Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (23 page)

During the next few weeks, Shaq and Kobe took their soap opera to absurd extremes. If Kobe noticed Shaq sidling up to one reporter, he’d refuse to talk to him or her, then promise an exclusive to someone else. And if Shaq saw that Kobe was getting his feet taped by one trainer, he’d insist on having his feet taped by another trainer. And so it went.

I was impressed by the way the rest of the players handled the situation. Most of them refused to take sides. Robert Horry made fun of the whole affair, calling it “a so-called feud between two big hot dogs.” Brian Shaw, who had played with O’Neal in Orlando, said it reminded him of the clash between Shaq and rising star Penny Hardaway, except that Penny was okay playing Robin to Shaq’s Batman, and Kobe wasn’t. Brian liked to say that the Lakers weren’t Shaq’s team or Kobe’s team; they were Dr. Buss’s team, because he was the one writing the checks.

Rick Fox said the Shaq-Kobe split was reminiscent of the standoff between Larry Bird and Kevin McHale when Fox joined the Celtics in the early nineties. Larry was serious about everything, while Kevin took a more playful attitude toward the game. McHale made jokes at practice and often tossed crazy shots in the layup line, which drove Larry nuts. Everybody on the team was expected to pick sides between Larry and Kevin. It was a nightmare.

Fortunately, the Shaq-Kobe split didn’t reach that point. By the time the All-Star game rolled around in mid-February, both players were sick of the spat and told reporters that they’d moved on. “I’m ready to stop answering these stupid questions,” Shaq said. Meanwhile Kobe took the view that many of his teammates shared. “The things that don’t kill you only make you stronger,” he said.

Now that he’s matured and is raising two headstrong daughters, Kobe laughs at what it must have been like dealing with him during that crazy season. “Both of my girls,” he says, “they’re at the stage where they feel like they know everything. It reminds me of me. I can imagine the headaches I gave Phil.” But, he adds, “even though there were times when it seemed like I wasn’t learning anything, I was learning.”

From Kobe’s perspective I used the rift between him and Shaq to strengthen the team. “Phil had two alpha males that he had to get going in the same direction,” Kobe says now. “And the best way to do that was to ride my butt because he knew that’s how he could get Shaq to do what he wanted him to do. That was fine with me, but don’t act like I don’t know what’s going on.”

In that sense, he’s right. I pushed Kobe hard that season because he was more adaptable than Shaq. In fact, Tex, who was Michael Jordan’s toughest critic, thought I should lighten up on Kobe. But I thought he needed strong direction on how to mature and grow. Kobe had all kinds of weapons. He could pass; he could shoot; he could attack off the dribble. But if he didn’t learn to use Shaq the right way and take advantage of his enormous power, the team would be lost. Even though I knew it would inhibit Kobe’s freewheeling style somewhat, I thought the best strategy for us was to get the ball to the big guy and have the defense collapse around him. It’s not unlike football, where you have to establish your ground game before you can launch your aerial game. In basketball, you need to go inside first before you can go to your shooters and cutters for easy baskets.

Kobe understood this, but he had other forces driving him. “It was tough for Phil to rein me in,” reflects Kobe, “because by nature I’m a number one. I had to go against my nature to become a number two. I knew I could lead a team, but it was a challenge for me because I’d never heard of a number two stepping into a lead role later on and winning.”

But eventually, Kobe says, he reenvisioned the problem. “The way I looked at it,” he explains, “I saw myself as a Navy Seal type of guy who goes in and does his job quietly. He doesn’t get the accolades that he should have gotten, but the true basketball purists know what he’s done.”

—

After the All-Star break we went on a long road trip that I hoped would help bring the team closer together. As part of my annual give-each-player-a-book program, I presented Shaq with a copy of
Siddhartha
, Hermann Hesse’s fictional account of the life of the Buddha. I thought the book might inspire Shaq to reexamine his attachment to material possessions. In the story the young prince Siddhartha renounces his luxurious life to seek enlightenment. The point I wanted Shaq to understand was that everyone has to find his or her own spiritual path—and accumulating more toys was not the way to get there. It was my way of nudging him to explore the road to inner peace—by quieting his mind, focusing on something other than his own desires, and becoming more compassionate toward his teammates, especially Kobe, who was dealing with some attachment issues of his own.

