Character Driven (8 page)

I enjoyed playing music a lot. Again, I can see a pattern here. Most kids like listening to music, but that wasn’t enough for my family and me. Why not
make
music instead of just passively listening to what someone else had produced? I began playing the trumpet in seventh grade and continued to be in bands until my junior year in high school. My forays into playing music and singing in the choir were a part of my learning to let my guard down a bit. I was anxious about performing in front of people initially, but I liked that slightly jittery butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling. I eventually earned my share of solos or featured sections in the choir and the band, and I enjoyed being out in front of a group of people and bringing pleasure to them and receiving pleasure in the form of applause. Standing up and taking a bow after a concert band or choir performance was almost as gratifying as hearing a crowd cheering at a basketball game.

Eventually those early lessons about the need to develop all sides of my personality and also to develop skills that could help off the court took root. I majored in communications in college, and all the study of and practice of various kinds of social interactions and speaking paid off for me. When I finally really blossomed on the court at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and later with the Lakers, a part of my job was being interviewed by newspaper and television reporters as well as doing public appearances. I always felt comfortable in front of the cameras or with microphones being placed in front of me.

I knew that if I was going to fit into Los Angeles and take advantage of all the opportunities that come with working in a major media market, and one as intensely media-centered as Los Angeles, my reserved nature wasn’t going to get me far. I didn’t know back in college that I’d play in the NBA or be living in Los Angeles, but I knew that no matter what career path I followed, many of my basketball lessons and skills would translate to success anywhere. Quiet confidence is a good thing, but being able to show that other side of yourself—that you can come out of your protective shell, that you can do things that people don’t really expect of you—is important. For me, developing my off hand meant trying things and testing myself off the court in some ways people back home were really surprised to see.

In 1998, an agent contacted me. She knew that some of the urban television shows presented possible opportunities for me to explore. One of those was an appearance on L. L. Cool J’s television show
In the House.
Kobe Bryant and I did cameo appearances along with our coach, Del Harris. According to the script, I was dating the character played by Kim Wayans. I had a lot of fun, prepared myself well for the taping, and took pride in being able to do my scenes in one take. The show’s producers were so happy with how I did, they invited me back to wrap up the bit about my dating Kim—the script stated that I was getting too distracted so Coach Harris had to intervene. Later on, I did some acting on Jamie Foxx’s show and then on
Moesha
, with the singer Brandy. I was serious enough about it that I took some acting classes as well. Unfortunately, I learned that as an NBA player, time is precious, and trying to do too much can mean that you don’t do anything as well as you’d like. I had to stop taking those classes when it became clear just how much time I had to devote to training and rehab in the summer.

Those acting gigs gave me a chance to step out of my usual reality, to be silly, and to have some fun. Don’t get me wrong, basketball was fun, but the longer I played and the higher up I advanced, the more intense the pressure became, and eventually I would come to think of it as my career, and my playing the game as the work I did. I still needed creative outlets, and I still needed to prove to other people and myself that I didn’t live and breathe basketball 24-7. When I first started dating Candace, I would invite her onto the set so that she could see these other sides of me. I wanted to reassure her that I wasn’t what she might have believed a stereotypical professional athlete was like. As you’ll learn more later on, I was a pretty low-key, unassuming guy when it came to dating and romance, and I wanted to impress her with all of my skills. I didn’t show off my typing ability, but she was convinced that there was far more to me than a strong left-hand dribble drive or a pull-up jumper.

Eventually I could confidently walk onto the set of a TV show and perform, and I have Parkview’s programs and its emphasis on sports, academics, and the arts to thank for that. I know that some people perceive that high school athletes, particularly those who excel and go on to pro careers, are “too cool for school,” as the expression goes. That wasn’t the case with me. The school I attended had a wellrounded focus. Parkview has a longer name, Parkview Arts Science Magnet High School, and the school was one of Little Rock’s finest. As a magnet school, it drew students from around the city, allowing high-achieving and motivated students to cross elementary- and middle-school boundary lines to attend. It remains the state’s first and only full magnet school and has a statewide reputation for excellence in all areas from academics to athletics to the arts. The faculty and staff there made certain that we developed both hands, so to speak.

