Character Driven (10 page)

One reason I became a better foul shooter was a change in my technique. I’d gotten better and better at foul shooting, but in my second season with the Golden State Warriors in 2005–6 I began shooting fouls in games using an adjustment I’d practiced during the off-season. During the 2004–5 season I’d made 86 percent of my foul shots. That was the highest in my career to then. That off-season, I began to experiment with moving just off center of the nail. For my whole basketball career, I’d centered my feet on either side of the nail, but something told me that I could get even better results with this change in my placement. I realized that if I moved a few inches to the right of the nail, so that my left foot was to the right of it, I would place my left elbow (my shooting hand) in line with the center of the basket. That made sense to me logically—aligning myself that way would put me in a position to shoot even straighter at the basket.

When I first started shooting that way, it felt a little awkward, but the results were good. I continued to work on it all that off-season, until even after having shot one way for my first ten years in the league, I was ready to switch. A lot of factors were responsible for my shooting three percentage points lower from the line that first year with my new method, but in the two seasons since then, my percentage has increased over the previous personal best.

Why didn’t I adapt the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality? I felt as if I’d done as much as I could to improve the other way, and as someone who is constantly trying to improve, I saw this as a viable opportunity to do so. I don’t think you should ever be content with how things are going, just as I don’t believe in change for the sake of change. I figured that if it wasn’t working for me as well as I wanted it to, I could always go back to shooting as I had before. I’m sure that the change was as much mental as it was physical. I had assessed my strengths and weaknesses as a foul shooter and come up with what I saw as a solution. I believed that it would make a difference, and it did. How much of that had to do with the change in the flight path of the ball, and how much of that had to do with my belief that I had found a better way, is not something that can be measured. That’s how it is in this game, in most games, and in many ways in all other aspects of life.

The important thing to remember is that I wasn’t satisfied even though I’d achieved the best results of my career. I still wanted to get better. I guess that’s just part of my nature to not be satisfied, but I think that most athletes and most successful people are that way.

I can remember that first year of the change facing the Detroit Pistons. I went to the line and made the first of two free throws. Rasheed Wallace, one of the more animated players in the game, looked at me with a startled expression on his face and said, “Fish, you always shoot your free throws that way?”

“No.” I gave him a quick explanation.

I missed the second shot, and as I headed back up court, Rasheed needled me, saying, “Back to the drawing board, professor.”

I framed this chapter around the idea of free throws and opportunity because I have to say, in looking back, if I can point to one thing as a reason for my success and longevity in the game, it’s that nearly every time when an opportunity presented itself, I maximized it. And if I didn’t, I looked back over the situation to learn why I had fallen short of my goal. To me, that’s the definition of success—maximizing opportunity. I think that it’s the rare person who doesn’t get opportunities in life. A lot of people complain about not getting them, but I think that most often the person does not recognize the opportunities that are presented. I’m more than sympathetic to people who are truly downtrodden and denied opportunity, but for the vast majority of us that isn’t the case. I’m sometimes troubled when I hear people say things like “It isn’t what you know, it’s who you know” or “The only way to get X [a job, a promotion, some tangible asset such as a house] is by being connected.” Being connected helps, but the reason that most people are connected somehow is because they took the opportunity to seek out other people. Those connections are rarely just handed out.

I sensed from the very beginning when I succeeded because of my physical attributes (size and handedness) that I could turn those advantages into something else. Quickly, once I advanced to higher levels, those physical gifts I had (and I realize that they aren’t the ones we typically associate with an NBA player) were no longer great advantages. As I progressed in the game, being left-handed wasn’t any real advantage for me, and other players were just as, if not more, physically strong as I was. But that early success gave me a quiet confidence. That I wasn’t the most skilled or physically gifted player on any of my teams made me hungry to prove to people that I was capable of playing the game and playing it well. I could also, briefly, operate in stealth mode. When I played with more physically imposing players or with guys whose reputations exceeded mine, I’d take advantage of having someone or even a whole team focusing on stopping those other guys. I could have looked at my reputation as not being as strong as a disadvantage and whined about lack of press or lack of respect, but I turned that into an advantage. Life is all in how you look at things, and developing that perspective of looking for opportunities to succeed and to make yourself more well-known is an important trait.