I was amused by the book report Shaq turned in a few weeks later. The gist was: This book is about a young man who has power, wealth, and women (much like me), and gives them all up to pursue a holy life (not so much like me). I would have been surprised if Shaq all of a sudden went on a search for enlightenment after reading the book, but I think the message about compassion hit home with him. He has a generous soul.

Kobe was a different story. The book I selected for him was
Corelli’s Mandolin
, a novel set on a small Greek island occupied by the Italian army during World War II. During the course of the story, the islanders have to accept the fact that they no longer control their own destiny and must come together and adapt to the new reality. In the end, they win by losing. I hoped that Kobe might resonate with the message and its parallels to his own struggles with the Lakers. Unfortunately, he wasn’t interested.

Still, life has a way of teaching us the lessons we need to learn. In the second half of the season, Kobe suffered a number of injuries—a sprained right ankle, a sore right hip, a sore right shoulder, and a sore right pinkie—that made him come face-to-face with his own vulnerability. Although earlier in the season Kobe had angered some of the veterans by saying that the team had “too many old legs,” in March he was struggling and revealed to Brian Shaw that the players he most identified with were the old-timers, Harper, Grant, and Shaw himself. In her book about the 2000–2001 season,
Ain’t No Tomorrow
, Elizabeth Kaye explores how Kobe’s injuries softened his attitude toward his teammates and himself. “For the first time, on the court,” reports Kaye, “Kobe could not simply power his way through everything. ‘There are cracks and holes that I’ve always been able to get through,’ he told Shaw, ‘that I can’t quite get through right now. I can’t elevate the way I want to.’

“‘That’s how I feel every single day,’ Shaw told him. ‘So now this is where you grow up. This is where you say, OK, I have to rely less on my athletic ability and more on my smarts.’”

Luckily, not all the players were hobbled by injuries during the latter part of the season. After missing sixty-two games with a stress fracture in his foot, Derek Fisher returned, fired up and brimming with newfound confidence. His timing couldn’t have been better. With Harper injured and Kobe out with the flu, we needed someone who could ignite the offense and lead the team out of its midseason doldrums.

When he charged out on the court for his first game—against the Boston Celtics at home—I could tell that this was a different Derek. He came out blasting, scoring a career-high 26 points, plus 8 assists and 6 steals. Not only that, his fearless attack on both ends of the court galvanized the team. That was the turning point in the season.

But we still had a few more hurdles to get over. The following week, just before a game in Milwaukee, a story appeared in the
Chicago Sun-Times
by columnist Rick Telander in which I mentioned a rumor I’d heard about Kobe sabotaging his team’s games in high school early on so that he could make a dramatic comeback and dominate in the end. Not only was this an irresponsible, off-the-cuff remark, it turned out to be untrue. Kobe wasn’t amused, and the Lakers soon got a call from his attorney threatening to sue me for slander. I apologized to Kobe in person, then later in front of the whole team. Still, I’d crossed a line and I knew it. What I didn’t know then was that it would take years for me to fully win back Kobe’s trust.

To make matters worse, during the Milwaukee game Kobe resprained his bad ankle, then missed the next nine games. This was a real blow coming so close to the playoffs. But while he was out, the team pushed it up another notch. In early April we went on an eight-game streak to close out the regular season. Midway through that streak, Kobe returned for a game against Phoenix at home, and it was clear that he had suited up as a “Navy Seal” that night. He spent most of the game giving the Suns a clinic on how to play righteous basketball, dishing off regularly to his teammates even after they flubbed their shots and playing aggressive defense, as we rolled to a 106–80 blowout. He told reporters after finishing with a (for him) mere 20 points, “It’s not about scoring. It’s about stopping people.”

—

Basketball unfolds in strange ways. On many levels, this had been the toughest season of my career—tougher even than my last hurrah in Chicago. Who would have guessed that this team, which had looked like it was going to implode at any moment, would pull itself together at the end of the season and go on a winning streak to rival those of the best teams in the history of the game?

