I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It (3 page)

Caretakers
of the Game

As great as Julius Erving was as a basketball player, he’s always been an even greater man. He was such a wonderful guy, and such a complete professional. I remember being so damn nervous before my first day of camp when I joined the 76ers in 1984. I had called and asked my friends, “What do you think I should call Julius Erving? Do I just call him ‘Doc’ or ‘Dr. J’ or ‘Mr. Erving’?” I was really nervous about it because, and you have to remember, this man was what you aspired to be, as a professional and as a man. At the start of the first practice he came over to me and said, “Hey, I’m Julius,” and I breathed a sigh of relief. I’m lucky to have started my career in Philadelphia, where I could be influenced by him. One of the important things he taught me early on was to value the game. Doc put it so eloquently when he said, “We’re all caretakers of the game.” I don’t want anybody to kill the golden goose. To be honest with you, the NBA is totally different from all other sporting entities because the people who produce the entertainment and the revenue and are caretakers of the game are overwhelmingly black. In what other sport is that the case?

To do what Julius said, to actually be a caretaker of the game, you absolutely have to play at a high level. Guys can do all the crazy stuff they want to on the side, but you’ve got to play. These kids now aren’t the first to come along with personality. We had some characters back in my day, but those guys loved to play. World B. Free and those guys . . . they played, man. Bill Walton . . . Bill Walton had all that Grateful Dead hippie stuff going on, and you know that whole culture was way, way out there, but Bill Walton played ball. Even when Bill’s body wasn’t willing, if he could walk onto the court he laid it on the line. Larry Bird was a beer-drinking brother, but he brought it every single night. Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Kareem, Magic, James Worthy, Michael Cooper, Byron Scott, they brought it. It was an honor to play against those guys.

Bernard King brought it even when he had serious injuries. Micheal Ray Richardson. I tell you what, Micheal Ray Richardson might have been doing some drugs, but that boy was playing some ball, too. Guys sabotaging their careers ain’t something new. Young guys don’t realize they can’t do anything that hasn’t already been done. It’s like I tell my younger brother. He tries to trick me or be slick and I have to tell him, “I probably have done it all and I’ve certainly seen it all, so I can’t be fooled.” I tell these young guys, you can’t come up with any new stuff to fool me or any stuff I haven’t seen, so I’m going to ask you to do one thing: appreciate the game and make it grow.

It’s a huge responsibility for every single guy in the league. But it’s an even bigger responsibility for the stars. It might not be exactly that way in baseball and football. But in the NBA, it all comes down to the stars, because stars get all the credit and all the blame. All those guys who were talking shit on a Tuesday night in December, you can’t find ’em with the game on the line late in the season or in the playoffs. Remember that Indiana Pacers series against New Jersey in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference playoffs last spring? There were a whole bunch of guys talking shit all week long, but in the last five minutes of the most important game of the series, it was Reggie Miller against Jason Kidd on every play. The only time other guys made a basket was off a pass from Reggie or Jason.

It’s all about star power. You can have all the damn role players you want to, but if you don’t have stars you’re wasting your time. Hey, I think stars are the most underappreciated people in the world of sports. As great as Michael Jordan was, he was underappreciated, because he was able to be Michael Jordan every single night for thirteen years. Only the stars can do that. It’s like being on Broadway; you don’t pay $100 a seat to see the understudy or the costars. You go to see the stars. If you look at the NBA the last fifteen years . . . The Celtics lost Larry Bird after the ’92 season and you couldn’t look low enough in the standings to find their asses for ten years. The Suns haven’t made it past the first round of the playoffs since I left in ’96. Every team that has lost their stars went straight to the bottom. The 76ers didn’t make the playoffs for eight years. How’d they get back? They drafted a star. Allen Iverson is a star. People wonder how the Lakers have been able to keep it at the highest level since Magic retired. It’s no mystery. Jerry West was able to get Shaq and then he was able to foresee that Kobe would be a star. Look at the Seattle Mariners. They’ve got a great manager in Lou Piniella. He’s a great manager of people; look at the guys he’s lost over the last few years . . . all of ’em stars, too. Piniella is great, man. It takes a helluva manager to lose all those people and keep a team in contention. They’ve got all those terrific role players, but they’re just not quite good enough to win the World Series.

