Killer Crossover, page 8
But I wasn’t backing down. The game was heated, back and forth. But the other team ended up winning (despite my trash talking) in double-overtime. MJ fouled out, but since it was summer league, no one enforced the rule. Once he’d arrived, it was standing room only in the gym, a fire hazard (but no one cared about that). People sat on top of whatever they could find. No one was about to kick him out of the game. In the end, it was a great battle. He had 65 points and I had 62. And after it was done, Mike turned to me and said, “Good game.” Then he looked up and said, “You got a chance.”
I knew exactly what he meant. This was 1988, when he was already Jordan. He was a four-time All-Star, two-time scoring champion, and an MVP. What he said carried big weight. And he’d just told me, a rising college senior, that I had a real chance 67at the pros. He gave me an inch and I took a damn mile. Every game I played after that, I knew I was worthy. I didn’t tell anyone that story back then, not even my mother. I just kept it to myself and used it as fuel. But when I finally made it to the league, while I knew I had a lot to learn and get better at, I never thought I didn’t belong.
* * *
Aside from basketball, though, there is a ton that rookies need to understand about the NBA. First and foremost are finances. It can be hard when you see the checks coming in fast and furious. I know it sounds like one of them good problems, but a lot of NBA players don’t have financial sense—especially back then. It’s a lot of fucking money coming in every two weeks. It can burn a hole in your pocket if you’re not careful. My rookie year, I made about $500,000, but I knew how to save most of it. My mother had always taught me that I didn’t owe anybody anything. So I remembered that.
She and my father told me “no” so often when I was younger that I didn’t mind saying that to anyone trying to glom onto me. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to take care of my mother and let her quit her job at the post office. She’d taught me how to pay my bills, which helped me know where all my money was going. Even so, I wanted to make a splash, and my first big purchase was a red Jeep Cherokee with special gold rims and gray interior. When I took that ride home, I thought I was the shit! While I would have played the game for free if I’d had to, it was nice knowing that I could take care of myself and my mother now. We had a safety net.
68 If I did well, my contracts would only get bigger and all I had to do was hold onto my dough. In fact, one of the first things Nellie talked to me about was money. “I want you to understand this,” he said one day. “This shit goes by very quick. The next thing you know, you’re retired. Ten years—boom. Whatever money you make, make sure you take care of it.” Those two things stuck with me my whole career. Thankfully, I also had a good agent who worked with me. A guy my high school coach had known for years. He was a lawyer in Chicago, Henry Thomas. And he’d become essential to me.
He’d played point guard at Harlan High School in Chicago, which was a basketball powerhouse. They’d won the city tournament when Henry was a junior and senior while I was still in diapers. After high school he attended Bradley University, where he was a starter on the team. He’d always wanted to be a sports agent after that and saw me as his way in. One summer, Henry served as my high school coach and really pushed me hard. He said he only wanted me to go to the hoop with my left hand, to make it stronger. If I went right, he took me out. I thought, Man, what’s wrong with this guy? In the end it was the best thing for me. He must have taken me out of games six times before I got it through my head.
While in high school, Henry would give me tickets to go see the Bulls play at Chicago Stadium. And while it was a really nice gesture, the seats were so high up on the third balcony that we could touch the arena’s ceiling. It didn’t matter, though, because we were there able to see NBA games live and in person. While at UTEP, he took me aside one day during my sophomore year and said, “Tim, I don’t know if you’re going to make the NBA, I don’t know if you’re talented enough. But by the time you get 69out of college, I want to be your agent. We can try to make it together.” At the time, nobody believed in me that much.
And here was Henry saying he was going to do whatever he could for me, and I never forgot that support. Even after I’d graduated, no one offered to represent me. Some agents had reached out for conversations, but in doing so they also tried to badmouth Henry and that was enough for me to close the door on them. But once I showed out in Seattle, Portsmouth, and Orlando, they came running to “help.” By then it was too late for them. “Y’all had your chance, and you blew it!” I trusted Henry, we started our careers together in the NBA, and he ended up representing me for the entirety of my career. Later he would have clients like Dwayne Wadde and Chris Bosh. Today, I’m the Godfather to his kids. We were like family until the day he died in January of 2018.
* * *
Growing up, there were a lot of players better than me from Chicago who didn’t make the NBA. For some reason, though, I did. I guess I never let the streets break me. I never let giant expectations ruin my head. One of the reasons was that I was patient. I never thought I needed to hit any check points by any certain age. I just knew I had to keep working to get better and avoid any distractions or dangerous elements. People always want to rush to the next thing. But if you’re patient, you will win the day. It might take longer than you want, but if you go through the right steps, you’ll be good. You’ll make the mountain top and stay there.
That was my mentality when entering rookie camp. When I was drafted, twenty-two of the top twenty-five players picked 70were seniors. The other two were juniors and one was Shawn Kemp, who didn’t go to college and was only a year removed from high school (but he was Shawn Kemp, so enough said). Even Michael Jordan was a junior when he left UNC in 1984. I was twenty-three when we began Warriors rookie training camp in July, just weeks after the draft. It was held at New Hampshire College, where Coach Nelson and his old Celtic pal Satch Sanders ran pre-season workouts. The other big rookie there was Lithuanian Šarūnas Marčiulionis, who’d been drafted in 1987, but wasn’t able to come to the pros until 1989 after playing in the USSR.
