by Ray Allen
“Don’t you want to celebrate?” they asked.
Celebrate what? Being traded? Being booed? The biggest night of my life, and I couldn’t remember when I felt as devastated.
I needed to get the hell out of there. I’d go for a drive, but not by myself. I’d pick up someone I met the day before.
Shannon and I met at the All Star Café in Manhattan, where I went for a party related to the draft. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful.
Our first conversation didn’t last long, but when I found out she was going afterward to the same club I was going to—fate always plays a role in romance, doesn’t it?—I asked her to save a dance for me. She said she would.
I liked everything about her, including the fact that she knew nothing about basketball.
“Tomorrow I’m getting drafted,” I told Shannon.
“I didn’t know we were at war,” she said. I swear, she wasn’t trying to be funny.
We had that dance she promised and talked until it got late and we both had to go: me to get ready for my big day and she for hers. Shannon was a singer for an R&B group, Shades, and her first single, released by Motown, was hitting the stores. How fitting. I said good night and told her I’d call the next day.
Now the next day was here. As soon as I walked off the stage in New Jersey, I found a phone.
“I have to see you right away,” I told her. “I can’t leave town without seeing you.”
I picked up Shannon at her apartment, and we drove to the pier in Jersey City to talk—me to talk, that is, and I whined more than I talked. I said how awesome it would have been if the Celtics had chosen me instead of winding up in Milwaukee. She was sympathetic, to a point.
“You’re going to live your dream?” she asked. Yup. “Make a lot of money?” Yup. “Take care of your family?” Yup.
She didn’t want to hear another word.
“Buck up, buttercup,” she said, no pun intended.
That’s another thing I appreciated about Shannon. She didn’t have a problem expressing herself.
Time was getting away from us. It must have been around 2:00 AM, perhaps 3:00, when I dropped her back at her apartment.
In a couple of hours, I would be getting on a plane to Milwaukee to start the future I’d been dreaming about since I was 14, when I saw Michael Jordan on television and knew I wanted to be just like him.
7
The Buck Starts Here
Think Storrs, Connecticut, is in the middle of nowhere?
Try Oshkosh, Wisconsin, about 90 miles from Milwaukee, where the Bucks held training camp.
I don’t want to sound petty. I know how many people would have traded places with me in a second, no questions asked. All I’m suggesting is that being in the NBA was not everything it was cracked up to be.
Hotel. Practice. Hotel. Practice. You get the picture.
It went on like that day after day in Oshkosh, and it was no more glamorous when camp ended and the season began. As for those parties and fancy cars and celebrities they tell you about, if that was the life of a professional basketball player, it was the life in other cities, not Milwaukee.
Often, I didn’t feel like I was in the league at all. We didn’t draw big crowds at home, and on the road there was no Milwaukee Bucks Nation that came out to cheer us on. The Green Bay Packers owned the city, and state, and used to play games in Milwaukee into the mid-1990s. I felt I was back in high school, football being the sport that people were passionate about. Whenever my teammates and I ran into folks on our way to practice, the conversations would usually go something like this:
“You guys are tall. You must play basketball.”
“We sure do.”
“So you play for Marquette?”
“No, we play for the Bucks.”
“That’s nice.”
And off they went, unimpressed.
After every game at the Bradley Center, I ordered a pizza and headed home to watch The X-Files. Did I know how to have a good time, or what?
On the road, we were the butt of jokes: all anybody knew of Milwaukee was that it was where Laverne and Shirley lived. We would hear the theme song from that sitcom whenever we ran out onto the court. That got old fast.
I didn’t have much fun when I was playing either. Come to think of it, it was not much different from my early days at UConn when I was trying to find a way to fit in.
Except in one very important respect: in the NBA, you are on your own, unlike in college, where, between classes and hanging out with your buddies, there’s a lot to take your mind away from any struggles you might be going through. Have a tough shooting night? Well, you can’t afford to think about it right now; you have an exam to study for.
The NBA was infinitely more difficult. I didn’t know the system. I didn’t know the offense. I didn’t know the rules. Defense? Forget it. Seriously, how in the world was I going to contain scoring machines such as Reggie Miller and Mitch Richmond and Dell Curry—Steph’s father—and the guy who wore number 23 for the Chicago Bulls?
Seeing Michael Jordan in person blew me away. I had been looking forward to it from the time I checked out the Bucks’ preseason schedule at training camp and noticed an upcoming game with the Bulls at the United Center in Chicago. This is actually happening, I told myself.
The night was surreal. I was doing my normal stretching when the Bulls jogged onto the court, Michael the last to appear. The first thing to strike me was that he was a lot darker than I remembered seeing on TV, like a shadow. Before I could take it all in, the horn sounded and I found myself on the court with him before the jump ball . . . and, my God, he’s headed right toward me!
“Ray,” he said, extending his hand, “welcome to the NBA.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Holy shit, MJ knows my name. Not until later did it hit me that he, like any other opposing player, must have glanced at the scouting report. So of course he’d know my name.
