Longshot (26 page)

It was six weeks
before I could run on my knee again. The healing process was painful and slow, as so many of the muscles had atrophied pre-and postsurgery to a point where it felt like I was learning to walk all over again. I had no insurance, so I could only wing my own physical therapy as best as I could and forced myself through the pain, knowing that it was mostly just the superficial pain of tearing scar tissue.

John flew me up to Seattle for a week to play with some of his clients to help me get back in the groove of playing. He put me up in an apartment and fed me for ten days, paying all of my expenses, as he knew I had no funds.

When I came back from Seattle it was late July. John told me to hang in there and that he had some things cooking overseas. But he warned me that it was going to be difficult with the résumé I had accrued the season before, unable to play for one team the entire year, combined with my recent knee surgery. Add to that the fact that the Eurobasket Web site listed that I was deaf and had played in the Deaf World Championships back in 2002. This little fact would rob me of several jobs, and John eventually asked the Web site to remove that information. The year before, the site had not posted that I was hearing-impaired, and this had not been an issue. Then Eurobasket found out about my impairment, thought it was a neat story, and posted it.

One overseas coach told John that he couldn't take the risk. He felt that my hearing impairment would only add to the language barrier, despite the fact that during my entire rookie season this issue never arose. Basketball terminology is universal. Because it's a relatively new sport in the world, many of the coaches were either coached by an American or attended American camps, where they learned the terminology. Most of basketball is simply body language and reading cues from your
opponents and teammates. At least that's the way I taught myself how to play it, and I had been doing pretty well up to that point.

When you're in a gym and the crowd is on their feet, roaring and stomping, everyone is deaf. We all have been in a noisy gym, cheering on our team, where we cannot even hear ourselves yelling. When the Jumbo Trons and sound systems are blaring Metallica and fans are rooting for the home team, I'm on an equal playing field with everyone else. In the land of temporary deafness, the permanently deaf man is king.

I was living on the generous faith of a remaining few who still believed in me. October came, and John, too, was growing frustrated. I wasn't angry with John, because if I hadn't gone against his advice a year earlier when I signed with Galatasaray, the story could've been completely different. I chose my fate when I knowingly made the mistake of signing with Galatasaray. I was now paying for it.

Finally in mid-October, John called to tell me that the Idaho Stampede, a CBA team in Boise, was joining the NBA Development League (D-League) and that the new coach, Bryan Gates, wanted me to join his team. Bryan Gates was the understudy of Rory White, my summer coach with the Clippers from the year before. Rory had told Gates to take the leap and get me on his team. Coach Gates trusted Rory and took him at his word. Gates called John asking if I was available. Although he was interested in me and would attempt to have me allocated as a local player to Boise, I still had to go through the draft.

Because the NBA D-League was still in its early stages and looking for fanfare, it had a system where it allowed a team to pick up nearby college players so that they could draw more fans. Otherwise, if you signed a D-League contract, your name was put in a pool where you were up for grabs, with any team free to select you. I didn't want to sign a D-League contract and end up Bismarck, North Dakota. You went through the draft process only once in that if you were drafted by Idaho and played with them, they retained your rights if you returned to the D-League the following season.

The idea of playing in Boise, only five hours from Salt Lake and a nice halfway point between home and my sisters in Oregon, was a very welcoming idea. It went through. I signed a rookie contract for the gross pay of $12,000 for the season.

It blows your mind how ridiculous the pay is in relation to the pay scale of the NBA, which the D-League is affiliated with. The D-League is comparable to baseball's minor-league farm system. The disparity of pay
is unlike that of any other sport. In one day of a road trip, the average NBA team will spend more money than it takes to budget a D-League roster for an entire season.

But that's the price you pay, and you know this when you sign on with the D-League. You willingly make a choice to sacrifice more money overseas for more visibility at home in America. NBA scouts and GMs keep a close eye on the D-League because many NBA players are assigned to the league throughout the season. Each D-League team is affiliated with at least one NBA team. Idaho was affiliated with both Utah and Seattle at the time I signed. NBA teams can send a player down to receive more playing time only to their designated affiliate, but a D-League player like me—a free agent, so to speak—can be called up by any team, not just Utah or Seattle.

In the back of my mind, as no jobs were coming my way from overseas, I knew the D-League was my last chance at a career—my last chance at my dream of making it to the NBA. When I signed the contract, I knew it was all on the line.

When I showed up at training camp, there were four players with NBA experience, and many other well-known names from the college circuit. It was a bona fide tryout. Idaho had invited sixteen men to camp. The fact that you sign a D-League contract does not mean you're on the team. It means only that they own your rights. You still have to make the team.

