Character Driven (9 page)

She wasn’t the first female who caught my eye. Back in third grade, I was head over heels for a girl named Sharona. She had long, flowing hair and a really cute smile. I remember one day deciding that instead of admiring her from afar, I would take some action. (Had I told my dad, he would have been proud of me for being so assertive and not sitting back waiting for things to happen.) It took me a while because I was confused since I also had a crush on my third-grade teacher, Miss Leslie. Do you go with the veteran or give the young kid a shot? One of the eternal questions that NBA executives and coaches all have to deal with, and there I was in the third grade faced with this dilemma. After a few weeks of wondering about how Sharona felt about me, I had to do something. I wrote a little note asking,
Do you like me? Please check one: yes no
.

I waited until Sharona went up to the pencil sharpener. Only two of us were allowed up there at any time, so I had to act quickly. I hopped out of my chair—all that basketball had given me a quick first step—and dashed up to the sharpener behind Sharona. I waited until she was done and was blowing the shavings off her pencil before I tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the note. She tucked it into her fist and went back to her seat. It took all the discipline I had to keep looking down at the pencil sharpener. I can still remember that engraved on the little dial that you turned depending upon the thickness of your pencil was the word
Boston
.

I went back to my seat, and I’m happy to report that eventually I got the note back from Sharona and she had checked the yes box. I sat back feeling really happy with myself. Of course, years later when the social mores and methods of girls had advanced beyond the stage when they had those folded paper clackers (which looked like Venus flytraps) with which they interrogated us with questions and asked us for numbers so that they could peel back the folds of their paper monstrosities to reveal our fate, I would long for those simpler days when a simple yes or no could fill or empty my heart. It was one of those small things, and just as I would have to sharpen my skills on the court, I needed to figure out what to do off the court to keep me in the game. But the foundation was there for success in life, in love, and on the court. Work hard, develop your fundamentals, attack your weaknesses, and always do the right thing. I was fortunate to have parents and coaches who helped me to recognize what I needed to do to develop other parts of my personality and explore other areas of interest besides basketball. And if you ever make it to the big time, don’t buy a house with a lot of pine trees.

CHAPTER FOUR

Knocking Them Down:

Free Throws and Seizing Opportunities

In the old days, sportswriters and announcers sometimes referred to it as the charity stripe. While I’m a great believer in giving back and helping out those in need, in some ways I never liked the basketball free throw line being referred to that way. Charity can sometimes mean a handout, being given something that you haven’t been able to attain for yourself, something that you didn’t work for. I can understand why sportscasters or sportswriters came up with that name for the free throw line. It’s a colorful bit of language, but inaccurate. I don’t think you’ll find a single guy in the NBA, NCAA, or even in high school who’s used the term. When it comes to free throws—or even better, call them foul shots—the inaccuracy of the term
charity stripe
is about the last thing you want associated with them.

First, in almost all cases, except if the opposing team has been whistled for a technical foul and your team gets to choose who goes to the line, the player shooting free throws has been fouled. You’ve earned the right to get to the “charity stripe,” and if you’ve ever watched an NBA game, you know that sportscasters have also come up with the term
hard foul
. That’s a more accurate term than
charity stripe
, since many times, as a result of a hard foul, the fouled player falls to the hard court, is struck hard by an opponent, or runs into a hard body on the other team. I’m not alone in having gone to the free throw line after having been smacked across the bridge of the nose or the back of the head. I was not the first player, nor will I be the last, who went in among the so-called trees and crashed to the floor after having made contact with one of the stout limbs or immovable trunks of the largest members of that species.

It’s hard to pull yourself together when you’ve had that kind of experience, but you have to. So, I don’t hold with the idea that a free throw is all that “free.” Most of the time you’ve earned your way to the line, and you have to use your shooting skills to make that free throw. Even though you get a “free” opportunity to shoot the ball, you still have to make that fifteen-foot shot (the distance from the free throw line to the plane of the backboard), and in the heat of the battle, especially in an up-and-down-the-court type of game, sinking that shot isn’t as easy as it looks. Even in a relatively “slow” half-court-type game, you’re still moving a lot, running through or around offensive screens, and your heart and respiration rates are climbing. In an up-tempo game, you’re doing a whole series of two-hundred-foot sprints. Gathering yourself and bringing your breathing under control isn’t all that easy.

