The Sixth Man Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 by Andre Iguodala

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  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Iguodala, Andre, author.

  Title: The Sixth Man : A Memoir / Andre Iguodala.

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2019. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018047034| ISBN 9780525533986 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525534006 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Iguodala, Andre. | African American basketball players—Biography. | Basketball players—United States—Biography. | Olympic athletes—United States—Biography. | Golden State Warriors (Basketball team). | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Sports. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Basketball. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC GV884.I76 A3 2019 | DDC 796.323092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047034

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Version_2

  To young fella, stay black!

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  Early Lessons

  CHAPTER 2

  Confidence

  CHAPTER 3

  When the Sun Is Too Hot

  CHAPTER 4

  Welcome to the NBA

  CHAPTER 5

  The Most Hated Athlete in Town

  CHAPTER 6

  Elevation

  CHAPTER 7

  Find the Flow

  CHAPTER 8

  The Seventy-Fourth Win

  CHAPTER 9

  Riding Home

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  INTRODUCTION

  It was the whole summer that changed me. Of course, everything changes you, but still there are moments that do it more than others, moments where life unfolds itself to you, peels away its layers piece by piece until you realize there is an entire universe of possibility right there staring, unblinking, back at you. That summer, that entire universe of possibility was in, of all places, Orlando, Florida. Disney World to be precise. It was the farthest away I’d ever been from my home in Springfield, Illinois. I was about to be a senior in high school.

  It was 2001. The Jay-Z song “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” came out and we couldn’t get enough of it. Our basketball team was bumping it that whole Florida trip, and it was the first thing I really bonded over with the Chicago kids, the first thing that made me feel like I belonged. Compared to them, I was a hayseed, this skinny kid with big ears from Springfield, Illinois. They used to tease me. My clothes were behind, my slang was behind, half the stuff they were talking about, I had no idea what it was. I tried to blend in, but I couldn’t. It was too obvious that I was a small-town kid playing on an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team with kids from the city.

  When you come from a town like Springfield, you just don’t know how you compare to the entire world that is out there. That’s the hardest part. You have no point of reference. Then all of a sudden you find yourself on a bus in Florida, on the way to a national basketball tournament at a place called Disney World. You are looking out the window at vast boulevards and palm trees seemingly weighted down by the sweat in the air; at strip malls and long, tall grass fields for miles; at a surface so hot and so foreign to you that it might as well have been Mercury.

  I didn’t understand what was happening in my life. The ground was moving beneath my feet. I had entered the summer thinking I was a pretty good high school basketball player. But mostly I just loved the game. I loved feeling the emotions of a contest, how things would ebb and flow with a team over two halves. I loved sensing where my teammates were going to be cutting, firing the ball to a guy with a crisp pass and watching him catch it and lay it in all in one unbroken movement. I liked playing with my best friend on the squad, Rich McBride. He was from Springfield too, but he was already more of a national name than I was. Basketball magazines had him highly ranked, and he had started on the varsity squad as a freshman. He was a star, a big enough deal that everyone took him seriously. I always felt like I was the second guy when he was around. Not quite as cool, not quite as famous.

  I just liked to practice, I just liked to get better. I just liked to take shots alone in the gym until my legs threatened to give out. I just liked to watch games from the sidelines, trying to understand what every player was doing, what every coach was thinking. I just wanted to be as good as I could, learn as much as I could. I just wanted to earn my place.

  But weird things were happening. I had gotten an invitation to a Nike Camp earlier that summer and that was next level. Nike Camp was only for the top players in the country. I didn’t think I was among that class, for sure, but nonetheless there I was. I went there and tried to do my best. Keep it fundamental, don’t make any mistakes, try not to get beat. I left not knowing how I had done, but within a month I had been contacted by coaches of Division I basketball programs around the country. Nolan Richardson at Arkansas, Gary Williams at Maryland, Roy Williams from Kansas, Lute Olson from Arizona. It was surreal. OK, so maybe I was going to be good enough to go to college, but still I was just the second fiddle on my own AAU team.