While it was important for me to have had early success and earned the praise of some of my coaches, having a father who didn’t lavish praise on me, and having parents who made certain that my hat size never got too big, were also advantages. I may not have known, but I had a fire in me that wanted to prove to people that even though it didn’t look as if I would grow to be six feet six or that I’d have 4.4 forty-yard dash or that I’d be able to grab a quarter off the top of the backboard, I did have something. Sportswriters and sports people in general sometimes refer to those things as “the intangibles,” and we have all kinds of clichés such as “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog that matters.” Call it good fortune, call it intuition, call it a knack, a talent, or whatever, but I have been able to turn opportunity into success.

Even when I made the transition from high school to college ball, I had my doubters. Including my first college coach, Jim Platt. Even though he’d recruited me, he still seemed to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out to lead his team. With all of the AAU ball and high school ball I’d been playing throughout my teens, I’d competed against the best players in the nation in my age group. I felt I could compete against any of them. Everyone said that when you went to the next level (from high school to the NCAA), everyone was going to be faster, stronger, and more skilled. I wasn’t intimidated by that possibility. I thought I’d done what I could to prepare myself to win the job as starting point guard. I also knew that I couldn’t rest on my accomplishments in high school. I’d been an Honorable Mention McDonald’s High School American, an AAU All-American, my high school team had won the state championship, my AAU team had won the national championship. Those team triumphs were most important. But I quickly realized none of that mattered. When I arrived in the summer to work out at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, Coach Platt told me immediately, “I can’t guarantee you any playing time. None at all. I just expect you to work hard and do the things you need to do.”

I had no idea if he gave that speech to every incoming freshman, but it sure made an impact on me. I didn’t expect to be handed anything, but I also didn’t expect to be told that I might not play at all. What the coach said wasn’t nearly as bad as the attitude with which he delivered those words. He seemed almost angry and a little bit dismissive, as if he couldn’t wait to get out of the room and move on to something else. I felt that I was just one more piece of paper on his desk that was linked to a lengthy to-do list. Now that he’d done what he needed to do, it was off to the shredder for me. I felt as if I should go to a nearby washroom and check my forehead for a giant check mark.

I wasn’t expecting him to roll out the red carpet for me. I was smart enough to know that coaches made all kinds of statements to high school kids that might not be true. During recruiting (more on that later) he’d never made it seem that he really wanted me to sign a letter of intent, that I figured in his plans for improving the team the next year. His assistants, Coach Finley and Coach White, were the ones who really pushed for him to offer me a scholarship. Every one of the starting five on my high school team earned a Division I scholarship—with guys going to such places as Florida State, Stanford, Oklahoma State, and Auburn. I knew that among us I’d gone to the smallest of the schools, but I didn’t think that meant I’d get the smallest amount of playing time. I’d had other schools interested in me, but I’d considered things carefully and decided UALR was the place to be. Had the coach changed his mind?

I had all summer to think about that. I enrolled in school early so that I could work out with the school’s strength-and-conditioning coach. One thing proved to be true about Division I ball—strength and conditioning workouts were a lot harder than what I’d experienced in high school. Parkview had one of the best strength training and conditioning programs of any high school, but that Arkansas, Little Rock, coach Ken Coggins put me through the workout of my life that first day—and all he was really doing was showing me each of the lifts I was going to have to do with free weights and what I would do on the various machines. All I can remember is feeling that I wanted to crawl out of that gym and drag my sorry butt to my car. I knew better than to let it show that I was hurting, so I casually strolled out. When I got to the car, I sat there for what seemed like twenty minutes. It felt as if someone had put a tourniquet around my triceps and biceps. Reaching for the steering wheel was sheer agony. The next few days were worse, but I persevered and actually looked forward to the workouts after a while.

