I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It (14 page)

God Doesn’t Have a
Favorite Team

Athletic competition is emotional enough without bringing religion into it. More wars have been fought over religious conflict than anything else, so clearly it’s an explosive issue.

I don’t think religion and sports should mix. There are so many different religions, and for the most part we only understand our own. People might want to be tolerant of views different from their own, but from what I’ve observed we don’t understand other people’s religions. Even a lot of smart people who deal with complex things in their lives every day can’t understand the rituals or the philosophies of other religions. And that ignorance often just opens up a huge box of problems and issues.

Look at professional sports nowadays. A team is a lot like most other workplaces, just smaller. People are from every part of the globe, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a hundred different religions. And most of the time we haven’t even been exposed to even half the religions being practiced by guys who are our teammates or the guys we’re playing against. So how can you have a couple of guys who may be practicing one form of religion dictating to the whole team, telling a team full of guys practicing different religions to do one thing? Look at any NBA team. It’s very possible you can have Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and atheists represented on one team. And now guys are coming in from China and bringing their religions with them. You’re not going to get everybody to agree on anything. You’re not going to get a consensus as it relates to religion.

And it’s just wrong, in my opinion, to act as if your religion is more important than somebody else’s. Just because one player is outnumbered doesn’t mean his religion is less important. That would cause resentment and all kinds of problems within a team.

And that’s not even the biggest problem with religion in sports in my opinion. You know what else bothers me about religion in sports? God doesn’t have a favorite team. I don’t like to hear guys after they win a match or a game or a fight go into an interview and say, “God was on my side.” How stupid is it to presume that God has a favorite team, or that he would take your side against your opponent? Where did that stuff come from? How religious are you really if you think God doesn’t care about the guy on the other side of the field, or the other side of the court, or in the other corner?

I just don’t think it’s fair that people assume they can determine the actions of others because of religion. Kevin Johnson, my teammate in Phoenix, is really religious. And before one of the Game 7s of a playoff series we played during my time with the Suns he and a couple of other guys talked the whole team into going to a prayer meeting. And I told them, “No, I’m not going.” I said, “Number one, God doesn’t have a favorite team. And number two, doesn’t it seem like we’re praying to God to win us a game when he must have more important things to worry about than this basketball game?” I hope and I pray God has more important things on his mind than some game. I can’t believe with all the serious stuff going on today in the world—terrorism, war, hunger, poverty, violence, hatred—that guys think their football or basketball game that day is the most important thing God might have to deal with.

It’s not like religion isn’t part of my life, because it is. I grew up going to church. I believe in prayer and treating people the way you would want to be treated. But the idea that God might help me beat another team never crossed my mind.

How come it’s often the most religious people who seem to forget the verse in the Bible which says that only God can judge men? I was reading something Lee Trevino said, that unless you’re a minister, preacher or rabbi you should never be pushing your religious beliefs on people. That’s pretty much the way I feel. Religion, to me, is your individual relationship with God, or whatever you call your Supreme Being. That’s it, plain and simple. My belief is that there is a Supreme Being. I don’t get into whether he’s black, white, man or woman.

I do think that God, by whatever name you want to use, gave me a special gift. One of my close friends who is an agnostic said to me, “Why do you thank God when you play well?” And I said, “I’m really thanking him for allowing me to be healthy and for giving me this gift, not that I played well in a specific game.” He said, “Then how is it that when something bad happens you never acknowledge God?” That really made me think. I said, “That’s fair. I don’t know the answer, but that’s fair.”

I’m just not going to walk around and talk about God all the time like a lot of players. I don’t think that proves to anybody how religious you are. A whole lot of people never talk openly about their religion; you don’t even know what, if any, religion or God they believe in. But they treat people the way they would like folks to treat them.

I know a lot of people don’t want to accept that, or they want organized religion to be more involved in everything. But to me, religion opens up the biggest can of worms, and I just try to keep it away from sports because the bottom line is, God doesn’t have a favorite team.