As for the game itself, if my memory is correct, I scored nine points in the first quarter before Chris Ford, our coach, sat me down for the rest of the night. I was upset; I would have played the entire 48 minutes if he had let me.
Chris made sure I always remembered where I stood in the pecking order, referring to me as “rook.” He subscribed to the old-school mentality many coaches believe in: Put the kid in his place. Remind him that he doesn’t know any better.
Every possession, he’d tell me to “shoot the ball” or “dribble” or “bounce it.” All I could think was: Dude, can you please let me do my job? It was hard enough trying to focus on the opponent and learn our schemes without listening to a coach yelling God knows what every other second. I finally wised up, walking to the other side of the floor, simply to get away from his badgering.
That didn’t stop him.
“Go get rook,” he would tell one of my teammates, and then get on my case all over again.
Instead of raising his voice, I wished he would’ve taken the time to calmly teach me. That’s how you bring out the best in your players. In the NBA, or at any level of the game.
There were occasions, to be fair, when Coach Ford did teach me something. Whether he intended to or not.
Such as the time my alarm failed to go off—I had set it for PM instead of AM—causing me to miss a shootaround. He didn’t start me that night against the Washington Bullets, which bothered me to no end. In his mind, if you miss practice, you must pay the consequences. In my 18 years in the league, I am proud to say, I was never late to a shootaround, or a practice, again.
Another time, we’d just lost and Vin Baker, our best player, was so disgusted that he dressed in a hurry and bolted from the locker room without a word to the press. Not interested in dealing with any questions myself, I took off too, and didn’t give the matter a second thought. Chris would make sure I did.
“Rook,” he told me after he heard complaints from reporters a few days later, “you don’t want to be locked in as having a bad reputation i
n this league. You’re a nice, well-meaning kid, and the media is going to have your back, or they’re not. So, whenever you lose, you have to be man enough to own up to your faults. You have to speak on behalf of your team, if you ever want to be a leader.”
From that moment on, I never ran from the media again, no matter how gut-wrenching any defeats were, and believe me, there were plenty.
“I could have played better,” I would admit, or, “I turned the ball over too many times,” or, “We didn’t match the other team’s sense of urgency.” It didn’t matter what I said, as long as I said something. A leader, I came to understand, is not just the player who scores the most points. A leader is also the one who accepts the blame even when—especially when—he doesn’t deserve it. I played with a lot of guys who saw themselves as leaders. That’s the last thing they were. They were willing to take the credit whenever the team was doing well, but when the team struggled, they vanished.
As a rookie, assuming that kind of responsibility wasn’t my concern. You can’t lead if you’re still trying to find your way. Shannon was a tremendous help in those early months, with a bluntness I would come to rely on. She visited me in Milwaukee quite a bit, and having her around was something I looked forward to more than you can imagine.
“What would you say if I asked you to marry me?” I said.
“We barely know each other,” she responded.
As it would end up, marriage was a ways off, which was the best thing for both of us. We had careers to build first. The fact that Shannon wanted to be successful in her own right was something else I admired about her.
There were things to admire about our team too—Vin and small forward Glenn Robinson, the number 1 overall pick from the 1994 draft, come to mind—but we still could not fare better than 33-49, finishing 36 games behind the Bulls. Yikes. Coach Calhoun taught me to hate losing, but I really didn’t know what it felt like to lose until I got to the NBA. I lost a lot in those early years, and I never got used to it. The fans didn’t either.
They had every right to boo, no doubt, but I thought they went over the top on more than a few occasions. Though, later on, I realized that they had a point, that some players didn’t give 100 percent night after night. Which was the norm, sadly, in the NBA, unlike college. In college, with far fewer games, each one is an event. Conversely, a game between two teams in the NBA with losing records on a cold evening in January is not an event.
Even so, that’s no excuse for a letdown. You’re a professional athlete, getting paid a ridiculous amount of money, and every night someone is coming to see you for the first, and quite possibly, only time. To give them anything less than your absolute best is unforgivable.
Off the court, I was slowly adjusting to my surroundings. I stayed in Vin’s home for a few months. He was like a big brother to me. I knew nothing about the city when I first got there: I didn’t know where to eat, where to shop, where to see a movie. Nothing. So not having to find somewhere to live was one less task to worry about. By the time I moved into a place of my own, I was ready, thanks to Vin.
I also bought a house in Connecticut for my mother. She’d done everything for me, and I don’t mean just the usual things that moms do for their kids. To see her in a home she owned, not an apartment she rented, made me happier than anything. Otherwise, I didn’t spend much the first year. I drove a rental car a friend at a local dealership let me use, and because it snowed constantly, I never had to wash it.
Milwaukee, for all my griping those first few months, turned out to be the right place for me, like South Carolina was. And Storrs, for that matter.
I grew as a player and as a person. I’m not suggesting it wouldn’t have happened somewhere else, but, in Milwaukee, because of the weather and lack of nightlife, I wasn’t enticed to buy a fancier car or spend time in the clubs. Which wouldn’t have helped me better prepare for Reggie Miller or Michael Jordan.
Nor would it have helped me better cope with whatever the press may say about me. Which could be anything, as I found out before I had even appeared in my first game.
