Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (26 page)

Sitting with your anger doesn’t mean being passive. It means becoming more conscious and intimate with your inner experience so that you can act more mindfully and compassionately than is possible in the heat of the moment.

This is hardly easy, but acting mindfully is key to building strong, trusting relationships, especially when you’re in a leadership role. Says Buddhist meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein, “An unexpressed anger creates a breach in relationships that no amount of smiling can cross. It’s a secret. A lie. The compassionate response is one that keeps connections alive. It requires telling the truth. And telling the truth can be difficult, especially when the mind is stirred up by anger.”

—

From the moment of Kobe’s arrest, I had a lot of practice working with my anger that year, and Kobe was my main teacher. In late January he showed up at the training facility with a bandaged hand and announced that he’d have to miss that night’s game. It seems he’d accidentally put his hand through a glass window while moving boxes in his garage and required ten stitches in his index finger. I asked him to do some running during practice and he agreed but never did it. Afterward I asked him why he’d lied to me, and he said he was being sarcastic.

I wasn’t laughing. What kind of adolescent game was this guy playing? Whatever it was, I didn’t want any part of it.

After practice I went upstairs and told Mitch Kupchak we needed to talk about trading Kobe before the mid-February deadline. “I can’t coach Kobe,” I said. “He won’t listen to anyone. I can’t get through to him.” It was a futile appeal. Kobe was Dr. Buss’s wunderkind, and he was unlikely to trade him, even if it meant jeopardizing our shot at another ring.

A few days later Dr. Buss, who worried that his young star might jump to another team, visited Kobe in Newport Beach and tried to persuade him to remain with the Lakers. Obviously, I wasn’t party to the meeting, but shortly thereafter, while we were riding on the team bus, Kobe told Derek Fisher, “Your man’s not coming back next year.” The “man” he was talking about was me.

I felt completely blindsided. Clearly, Dr. Buss had shared information with Kobe about the team—and my future—before consulting me. It was a harsh blow, and Kobe seemed to be reveling in it. Deep down, this turn of events made me question whether I could trust Kobe or Dr. Buss.

Later that day I called Mitch and told him I thought that he and Dr. Buss were making a big mistake. If they had to choose between Shaq and Kobe, I advised going with Shaq because Kobe was impossible to coach. And, I added, “You can take that to the owner.”

A few days later my agent called to tell me that the Lakers were suspending contract negotiations with me. When the Lakers announced the news on February 11, reporters asked Kobe if my departure would affect his free-agency plans and he replied coldly, “I don’t care.” Shaq was stunned. He couldn’t fathom how after all we’d been through, Kobe could throw me under the bus. I asked Shaq to refrain from stirring things up. The last thing the team needed was another verbal shooting match between the two players.

Jeanie was convinced that the Lakers were deliberately trying to undermine me, and she was probably right. Still, I found the announcement strangely liberating. Now I could focus on the task at hand—winning one more championship—without having to worry about the future. The die had been cast.

—

After the All-Star break, I met with Kobe to clear the air. Obviously, my laissez-faire approach with him had backfired and was having a negative effect on the team. Kobe had interpreted my efforts to give him a wide berth as indifference. So I decided to take another tack and work much more actively with him. My intention was to help him focus his attention on basketball so that the game would become a refuge for him in the way that it had been for Michael Jordan when he was being hounded by the media over his gambling problems.

But the team was in a perilously fragile state. I asked Kobe to stop making divisive comments that confused the young players and threatened to divide the team even further. Now that the issue of my contract had been settled, I added, we were free to focus on this year alone and not worry about anything else. “You and I can work this out, right?” I asked him. He nodded. I knew this wasn’t the end of the friction between us. But it was a good beginning.

The question of Kobe’s free agency was a dark cloud hanging over the team. Nobody knew which way he was going to turn. To complicate matters, he was away from the team a great deal, in both body and spirit. And when he was present, he seemed detached and often fell back on his old habit of trying to win games on his own. We hadn’t exactly gelled into “Dream Team IV” as some sportswriters had predicted early in the season.

