ELEVEN RINGS Part 23

As the playoffs began, the Lakers were riding that wave. I was struck by how poised and relaxed the players were in the closing minutes of games, compared to the previous year. Nothing seemed to faze them.

"The one thing people are starting to notice about our team now is how much composure we have," Fish told the Los Angeles Times's Tim Brown. "We're not playing out of control; we're not turning the basketball over a lot. I think those are trademarks of not only Phil, but our whole coaching staff. Their personality." Fish was impressed by how the coaching staff continued to prepare the team meticulously for every game, no matter what was going on with Shaq and Kobe.

Clearly the players were beginning to internalize the coaching staff's chop-wood-carry-water att.i.tude. A key moment occurred during the second game of the Western Conference finals against the San Antonio Spurs when I was ejected in the third quarter of the second game for stepping into a ref's s.p.a.ce and supposedly impeding his ability to do his job. In the past, the team would have lost its bearings and gone into a slide, but this time the players turned up the defense and ended the game with a 135 surge to win, 8881. "We've matured," said Fox afterward, "to the point where we maintained our composure. Outside of Phil."

After sweeping the Portland Trail Blazers in the first round, we faced the Sacramento Kings, who tried several different tactics to stop Shaq without much success. In game 1 Vlade Divac played him straight up, and Shaq scored 44 points and grabbed 21 rebounds. Then they put Scot Pollard on him for most of game 2, but that reduced Shaq's numbers by just 1 point and 1 rebound. Finally in game 3 on their home court, the Kings upped the pressure even more, swarming Shaq and hacking him relentlessly in the fourth quarter. Happily, that created a world of opportunities for other players, especially Kobe, who scored 36 points as we mounted a 30 lead in the series.

Later that night Kobe flew back to L.A. to spend time with his wife, Vanessa, who had been hospitalized with excruciating pain. He stayed with her until she stabilized, then flew back to Sacramento for game 4, during which he erupted for 48 points and 16 rebounds to lead the team to another sweep. His wild enthusiasm inspired his teammates. "I was prepared to do whatever," he said. "I was going to run and push myself to exhaustion. It doesn't matter."

By the time we arrived in San Antonio for the conference finals, we had won fifteen straight (including regular-season games), and the pundits were already speculating about our becoming the first team to sweep the playoffs. Getting past San Antonio wasn't going to be easy, though. They had two of the best big men in the game-David Robinson and Tim Duncan-and the best record in the league that season, 58-24. The last time we'd faced them, they had beaten us on our home court. But that was in March, before Fish's comeback. Ancient history.

Robinson and Duncan did a respectable job on Shaq, holding him to 28 points. But n.o.body on the Spurs seemed to know what to do with Kobe, who put up 45 points, the highest total by anyone against the Spurs in playoff history. An exuberant Shaq fist-b.u.mped Kobe at the end of the game and gushed, "You're my idol." Later O'Neal told reporters, "I think he's the best player in the league-by far. When he's playing like that, scoring, getting everybody involved, playing good defense, there's nothing you can say. That's where I've been trying to get him all year."

When I'd first started working with Kobe, I'd tried to persuade him not to push so hard and to let the game flow more naturally. He'd resisted then, but not now. "Personally, I just tried to feed off my teammates," he said after that game. "That's one way that I am improving: learning how to use my teammates to create opportunities, just playing solid and letting the game and the opportunities come to me." He was sounding more and more like me.

When we returned to L.A. for game 3, we went on a 11172 romp during which Kobe and Shaq combined for 71 points, or one fewer than the entire Spurs lineup. Then two days later we closed out the series. This time the hero was Fish, who made 6 of 7 three-point shots and scored a career-high 28 points.

Although we tried to play it down, it was hard to ignore that something big was happening. "It's become greater than Shaquille," said Fox after the game 3 win. "It's become greater than Kobe, greater than any effort by one or two people. I've never seen it before. It's as though we're starting to round into the team we thought we'd be."

None of this talk about making history intimidated the Philadelphia 76ers, the team we faced in the champions.h.i.+p finals. They were a tough, fiery team led by guard Allen Iverson who that year at six feet, 165 pounds, became the smallest player ever to win the MVP award. Iverson dismissed talk of a sweep, pointing to his heart and saying, "Champions.h.i.+ps are won here."