I had a guy tell me recently that my high school had never made it to the state championship until I got there, my college had never made it to the NCAA Tournament until I got there, and the 76ers didn’t make it to the NBA playoffs for eight years after I left. And the Suns haven’t made it past the first round since I left.

We didn’t win, but I know I was doing something right. But people don’t appreciate stars. They take stars for granted. You know a guy is a star when people feel like “He’s
supposed
to play great.” The key thing is doing it every single night, being the guy the fans expect to do it, management expects to do it, and the other players on the team expect to do it. And the role players can do what they do because of the star player’s presence.

Malik Rose on San Antonio is a really nice role player. You’d like to have him on your team, right? If he wasn’t playing with Tim Duncan, people would be boxing
his ass out
instead of blocking out Duncan when there’s a rebound. You see the difference? That’s the way it is for a whole lot of guys. Role players never are guarded by the best defensive player on the other team.

In that context, Michael Jordan is underrated. Look at the levels of success those other guys had once they left him. When Horace Grant left and went to Orlando he helped them get to the championship, but the Bulls retooled the very next year without him. Being a star is hard, and so is the actual work involved to be great every night, and the responsibility. And you have to have incredible talent and a different mind-set to begin with.

Take Robert Horry. He’s a great role player with the Lakers, and he was a great role player in Houston. But in between, he was traded to Phoenix where they wanted to make him a star. And he fought with the coaches and staff. And that doesn’t mean Robert Horry wasn’t a good player, because he is. But you can’t learn to be a star. You either are or you aren’t. I heard Robert Horry say after he hit that three-point shot at the buzzer to win Game 4 of the Western Conference finals against Sacramento that one reason he’s able to be so calm about taking those shots is that if he misses and his team loses, Shaq and Kobe are going to receive all the blame anyway, so why worry about it. See, Robert Horry understands the importance of stars in the league and how role players are supposed to feed off them. A star has to have extra toughness, that special sense of the moment. When everybody in the building knows you’re going to get the ball on all the big possessions, that’s athletic pressure. The pressure of being a star should be fun, even the part where you get all the credit or all the blame for what happens with your team.

The fans and the media may be fooled sometimes. They’ll think somebody is a star, but he’s not really up to the biggest moment. You can never fool the players. We know who’s a star.

In high school I don’t remember when I felt I’d become a really good player, and I don’t remember a specific point in college either. But I do remember in the pros. I was in my room one night—we had just played the Knicks in Madison Square Garden, and I had put on a show. Rick Pitino was their coach, and it was the 1988–89 season. I was watching
SportsCenter
after the game when a reporter asked Rick, “Is it possible Barkley is getting to the point where he can take over a game like Magic, Michael and Larry Bird? Is he knocking on that door?” And Rick said, “If you saw what I’ve seen lately, he’s kicking in the door.” I’m sitting in my room, watching the 2:00 a.m.
SportsCenter
and I thought, “Damn, I can play with anybody in the world?” I sat there and thought about it for an hour or so. I went to bed, and the next morning I woke up and said, “You know what, Rick is right, I can play with anybody in the world.” And from that point on, I just said, “There might be two or three guys as good as me but nobody’s better than me.” And that was the turning point for me; it came in my fifth year. Of course you need the talent to do it, but talent isn’t the only ingredient. If you don’t
feel
that way, if you don’t think you’re better than everybody else, you can’t be better. People sitting at home listening to guys when they say that just figure, “He’s too cocky.” But it’s absolutely necessary to have that attitude. When you realize it and can back it up, at that point you just have to get out of your own way.

