has more important things on his mind than some game. I can’t believe with all the serious stuff going on today in the world—terrorism, war, hunger, poverty, violence, hatred—that guys think their football or basketball game that day is the most important thing God might have to deal with.
It’s not like religion isn’t part of my life, because it is. I grew up going to church. I believe in prayer and treating people the way you would want to be treated. But the idea that God might help me beat another team never crossed my mind.
How come it’s often the most religious people who seem to forget the verse in the Bible which says that only God can judge men? I was reading something Lee Trevino said, that unless you’re a minister, preacher or rabbi you should never be pushing your religious beliefs on people. That’s pretty much the way I feel. Religion, to me, is your individual relationship with God, or whatever you call your Supreme Being. That’s it, plain and simple. My belief is that there is a Supreme Being. I don’t get into whether he’s black, white, man or woman.
I do think that God, by whatever name you want to use, gave me a special gift. One of my close friends who is an agnostic said to me, “Why do you thank God when you play well?” And I said, “I’m really thanking him for allowing me to be healthy and for giving me this gift, not that I played well in a specific game.” He said, “Then how is it that when something bad happens you never acknowledge God?” That really made me think. I said, “That’s fair. I don’t know the answer, but that’s fair.”
I’m just not going to walk around and talk about God all the time like a lot of players. I don’t think that proves to anybody how religious you are. A whole lot of people never talk openly about their religion; you don’t even know what, if any, religion or God they believe in. But they treat people the way they would like folks to treat them.
I know a lot of people don’t want to accept that, or they want organized religion to be more involved in everything. But to me, religion opens up the biggest can of worms, and I just try to keep it away from sports because the bottom line is, God doesn’t have a favorite team.
My Dad
My dad made me feel horrible when I didn’t graduate from high school. I had flunked my final exam in Spanish and couldn’t graduate until after I passed it in summer school. He flew all the way across the country to see me graduate, and when he couldn’t, he took his disappointment out on me. He screamed, “I can’t believe I flew all the way from California, that I came all the way across the damn country to see this ceremony and you aren’t even going to graduate.”
I never did march. It was my fault I flunked Spanish, and it took me a long time to get over that. I had to take it again in summer school. It taught me that you aren’t going to be given anything in life, that you have to earn what you get. It was my life and my fault. And I feel bad I blamed it on other people. But my dad wasn’t concerned with that important lesson, just that he was inconvenienced. It turned out that he motivated me the first few years—unintentionally—because I was so angry at him. For the longest time I tried, then for years I just didn’t talk to him. I was angry and it was too frustrating. I’m positive my old man never saw me play a basketball game in high school, never saw me play at Auburn. He never saw me play until I got in the NBA. He got interested in a relationship again when I became an NBA All-Star. He was living out in Los Angeles, and he always wanted me to visit him when we played out there. So finally, I started to visit him, spend some time with him when I went out there. But it seemed every time I went to L.A. all of our time was spent with him introducing me to all of his friends, his coworkers and associates. And it was clear what was going on there; he was just showing me off. I was his show pony.
It would make me so damn angry. I mean, I felt this way for years. And finally I had to get to the point where I realized that he had his own life. He had a totally separate existence in which I didn’t even matter to him. He wasn’t walking around all pissed off; I was. This shit was on my mind all the time, but not his.
But one time a few years ago he became sick for a while and I began thinking, “I’ve only got one father.” And as a result, I’m trying now. I’m making a real effort to extend myself, to get to know him better and let him get to know me better. But I did tell him, “Don’t try to be a dad now; it’s too late for that. Let’s be cordial. Let’s be friends.” You can’t be father-son this late in the game when you haven’t actually had that relationship all your life.
At this point in my life I just want to be at peace with my dad. You get one dad, so there’s no sense in being pissed off about what happened, whatever void you might have felt in your life. He’s not going to live forever, and I don’t want to look back and feel I squandered the time. I want him to know his granddaughter. One of the positive things that come from this is I know my relationship with my father—or lack thereof—affects my feeling about fatherhood, about participating and not just being there to take the bows. At the same time, he cannot be my dad, he can only be my friend.
September 11
Normally when I travel from my home in Phoenix to Atlanta to work for TBS and TNT, I catch the midnight red-eye flight to Atlanta. I hop on that flight, get served a late meal, then go to sleep before landing in Atlanta at 6:00 a.m. or whatever it is. That’s what used to happen before September 11, 2001. And of course, everything changed for everybody in different ways. For people who travel for a living, the change was dramatic and damn sure immediate. For the first six to eight weeks after September 11, I flew private jets to Atlanta. I couldn’t bring myself to fly commercial. After a while I flew commercial again, but now I don’t sleep. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I know I’m not alone in having this experience. It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep on a flight I used to sleep on all the time because now I’m looking over my shoulder for al Qaeda.
People who don’t travel might not understand. People who do travel frequently probably understand completely. I don’t sleep because I’m thinking, “You need a chance to fight if somebody makes a move toward that cockpit and you can’t give yourself a chance to fight if you’re sound asleep.” So you don’t sleep. You can’t sleep. I know if I see or hear somebody running down the aisle toward that cockpit, I’m going to be trying to kick his ass. When I’m flying now I’m sweating and nervous. This is all new for me because I was never a nervous flier. I could fall asleep in a heartbeat. But I can’t anymore. This is the world in which we live now. It’s a world where you can’t let your guard down. You can’t let your kids play outside alone anymore without adult supervision. You can’t really let any kid out of your sight. And it’s like this because there are some profoundly evil people in the world now. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. There are just evil people whose primary objectives are to destroy, and so now we’re in this place in our history where we have to be on guard and sometimes there’s just no place for falling asleep.
On Tuesday, September 11, I was at home in Philly, just getting up to get ready to get on the Metroliner to go to New York City for Joe Pesci’s charity golf tournament. My secretary called and said, “What are you doing? Well, you’re not going to New York today. You’d better turn on the television.”
When I turned on the TV neither tower had fallen yet. But both towers had been attacked. I just sat there the whole day in a trance. I watched it all day, e
very moment. Six or eight hours later I went out to get something to eat, and then I went right back to watching it. I guess my primary emotion was sadness. It’s just so sad to me that there’s this kind of evil on the planet, people this evil among human beings. And it’s not just the terrorist acts against the United States, it’s the kidnapping and killing of young kids, the shootings in these schools. I’m just nervous and sad that there are so many bad people in the world. I guess I was in shock, just numb over the whole thing.
The thing I’ll admit to hoping for in the wake of 9/11 was a kinder and gentler America. And I’m sure there are people out there who were so profoundly affected that they changed some basic things about their lives, like the way they treat people, the way they conduct themselves professionally or personally. I figured—and I guess I was really naive—that as horrible and as tragic as this was, it was a chance for people to pull together and fundamentally change things about ourselves and about our country. How could you not hope that when you’re watching policemen and firemen and average citizens risk their lives to help people? The way people came to each other’s rescue, you had to be inspired and hopeful something productive could eventually come from this. I know I was. I thought, “Okay, we’ve got a chance now to be better to each other and just be more respectful of each other.” People were on TV saying this would change us forever. How could you watch what happened in the days immediately after 9/11 and not feel “We’re all in this together”?
I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It Page 14