I showed up in Boise and met Coach Gates for the first time. Upon first seeing him, with his long, droopy dog face and beak for a nose, you wouldn't think he knew even the slightest thing about basketball. Gates started off as a team bus boy for the Idaho Stampede, working for free for several years, climbing his way up the ladder to eventually become an assistant coach under Rory White. He then spent time coaching in Lebanon and was now back in America, with his first-ever position as a head coach. He was a purist. He held everyone else to the same standard—that the game should always be respected and that giving anything less than your best was only cheating yourself.

You can say what you want about Bryan Gates as an “X and O” coach. That's all relative. But there's one thing you cannot dispute: he is a brilliant personnel director. He understands chemistry. He takes hard work over talent. He knows which guys to put on a team, figuring in the traits and tendencies of his players. He does his homework early, creates a machine, and then just sits back and watches the creature he's created work on its own.

The NBA Development League is a cutthroat environment, where you have players with NBA experience or talent and skill competing like rabid dogs over table scraps for the chance to be seen by NBA eyes. Starvation brings out the animal in all of us. People tend to shrug off the D-League because they make the mistake of assuming that our talent matches the level of our pay. When people see NBA players making millions, that's their point of reference. So they judge every other player according to that standard, and when they see me making $12,000, they assume I must not be very good.

If I could change one thing in the D-League, I really would raise the pay to at least $70,000 minimum, because the average Joe fan will say, “$70,000? He must be halfway decent. Let's go see if he's worth it.” They will be more inclined to go to a game and see if the player can earn his keep. But if they know a player is making only $12,000 to $25,000, they can all too easily assume it will be a poor showing. If you want to make money, you have to spend it.

It really is no small feat to make the roster of a D-League team. In the NBA you have guaranteed contracts, and the players can relax and just play and do their jobs without the angst of wondering if they will be cut tomorrow. An NBA training camp will usually have twelve or thirteen guys already protected under guaranteed contract, with the remaining three places up for grabs between guys who are on the outside looking in. In the D-League, nothing is secure and nothing guaranteed. The level of intensity and awareness, the panic and worry lying just beneath the hardwood waiting to erupt—it's all enough to make you want to quit right then and there. When I stepped onto the practice floor in Boise for the first time, I nearly vomited. The tension was fogging the windows as each of us players cautiously introduced ourselves, knowing we were all enemies, gunning for the other's job.

Coach Gates warned us all that no one was safe and that it was going to be ten days of hell full of two-a-days until the very last moment, when he would have to cut the roster down to ten men. He told us not to get hurt or injured, because if we did, we were going home. It just depended on who wanted it the most. Even though I was allocated locally, and held a lowly rookie contract, I knew I wasn't secure in my positioning. The D-League has only so many men at so many pay rates. There are A, B, C, D, and rookie contracts. Each team must have at least two rookies, and they have to be receiving rookie pay at all times. The fact that I was
coming cheap didn't make my future any more secure than the rest of the guys'.

I walked onto the floor and laced up the same shoes I had been wearing since I was in France the season before. They were worn and tattered. I couldn't afford new ones, as I was completely broke. I was asking these shoes, which had carried me through the end of Spain, through my knee surgery, to carry me just a bit further through this training camp, whereupon I'd receive team-endorsed Adidas shoes. As much as I was hoping for the job, I was hoping for a new pair of shoes.

They did their best, but they couldn't last. During the very first practice, while I was doing defensive slides, the skin on the ball of my right foot ripped off without even blistering. And then the entire toe print on my big left toe ripped off. When practice was over and I walked over to the bench and took my shoes off, my socks were caked with blood. The calluses that had formed over the years on my well-worn feet simply ripped without warning. The rips were deep. They took a month to fully heal. Coach Gates came and looked over at my feet and then immediately turned away as he grew squeamish.

I duckwalked to the locker room, where I took a shower and did my best not to scream as the water stung the exposed flesh of my feet. Blood flowed, with the soapsuds, down the gutters of the shower stall. Kevin Taylor, our trainer, awkwardly worked on my feet, doing his best to patch up what was nearly irreparable. I went back to the hotel, where I soaked my feet in Epsom salts. That evening practice, with only Band-Aids to protect my feet, I laced up the old shoes again and went back out on the floor. Gates had warned us to not be injured, and I wasn't going to sit out of practice because of flayed flesh on my feet when my future depended on it.

There wasn't anything else waiting for me. It was either Boise or bust. I had resigned myself to the fact that if I didn't make the team, I'd be hanging my shoes up for good, and moving on. Seeing that this was my last chance, my last-ditch effort along the path toward my dream, I wasn't going to step off the floor with any regrets. If I was going to retire, or be forced into retirement, I was going to do it on my terms, knowing I had done everything I possibly could to achieve my goal. I wouldn't let what-ifs haunt me for the rest of my days.