I was enrolled in the arts program, which was why I was in the choir and the band, but that didn’t mean that I focused exclusively on those things. I also had to take the usual required academic courses. I was a hardworking student, earning a B average or just above. I took a couple of advanced-placement classes, but I wasn’t on the fast track with the really smart kids. I felt comfortable at school and could be myself there. I think sometimes that my being left-handed played a part in that. Being a part of a small group and standing out gave me a sense of identity apart from what everyone else, the majority, was doing. Sports were a huge part of the life of the school and the community at large. I can’t say that I made a conscious decision to be different, but I do know that I pursued my interests regardless of what it may have looked like to other people.

In high school cliques develop, and in lots of places if you belong to one group or another, you’re not supposed to socialize with the others. I kind of cut through that and did my own thing. I like music, so I chose to be part of the concert band. No one ever gave me any grief for it. I think that people respected me because I didn’t always go with the flow. I might have been expected, or people might have assumed I was going to go one way, but I could just as easily go the other. Just as I had to develop shooting and dribbling skills with my right hand, I felt it was important not to be one-dimensional in other areas of my life. I think being in a magnet school helped. For winning state championships in debate, other kids got nearly as much attention as the basketball players. This wasn’t a typical jockdominated place. Sure, basketball games were a big deal, but you were still expected to do your work in the classroom and participate in other activities.

With concert band, we got to perform at football games—marching band wasn’t a big thing the way it was in some other parts of the state and country. We also traveled to various parts of the state to perform in concerts and competitions. I got to combine my favorite interests in 1991 when I was a sophomore and in my first year at Parkview High School (in Arkansas, junior high was seventh through ninth grades, and senior high school was tenth through twelfth). We went to Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas for a band competition just after the Christmas holidays. That meant that Coach Nolan Richardson and his team were in full swing. I was a huge college-basketball fan. Even though I idolized Magic Johnson and loved the Lakers, college ball was really my thing. I grew up idolizing guys from our local area who were great basketball players, and also guys in the NCAA whom I’d get a chance to see on Saturdays with the game(s) of the week on CBS television. If I wasn’t out doing yard work on a Saturday (fortunately basketball season usually started after the last leaf had been raked), I would come home from my practice or game and sit down in front of the TV to watch Georgetown and Villanova go at it. If I was lucky, I’d be able to watch a second or a third game. It was like the sun moving from east to west across the country. After a Big East or Southeastern Conference game, it was on to the Big 10 or the Big 12—Kansas versus Oklahoma State—and then out west to the Pacific-10 and UCLA against Stanford.

Naturally, when I got onto the campus of the University of Arkansas that January weekend in 1991, I had to see if the U of A was playing. I was a huge Arkansas fan and by that age was dreaming of being able to play there. Nolan Richardson’s bunch were known for their fanatical devotion to a pressing man-to-man defense and an up-and-down-the-floor game called Forty Minutes of Hell. Somehow, a U of A student who somebody in the band knew got a student ID I could borrow to get into the game. I was almost out of breath from anticipation when I filed in along with thousands of other devoted Razorback fans. This was the last year that the team would be in the Southwest Conference. The following season they were going to join the more competitive Southeastern Conference.

Interest in the Razorbacks that year was at a fever pitch—and that’s saying something because after Nolan Richardson’s style of play took hold on that program, the results were amazing and almost enough to make everyone forget about football. The previous year, they’d gone 25–7 overall and 13–3 in the conference. They’d lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament, but they were on a roll in the 1990–91 season. They’d eventually make it to the Final Four, losing in the national semifinal to a powerful Duke Devils team. I had no way of knowing that I was seeing a Final Four team that day, but the crowd was totally into it, and those Forty Minutes of Hell were devilish on my ears. One reason I wanted to go to the game so badly was because one of my favorite players, Lee Mayberry, was a starting guard. I idolized him and felt that we had a lot in common in our games. He wasn’t flashy and played with a quiet confidence, a humility I admired. He was also supertalented. After the game, I got a chance to meet him. He shook my hand, and I remember thinking, I’m never going to wash this hand again.