The year I thought it would all come together was 1993, my first season in Phoenix. I thought we could beat Michael Jordan and the Bulls that year. But we had such a hard time getting to the Finals. We were the No. 1 seed, had the best record in the entire league, but lost the first two games at home to the Lakers. But we won Games 3 and 4 on the road in L.A., then came back and won Game 5 at home, in overtime. The next series was San Antonio, and I hit the shot at the buzzer to eliminate them in Game 6 and close out the HemisFair Arena. I was so nervous about getting to the Finals. We were up three games to two in the Western Conference finals against Seattle and got our asses kicked real good. I remember sitting on the plane coming back and everybody was scared shitless and nervous. People can talk all the shit they want to, but those deciding Game 5s in the first round and those Game 7s, you ain’t eatin’ and you ain’t sleepin’. You’re nervous and hyper. I remember walking around trying to cheer up guys and you could hear a pin drop. So I figured, this is useless, let me go and get some damn rest myself.

Frank Johnson came up to me and said, “Look, we’re going to the Finals.” I said, “Frank what do you mean?” And he said, “You’ve never been to the Finals. We’ve got everything on the line in this one game. You play your best game, we’re going to win.” And I thought to myself, “He’s right. If I play my best, the only other person who could beat us in the league right now is Michael Jordan. But nobody else in the Western Conference can beat us if I play my best, and we’re going to the Finals.” I got 44 points and 24 rebounds. Nip-and-tuck game all night, Eddie Johnson tried to bring them back in the fourth quarter, but we won and got to the Finals.

Then we lost the first two games at home.

The day of Game 5 in the 1993 NBA Finals in Chicago, I was pissed off. We had won Game 3, in Chicago, to make it a series again. But the Bulls were ahead, 3–1, after four games. Michael Eisner, or whoever was running Disney at the time, had called my agent. And my agent called me in the hotel on the day of Game 6 and said Disney wanted to do something different with its “I’m Going to Disneyland” MVP promotion. He said they wanted to hire me, win or lose, to look into the camera and say after the series, “I’m going to Disneyland” if we won, or “I’m
still
going to Disneyland” if we lost. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, “You call that asshole back and tell him to kiss my ass, we’re not going to lose tonight.”

So I was ticked off all day. Then, I’m sitting there watching the news and they’re boarding up the city of Chicago. The previous year when the Bulls beat Portland in the NBA Finals, there had been some rioting. People got out of control after the Bulls took Game 6 in Chicago to win the championship. And the storekeepers weren’t going to have any more of that crap, I imagine. So I was already seeing dead-red because of Disney, and then to have all these damn public service announcements running on TV in Chicago about don’t hurt the city and don’t riot after the Bulls win tonight . . . I couldn’t believe all that shit. So I started my campaign, “The Suns Will Save Chicago.” And “Don’t Let Chicago Burn.”

I told the reporters before the game, “I love Chicago. It’s a beautiful city, so I’m going to do my best to keep it from burning down.” We won Game 5 to get the series back to Phoenix.

•  •  •

It’s a wonderful life we have. Life is funny. Normal, everyday shit is funny. The guy who set off those pipe bombs a few months ago, said he’s mad at the world. Kid is going to college, says he has a nice girlfriend he loves, is in a band and smokes a lot of pot. What the hell has he got to be mad about? He’s mad?

I would get mad about stuff, but I wouldn’t stay mad. Life is too short to stay upset and hold grudges. People are probably thinking, “Well, you got mad at the refs.” But I didn’t carry that stuff around. I will say, though, that I never got along with Mike Mathis. He threw me out of a game in Atlanta once. You know how you holler and scream and curse at each other? He threw me out of a game in Atlanta, then threw me out of, like, three more after that. It was never over. I actually called him to the NBA office in New York, that’s how bad it got. We went up there and met with Rod Thorn, who was handling discipline for the league at the time. It was that bad. Mathis never let bygones be bygones.

The best one to me was Joey Crawford. Great official. Once an argument was over, it was over, which is all you ask. Mathis, once you’ve pissed him off you were done for the season with him, maybe your career. Steve Javie is good, but once you make him mad you’re done for the game. Bob Delaney is a good official, too, but same thing—once you make him mad you’re done for the game. Dick Bavetta is terrific. The late Earl Strom. Derrick Stafford is great. Problem is, some of these officials think they’re the show.

People don’t know how powerful these guys are, how they impact the game. And league officials keep refs’ fines and suspensions private. I never got mad when a guy said, “I think I might have missed that call.” It’s a fast-moving, difficult game to officiate. Most of ’em are good guys.