I stepped out onto the floor and practiced and ran and sprinted, cursing the pain in my feet until the sensory overload shut down the nerve
passages, sending my feet into a state of numbness. When practice was over, I took the shoes off to see blood crystallizing with the salt of sweat. This time the pain was so unbearable that I silently cried in the shower and bit down on the washcloth. I was safe to do so, as my tears disappeared with the bloody shower water.

The next day I received my per diem: $30. I put aside $10 of it for food and then bought a pair of basketball shoes for the other $20 at an outlet store. The shoes were a hit with the rest of the team. There were junk and looked like junk, but at least they were not tearing up my feet anymore. The next day Coach Gates took pity on me and gave me a new pair of Adidas shoes, even though he wasn't supposed to until the final roster cut.

On each of those ten days of camp, I drove to my bank and put $20 of my daily $30 in my checking account, allowing myself to eat for the day on only a $10 budget. I was able to make that month's bills without any overdraft fee, with $5 to spare.

Coach Gates was still unsure whether he could keep me. In practice I wasn't doing too well, because Jeff Graves and Pete Ramos were bruisers who believed they had never committed a foul in their life. Jeff and Pete were much stronger than I was and would just manhandle me in practice, where I had no one to uphold the standards of the game or at least protect me.

Then in the very first exhibition game Gates saw what I could do in a structured environment. I scored eleven points in eight minutes in the first half. Gates saw that I wasn't the strongest, nor the most athletic. I didn't have the biggest wingspan or freakish hops. I wasn't a baller or a gangster.

I was merely a basketball player. Nothing more.

I made the final cut and was the lone token white guy on the team.

My point guard,
Randy Livingston, became my close friend—maybe the closest friend I have made in my basketball travels. Born and raised in Louisiana, Randy Livingston has become my brother from another world. We speak a different dialect and have nothing in common but basketball, yet we have only absolute love and respect for each other, because we both love and respect the game and try our best to play it as it should be played—with heart.

Randy was a grizzled point guard, well traveled, having hopped around through various NBA teams throughout his career, setting the record for most call-ups to the NBA from the minor-league systems of the CBA and D-League. He was originally drafted by the Houston Rockets out of LSU in the mid-1990s, but several devastating knee injuries would wipe out the freakish athleticism he had originally been known for. You can always find Randy in an airport, as he is the guy who is waddling around like a duck.

Randy is as smart as they come. I have never encountered a higher basketball IQ. As slow and hobbled as he was, Randy embarrassed even the quickest guards as he would just take his time and pick apart a defense, finding the open teammate. He would never yell at you for shooting it, only for not shooting it. He made it clear that failing to shoot the open shot was just as malignant as shooting a bad one. Randy could put a ball anywhere he wanted it. He would lead you with a pass to where you needed to go, as he could see the defense behind you when you couldn't. For the two years I spent in the D-League with Randy Livingston, he led the league in assists both years. He wasn't anything flashy. Straight to point with his passes and intentions. He made the game so simple. Randy would do all your homework for you. You just had to worry about putting the ball in the hoop.

My first game was against the Colorado 14ers. I scored fifteen points in twenty-one minutes. But we lost that game and then promptly lost the next five, sprinting out of the gate to an 0–6 record. Every day it was a constant battle in practice to see which of the two bruisers—Jeff or Pete—was going to make life miserable for us. They usually would just talk heat to each other, flexing their muscles, threatening to break the other's legs, but sometimes they ventured off to try to intimidate someone else on the team. Coach Gates would get in shouting matches with at least one of those two nearly every day, sending the whole team on sprints because of their petty grandstanding.

After starting off at 0–6, Coach knew his job was already on the line. He needed to change something. He cut a few players, and we eventually were able to turn the ship around, slowly but surely beginning to tick off a ten-game winning streak, climbing back into the standings. But even during the time we were winning, everyone was miserable. You never knew what you were going to get that day in practice.

I had roommate problems as well. My two roommates, who shall remain nameless, liked to smoke dope. And they liked to have women over, preferably mother-daughter combinations, through all hours of the night, laughing and screaming, slamming and banging doors until four in the morning. One day I'd finally had enough and told them that I didn't care that they smoked dope or enjoyed prostitutes at night but that they had to take it elsewhere.

They never stopped. They did, however, just stay in their rooms and smoke pot by the window, but that smell, that pungent smell that I hate so much, which flares up my sinuses, would always leak through the vent. Always. I'm all for the legalization of drugs. I really didn't care that they were smoking pot. I just hated the fact that they made me smell it and get sinus infections because of it.

At home or on the road, it was hard for me to be roommates with guys of such different backgrounds and preferences. Most of the guys loved to turn up the thermostat, preferring their room as hot as a sauna. They loved just falling asleep in a sweat on top of their covers. To me this was just about as unpleasant as trying to pop cysts in my armpit with a quilting needle. It was evident that I often didn't fit in and made people uncomfortable without even trying.