After his whirlwind performance in the Staples Center in game 1, it looked as if he might be right. He scored 48 points, and the Sixers snuffed out our 5-point lead in overtime, ending our storied streak at 19. I was actually relieved when the media hoopla surrounding the streak died down. Now we could focus on beating the Sixers without distractions. Before the next game Iverson told reporters that the Sixers were going to "spread the war," hoping to intimidate Kobe and the rest of the team. But Kobe didn't back down when Iverson's jibes turned into a trash-talk shouting match at midcourt. And he silenced Iverson by scoring 31 points with 8 rebounds, as we banged out a 9889 win.

That was just the beginning. Game 3 in Philadelphia was another street fight, but this time Shaq and Fish fouled out with a little over two minutes left and the Lakers up by 2. No problem. In the closing minutes, Kobe and Fox gutted it out, while Horry appeared out of nowhere to nail the win with another one of his trademark three-pointers and four free throws. "The 76ers have heart, but so what?" said Shaw. "You can have heart and lose. We have heart and we have injuries and we just play through it."

The rest of the series flew by. We won game 4 with "a whole lotta Shaquille O'Neal," as Iverson put it. Then we clinched the t.i.tle two days later in a game that few would call a work of art. As often was the case, Horry summed up the moment perfectly. "It's closure," he said, referring to the difficult season. "So much turmoil. So many problems. So many people talking about what we weren't going to do. It's closure. That's what it boils down to."

I was relieved that this crazy season was finally over. Yet when I reflect back on it, I realize that I learned an important lesson that year about transforming conflict into healing. Gandhi once said, "Suffering cheerfully endured ceases to be suffering and is trans.m.u.ted into an ineffable joy." If we had tried to squelch the strife instead of letting it play itself out naturally, this young, growing team might never have come together the way it did in the end. Without the pain, the Lakers would not have discovered their soul.

CHAPTER 17

ONE-TWO-THREE-LAKERS!

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

GEORGE MACDONALD

One day early in the 200102 season, Rick Fox told me he wasn't feeling high anymore, and it was driving him crazy. He wasn't talking about drugs; he was referring to the spiritual high he'd felt during our second champions.h.i.+p run. Rick grew up in a Pentecostal family in the Bahamas, and he understood right away when I talked about basketball as a spiritual game. He said that when everybody was playing with one mind, it was a beautiful experience that made him feel higher than anything else he'd ever done. Then, all of a sudden, the feeling evaporated like a dream, and he longed to get it back.

I knew what he was talking about. I'd been there myself. The feeling Rick described is sometimes referred to as "spiritual addiction"-a sense of connectedness so powerful, so joyful, you never want it to stop. Trouble is, the more you try to hang on to the feeling, the more elusive it becomes. I tried to explain to Rick that his experience during the previous season, though profound, was just one moment in time; it was a losing battle to try to re-create it because everything had changed, including Rick himself. Sometimes basketball can be a joyride, as it was for us at the end of 200001, and sometimes it can be a long, hard slog. But if you look at each season as an adventure, it takes on a beauty all its own.

I knew on day one that 200102 wasn't going to be easy. Three-peats never are. The good news was that Kobe and Shaq were getting along. They weren't taking potshots at each other, and I often saw them laughing together at practice and after games. During a road trip to Philadelphia, Shaq and several other players attended a jersey-retiring ceremony for Kobe at Lower Merion High School, and Shaq hugged Kobe on stage afterward.

Not all the changes were so welcome; the team was in a state of flux again. In general, the Lakers' rosters were much more fluid than the Bulls' had been. There's a group portrait in Jeanie's office of the players who took part in all three champions.h.i.+ps during my first run as the Lakers' coach. The painting includes just seven players: O'Neal, Bryant, Horry, Fox, Fisher, Shaw, and Devean George. The rest of the roster was filled with an ever-changing rotation of players, some who played critical roles, others who never quite found their niche. This musical-chairs environment made it challenging to sustain a strong sense of team unity from one season to the next.

In the off-season we lost the last two ex-Bulls on the team: Ron Harper to a long-postponed retirement and Horace Grant to a spot on the Orlando Magic. We replaced them with two solid players: Mitch Richmond, a six-time All-Star guard, and Samaki Walker, a promising power forward from the San Antonio Spurs. But it was impossible to replace Ron and Horace's champions.h.i.+p experience and steadying influence on the team.

If the second season felt like a soap opera at times, the third was reminiscent of Oblomov, the Russian novel about a young man who lacks willpower and spends most of his time lying in bed. Our biggest problem was boredom. That's true of many champions.h.i.+p teams, but it was more p.r.o.nounced with the Lakers. This team had been so successful so fast that the players had begun to believe that they could flip a switch whenever they wanted to and automatically rise to another level-the way we had done the year before.