This was a team—despite all the turmoil—that knew it was destined for greatness, if only it could get out of its own way. During the heat of the meltdown, I talked a lot about the power of community. In L.A. it wasn’t as easy to build community by traditional means because the players lived far away from one another and the city itself was seductive and distracting. But all the hardships we faced that season forced us to reunite.

In her book
The Zen Leader
, Ginny Whitelaw describes how joy arises when people are bound together by a strong sense of connectedness. “This joy may be more subtle than the ‘jump for joy’ variety,” she writes. “It may feel like full engagement in what we do, and a quiet satisfaction arising. It may feel like energy that keeps renewing itself, much as pumping a swing seemingly gives us more energy than it takes.”

This kind of joy is contagious and impossible to fake. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle observes: “With enthusiasm you find you don’t have to do it all yourself. In fact, there is nothing of significance you
can
do by yourself. Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy and all you have to do then is ride the wave.”

As the playoffs began, the Lakers were riding that wave. I was struck by how poised and relaxed the players were in the closing minutes of games, compared to the previous year. Nothing seemed to faze them.

“The one thing people are starting to notice about our team now is how much composure we have,” Fish told the
Los Angeles Times
’s Tim Brown. “We’re not playing out of control; we’re not turning the basketball over a lot. I think those are trademarks of not only Phil, but our whole coaching staff. Their personality.” Fish was impressed by how the coaching staff continued to prepare the team meticulously for every game, no matter what was going on with Shaq and Kobe.

Clearly the players were beginning to internalize the coaching staff’s chop-wood-carry-water attitude. A key moment occurred during the second game of the Western Conference finals against the San Antonio Spurs when I was ejected in the third quarter of the second game for stepping into a ref’s space and supposedly impeding his ability to do his job. In the past, the team would have lost its bearings and gone into a slide, but this time the players turned up the defense and ended the game with a 13–5 surge to win, 88–81. “We’ve matured,” said Fox afterward, “to the point where we maintained our composure. Outside of Phil.”

After sweeping the Portland Trail Blazers in the first round, we faced the Sacramento Kings, who tried several different tactics to stop Shaq without much success. In game 1 Vlade Divac played him straight up, and Shaq scored 44 points and grabbed 21 rebounds. Then they put Scot Pollard on him for most of game 2, but that reduced Shaq’s numbers by just 1 point and 1 rebound. Finally in game 3 on their home court, the Kings upped the pressure even more, swarming Shaq and hacking him relentlessly in the fourth quarter. Happily, that created a world of opportunities for other players, especially Kobe, who scored 36 points as we mounted a 3–0 lead in the series.

Later that night Kobe flew back to L.A. to spend time with his wife, Vanessa, who had been hospitalized with excruciating pain. He stayed with her until she stabilized, then flew back to Sacramento for game 4, during which he erupted for 48 points and 16 rebounds to lead the team to another sweep. His wild enthusiasm inspired his teammates. “I was prepared to do whatever,” he said. “I was going to run and push myself to exhaustion. It doesn’t matter.”

By the time we arrived in San Antonio for the conference finals, we had won fifteen straight (including regular-season games), and the pundits were already speculating about our becoming the first team to sweep the playoffs. Getting past San Antonio wasn’t going to be easy, though. They had two of the best big men in the game—David Robinson and Tim Duncan—and the best record in the league that season, 58-24. The last time we’d faced them, they had beaten us on our home court. But that was in March, before Fish’s comeback. Ancient history.

Robinson and Duncan did a respectable job on Shaq, holding him to 28 points. But nobody on the Spurs seemed to know what to do with Kobe, who put up 45 points, the highest total by anyone against the Spurs in playoff history. An exuberant Shaq fist-bumped Kobe at the end of the game and gushed, “You’re my idol.” Later O’Neal told reporters, “I think he’s the best player in the league—by far. When he’s playing like that, scoring, getting everybody involved, playing good defense, there’s nothing you can say. That’s where I’ve been trying to get him all year.”

When I’d first started working with Kobe, I’d tried to persuade him not to push so hard and to let the game flow more naturally. He’d resisted then, but not now. “Personally, I just tried to feed off my teammates,” he said after that game. “That’s one way that I am improving: learning how to use my teammates to create opportunities, just playing solid and letting the game and the opportunities come to me.” He was sounding more and more like me.