I was also eager for the season to begin so that we could start practices in earnest. I found a group of guys to play with informally, but that was only making me hungrier to get out in front of the coaches and other players to really prove what I could do. Finally, in late November of 1992 we had a couple of exhibition games in anticipation of the season opener—a tournament at South West Missouri State University in Springfield. The Basketball Traveler’s Tip-off Tournament was our first real test of the season, and as predicted, Coach Platt had me sitting on the bench when the game began. During that tournament, in the first two games, our starting guard got into early foul trouble. The rotation had not been completely set, but coach waved me into the game.

I can’t say that I remember feeling any extra sense of pressure, but I must have known somewhere inside me that something was on the line other than just the game. When the whistle blew to stop play and I went into the game, I simply took a deep breath, said a quick prayer of thanks to God for this opportunity, then went into tunnel-vision mode. It’s hard to describe what that mode looks and sounds like. Basically I was aware of my environment but only fully aware of a small part of it—the ninety-four-by-fifty-foot court. I also operated within a limited mental space—I couldn’t consciously think, “Oh, this is an opportunity that I’ve worked so hard for. The coach hasn’t demonstrated a lot of faith in me. This is a make-or-break moment for me.” After having played the game for so many years, it was almost as if every cell in my body had that message encoded in it. I didn’t need to think through all those thoughts and their associated feelings. Instead, I just let the instrument that I’d worked so hard to refine—my body—take over and do its thing.

I did have one conscious thought, one that I always had when I went into the game as a substitute or even as a starter. I wanted to make an impact right away. I don’t mean that I went out there and took a huge risk—overplayed my man defensively so that I could get a steal (or alternatively give up an easy basket if my steal attempt failed) or fired up a shot at the first sign of being even remotely open. Instead, I took in all the data I’d collected while sitting on the bench observing, and looked for a chance to exploit the South West Missouri State’s point guard’s tendency to leave his feet prematurely on a pump fake. The first time he came out to guard me at the top of the circle, I rose up as if to shoot, got him in the air, and drove around him before dishing off when our center’s man left him to help guard me. A nice easy layup and an assist for me. I went on to score 12 points, handed out a fistful of assists, and even managed a steal or two.

At every time-out, I came back to the bench and could see in the eyes of my teammates and the coaches a glimmer of respect. I think my guys understood that I could play the game, and I didn’t think that I had anything to prove to them, but having evidence to back up my confidence and their belief in me made a big difference. After that game I never looked back, and started every game in each of my four years at Arkansas. It’s impossible to say that my career hinged on my success in that game, but people always say that first impressions are important. Just as I always felt that it was important to make a difference right away when entering a game, it’s equally important to start off a season, a career, or a comeback from injury on the right foot. More on comebacks and my foot in a bit.

The other major opportunity that I knew I had to seize came at the end of my senior year at UALR. Sometimes opportunities come at the most surprising times. When we lost our last game our senior year in our conference tournament, I was devastated. A buzzer beater knocked us out, and I just wanted to sink into the floor. That loss meant no conference tourney championship, no bid to the NCAA tournament (I’ve had a great career, but I would have loved to have played even a single game in March Madness), and the likely end of my basketball career. We had some consolation in being selected for the National Invitational Tournament, but that was like going to the big dance with the fifth or sixth girl you’d asked—even after your cousin said she couldn’t because she had other plans. Losing in the first round of the NIT to Vanderbilt was equally tough. I was nursing a slight injury as well, and sitting in that locker room in Nashville contemplating the dying of my dream was incredibly difficult. Every now and then I’d look around the room and see some of the underclassmen, and I was a bit envious of them. When Coach Sanderson started talking about next year, I couldn’t control my tears. For me, the odds were that there would be no next year.