ELEVEN RINGS Part 22

Rick Fox describes Kobe during this period as "willful and determined, like a bull in a china shop." In his first years with the Lakers, Rick often competed with Kobe for playing time. "Kobe's an alpha male," he says. "He looks at the world with the eye of someone who says, 'I know more than you,' and if you were in his way, he was going to push and push until you pushed back. And if you didn't push back, he was going to eat you."

Rick compares Kobe's compet.i.tive drive to that of M.J., whom Fox worked with at Jordan's basketball camps when he was a college student. Rick says: "There are no other individuals I've known who act like they do. To them, winning at all costs is all that matters. And they demand that everyone around them act the same way, regardless of whether they can or not. They say, 'Find somewhere inside yourself to get better, because that's what I'm doing every day of the week, every minute of the day.' They have no tolerance for anything less. None."

But Fox noticed a difference between Michael and Kobe. "Michael had to win at everything," he recalls. "I mean he couldn't drive from Chapel Hill to Wilmington without making it a race. Whether you wanted to compete or not, he was competing with you. But I think Kobe competes with himself more than anything else. He sets barriers and challenges for himself, and he just happens to need other people to come along with him. He's playing an individual sport in a team uniform-and dominating it. Once he steps off the court, though, he's not interested in competing with you in the way you dress or how you drive. He's obsessed with chasing the goals he set for himself at age 15 or 16."

Which is exactly what was making Kobe so difficult to coach. In his mind he had it all figured out. His goal was to become the greatest basketball player of all time. And he was certain he knew what he had to do to get there. Why should he listen to anybody else? If he followed my advice and cut back his scoring, he'd fall short of his ultimate goal.

How was I going to get through to this kid?

The player who was the most irritated by Kobe's self-serving style was Shaq.

After the playoffs, I'd told Shaq to have a good time over the summer and come back relaxed and ready to go. He got the first part of the message, but unfortunately he had trouble with the "ready to go" part. He arrived in training camp overweight and out of condition, and it took him almost half the season to get back in fighting shape. He looked exhausted, as if he were still trying to recover from the previous season, when he led the league in scoring and won all three MVP awards.

But early in 20002001 his shooting percentage declined, and his free-throw touch-which had never been great-disappeared. In early December Shaq broke Wilt Chamberlain's futility-at-the-line record by going 0 for 11 against Seattle. It got so bad that fans started sending me amulets and crystals to bring him luck. Even his three-year-old daughter started giving him tips. Tex Winter tried to work with Shaq but gave up after two days, saying that he was "uncoachable on free throws." So we brought in Ed Palubinskas, an Australian free-throw champion Shaq's agent had discovered, and his work paid off handily. By the end of the season, Shaq had improved his percentage on the line from 37.2 percent to 65.1 percent.

In late December, after a game against the Suns in which Kobe scored 38 points and Shaq struggled to get 18, O'Neal told general manager Mitch Kupchak and me that he wanted to be traded. Kupchak, who had replaced Jerry West after West had resigned unexpectedly over the summer, didn't take the request seriously. Mitch believed that Shaq was simply expressing his frustration with Kobe's attempts to hijack the offense.

This was the start of what evolved into a full-fledged feud between Shaq and Kobe over the question of who would lead the team. Clearly the alliance they'd formed the year before was falling apart.

I had encouraged the two of them to get to know each other better, in the hope that this would strengthen their bond. But Kobe balked at the idea of getting too close to Shaq and was appalled by the big guy's attempts to turn him into his "little brother." As Kobe explained, they came from different cultures and had little in common. Shaq was an army brat from the South by way of Newark, New Jersey, and Kobe was the worldly son of a former NBA player from Philadelphia by way of Italy.

They also had strikingly different personalities. Shaq was a generous, fun-loving guy who was more interested in getting you to laugh at his jokes than in winning the scoring t.i.tle. He couldn't understand why Kobe always wanted to make everything so hard. "That's what drove Kobe crazy about Shaq," says Fox. "In the most serious moments, Shaq had to have fun. If he wasn't having fun, he didn't want to be there."