My Dad

My dad made me feel horrible when I didn’t graduate from high school. I had flunked my final exam in Spanish and couldn’t graduate until after I passed it in summer school. He flew all the way across the country to see me graduate, and when he couldn’t, he took his disappointment out on me. He screamed, “I can’t believe I flew all the way from California, that I came all the way across the damn country to see this ceremony and you aren’t even going to graduate.”

I never did march. It was my fault I flunked Spanish, and it took me a long time to get over that. I had to take it again in summer school. It taught me that you aren’t going to be given anything in life, that you have to earn what you get. It was my life and my fault. And I feel bad I blamed it on other people. But my dad wasn’t concerned with that important lesson, just that he was inconvenienced. It turned out that he motivated me the first few years—unintentionally—because I was so angry at him. For the longest time I tried, then for years I just didn’t talk to him. I was angry and it was too frustrating. I’m positive my old man never saw me play a basketball game in high school, never saw me play at Auburn. He never saw me play until I got in the NBA. He got interested in a relationship again when I became an NBA All-Star. He was living out in Los Angeles, and he always wanted me to visit him when we played out there. So finally, I started to visit him, spend some time with him when I went out there. But it seemed every time I went to L.A. all of our time was spent with him introducing me to all of his friends, his coworkers and associates. And it was clear what was going on there; he was just showing me off. I was his show pony.

It would make me so damn angry. I mean, I felt this way for years. And finally I had to get to the point where I realized that he had his own life. He had a totally separate existence in which I didn’t even matter to him. He wasn’t walking around all pissed off; I was. This shit was on my mind all the time, but not his.

But one time a few years ago he became sick for a while and I began thinking, “I’ve only got one father.” And as a result, I’m trying now. I’m making a real effort to extend myself, to get to know him better and let him get to know me better. But I did tell him, “Don’t try to be a dad now; it’s too late for that. Let’s be cordial. Let’s be friends.” You can’t be father-son this late in the game when you haven’t actually had that relationship all your life.

At this point in my life I just want to be at peace with my dad. You get one dad, so there’s no sense in being pissed off about what happened, whatever void you might have felt in your life. He’s not going to live forever, and I don’t want to look back and feel I squandered the time. I want him to know his granddaughter. One of the positive things that come from this is I know my relationship with my father—or lack thereof—affects my feeling about fatherhood, about participating and not just being there to take the bows. At the same time, he cannot be my dad, he can only be my friend.

September 11

Normally when I travel from my home in Phoenix to Atlanta to work for TBS and TNT, I catch the midnight red-eye flight to Atlanta. I hop on that flight, get served a late meal, then go to sleep before landing in Atlanta at 6:00 a.m. or whatever it is. That’s what used to happen before September 11, 2001. And of course, everything changed for everybody in different ways. For people who travel for a living, the change was dramatic and damn sure immediate. For the first six to eight weeks after September 11, I flew private jets to Atlanta. I couldn’t bring myself to fly commercial. After a while I flew commercial again, but now I don’t sleep. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I know I’m not alone in having this experience. It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep on a flight I used to sleep on all the time because now I’m looking over my shoulder for al Qaeda.

People who don’t travel might not understand. People who do travel frequently probably understand completely. I don’t sleep because I’m thinking, “You need a chance to fight if somebody makes a move toward that cockpit and you can’t give yourself a chance to fight if you’re sound asleep.” So you don’t sleep. You can’t sleep. I know if I see or hear somebody running down the aisle toward that cockpit, I’m going to be trying to kick his ass. When I’m flying now I’m sweating and nervous. This is all new for me because I was never a nervous flier. I could fall asleep in a heartbeat. But I can’t anymore. This is the world in which we live now. It’s a world where you can’t let your guard down. You can’t let your kids play outside alone anymore without adult supervision. You can’t really let any kid out of your sight. And it’s like this because there are some profoundly evil people in the world now. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. There are just evil people whose primary objectives are to destroy, and so now we’re in this place in our history where we have to be on guard and sometimes there’s just no place for falling asleep.

