A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (36 page)

Our team’s talent continued to mesh in the second round, when we met up with the New Jersey Nets, who hadn’t forgotten the previous year’s sweep. In game one they said as much by beating us badly. In our house, no less. But from then on, we were unstoppable, ballin’ all the way through the next four games, cruising to a 4–1 victory for the series. Besides the leadership from Shaq and memorable contributions from Alonzo and Udonis, along with tremendous scoring from our newer additions, a highlight for me came in game five at home when I sealed the one-point game win and the series by stealing an inbound pass that could have otherwise let the Nets score and win—with nine-tenths of a second on the clock.

Back again at the Eastern Conference Finals, one year later, we faced a familiar foe. Guess who? Yep, the Pistons—who after beating us had gone on to lose the 2005 championship to the Spurs—and might have hoped that they’d be able to put us away quickly so they could go back and reclaim the throne they’d won in 2004. Well, obviously, we had different ideas that were spelled out in game one in Detroit—a Miami win! In a rousing game that had contributions from everyone (compensating for the limited time that both Shaq and I had due to foul trouble), we won, 91–86. Sticking with what had worked, we played game two in Detroit, with heavy lifting from Shaq and Antoine Walker, and a good game for me, but we lost, 92–88. In game three, we returned home to Miami, where the fans gave us extra octane for sure. I had 35 points for the game and a crucial block in the fourth quarter that added to the combined effort from the rest of the team—which delivered an eyebrow-raising 98–83 score. Leading the series 2–1, we rode a wave of enthusiasm into game four, again on home court, and with big plays from Shaq and Udonis, we went up one more game.

In the Eastern Conference Finals you always want to be in the position of leading 3–1 in the series going into game five. But this is, as they say, a slippery slope. As dangerous as it is for the team that faces elimination with every game and must win all three remaining games to survive, the threat of complacency or overconfidence is just as great. Not only that: since we didn’t have home court advantage, we had to return to Detroit for that fifth game. And sure enough, we had ourselves handed a thirteen-point loss in front of a sellout crowd of bloodthirsty fans in Michigan.

The stage was thus set for game six, on June 2, 2006. Ghosts of the Eastern Conference battle of the past came back to haunt me when I went to bed the night before the game feeling sick as a dog. For the last year I had wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t missed game six and returned less than 100 percent in game seven. The night before the game was brutal and in the morning when I awoke there was no improvement. In fact, I felt so lousy, I had to be rushed to the hospital. What made me feel worse was the prospect of not playing. The only way I could convince the doctors and the coaching staff to let me play was by agreeing to have my time in the game limited.

All I could hear was Shaq’s voice echoing in my ears that we had let a championship slip through our fingers. At the game, however, my eyes and head still blurry from the flu symptoms, I watched Shaq and Jason Williams take over, along with Antoine Walker, who scored in the double digits, James Posey with game-changing rebounds, and Udonis Haslem with a key jumper. For my time on the floor, I was able to add 14 points and 10 assists, a double double—not too sorry for a man who had to talk his way out of the hospital earlier in the day. In the fourth quarter, we took a small lead and stretched it out mercilessly until, by the power invested in the clock, yes, yes, yes, we won the game by seventeen points.

We had done it! We had won the Eastern Conference title! We were on our way to the NBA Finals—to Mount Everest! For the first time in Miami Heat history, we were advancing to the fourth and final round of the playoffs, to battle for the championship.

And the strangest thing was that whatever had threatened to knock me on my ass and keep me out of that last game was instantly cured.

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. IN MY LIFETIME, EVEN though I believe that life is bigger than basketball, I probably won’t attempt to climb the real Everest. Nothing against heights. They don’t scare me. But I don’t love high-flying birds and I have a fear they’ll swoop down and knock me over or remind me that their wings are real and mine aren’t. Yeah, I know, it’s weird. Blame it on scary stories and Hitchcock’s
The Birds,
which I have been much too freaked out to watch.

That said, what I know of getting up into the rarefied air of the NBA Finals is that you win as a team—just like mountain climbers who are connected by that rope. If one falls, the others may go down, too. You hold each other up. You depend on each other and you know the others are depending on you.