 

Then the economic aspect of the D-League kicked in. Seattle sent down Mohammed Sene, their first-round draft pick that year, who wasn't getting any play time up in the NBA. They wanted him to develop and get more playing time in the D-League. With one bimonthly paycheck, Mohammed made more than all of us combined for the entire season. The disparity was comical.

What player wants to leave the convenience of the NBA—where you fly on your own jet with all the food you want and stay in the nicest hotels in your own rooms—and go down to the D-League, where you fly on little commuter jets to second-class cities, traveling via vans and buses to your destination, stopping at Subways across the great American landscape? No one. The fact that an assigned player who is sent down to a D-League team can very well buy out that franchise makes it difficult for any such player to take playing there seriously.

People want in the D-League, but they also want out. No one wants to stay in the D-League. Everyone goes to the D-League in hopes of a better job: players, coaches, dancers, administrators, PR reps. Everyone. When an assignment (i.e., a player) was sent down, the NBA team he played for sent checks down to cover his expenses as well as his development. As they assign a player they're investing millions in, they expect to see him play. And he gets to play. That's the way it goes. An assignment gets
x
number of minutes regardless of his attitude or effort in practice.

It's not economically sound to send a player down to the D-League and not have him play.

When Mohammed came down, it knocked me out of the rotation. No matter how hard I practiced or hustled, it didn't matter. Mo was still going to get his minutes, regardless of his effort or interest. Resistance was futile. All I could do was shoot my extra shots after practice and then sit at the end of the bench and cheer my teammates on.

Sometimes I sat on the bench for stretches that went for games at a time. My confidence plummeted. I was making $12,000, and not even playing. How was this helping me in the long term? How was I hoping to have a better job the next year with minutes and numbers like mine?

My confidence was so bad that whenever I did get in a game for short spurts, I'd miss layups. Wide-open layups. And Gates felt that it was best to take me out, fearing I might otherwise compound one mistake with another. He subbed me out, and all I could do was sit and analyze that one minute I got to play.

I found myself once again staying up late at night, stressing and obsessing about the mistakes I had made in a previous game, never being given a chance to redeem myself. I was also concerned that I wasn't getting any younger. I began to develop ulcers and vomit blood.

I was unhappy and depressed, and I saw no light at the end of the road. I kept trying to get hold of John, wanting him to do something, to trade me—anything. On the eve of the year 2007, we were in Austin. I had played for only a few minutes, and again was just perseverating over all the little things that had occurred in the time I had been in the game.

I texted John: “John, I'm unhappy. Why are you not listening to me? I don't want to be here anymore. Where is this going?”

John had been MIA for a while, as there wasn't a thing he could really do for me. Gates didn't want to let me go or be traded. John finally sent a text message back: “Then go work at the 7–11 if you're so miserable.”

As I walked down a quiet street in Austin, Texas, I put the phone back in my pocket and began to cuss obscenities at John, twenty-five hundred miles away. I'm sure he heard me. It was the only time I came near to firing him.

In February, my twenty-sixth birthday approached and the family gathered in Boise to meet up and see a game of mine. I played for one minute, getting two rebounds. And then, having done nothing wrong, I was subbed out. I looked up and saw my family in the stands. There I was, turning twenty-six, in debt, with nothing to show for myself, sitting on the bench in the D-League, making $12,000 a year. I couldn't even look at them from across the arena. The rest of my siblings were carving their way through the world, doing their best to make themselves a life, while I was chasing a pipe dream. Before the game was even over, I snuck off to the locker room and began to violently vomit blood.

That night the family gathered at the hotel, where they all gave me gifts. I have never been a fan of birthdays. I think that on my birthday, if anyone should be giving a gift to say thank you, it should be me. I couldn't look my siblings in the eye as I opened their gifts. They knew I was in pain. They knew it was difficult for me to accept their generosity when I had nothing to give them. I still owed them money. Yet here they were, giving me more.

That night as I lay in bed, my stomach churning, eating at my insides, I came to the conclusion that I was living in a fantasy and it was time to grow up.

That next morning I packed my bags and told Coach Gates I at least needed to take a medical leave of absence to get my ulcers under control. But I also told him I might not be coming back, and that I was pretty sure I'd be quitting.

I felt I had traveled this road as far as I could, that it had come to its end and life needed me elsewhere. Driving home to Salt Lake, I cried in the car as I recalled all those morning with Coach Rupp when the game was innocent.

I had given so much to this game. It had given me a free education. But other than that, nothing but heartache. Why were people who didn't respect it, who didn't touch the line every time when running sprints—why were they being rewarded while I wasn't? I believed that the game of basketball was a living, breathing organism, that she had a soul, and that she watched me doing the little things when no one else was or could even appreciate them. Why had she let me fail? Was I simply another candle in the wind? Was my lesson in all of this to take it to the very end, with no regrets?

She had broken my heart.