I don’t remember how we did in that band competition. Eventually I gave up band to concentrate on basketball for my senior year. I wasn’t exactly crushed to give it up. My mom had gone out of her way to provide me with every possible opportunity to succeed in music. To help me catch up to some of my bandmates who had been playing for years before I began, she hired a private teacher for me to supplement my work at school. This private teacher had an honest—and I think too honest—conversation with me. He was critical of my embouchure, the position and formation of my lips. He told me that I’d never be a good trumpet player as a result. That hurt me. It wasn’t as if I thought I was the next incarnation of Miles Davis, but instead of offering me some corrective tips or drills, he just basically said, “You don’t have it.”

I kind of understand that maybe it was his way to motivate me, to get me into an “I’ll show you you’re wrong about me” mode. That didn’t work. I knew even then that we all have to face harsh criticism in our lives. I knew that I’d only been playing the trumpet for a few years while some of my bandmates had been playing since they were young. Compared to my basketball skills, my musical ability was pretty low. I didn’t get angry, and I didn’t get resentful, but I did feel the sting of those remarks. I loved music and singing in the choir, and playing in the school band helped me to develop a more well-rounded version of myself. Maybe it was a good thing that he didn’t apply different standards to me and my ability on account of my being a basketball player or being relatively new to music. Maybe absolute standards exist in the music world, but instead of spurring me on, his words discouraged me.

I didn’t have many of those kinds of experiences in school. I had several teachers whom I admired, and who I thought did an outstanding job. One thing that I’ve found about developing skills, especially early on, is that a little positive reinforcement goes a long way. I had a teacher in junior high school, Mr. Baker, who was influential in my development. He radiated such a positive energy and such a love of his subject matter that math became one of my favorites. I can now see why it was. I was always a pretty realistic kind of guy. In math, there were clean-cut answers. You were either right or wrong. There were no “yes, but . . .” responses as there were when I was in English class and someone offered up an opinion or explanation about a story we had read. That was one of the things I liked about basketball. You kept score. You knew who won or lost. Now that I think about it, that was probably one of the other reasons I don’t remember how we did in the band competition. I know that scores were given, but it wasn’t as if some electronic device was measuring the airwaves and determining that Parkview High School’s concert band hit 97 percent of its notes in tune / on key. That was better than the next school’s band, which achieved a score of 94 percent. Music didn’t work that way, and as much as I enjoyed playing it, and still enjoy listening to it, I’m not temperamentally suited for it.

None of us are one-dimensional. Frequently, people want to know a lot about us professional athletes, and they judge us for things we do off the court as well as on the court. I’ll get into some of those issues later, but I hope that people know that I’m much more than a spin move and dribble drive to the basket.

My Spanish instructor in high school, Señora Smith, was the very opposite of my private music teacher. I wasn’t the most brilliant student in her class. I was pretty good at studying vocabulary, but then we got into conjugating verbs beyond the present tense and the simple past tense into things like the past perfect and the perfect tenses. Even though I stumbled and got flustered when I couldn’t come up with the correct form of the verb, she never said, “You’ll never be any good at this.” I think she liked that I was generally quiet and respectful.

Parkview was one of the better schools in Little Rock, but we had our share of knuckleheads—including me at times—who liked nothing better than to cut up in class. I sometimes felt bad for teachers like Señora Smith who had to deal with students acting out. No one was ever really seriously out of control or violent, and I sometimes think that because she was so nice, students thought that they could take advantage of her. Because I wasn’t any trouble most of the time, she went out of her way to work with me so that I maintained a B average in her class. I wasn’t immune from schoolboy crushes, and Señora Smith’s being so nice to me turned my head a little bit. She wasn’t a young teacher fresh out of college, but her willingness to reach out to me had me feeling secretly affectionate toward her.