Kobe wasn’t our only problem. Gary Payton was having adjustment issues of his own. Gary was used to having the ball in his hands most of the time, but now he had to share it with several other ball-hungry players. And he was struggling to find his rhythm. As the point guard for the Sonics, he was used to attacking off the dribble and posting up smaller guards. Now he had to work within the triangle offense, which he felt stifled his ability to express himself creatively. Not only that, he’d lost a step or two on defense, which caused columnist Mark Heisler to joke that his nickname should be changed from “the Glove” to “the Pot Holder.”

Still, soon after Karl Malone returned to the lineup in March, the team started to win again and went on an 11-0 streak. During that period I began to give Fish more playing time late in games because he had a better feel for the system than Payton. I also made Kobe the team’s floor general and put him in charge of directing the action.

But the rift between Kobe and rest of the team was growing. During the final week of the season, Kobe, who had never been shy about shooting, took just one shot in the first half of a game against Sacramento, allowing the Kings to take a 19-point lead and win handily. The media concluded that Kobe had intentionally tanked the game to improve his negotiating position with Dr. Buss. Kobe said he was just doing what the coaches had asked him to do—share the ball—but nobody bought it. One player, speaking anonymously, told the
Los Angeles Times
’s Tim Brown, “I don’t know how we can forgive him.”

This led to an ugly scene at practice the next day. Kobe burst into the training facility in a rage and polled every player, one by one, trying to find out who was responsible for the quote. It was a wrenchingly painful episode.

At the start of the season, one writer had called the Lakers “the greatest array of talent ever assembled on one team.” Now we were slumping into the playoffs in second place in the Western Conference and feeling as if we were coming apart at the seams. The injuries were mounting. Malone had sprained his right ankle, Devean George had strained his calf, Fish had pulled a muscle in his groin, and Fox was hampered by a dislocated right thumb.

But the injuries weren’t the worst of it. Given all the distractions, my greatest concern was that the team had yet to find its identity. As Fish said, “This year just seems like nothing ever really got settled. Every time it seemed like we were kind of settling in and getting to know each other and playing good, something would happen that would take us back a couple steps. I think that was the biggest difference with this season. There was never really a point where we got comfortable as a team.”

—

It wasn’t until we fell behind 2–0 in the Western Conference semifinals against the San Antonio Spurs that we started to wake up. In game 3, at the Staples Center, we reverted to our standard winning formula—playing ironclad defense and feeding Shaq in the post—and overwhelmed the Spurs, 105–81. The next game featured a stunning performance by Kobe, who flew back from his arraignment in Colorado to score 42 points with 6 rebounds and 5 assists, leading the Lakers to a come-from-behind victory and a 2–2 tie in the series. Afterward an overjoyed Shaq dubbed Kobe “the best player ever”—including Michael Jordan. This wasn’t the first time Kobe had lifted the team after flying back from one of his court appearances in Colorado. But it was the most inspiring. Basketball, he said, was “kind of like a psychologist. It takes your mind away from so many things. So many things.”

The fifth game, in San Antonio, was when the magic really happened. We were up by 16 in the third quarter, but the Spurs clawed back and regained the lead in the closing minutes. With eleven seconds left Kobe put up a twenty-footer that gave us a 72–71 edge. That set up what should have been the final play with five seconds on the clock: an off-balance fallaway eighteen-footer by the Spurs’ Tim Duncan that miraculously went in.

The Spurs started jumping up and down as if the game already had been won. I told the players at the time-out that even though there was less than half a second left on the clock, we were still going to win. Payton took the ball out of bounds, and Robert Horry, who knew our last-second shot set, took the passing lane away. As a result, Gary had to call another time-out. This time I told him to look for the open man, whoever it was, and he found Fish breaking free on the left side of the key. With nanoseconds left, Fish grabbed the pass and shot a miracle turnaround jumper. Swish. Game.

—

We put away the Spurs in game 6 and proceeded to take apart the Timberwolves in six games to win the Western Conference finals. But Malone reinjured his knee in the last game, which disrupted our momentum and put a big question mark over the upcoming championship finals against the Detroit Pistons.