There is less oxygen up in the heights of whatever you are climbing toward, or at least on that last ascent, because you have already crawled and scratched your way up to get to where you are and you are running off the air and fuel that you’ve been storing in your being since you ever dreamt this incredible dream. You’re not always thinking when you need to be hyperfocused and every move matters.

Now, if that’s true for you and the other members of your team, imagine that it’s also true for your opponent, who is climbing with the same fury to get to the top. And only one team gets to reach it.

In the case of the Heat and the Dallas Mavericks, neither team had ever won the NBA championship before. So the thing that unified us as players earlier in the season in our desire to win was no longer the antigravity force that was working for us. We needed something more powerful, the proverbial fire in the belly, to take everything we had been doing and turn up the dial—several notches.

We were not the same team that the Mavs had embarrassed early in the regular season. They knew that. They weren’t the same team, either, of course. They brimmed with game- and series-winning confidence, big, lean athletic ballers who looked like they felt damn fine to be opening the series with home court advantage as they stampeded onto their floor on June 8 for game one of the series in Dallas. Between Jason Terry, Dirk Nowitzki, Josh Howard, and Jerry Stackhouse and the rest of the Mavericks, they appeared to be ready to rumble.

So were we, obviously. But by the second half, the momentum swung in their favor, helped along by their bunch that killed ours. The 90–80 win for Dallas in game one wasn’t disastrous. We left their arena resolved to adjust, shake off the loss, and come back to turn the tables on them in game two.

Instead, on June 11, still in Dallas, we got slammed even worse! Crushed by nightmarish proportions. Oh, yeah, the fourteen-point loss could have been worse. At one point we’d been losing by twenty-seven! No matter what we did, we couldn’t catch up to bring us any closer than twelve points behind.

So we traveled back to Miami like we were the payload in a hearse. Knowing the importance of home court advantage, we had assumed we weren’t going to win both games in Dallas. But we had planned on winning one of them. We were good enough to do that and we had allowed the Mavs to control both games.

We didn’t want to think about how sharp the incline just got and how the oxygen was running low. We could only hope that being back in front of our fans on home court would level the playing field. Not that we needed to be reading statistics at this stage, but the track record for reviving and winning a series after losing the first two games of a playoff series wasn’t at all heartening. Only two other teams had ever done that before. Uncharted territory? Almost.

Before tip-off of game three, on June 13 in Miami, I’m taking my moment to do my pregame ritual—three pull-ups heavenward through the basket, letting myself come up through the rim and see above it, marking this zone as my turf. I’ve got my three pieces of chewing gum ready and my three bottles of Gatorade. (Endorsement alert!) The patterns of the number three make me joyful, reminding me that this is, after all, game three, and this battle is far from over.

That’s what I’m thinking. We’re all alive and playing but the Dallas Mavericks have apparently decided they can sweep the series and will have all but the last few nails in the coffin after this game, with a 3–0 series advantage. Well, the first half is a struggle but we hang in. By the second half, that awful piercing pain in the gut starts to suggest that we aren’t going to pull this out. Coach Riley wears a look of bewilderment, as if he doesn’t know how to get us back to the moment of truth we had earlier in the season. Then I realize that we’re allowing ourselves to be defined by a team that doesn’t think we can beat them. In my brain a big red warning light turns on that makes me angry. Down by 13 points with only 6:15 to go, at the end of a timeout I say to no one and everyone, “I’m not going out like this.”

Now, add to that anger a whole bunch of unspent currency of pent-up rage—the fear and loneliness of childhood, the hunger that lived with me daily, mixed with the pride that kept me from asking for food when it was there, the poverty and absent fathers and mothers, not passing my ACT, struggling to feed my son, I mean, all of it—and I went and took all of it out on the Dallas Mavericks.

The rest of my team felt that moment and brought their own fury into the game and with 9.3 seconds to go, when we were locked into a 95–95 tie, Gary Payton sank a basket to let us take a two-point lead. With 3.4 seconds left, Dallas had the ball and we fouled Nowitzki, giving him the chance to tie us up again. Dirk missed the second of his two free throws, putting the score at 97–96, with our razor-thin one-point lead. Then I went to the line to shoot two free throws and missed the second as well. Dallas had the last possession. With three-tenths of a second remaining, the Mavs took the ball down the court to inbound it, hoping to get it in and tie the game, sending it into overtime, or win with a three-pointer. As soon as the inbound happened, I stole the ball right before the buzzer. We won game three, 98–96. Like Shaq said, stats don’t matter if you don’t win. For this game he had five critical assists and I had 42 points—15 of them in the fourth quarter—and 13 rebounds.