On Tuesday, September 11, I was at home in Philly, just getting up to get ready to get on the Metroliner to go to New York City for Joe Pesci’s charity golf tournament. My secretary called and said, “What are you doing? Well, you’re not going to New York today. You’d better turn on the television.”

When I turned on the TV neither tower had fallen yet. But both towers had been attacked. I just sat there the whole day in a trance. I watched it all day, every moment. Six or eight hours later I went out to get something to eat, and then I went right back to watching it. I guess my primary emotion was sadness. It’s just so sad to me that there’s this kind of evil on the planet, people this evil among human beings. And it’s not just the terrorist acts against the United States, it’s the kidnapping and killing of young kids, the shootings in these schools. I’m just nervous and sad that there are so many bad people in the world. I guess I was in shock, just numb over the whole thing.

The thing I’ll admit to hoping for in the wake of 9/11 was a kinder and gentler America. And I’m sure there are people out there who were so profoundly affected that they changed some basic things about their lives, like the way they treat people, the way they conduct themselves professionally or personally. I figured—and I guess I was really naive—that as horrible and as tragic as this was, it was a chance for people to pull together and fundamentally change things about ourselves and about our country. How could you not hope that when you’re watching policemen and firemen and average citizens risk their lives to help people? The way people came to each other’s rescue, you had to be inspired and hopeful something productive could eventually come from this. I know I was. I thought, “Okay, we’ve got a chance now to be better to each other and just be more respectful of each other.” People were on TV saying this would change us forever. How could you watch what happened in the days immediately after 9/11 and not feel “We’re all in this together”?

You know how long things were different?

It didn’t even last two full weeks. Four days? Maybe a week. That’s about it. Maybe it was longer in New York because of the impact there, but that’s it. But everywhere else, it was business as usual. Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative, black vs. white. We didn’t even get to October and we were pitted against each other again. Damn. I have to admit I was disappointed because I figure we all want the same things out of life. People, regardless of what race or ethnic group, seem to want to join in the pursuit of happiness, personally and professionally. But if that tragedy and the response to it can’t rally us for more than a week, then what the hell can? In a week’s time we were back to the same old life of lying and stealing and cheating poor folks and killing children. If we’re going to fight off all this evil, we’ve got to do better. We’ve got to pull together.

Moses Was Right

I modeled my game after Adrian Dantley and John Drew because they were undersized guys who had to play inside offensively but also had some perimeter skills they developed over the years that helped them evolve and become complete players. Dantley’s 6-5, if that tall, and he averaged 25 points for fifteen years and 6 or 7 rebounds a game early in his career. Drew was 6-6, if that, and he averaged 20 points a game and was a 10-rebound-per-game guy when he was young. So at just under 6-5, I really studied those guys and what they did.

I had a coach at Auburn, Roger Banks. He was Sonny Smith’s assistant when I was in college. And because he had coached John Drew at Gardner-Webb, I got to meet Drew and be like a little brother. And we’d talk about basketball and life. He was giving me a ride once in his car—I’m talking about a $75,000 Mercedes—and he said to me, “Son, I snorted up about twenty of these. I’ve messed up so much money. I’ve got kids all over the place.” He told me, “Look, I’ll work with you on your game, but if you’re going to listen to anything I say, listen to me when I tell you not to do drugs.” I’m sitting there thinking, “Damn.” He told me about one Friday night when he got a big pile of coke, got naked, and snorted it all up, and didn’t wake up until Saturday just in time to make the game. I was a freshman or sophomore at Auburn when I heard this story. And it had an unbelievable effect on me.

But after a while, I didn’t see John again, and I mean for years and years. I just didn’t know where he was. His last year in the league was 1984–85, which was my rookie year. He was only thirty years old that season but he played in just nineteen games for Utah. And then it was like he just disappeared.