Kobe, on the other hand, was cool and introverted and could be bitingly sarcastic. Even though he was six years younger than Shaq, he seemed older and more mature. As former Lakers coach Del Harris said, "You ask what Kobe was like as a kid. That's just it, he was never a kid." But I think it was easy to mistake Kobe's worldliness and intense focus for maturity. As far as I could see, he still had a lot of growing up to do-and because of his nature, he'd have to do it the hard way.

Shortly after Shaq made his halfhearted trade appeal, a cover story on Kobe by Ric Bucher appeared in ESPN the Magazine in which Kobe hinted at being interested in moving to another team. The article referred to a conversation I'd had with him early in the season, asking him to turn down his game. Kobe's answer to me, in the story, was "Turn my game down? I need to turn it up. I've improved. How are you going to bottle me up? I'd be better off playing somewhere else." He also took a shot at Shaq. "If Shaq were a 70 percent free throw shooter," Kobe said, "it would make things so much easier. We have to know our strengths and weaknesses. I trust the team. I just trust myself more. Yeah, we won last year with the offense going through Shaq. But instead of winning the series in five and seven games, this year we'll have sweeps."

Recognizing how inflammatory these remarks might be to his teammates, Kobe tried to soften the blow by giving them a heads-up before the article appeared. But that didn't keep Shaq from going ballistic. "I don't know why anybody would want to change except for selfish reasons," he told reporters after our next practice. "Last year we were 67-15 playing with enthusiasm. The city was jumping up and down. We had a parade and everything. Now we're 23-11, so you figure it out." Then he dropped the bomb. "Clearly if the offense doesn't run through me," he said, "the house doesn't get guarded. Period."

It was tempting to inject my own ego into this dispute. In fact, that's what most of the media pundits thought I should do. But I was wary of turning what I considered a ridiculous sandbox fight into something more serious. I'd seen that happen too many times in Chicago when Jerry Krause would bl.u.s.ter his way into a volatile situation and end up making things worse. I generally prefer taking a page from the playbook of the other Chicago Jerry-Jerry Reinsdorf. He once said that the best way to handle most flare-ups is to sleep on them. The point is to avoid acting out of anger and creating an even stickier mess. And if you're lucky, the problem may resolve itself.

I'm not averse to taking direct action if that's what is called for, but like Reinsdorf, I've discovered that you can solve many difficulties with what Lao-tzu called non-action. This approach is often misinterpreted as pa.s.sivity, but actually it's just the reverse. Non-action involves being attuned to what's happening with the group and acting-or non-acting-accordingly. In the foreword to his adaptation of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitch.e.l.l compares non-action to athletic performance. "A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will," he writes. "This is the paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can't tell the dancer from the dance." Or as Lao-tzu proclaims in Mitch.e.l.l's work:

Less and less do you need to force things,

until finally you arrive at non-action.

When nothing is done,

nothing is left undone.

With Shaq and Kobe I decided not to force the issue. Rather than try to strong-arm them into making nice, I let their conflict play itself out over the next few weeks. I didn't think it was worth escalating the fight and distracting the team from what I saw as the real problem: getting the players to regain the focus and self-discipline they'd had during our first champions.h.i.+p run.

The day after the ESPN the Magazine article appeared I asked the media to back off the story. "This is our business," I said. "It isn't your business." Of course, I knew even as I said it that this was a futile request. We were in L.A., after all, the storytelling capital of the world. How could reporters resist a story about two young superstars clas.h.i.+ng over who was going to be top dog?

At the same time, I didn't try to suppress the story or pretend it didn't exist. As Brian Shaw says, I let it "manifest" itself. "Phil allowed Shaq to be who he was and he allowed Kobe to be who he was," says Brian, "but at the same time, he let it be known that he was driving the bus. So when it got off course, he was going to be the one to steer it back in place. But as long as we stayed on the road, we could go ahead and take it wherever we wanted to."

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 att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.s; 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 acc.u.mulating 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 compa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.sion 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 20002001 season, Ain't No Tomorrow, Elizabeth Kaye explores how Kobe's injuries softened his att.i.tude 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 a.s.sists 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, dis.h.i.+ng off regularly to his teammates even after they flubbed their shots and playing aggressive defense, as we rolled to a 10680 blowout. He told reporters after finis.h.i.+ng 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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."