The Sixth Man

You never feel 100 percent right in the summer, and you never feel 100 percent right in the winter. You never feel right at all. You learn not to expect too much. You just get used to it.

So I swallowed it and learned how to use it to play. It was like a performance-enhancing drug. One hit of it and suddenly I could run faster, jump higher, and get to the hoop quicker. I just wanted to prove to him that there was nothing he could do to stop me. Over time I would come to regard the entire world like that. But I learned it first from my brother.

It’s a game in which five people begin to think as one person, and human beings sense and react to each other’s movements even seconds before they are made.

Once my focus was off my defender and how I could beat him, it was like a whole other layer of basketball opened up to me.

This world is full of people who demand that you live by their rules and try to hate you for not doing that, even though there’s literally nothing in their lives proving that what they’re doing works.

But he was still hanging around with guys who he grew up with. Guys who were not, under any circumstances, good for his career.

Blue Chips. Sure it’s a little campy, but to be quite honest, Blue Chips was dope to me when I was nineteen years old. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a basketball movie starring Shaq, Penny Hardaway, and Nick Nolte.

Usually the pushier you are, the more you trash other people and pump yourself up, the less I trust you. It’s just not a style that works for me.

It seemed that everything had happened to me so suddenly. But what had been done had been done. There was no room for those moments of doubt. So I made no room for them.

His T-shirt was tucked into his shorts. Anytime a guy’s giving you drills and his T-shirt is tucked into his athletic shorts, he’s going to give you hell—you can count on it.

I knew that no matter how much I wanted to quit that I could not. It was one of those defining moments in my life. Everything in my body told me that I could not do this. But everything in my will told me that I must do this. There was no choice. I would have to find it somewhere inside me.

“This man breathes the same air you breathe.” That’s the way he saw things. You were to give your opponent respect, but not too much respect.

“Look,” he’d say, “they’re going to score. There’s a reason they score twenty-five points a game. You’re going to get bad calls on you. You’re a rookie—the refs aren’t going to let you reach in. Your job is just to make them work as hard as possible for those twenty-five points. If they score twenty-five but are exhausted at the end of the game, then you’ve done well.”

Aaron taught me how to understand the bigger picture of guarding great players. You have to make them work.

I didn’t want to be a part of anything that didn’t involve a gym. I shut myself down. My life became very small, and I had a hard time finding any kind of joy in anything.

If my teammate is open, I’m going to pass. It’s just natural for me.

There are certain guys who are trying to score for their teams. You can tell because they’re playing hard on defense. Making that extra dive for the ball, that extra play. Defense doesn’t get you shoe contracts or TV commercials. So when a guy is really trying on defense, you know he’s really trying for his team.

If we make enough money, have enough success, then we should be free from all struggles—or more accurately, our struggles are no longer valid. But what most of us find after a while, and much to our surprise, is that even with all the cash and prizes, the question of purpose remains. Pain and suffering still remain. Anger and frustration still remain.

He recognized that I was still relying too heavily on the isolation, and that I could be an entirely different player in a ball-movement offense.

true job of an athlete was not to win but to rise to every occasion, give your best effort, and make those around you better as you did it.