SLAM magazine covered the highly touted 1996 draft class—“Ready or not . . . here they come!”—and predicted that Stephon Marbury was the most likely to be Rookie of the Year, and Shareef Abdur-Rahim the most likely to average 20 points per game. Fair enough. I, on the other hand, was deemed the most likely to “fade into obscurity.”
I knew what “obscurity” meant, but wanting to be sure, I looked it up anyway, and man, was I pissed off. What would ever possess them to write that? I never bothered to find out, but like Kenny and those others who doubted me, I didn’t forget. I still spoke to their writers as the years went on, but I always reminded them how angry I was about that article. As usual, being put down like that made me more motivated. I wasn’t sure that was possible.
In year two with the Bucks, we struggled once again. There was at least a sense that the future would be better than the past. It couldn’t be much worse.
In September, we had sent Vin Baker to Seattle in a three-team deal that included the Cavaliers, and while I looked up to Vin, it meant a bigger role for me in the offense, similar to when Donyell Marshall left for the NBA after my freshman year at UConn. I went from averaging 13.4 points per game to 19.5, second behind Glenn Robinson’s 23.4.
That season I had another memorable chat with Coach Ford.
“You don’t have a routine,” he explained. “You just go out and do whatever and believe that will be enough. You need to find a routine and stick to it every night. You can’t just run around.”
He was right. I didn’t have a routine because I didn’t think I needed one. In college, the coaches created a routine for you, day after day. There was a set time for meetings, for watching film, for being on the floor, for stretching with the trainer, for joining the layup line, for study hall, and for eating meals. I think that covers everything.
That isn’t the situation once you turn pro. Except for practices, shootarounds, traveling, and the games themselves, what you do with your time is up to you. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
It is, if you spend your time wisely, which I did. And, for a while in Milwaukee, I had company.
Each morning, two teammates, Michael Curry and Elliot Perry, both guards, and I met for breakfast at the hotel, taking turns on who picked up the check. Then we took a taxi to the arena, arriving roughly three hours prior to tip-off to get our shots up before the bigs showed up. Nothing personal against the bigs, but being in the paint, they get in your way and slow down your rhythm. Midrange, long range, free throws, we worked our way around the perimeter, with a rebounder tossing the ball to keep us in sync.
I was happy to have Michael and Elliot with me, as I would be later in my career when other players came to my workouts. Provided that they were in it for the long haul.
Some teammates, every so often, would ask: “Ray, can I shoot with you?”
“Sure,” I told them, “but you can’t just be here today. You have to be here every day.” That was because, once you join me, you become part of my routine, and it would throw me off if you are in the gym one day and gone the next.
Michael and Elliot both left the Bucks in 1999, but I stuck to my routine, through my last game in 2014.
At times, my teammates could not figure out why I put in the extra effort, but there was no mystery. You get such a small window to make it as a professional athlete, you owe it to yourself to give it everything you have until age, the one opponent you cannot overcome, takes you down. I thought of my father, who may have been able to advance further in his career, and how I promised myself I would work as hard as I could.
Lots of players won’t make the commitment simply because they don’t want to be held to the same high standard for the rest of their careers. I get it. There were countless mornings I woke up in freezing, snowy Milwaukee, my back still aching from the game the night before, and asked myself: Why not, just this one time, give yourself a break and sta
y in bed for another hour? What’s the harm? No one will ever know.
Only I would know, and if I skipped one time, I might skip another, and another, and would soon feel the difference come the fourth quarter, when my team needed me the most and the usual lift in my legs wouldn’t be there. It’s one thing to miss a free throw or a jump shot because, well, you miss; that happens. It’s another to miss because you don’t put in the work. That should never happen.
Each time I worked out for 30 minutes I felt like a new person, so when the game began, and other guys worried about making their shots and having enough stamina down the stretch, I was as relaxed as I could be. As strange as it may sound, I’d already played the game.
That doesn’t mean I would automatically come through—the player guarding you is also a professional, with pride and talent—but whenever I didn’t, it was not for lack of preparation.
A writer once asked me: “You had a bad game. How are you going to respond?”
“I didn’t have a bad game,” I said. “The ball just didn’t go in the basket.”
A bad game isn’t necessarily when you shoot three for 15 or throw a few errant passes. That’s because you can still contribute in numerous other ways to help the team.
To me, a bad game is when you come in unprepared, with little energy—and shoot poorly and commit turnovers.
At the same time, a good game isn’t necessarily when you shoot 11 of 15. The “experts” on TV will rave about a player who scores a lot of points, but is he helping out on defense? Is he taking the proper shot at the proper time in the flow of the offense? Is he bringing out the best in his teammates?
I don’t mean to put down how important shooting is. I thought about shooting more than you can imagine. I dreamed about it. And, by the way, in those dreams, I always shot zero for something like 1,000, which meant I would have to leave for the gym earlier than usual in the morning—or the lab, as I called it. The idea was to get any negative thoughts out of my head as fast as possible. Once I got the work in and saw the ball fall through the net I could relax, knowing that I would be fine. For the next game at least.