The only thing free about a foul shot is that you don’t have a defender guarding you, but that experience, standing alone with the ball in your hands and everyone watching you, is uniquely different, making it either a pleasure or a nightmare for some players. I’ve played with and against some of the greatest and some of the poorest free throw shooters in the game—John Stockton, Ray Allen, and Steve Nash are among the best in the history of the NBA. Shaquille O’Neal’s struggles at the line are legendary as well, but he wasn’t alone in clanging the ball off the rim or the backboard. Ben Wallace has the lowest free throw percentage (41.8%) among NBA players who have played at least five hundred games, and even greats such as Bill Russell (56%) and Wilt Chamberlain (51%) were well below what most people consider a good free throw percentage of 75 percent. Obviously, those last two guys made up for that deficiency in other ways and easily earned their way into the NBA’s Hall of Fame. I’m sure that Shaq will follow them into the hall as soon as he is eligible, and people will remember him more for other parts of his game than his misadventures at the free throw line.

I think that part of the reason you see so many big men at the bottom of the all-time free throw percentage list is that these guys are so used to banging underneath and have had to develop a body suitable for that kind of pounding that a more fine-motor-skill activity such as shooting free throws is harder for them. Also, the taller you are, the longer your arms tend to be, and the lever you use to shoot with can be harder to control as a result. It doesn’t take much of a mechanical flaw to throw off a shot and make that sweet sound of a swish turn into a thudding clank. Despite his height and build, Karl Malone was one of the NBA’s greatest free throw shooters, leading the league in free throw percentage eight times in his career (five seasons in a row from 1988 to 1993) and sinking 9,787 of them. That leaves me about 8,134 shy of his mark as I write this.

I’ve attempted just a little more than two thousand free throws in my years in the league, and I’ve heard both the swish and the clang, and let me tell you, it still really gets to me when I miss a free throw. It’s almost as if that sound of a miss, or someone shouting “Off!” at one of my errant attempts, is directly transmitted to my spinal column and I feel those vibrations coursing through my whole body. Other than the obvious—my competitive desire—the reason I feel that sensation so fully is that a free throw represents an opportunity—one that you either seize or let pass you by. In my life, I’ve tried to take advantage of every opportunity I’ve ever had, and I feel I’ve done a good job.

Shooting free throws well is a matter of both mental and physical discipline and is one of the fundamentals that every NBA player works on. When we’re working our way up through the ranks from recreation leagues to school teams, to Amateur Athletic Union, to college ball, we probably put more of an emphasis on practicing foul shooting. I’ve seen and heard stories of guys who were really good free throw shooters working on them all the time and demanding as close to perfection from themselves as they could. Calvin Murphy was regarded as one of the greatest free throw shooters of all time. He set an NBA record by making 78 consecutive free throws in 1980 and 1981. That same year, he made an astounding 95.8 percent of his free throws (206 out of 215). He credited his years spent as a baton twirler with helping him become a Hall of Fame basketball player. His free throw record stood for twelve years, before Micheal Williams, guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves out of Baylor University, broke it. Williams’s streak lasted until the 1993–94 season when he finally missed one, ending his streak of 97 consecutive conversions. That kind of precision is pretty amazing.

Williams practiced his free throws religiously, shooting hundreds at a time. He also played little mind games with himself to keep his focus on the task. If he missed one, he told himself that he had to make ten in a row to make up for his mistake. He made a science of free throw shooting and even studied professional golfers as they putted to see if he could learn something he could apply to his own game. Everybody knows that practice makes perfect, but few of us are really willing to put in the effort it takes to truly practice a skill and not just go through the motions. Today, I admire Jose Calderon and his amazing touch from the line. For the 2008–9 season he hit an astounding 151 out of 154 (98%) from the line.

While I didn’t really think of it that way back in the day, I was really preparing myself to be successful when I played in those imaginary games. That’s an important part of being successful at anything. Obviously, the more times you do something, even doing it mentally through visualization, the more you become comfortable at doing it, and the greater your chances to succeed. I can still remember a game from my junior year at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. We were playing Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas, at the Johnson Coliseum. The Bearkats weren’t in our conference, but any win was important, and as the clock wound down under ten seconds, the ball was in my hands. I figured that with good dribble penetration, I could either get up a shot, get fouled, or kick out. The defense converged on me, and I had no way to get the ball to anyone on the wing, so with just a few seconds left in the game, I pulled up for a short jumper. As soon as I left the floor, I knew I was going to get hammered, and sure enough, someone swatted my forearm. I could barely get the shot off, but it didn’t matter. The referee blew the whistle and I got sent to the line with just a fraction over a second left. We were down 69 to 67, and if I made the two shots, chances were really good that we’d go to overtime.