Fox had an interesting theory about what was going on. He thought the players' egos were so inflated by the start of the season that they believed they knew more than the coaches did about what they had to do to win another ring. As he puts it, "The first year we all blindly followed. The second year we joyfully contributed. And the third year we wanted to drive the s.h.i.+p." Rick remembers having a lot more debates that year than before about the coaches' decision-making process. "I wouldn't call it anarchy," he adds, "but I started to see guys act out more and express their opinions more and try to figure out ways to get around the triangle." The result, he says, was that the team was often out of sync.

This didn't surprise me. I'd seen it before with the Bulls during their first three-peat season. As far as I was concerned, the Lakers were evolving into a more mature team, the inevitable result of our effort to empower the players to think for themselves instead of being dependent on the coaching staff for all the answers. I always welcomed debate, even if it disrupted team harmony temporarily, because it showed that the players were engaged in solving the problems. The big danger was when a critical ma.s.s of players jettisoned the principle of selflessness upon which the team was founded. That's when chaos ensued.

The mistake that champions.h.i.+p teams often make is to try to repeat their winning formula. But that rarely works because by the time the next season starts, your opponents have studied all the videos and figured out how to counter every move you made. The key to sustained success is to keep growing as a team. Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new. Remember that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie when someone asks Indy what he's going to do next, and he replies, "I don't know, I'm making it up as we go along." That's how I view leaders.h.i.+p. It's an act of controlled improvisation, a Thelonious Monk finger exercise, from one moment to the next.

But complacency and oversize egos weren't the team's only problems.

My biggest worry was Shaq's health. Before he left for the summer, he had promised to return at his rookie weight, 290 pounds. Instead, he showed up weighing more than 330 pounds, recovering from surgery on his left pinky, and with severe toe problems.

With Shaq, as with the rest of the players, I needed to suss out the most effective way to communicate. Fortunately, from the beginning Shaq and I were able to get through to each other with a minimum of bulls.h.i.+t. At times I'd be very direct. For example, just before the second game of the finals in 2001, I told him not to be afraid of going after Allen Iverson when he drove to the basket. Shaq was so taken aback by the implication that he was frightened of Iverson that he forgot to lead the team in the "1-2-3-Lakers" pregame chant. Still, that night O'Neal blocked 8 shots and, in effect, neutralized the Iverson threat. At other times, I'd motivate him indirectly through the media. During our midseason doldrums in 200001, I goaded Shaq into hustling more by telling reporters I thought the only players who were going all out were Kobe and Fox. Shaq felt stung by this comment, but after that he became much more aggressive on the floor.

Shaq had a great deal of respect for male authority figures because that's how he'd been raised by his stepfather, Phil, a career military man whom Shaq called "Sarge." In fact, during my first year with the team, Shaq started referring to me as his "white father." He was so hardwired to respect authority that he would often have other people tell me when he didn't want to do something. That first season I asked him to play forty-eight minutes a game instead of his typical forty. Shaq gave it a try for a week or two, going most of the way in several games, but then he decided he needed more rest. Instead of telling me himself, he appointed John Salley his messenger. On another occasion Shaq sent one of the trainers in to tell me that he wouldn't be coming to practice that day. When I asked why, the trainer said that Shaq, who had been training to become a police officer, had been up all night cruising the city looking for cars on the LAPD's stolen-vehicles list. At heart the big guy dreamed of being a real-life Clark Kent.

The Lakers staff called Shaq "the Big Moody" because he tended to get grumpy when he was struggling with injuries or disappointed in his game. Much of his frustration was directed at me. Early in the 200102 season I fined him for taking two days off when his daughter was born instead of the one day he'd requested. In response, Shaq told reporters, "That motherf.u.c.ker knows what he can do with that fine." But in the next game, he scored 30 points with 13 rebounds against Houston.

Grandstanding in the press didn't trouble me as much as when Shaq lashed out in person at one of his teammates. That happened in a game against the San Antonio Spurs during the 2003 playoffs. Shaq was furious because Devean George had made a mistake at the end of the game that allowed Malik Rose to pick off an offensive rebound and put up the game-winning shot. Shaq started to go after Devean in the locker room after the game, but Brian Shaw made him stop.

Shaw was the team's truth teller. He had a good read on the team's p.r.i.c.kly interpersonal dynamics, and I encouraged him to speak his mind. "My mother always told me growing up that my mouth would get me in trouble someday," says Brian, "because if I saw something that wasn't right, I had to point it out. I felt that as long as I was telling the truth, I'd be all right. You can't be mad at the truth."