Game three turned out to be just as fortuitous and pivotal as I had imagined it might be. In game four, on June 15 in Miami, three of us—Shaq, James Posey, and I—each recorded a double double and everyone in our ranks soared as we fed off the love of the fans. We did unto the Mavs exactly as they had done unto us in game two, and won, 98–74.

But wait. Maybe you think that you know how this ends. Well, remember, we did not. The series now was tied up, 2–2. Once again all bets were off. Game five, played in Miami on June 18, left so many milestones for both of our teams and had so many twists and turns that everybody came out of the arena with whiplash.

We had been down by as much as 8 points at halftime and found ourselves trailing by that amount as we were finishing up the third quarter. A burst of effort gave us 23 points in the fourth quarter, 17 of which came from me, including a long bank shot that helped tie the game at 93 all and send the game into overtime. We went neck and neck until Gary Payton helped push the score up by one. Nowitzki answered with his own basket, giving Dallas the edge, 100–99—with 1.9 seconds left in overtime. Then I was fouled and made both free throws. We won, 101–100!

We traveled back to Dallas for game six, which took place on June 20. Now that we were up 3–2 in the series, the momentum had shifted to give us the edge. Theoretically, Dallas could use the same advantages that had given them wins for games one and two. But now that we had been in the trenches over the last five games, the odds were slightly better that we could win at least one of the two games and take the series.

We had a better plan than just going with slightly better odds. We went to win, to take the series in six games. Pat Riley announced he was only bringing one tie for the trip. I did the same and said so to reporters when I arrived in a cream-colored suit and walked to the locker room, telling them, “This is all I’ve got. I’m not packing anything else. This is our game seven.” After that, I went to change, saying to some of the press standing by, “Hope to see you at the party later on.”

That’s what I mean about oxygen deprivation from playing in higher altitudes. Traveling with one suit was very risky. But in hindsight I think that the fearlessness of being willing to risk all to win all was where I’d been coming from. That thinking gave me the confidence to try to put my team on my shoulders—to get us back into the series when we had been counting ourselves out.

I did do that. But game six, however it played out, was going to be won by the best team—by whoever showed up to play. For most of the first half, the Mavericks held the lead. Then we went up with less than a minute before halftime when Posey made two free throws. In the second half, we never fell behind, even though we found ourselves tied more than once. But I knew the outcome would be in our favor. I’ve never played with a greater feeling of relaxation, or at least not in a playoff game. Yes, I found my shots and made them, 36 points’ worth, yet there was no anxiety or fury. The expectation that we would be champions when the game was over made everything feel effortless. All fifteen players on the Heat contributed in some way. Udonis had 17 points and 10 rebounds and Antoine Walker scored 14 points and grabbed 11 rebounds. James Posey scored 6 points, including a three-pointer at a critical moment in the game, and made 5 rebounds. Alonzo Mourning will always be remembered for 5 blocks that were considered game-altering, as well as for 8 points and 6 rebounds. Shaq had 9 points and 12 rebounds, a team high, and Jason Williams had 7 assists, also a team high.

In the last seconds of the game, we were up 95–92, and when the Mavs missed their possible tying shot, and I realized that we had won the game, I grabbed the ball, heard the final buzzer, and threw the ball high in the air—something that I’d only ever fantasized doing.

The power of 15 Strong added to the most unforgettable celebrations for us as a team, at home and everywhere else. There is no way that I could have imagined any better party than the parades and fanfare and jubilation that lasted until the next season. That’s a high you just don’t want to come down from. Oh, and when the press finally gathered in the locker room to see what was in the bowl turned vat, they couldn’t believe that no one had come close to guessing. Everyone was shocked. How could cards in a bowl with sayings and pictures on them fire up a team of guys so much? However it happened, they did. Pat Riley had orchestrated this, using his powers of unpredictability, which are part of his secret for success.