I was always a decent free throw shooter, hovering around the low seventies as a percentage, and stepping up to the line, I was confident. Shooting in those situations, it is impossible to tell yourself and to believe that these are just any old free throws. As a player, you’re always aware of the score and any other circumstances. Instead of that being a burden, I looked at it as an opportunity. I knew my team needed me to make those two foul shots, and I was glad to be in the position where everyone relied on me to do my job. But even though I knew that in a lot of ways these free throws were different, I couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary in my approach.

For years, I had been following the same pre-shot and shot-taking routine. After the foul is called, I’ll hang back from the line, at the top of the key, and wait for everyone to get set on either side of the lane or for any substitutions to be made and players to enter or exit. Once the referee has the ball in his hands and indicates by raising his hand that the game is going to resume, I step up to the line. Back then, most courts we played on were more or less permanent—they weren’t periodically taken up for concerts, ice hockey games, or other uses as in the major venues I play in today. On nearly every wood court I’ve ever played on, there’s something we refer to as the nail. In some cases, that nail is literally a metal fastener in the wood that fixes the court to the subflooring underneath it—whether that’s cement, another layer of wood, or some composite material. The nail is the head of that fastener or sometimes a painted mark on the floor that is lined up with the exact center of the basket. In other words, it is the center point of the court from sideline to sideline and exactly fifteen feet from the baseline. I always looked down to find the nail so that I could put my feet, shoulder width apart, equidistant from that center mark.

Once the official handed me the ball, I would take it, and after eyeing the rim, I would dribble the ball three times while looking down at the floor. While doing that, I would visualize the ball as it dropped through the hoop—not a movie of its flight through the air, but a snapshot of the final result. I would bend my knees slightly while rotating the ball in my hands until the tip of my index finger came in contact with the ball’s air hole. I like it so that the ball’s seams are perpendicular to the rim. With the fingers of my shooting hand comfortably fanned out, I would rise and flex my knees again with my guide hand on the side of the ball approximately in the center. After I’d exhale, I’d flex my knees and hips, trying to limit the amount of side-to-side motion, and raise my arms up into the shot. As much as possible, I’d try to limit the amount of motion in other parts of my arms except from the elbow down to my hand.

Of course, when I was shooting, I couldn’t think of all those fine points. Instead, I would let muscle memory take over completely, or I’d remind myself of one or at most two key points. After my having shot thousands and thousands of free throws, muscle memory has developed, but the key is that my muscles need to remember to do the proper things. I don’t know of too many NBA-caliber players who have had to have their stroke completely rebuilt once they got into high school or college, let alone the pros. I take a more or less textbook approach to foul shooting, but guys such as Reggie Miller and Peja Stojakovic have little quirks in their style that you won’t find in the textbook method. Despite those quirks, those two are great shooters, and the old cliché “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here. Guys develop habits, and it’s impossible for players to be mirror images of one another.

The key to any shot routine is that you repeat it as a way to eliminate thought. You want your body to take over to do what it knows best. By relying on the familiar and on past success, you eliminate negative thinking or distracting thoughts. You enter a weird mental state where you’re not really thinking but reacting. In that game against Sam Houston State, I was aware that my uncle, who lived relatively nearby in Waco, was at the game, but I was not consciously thinking about him. I was grateful that all the practice I’d been doing paid off and I made both shots to get the game into overtime. I was thrilled that my uncle had been there to see me come through in the clutch. I was gratified that I had come through when it really mattered. We went on to win the game, and that was the most special part of the whole experience.

Since then, I’ve drawn on those clutch free throw attempts over and over. Having that past success to recall and to rely on is enormously helpful. Not only have I sunk thousands of free throws in practice, but I’ve come through when it was really needed in game situations. In college, I made between 75 and 76 percent of my free throws. In my first year in the NBA, that fell to 66 percent, but it has climbed steadily since then, until in 2007–8 I shot the best I ever have from the line, making 88 percent of my shots. Seizing 22 percent more of the opportunities to score a point isn’t going to earn me headlines; free throw shooting is more noticeable when it’s done poorly than when it’s done well. Free throws aren’t nearly as exciting as a thunderous jam or a rainbow three from the corner being buried, but I still take some gratification at having improved that much over time.