Anyway, I was still playing in Philly—I don’t remember the exact year but I was with the 76ers through the 1992 season—and we were on the road in Houston one night, we were right in front of the hotel at the Galleria. And this homeless guy walks right up to me and grabs me. I mean, the guy is just a bum, dirty and shabby. And he’s a big guy and he’s really on me, so I rear back to knock the shit out of him. But first I look. It’s John Drew. I was in total shock. I mean, I don’t even know what I said to him. Here’s a man who was a two-time NBA All-Star, a guy who had a productive eleven-year career who must have come in contact with all kinds of people, and he was homeless, a bum on the streets. I gave him all the money I had in my pocket, which must have been several hundred dollars, maybe $500. And then I went up to my hotel room and cried. I couldn’t get over it then, and I still can’t get over it. And I haven’t seen him since, don’t know where he is, can’t find him. I don’t know anybody who knows where he is. It just shocked me so bad. Even though you know somebody’s life can go bad when he’s on drugs, you don’t think it can go that bad. And I keep thinking back to when I was in college, him virtually begging me not to do drugs and not do the kind of stuff that would throw my life off course.

Man, you can find physically talented guys anywhere. It’s as if they grow on trees. A whole lot of people have talent. And so many of them don’t know how to use it, or they put themselves in positions where they sabotage their own careers. I was thinking about doing another book, a where-are-they-now type book on all the guys I’ve been with and around, who played from high school to the pros. I really wonder where they all are now. Just ’cause a guy has talent doesn’t mean he’s going to make it. We assume guys are going to “get it” and they don’t. J. R. Rider is an example of a really talented guy, smart guy, too, who never got it. Richard Dumas was way, way up there in terms of talent. Oliver Miller. Kenny Green from Wake Forest. One day a week, Kenny Green was the best player in the world in practice. He was so scary-good you’d say to yourself, “If this guy ever gets it, he’ll be dangerous.” But they don’t get it. They’re too immature or too something to ever “get it.”

When I first got to Philadelphia in the summer of 1984, Moses Malone told me, “You can come in here every day and work your ass off and still not make it. But I can guarantee you if you come in here and don’t work you won’t make it.” The second thing he told me was, “There are going to be big decisions you’ll have to make and you don’t have the luxury of making them in private. One mistake can hurt you. If you put yourself in positions where you’re vulnerable, it’s on you. Use your head.”

The physical talent, everybody who makes it to a certain point has that. Then what? Guys screw it up, that’s what. Jayson Williams is a perfect example. He signed that contract with the Nets for $100 million, and even though he got hurt and had to retire earlier than he wanted, he still had the world in his hand one minute. On national TV, making a second career for himself. The next minute it’s all gone. He’s facing jail time and the money he made could be gone in a civil suit. I know Jayson and he’s a good guy and I just feel bad, but that’s such an example of one mistake. We could sit here and talk about basketball stuff, but it’s the management of your life that is really the big difference between making it and not making it for a lot of guys, or hanging on versus making it big. If you don’t start with that, you’re wasting your time. I’ve probably played with twenty players who should have played in the NBA for a long time but didn’t. It’s because their heads weren’t together. You see guys with talent all the time who can’t make it.

And leaders are even harder to find in sports because most guys want to do it by example, when there’s more responsibility involved than that. It’s difficult to do because you can’t worry about what others think or say. You can’t put your efforts into pleasing folks. I had Julius Erving and Moses Malone as leaders, so I got to play with two great ones. It’s not a coincidence that in their prime they were able to lead a team to a championship, and Doc was able to lead them to the Finals three other times.

You have to be obsessed to get to the NBA Finals, and I’m not talking about just one guy or just the best player on the team, but everybody. That first year in Phoenix that we reached the Finals, nobody cared about contracts or the number of minutes he played or the number of shots he got or who had the most endorsements. But what you see often in team sports is that after you win once or get to the championship series, guys start saying, “I need more minutes than him,” or “I should be making more money than that guy,” and when that’s the case, you ain’t gonna win. That’s what happened to us in Phoenix after that first season.