Even before Malone’s accident, I was nervous about the Pistons. They were a young, cohesive team that was peaking at the right moment, having just won the Eastern Conference finals against the team with the league’s best record, the Indiana Pacers. Our players didn’t take the Pistons that seriously because they didn’t have a lot of big-name stars, but they were coached by one of the best, Larry Brown, and created tough matchup problems for us. Chauncey Billups, a strong, inventive playmaker, could easily outrun Payton or Fisher; Tayshaun Prince, a six-nine, long-armed defender, would give Kobe trouble; and we had no good answer for their power-forward double threat of Rasheed Wallace and Ben Wallace. Brown’s strategy was to draw offensive fouls on Shaq by having his big men fall down when he backed in. Before each series I spent a lot of time visualizing new ways to neutralize our next opponent’s attack. With the Pistons, I was drawing a blank.

It started with game 1 in L.A. The Pistons outmaneuvered us defensively and grabbed back home-court advantage, even though Shaq and Kobe combined to score 59 points. We rebounded in game 2 and squeaked out a win in overtime. But when the series moved to Detroit, we started to struggle and weren’t able to recover. Malone’s knee continued to cause him problems and the engine ground to a halt. The Pistons roared to victory in five games.

My biggest disappointment during this season was our inability to shut out all the distractions and mold this talented group of superstars into the powerhouse it should have been. There were some great individual performances—from Kobe, Karl, and others—but in the end we remained a collection of mostly aging veterans with tired legs, struggling to keep up with a young, hungry, energetic team that was not unlike the Lakers of a few years past.

To Fox, the reason we lost was simple. “A team always beats a group of individuals,” he said. “We picked a poor time to be a group of individuals.”

For Fish, the demise of the Lakers started much earlier, in the middle of our third championship run. As soon as success became a normal part of the team’s culture, he says, “the players started to take more credit for what was happening. So there was less focus on what the coaching staff brought to the equation and more focus on whose team it was. Was it Shaq’s team or Kobe’s team? And which guys on our roster needed to step up and get better? All those things began to creep into the locker room, and it really changed the energy and the cohesion that was there those first few years.”

—

The collapse happened quickly. Shortly after the playoffs ended, Dr. Buss confirmed what Mitch Kupchak had already told me. He said that the team was moving in a different direction and wouldn’t be renewing my contract. And not surprisingly, he was planning to trade Shaq and hoped to re-sign Kobe. I told Dr. Buss that losing Shaq would probably mean handing over at least one championship to whoever got him. He said he was willing to pay that price.

My prophecy came true. In mid-July, the Lakers traded Shaq to Miami, and he led the Heat to a championship two years later. One day after the Shaq trade, the Lakers announced that Kobe had re-signed with the team. His trial in Colorado proceeded with jury selection on August 27 and was over by September 1. The judge dismissed the charges after the prosecution dropped the case. Apparently, their key witness, Kobe’s accuser, refused to testify.

Coaching legend Cotton Fitzsimmons once said that you don’t know what kind of coach a guy’s going to be until he’s been fired. I’m not sure what this says about me, but in any case, I was ready to take a break from basketball and find some other ways to nourish my mind and spirit. I had some work to do on
The Last Season
, a book I was writing about my time with the Lakers. After that, I was heading far away from L.A. on a seven-week head-clearing trip to New Zealand, Australia, and various points around the South Pacific.

Despite all the intense drama, I felt good about what I’d accomplished with the Lakers during the five years I had been with the team, even though I wished I could have rewritten the ending. And I was encouraged by the positive shift in my relationship with Kobe by the time I left. Coming to terms with anger is always treacherous and inevitably puts you in touch with your own fears, frailties, and judgmental mind. But the steps Kobe and I took that season, each in our own way, laid the foundation for building a stronger, more conscious connection in the future.

When I look back at this time, it feels like the end of an important chapter for me—in a good way. Coaching the Lakers was like having a wild, tempestuous fling with a beautiful woman. And now it was time to move on and try something new.