  Then there was Peach Jam, another tournament we played earlier in the summer. I got there and saw some of the best players I had ever seen in my life. In particular there was a dude named Rashad McCants, a six-foot-four guard out of a prep school in New Hampshire. He was, and I have no doubt about this, one of the top five basketball players I’ve ever seen. On any level. Period. To this day, I believe that is true. Yet he only played in the league for three years. How is that possible? The answer to that question is not something I would learn until much later in life. I would learn that the higher up you go in this game, the more replaceable you become. I would learn that being the best was not a guarantee of a career, that a career was made of myriad things, of small, boring things. Of good agents and early morning workouts. Of medical procedures and yoga and nutritionists. Of sleep hygiene and the ability to tamp your emotions down so hard that they first become stones and then diamonds that you only reveal when there are three seconds on the clock and you are down by two points and you have to see, understand, and predict the movements of ten men on a basketball court at one time, while 45,000 people are screaming at you. A career is made of these things. It is made of broken fingers and trade rumors and coaches you can’t quite trust, and the occasional referee who reminds you a little too much of the police officers that stalked your neighborhood when you were a kid, glowering at you and your friends as though you were dangerous animals escaped from captivity rather than children—a look that gives you a cold chill, a fight-or-flight response that will lie dormant and coiled and always ready to spring at the base of your sp
ine for the rest of your life.

  I didn’t know any of this yet. I was a kid. I liked Jay-Z. I wanted to fit in. I kept growing out of my clothes. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or my team at the tournament. I liked making people laugh. I used to take the tobacco out of one of our assistant coach’s cigarettes and put it back in his pack, and when he lit it up, the whole thing went up in flames. We thought it was hilarious. He used to get so pissed. I had no idea people were obsessed with their cigarettes like that.

  At Peach Jam we made it to the final four, but we didn’t win. I felt like everything in that last game was happening too fast for me. Dudes were too quick, too sharp. I didn’t know how to keep up, and it felt like I couldn’t get over the hump. It was disappointing. I had done my best but it wasn’t good enough. The summer was moving along. I had been to Nike Camp, I had played OK at Peach Jam, but I still felt like I was swimming upstream.

  At the Disney World tournament, we were in the semifinals against some East Coast team, maybe from DC or Baltimore. I wasn’t yet used to having full-on confidence when I played against kids from other cities, but I was used to drafting off the confidence of those Chicago boys on my team. Collectively we didn’t feel like we needed to back down from anybody, no matter where they came from. But now it seemed that guys were actually keying in on me. I could see the team and coach looking at me during time-outs. When I got the ball, there would be a dude in my chest, sometimes two, like immediately. It started to dawn on me that, for some reason, these guys were treating me as though I was the man on the team. In Springfield, while playing on junior varsity and varsity teams, I had seen guys double-team me, make me the priority, but it was not hard to manage there. Down here in Florida, however, it was a whole different ball game. These were seventeen-, eighteen-year-old guys, elite guys, guys who were about to start at Division I programs. This was not high school basketball. It was something different. When they were on me, I couldn’t breathe. These guys on me were getting after it, dogging my every twitch.

  We managed to hang around in that game, never getting too far behind, but I was not able to produce the kind of offense I was used to. We got to the end of the game and there were three or four seconds left on the clock. They scored, we were down two. We called a time-out so we could advance the ball to the other end of the court. There wasn’t much to say during the time-out. I mean, as good as we all were, this was still AAU. No one was drawing up elaborate plays. It was basically just getting the ball, going down and shooting. We had this one white kid on the team, a smart dude, very fundamentally sound. Coach drew up a play for him to get the ball and make something happen. As we were walking back onto the court, he turned to me and said, “Andre, I’m coming to you, man. Be ready.”

  Me? Was I the guy that teams go to when they’re down two with seconds on the clock?

  Dude got the ball, took one dribble, found me away from the basket. I had to be like thirty-five feet out, if I remember correctly, damn near half-court it felt like. I didn’t think. I didn’t hope. I didn’t wish. I just shot. It was so simple. There was no distance between me and anything in the world. I just shot the ball as naturally as if I were taking a breath. As I shot it, a defender was flying toward me, kind of brushed me a touch, and I fell backward out of my own momentum. All I saw was him standing over me, and behind him I could just barely make out the ball going through the net.

  Swoosh.

  Everybody was going crazy. You don’t even know what you’re doing in that moment, you’re just jumping and running and screaming. Hugging whoever. We were teenage boys in Florida in the summer of 2001, covered in sweat, a million miles away from a classroom, jumping up and down, waving our arms, and running like kindergartners at an unsupervised slumber party, hopped up on bottomless bowls of Halloween candy.

  Eventually we remembered ourselves enough to shake hands with the other team, and I just remember one of their players saying, “Damn, we had him shut down the whole game!” It was still hard to believe they were talking about me.

  The next game, we played a team with JJ Redick on it, who was already known as one of the best high school shooters in the country. I was on him defensively and had to lock him down as well as I could. It was the most complete game I had played up until that point. It was something else, something beyond what I was used to. It came easily. Years later my teammate Klay Thompson would describe this feeling so simply. “You feel like you can do anything,” he said to me. That’s it. You feel like you can do anything.