We had a good group of guys. Phil Handy, the future Lakers assistant, was there, too, though he didn’t make the team. Camp was tough, especially the first few days. There was a lot of verbiage to learn, like V-Back (which is a name for boxing out a certain man), different plays, rotation assignments, you name it. I knew some of the nuances of the game, but the slang was hard to pick up at first. Some of the rules were different in the NBA, too, like illegal defense. To avoid it, you’re taught that, if you step in the lane as a defender, you have 2.9 seconds to get out unless you’re double-teaming someone. That was different from college. We had to think quickly.
It took us rooks a few days before they even let us play five-on-five. Coach was on my ass about everything. He was on Šarūnas, too. He loved beating up on rookies. Coach was running two-a-day practices. We’d have the first one in the morning for several hours from nine to noon, then we’d go back to the team hotel, rest, get treatment, and then come back around 6 p.m. and run more until 8:30. It was like that every day—mornings for drills and learning the playbook and nights for practicing offensive 71strategy. But after about a week, I started to get the hang of things. The repetition helped. I tried to learn everything as fast as possible, absorbing it all so I wouldn’t get my butt handed to me by Nellie. By the tenth day of the two-week camp, my offense started to come around. Before that, I’d just been embarrassing myself.
I kept turning the ball over, couldn’t make shots. I was befuddled. But near the end of rookie camp, I finally began to put it all together. Mitch Richmond, who was entering his second year after earning Rookie of the Year honors, came to practice for a few days, but he didn’t have to do any of the hard stuff. He was just there to see the new crop of youngins. Chris Mullin hadn’t yet shown his face, nor had Manute Bol or my former pro-am friend Rod Higgins. After camp, the Warriors sent us home and I rested for several weeks. It was late September when the team called us back for full training camp with the entire roster. Two more fun weeks before preseason games in October and then the start of the regular season.
The Warriors held team camp at the College of Alameda, which was about 10 minutes outside of Oakland. Back then, most teams—other than Detroit and Chicago—didn’t have their own practice facility. After some grueling practices where I got to know guys like Mitch and Mully, we began the short exhibition preseason.
Prior to training camp, I thought I would be a third- or fourth-year player before I was an NBA starter. But it had all happened so quickly. In my eyes, I was coming in as a backup to the incumbent Winston Garland (father of future NBA All-Star Darius Garland). I was going to learn from him and, in a few years, take the reins. But Nellie put my name up on the 72chalkboard as the starter. Also, to my surprise, it was something Garland—who’d been a double-digit scorer and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting two seasons prior—handled with class. We had zero bad blood. He was never visibly pissed at Nellie’s decision though, I knew I would have been if I was in his shoes.
I got a gift with Nellie, lucky he believed in me. He saw something in me, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
At that time, each team played three exhibition games (not five, like today) before the regular season began. The first game would see the starters play a lot, maybe 40 minutes. In the second game, starters only played about 10 minutes so the coach could get a look at the fringe guys to see who he wanted to keep. The third game was the last warmup.
In our first game, just by coincidence, we played in a familiar locale for me—El Paso! When I’d told Greg, Prince, and Antonio that I’d see them again on campus, I never would’ve guessed it would have been that fall with my new NBA team. That’s fate. When the game began, my teammates played a little joke on me. “Tim, you lead us out,” they told me. So I ran out and never turned around until I got out to halfcourt. When I looked back, I realized I was all by myself and the rest of the team was back in the tunnel laughing. Thankfully, I was out there in front of the UTEP crowd—my crowd. The one I played in front of for four years.
Taking it all in, I just put my arms up and they gave me a standing ovation. All the Jazz players were laughing, too. But it all worked out! The arena buzzed. In a way, it was the best of what could have happened—they actually did me a favor. I had my own little moment pregame, celebrating my “making it” with the El 73Paso faithful. In the huddle moments later, Mullin, Mitch, and Rod Higgins snickered and said only I could’ve gotten away with that. When the game finally started, I was lined up against John Stockton. Already an All-Star, he’d led the league in assists and steals the previous season. That night, I learned a lot about the NBA. I was thrown into the fire and burned a few times by one of the greatest point guards to ever play the game. Whenever you play John, you pick things up. The guy is one of the savviest players in NBA history. He went out every night and played the same way each time. He controlled the situation, engaged his teammates, and was always ready to try and whoop your butt. The other thing was, he never talked on the court. It was eerie and awe-inspiring.
* * *
The first time I stepped into an actual NBA locker room—not for practice, not for preseason, but before an actual game—it was a holy shit moment. I just stopped when I walked through the door and said to myself, I’m in a fucking NBA locker room. That’s exactly how it was. I was in awe. Preseason is cool, rookie camp is cool, training camp is cool. But it feels real when the season starts and you’re there for the first of 82 games. You’re working hard in practice, but you can never mimic game speed until tipoff. And so when I got to the locker room before that first game, my mind sizzled with excitement.