But one guy who really helped me while I was in Phoenix was Paul Silas, who was an assistant under Paul Westphal. Paul Silas helped me with how to judge whether a guy could play, who could play and who couldn’t. My fourth and final season in Phoenix, which was 1995–96, I thought we had a really good team. Paul said, “Nope, we really don’t have that good a team.” And he was right. I’m not surprised by Paul’s success as a head coach one bit. Really, he should have gotten a job a lot sooner. Way too much time passed and far too many guys were hired between the time Paul got fired from the Clippers in 1983 and hired again, by Charlotte, in 1998. Hell, the Clippers were still playing in San Diego in 1983. There were something like 140 coaches hired between the time he was fired from his first job and hired in Charlotte.

I’ve been fortunate to play for several different guys who were good leaders, good coaches, good communicators. Paul Westphal, who I played for in Phoenix, is a great person. No better person ever coached in the NBA, I can say that with certainty. Billy Cunningham was a strict disciplinarian, and he was a great coach for me as a rookie because he provided a lot of structure and discipline. Rudy T. is a great coach for a veteran team because he’s more lax. There are a lot of people who have very different personalities who can lead teams effectively in their own ways. Same thing goes for certain players. Mark West, who I played with in Phoenix, is a guy who you’ll never hear mentioned as a great leader. But he was a great guy and knew the subtleties of the game and could communicate with the star players or the role players. I had started to develop Michael’s mentality, hollering and screaming at guys and beating the hell out of my team. But we had Oliver Miller and Richard Dumas, guys you couldn’t scream at and get any results because they were too immature. Mark came to me and said, “Listen, man, you can’t put the hammer down on these guys every day, you’ve got to take a different approach with them.”

You see how Bill Cartwright has done a nice job with the Bulls? I know it’s early and he’s got a long way to go with a young team. But we really shouldn’t be that surprised because Bill had more influence with those championship Bulls teams than people thought. Michael would yell and scream at everybody. And one day Michael told me that Bill said to him, “ ‘If you yell and scream at me again I’m gonna kick your ass.’ “ When I got to Auburn I was an eighteen-year-old kid who was basically lazy. And my head coach, Sonny Smith, would tell me over and over, “Charles, you’re fat and lazy.” And I’m thinking, “If I’m leading the Southeastern Conference in rebounding, these other guys must really be lazy.” So Sonny and I were always butting heads, and after two years I was just ready to leave. But one night we sat down and had dinner and I told him, “Sonny, if you change your approach just a little . . .” And after that he said to me once, “Charles, you’re doing great . . . now if we could just do this a little better,” and it made all the difference in the world in my case. Leading a team is difficult: it’s so much about knowing when to do something and when not to.

I’ve got to tell this story about some of the best basketball advice I ever got. People looking in from the outside think that the most important thing is Xs and Os and devising strategies for certain situations. And yeah, that stuff is damn important at the end of games and in special situations. But when I first got to Auburn, Roger Banks watched me struggle with rebounding and he told me, “Son, you averaged twenty rebounds a game in high school . . . I’m gonna watch you for a while and figure out why you’re not rebounding here.” He came back to me after watching me and said, “No wonder you’re not rebounding; quit boxing out and go after the damn ball.” I’m standing there looking at him . . . he just told me the opposite of what people preach all the time and he said, “Son, go get the ball. If you’re blocking out all the time, five rebounds might bounce right to you, but we didn’t bring you here to get five rebounds a game.” So much for conventional methods. Might be the best basketball advice I ever got. I’m so glad Roger took me under his wing from Day 1 at Auburn.

I guess the thing I’d want any young or aspiring player to take away from this is that making a successful career in anything has to do with so much more than pure talent. And that doesn’t pertain to just sports. I’d bet it’s the same way with any profession. It’s just that sports are right out there in the open for everybody to see. But there’s a lot of talent wasted in the world because people don’t realize that what’s just as important as the physical skills and the Xs and Os—maybe more important—is managing your life and staying away from the big mistakes that can ruin your career, ruin your life no matter how much talent you have.