  That summer might have been the first time I had that feeling, an invisible power, a simplicity, a oneness that made you capable of everything, a slowing of the game, a strengthening of the muscles, a disappearing of the aches and pains. Baskets become wide as barns, defenders become small as children. I would get that feeling for a moment that summer and it would open up the entire universe of possibility for me, a universe where in the very far distance I could make out a future. Championships and trophies. Commercials and investments. Interviews and cars. Olympics and bank accounts. Tech conferences and, yes, even a book. What I could see was as far away from Springfield, Illinois, as anything could ever be.

  But if I was going to have it, I was going to have to leave everything behind. I was going to have to cut loose every single thing that held me back. I was going to have to hurt. And, even then, that feeling was going to be fleeting. It was going to come ever so briefly in moments like fireflies lighting up the summer sky before disappearing again. Most of the time that feeling would be eclipsed by confusions and complexities and difficulties and frustrations more dark and thorny and unwieldy than my 2001-summer-in-Disney-World-Florida self could have ever imagined, let alone understood. Most of the time I would spend looking, once again, for that freedom.

  01

  Early Lessons

  The Midwest makes a certain kind of person. Even-keeled, simple, and without drama. Where I come from, you get all four seasons with all their fullness and all their difficulty. The winters humble you. There are no mountains or tall buildings to stop the winds, so they just come at you like you don’t matter. It’s so cold that you can feel it in your bones. You think your skin is going to break, and your body seems like something not too well designed for this intensity. Winters in the Midwest make you feel small, and they help you know your place. You can’t compete with the winter and wind out there. You are just a person. Your body is all you have and it’s not much.

  But the summers kill you another way. The air is blanket-thick and lays on top of you like it wants to suffocate you. Mosquitoes, gnats, and flies dog your every move. Your clothes get soaked with sweat, dry up, and get soaked again six different times a day, and you get used to the feeling of being dried up and salty, and pounding pop and Kool-Aid, sucking on ice cubes or freezy pops. 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.

  My hometown of Springfield, Illinois, has a population of 115,000, and about 20,000 of those people are black. And from the perspective of my early childhood, the black world was the only world there was. Officially, Springfield is not a segregated town, but officialities don’t matter in race. Springfield is segregated. It always has been, and it always will be. That’s not accidental. In 1908 Springfield experienced one of the most violent and intense race riots in American history. Two black men were accused of rape and attempted rape of a white woman. The town sheriff transferred the men to a jail in another town to avoid mob justice, but 5,000 white citizens nonetheless decided to attack the black neighborhood as a whole. They killed fifteen black people, lynched two, and burned bodies in public. A baby died of smoke inhalation. An eighty-year-old wealthy black business owner, himself a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, had his throat slit by a white vegetable merchant. By the time it was done, there had been what today would be over $4 million in property damage,
including attacks on white businesses that were thought to be too friendly to black customers. Despite taking place in a northern town, the Springfield Race Riot was the primary reason for the founding of the NAACP. The woman who was said to have led the mob, Kate Howard, wrote that after visiting the South, she was inspired by the efficiency of Jim Crow segregation’s ability to “teach the Negro where he belonged.” She killed herself before she could be brought to trial. The woman who launched the rape accusations, Mabel Hallam, later admitted that she had made up the story to cover for her husband’s physical abuse. She was never convicted of a crime.

  A town doesn’t fix itself after a thing like that, unless the people really work very hard to address it. And Springfield didn’t. The Illinois General Assembly didn’t even formally acknowledge the event had occurred until 2008. Instead what happened is that over the generations, this trauma just seeped back into the skin and calcified into the town’s DNA. Black people stayed on one side, white people stayed on the other. Both remained insular and suspicious of the other. By the time my generation came around, things were just that way, subtly but persistently. It never occurred to any of us that they didn’t have to be that way. In Springfield it rarely occurred to most people that things could be any other way.

  We had our own world, the black side, and within that world I had my own little community. My mother, my brother, my grandmother, all my cousins, my rec league coaches, and me. That was Andre’s world. I remember the summers, waves of heat rising up off of the asphalt, and the fields had grasses as tall as my head.

  My grandmother’s name is Poletha Webster, and she was the biggest influence on my early life. She was a tough and loving woman, and I can still see her standing in the sun, tending to her vegetable garden, which she did with great care while I ran around the house making games out of everything. She cared for that garden like it was her lifeblood, and from it she could produce the most beautiful vegetables you’ve ever seen. Perfect tomatoes and Technicolor-ripe squashes that she would use to make pies and casseroles. Sweet peas and strawberries. Her hands were always busy, and those early summer afternoons were quiet and magical for me, a small child, with my grandmother beside me and my hands in the dirt, warmed by the sun.