When you’re the point guard of a team, you’re like the quarterback. You’re telling people where to go and what to do, relaying the coach’s message to your teammates. You need to know what everyone is doing and where everyone should be. It somehow never felt too much for me to handle—I was born for the job. 74With all that in the back of my mind, I walked into the locker room ahead of my game one, and there are the established pros going through their already established pregame routines. Mitch Richmond, for example, would get so focused and so quiet on the bus that we just knew the guy guarding him on a given night was done for. Chris Mullin, a three-time MVP of the Big East in college and NBA All-Star, was always prepared, from his conditioning to his technique coming off screens. People were scared of these guys on the court—and they were on my side!
Then there was big Manute Bol, who talked trash all the time, God rest his soul. We had veteran forward Terry Teagle, a perennial double-digit scorer. Rod Higgins was another big-time bucket-getter. But the best part about it was there was no bullshit in the room. No one out for individual stats and star power. Everyone on that team wanted to win. It made me realize that I’d gone to the right team because all I wanted to do was win, too. It wasn’t a collection of guys who were hating on you, trying to push you down for their benefit. Or guys who thought you were out for their job. It was all about victories.
And so began our quest.
* * *
As I mentioned, Coach Nelson inserted me as the starting point guard from day one. After I got the starting gig, my confidence went to another level. Indeed, as soon as I stepped onto the floor, I was ready to ball and make a name for myself in the best basketball league on the planet.
I wanted to bust people’s asses on the court. I immediately became more assertive. Nellie just told me, “Do what you’re 75supposed to do out there and you’ll be fine.” After all, it was just basketball!
Well, in my first game, it took some time. I was 0–7 from the floor and finished with zero points in 23 minutes—with five fouls! We lost that one to Phoenix, 136–106. Our next game against Houston at home—my first time in front of the Warriors crowd—and I had just six points, to go along with five turnovers, in another loss. It wasn’t until my fourth game (the team’s seventh) that I scored double digits. (I’d missed a few games prior, sick with strep throat.) We had a rough start to the year, going 4–14. But then the wins came. We won 12 out of the next 15, including two six-game winning streaks. I averaged 12 points and nine assists in that stretch. I’d arrived.
* * *
Let me take a moment here to tell a quick story here about my man Manute Bol. The 7-foot-7 center from South Sudan remains one of the most unique players in NBA history. He’d been taken in the 1983 draft by the Washington Bullets (leading to some famous photos with 5-foot-3 guard Muggsy Bogues). After four seasons in DC, he’d come to Golden State. The 1989–90 season was his second with the Warriors and, when I got there, he was wearing my signature No. 10—the number I’d worn all my life. As a rookie, though, I found out sometimes guys will sell you their number if the price is right.
I thought that was cool, so I asked Manute about it. I didn’t know what he might say—$10,000, $20,000—but maybe my teammates were setting me up. I thought it would be a hard negotiation, but I said. “Nutey, can I ask you something?” He 76said, “Yes.” I said, “How much is it going to cost me to get my number back?” He said, “You really want the number?” I said, “Yeah, yeah!” He looked at me and said, “$500,000!” At this time, Manute was making about $400,000 a season. I said, “What?”
He repeated the number, but that was my paycheck for the entire season. He said, “If it’s worth it to you, you’ll pay $500,000, your whole paycheck. And I will give it to you.” So I went to the uniform guy and said, “I’ll take No. 5, please!” But the little secret is that, after all that, Manute got traded the following season to the 76ers (for a first-round draft pick, which we later used to select Chris Gatling). I don’t want to say he got dealt just so I could get my No. 10, but basically that was why. Nellie had my back there! He told me, “You got your number now!” That kind of thing still happens today, too. I heard someone from the Houston Rockets was just dealt because he wore Kevin Durant’s number and wouldn’t give it up. After that, I wore No. 10 for the rest of my career until my last season in Indiana, where I wore No. 14.
But other than that silly exchange, Manute was by far one of my favorite teammates. He’s a legendary guy. He used to say he hunted lions in Africa. Today, South Sudan has a proud basketball tradition, but it largely started with him. The tall, lanky guy was one of the coolest people in the world and one of the coolest to put on a basketball uniform, too. On the court, he was all about winning and teamwork. He was also kind and respectful. He did his job, which was primarily to block shots. He was so tall that he damn near blocked out the sun—and definitely the basket!
But after every game, Manute liked to have a 12-pack of Heineken. He’d suck them down! I’d say, “How can you drink 77all of them fucking beers!?” He’d just smile. Back in those days, it was normal to have beer in the locker room or on the bus after a game. Nellie used to leave the postgame press conference for the bus with two beers in each coat pocket and two in each inside pocket of his suit, along with one in each hand. That was the Don Nelson six-pack.
Everything was about team unity. Everyone had to be a good teammate. Don Nelson set a good role for that, and Manute, for a while anyway, personified it.