When Brian saw Shaq attacking Devean, he called out to him, "If you'd used that much energy blocking out under the boards, you would have gotten yourself a rebound and we probably would have won the game. So instead of taking it out on Devean, why don't you take responsibility for where you came up short?" At that point, Shaq let Devean go and went after Brian, who tried to tackle him but ended up getting dragged around the locker room by Shaq until his knees were bleeding and the other players pulled him off.

"Shaq was mad at me because I hurt his feelings," says Brian. "But a couple days later, he came up to me and said, 'You know, you were right. It was my bad. I shouldn't have gone off like that.'"

Kobe was also going through a difficult transition that season. During the previous spring, he'd fallen out with his family over his marriage to Vanessa Laine, a then-eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate. Kobe's parents, Joe and Pam, who had been living with him in his Brentwood home, argued that he was too young to marry. But Kobe was eager to start his new life. "I do everything young," he told reporters. Joe and Pam, who had been regulars at Lakers games, returned to Philadelphia but didn't attend the champions.h.i.+p finals that year in the family's hometown. It wasn't until two years later that Kobe and his parents reconciled. In the meantime he and Vanessa moved to a new house, a block away from her mother in Newport Beach, and had their first child, Natalia.

In his rush to make it in the NBA, Kobe had missed out on college and some of the growing pains that go along with being out in the world for the first time. After breaking with his parents, he started to establish himself as his own man, sometimes in surprising ways. Kobe had always avoided clashes with other players, but during the 200102 season, he became belligerent at times. Once he got into an argument with Samaki Walker while traveling on the team bus, then suddenly took a pop at him. Samaki laughed it off, saying, "It was good to see the intensity." Later, during a game in the Staples Center, Kobe reacted violently to Reggie Miller's trash talk, balling his fist and chasing Miller around the court until they crashed into the scorer's table. Kobe was suspended for two games.

Kobe had a lot of pent-up rage inside, and I worried that he might do something he might regret someday. But Brian, who had become Kobe's confidant and mentor, thought that these clashes were signs that Kobe was "branching out into manhood and establis.h.i.+ng what he was going to stand for and what he wasn't." Watching Kobe, whom I had named cocaptain that year, go through these growing pains, says Brian, "you could see that he was obviously maturing, becoming more of a good teammate and one of the guys. There were times when he would still go off and say things, but for the most part he was much more comfortable in his own skin and a lot more confident about being who he is."

Improvising was the only way we could get through the 200102 season. Nothing that happened followed any pattern I'd seen before. We took off on a 16-1 run, the best start in franchise history, and the media began whispering that it looked like we could break the Bulls' 72-10 season record. That didn't last long. In December we sank into a puzzling lethargy that lasted through mid-February. Even though we held our own with our toughest rivals, we lost six times during that period to last-place teams, including twice to the rebuilding Bulls. We leveled off somewhat after that, but we were never able to flip that illusory switch everybody was talking about.

I knew this team was capable of playing much better basketball. The trick was trying to hold body, mind, and spirit together until we got to the playoffs. One of my biggest disappointments was figuring out how to get the most out of Mitch Richmond. Mitch was a terrific scorer who'd averaged 22.1 points coming into the season, but he had a difficult time adapting to the triangle offense. He also wasn't adept at jumping in and out of games off the bench because he needed a lot of time to warm up his legs. Fortunately, Shaw was able to fill in for Mitch as the third guard at the end of the season. Because the bench wasn't that strong, we had to rely heavily on the starters to play extra minutes, and the cracks were beginning to show. To prevent the starters from getting worn out too early, I decided to lighten up on the team during the final stretch. As a result, we entered the playoffs tied for second place in the Western Conference and still searching for our mojo.

We swept Portland in the first round, but we didn't look impressive doing it. It wasn't until we lost at home to the Spurs in the second game of the Western Conference semifinals, tying the series at 11, that we woke up and started playing like champions.

Shaq was suffering. To add to his toe problems, he'd sliced the forefinger of his shooting hand in game 1 and sprained his left ankle in game 2. Still, I thought he needed to be more aggressive and told him so. When reporters questioned me about him before game 3 in San Antonio, I said, "I had a heated conversation with Shaq, actually, about getting actively involved in chasing the ball down... . He said, basically, his toe [hurts]." Shaq had been avoiding the media that week, but when a reporter pressed him for a comment, he said, "Ask Phil, he knows every other f.u.c.king thing."