I remember a day in December ’99 when even I needed a strong dose of motivational mojo to maintain my positive attitude. I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was an early Sunday morning, the week before Christmas. I put on my bathrobe and slippers, limped down my long driveway using my forearm crutches, and retrieved the Sunday Inquirer. As I’m walking back, I take a peak at the headlines through the clear, plastic bag and I spot the teaser on the front page: “Iverson wants to be traded.”
Immediately, I drop my crutches, and stand stranded. I rip open the newspaper, pull out the sports section, and quickly scan the article. “Oh no!” I gather up the paper and my crutches, hustle back into the house, wake up my wife, and say, “Hon, wake up, hurry up, we’ve got to get to church, now!”
I didn’t travel to the game the night before in Detroit (my leg was still a medical shish kabob), but I did watch the game on TV and saw that our team had played awful and Allen Iverson had been benched. And according to the morning paper, Allen went off on the reporters during the post-game interview claiming that he had been disrespected and he demanded to be traded.
It took me the better part of that Sunday afternoon to separately convince head coach Larry Brown and our superstar Allen Iverson to attend a joint meeting on the following Monday morning. Neither one of them wanted to see the other one, ever again! Trade him, fire him or else. FYI, Hades will become an ice rink before I succumb to ultimatums.
Imagine sitting in a conference room and on opposite sides of the table are a 59-year-old white man and a 24-year-old black man. One wears Ferragamos and Armani and knows the world of basketball, whereas the other one wears Timberlands and tattoos and knows the streets of basketball. One is meticulous, the other one a maverick. One grew up in the ‘50s in a time of structure, discipline, and do-wop. The other one grew up in the ‘90s famous for free styling, anarchy, and hip-hop.
The differences between the two are huge, but more amazingly, when you adjust your focus, you see the similarities are so striking - they’re so sensitive, so head strong, so impulsive, so moody, and so, so talented.
There’s an old saying: If it’s to be, it’s up to me. Well, it was up to me to mediate, motivate, communicate, and at times, dictate our common goals of learning from each other, respecting each other, and winning with each other. It took two hours of dialogue before they finally realized that they needed each other. They left that conference room with a feeling of coexistence rather than resistance, grinning instead of groaning, and hugging as opposed to huffing.
It was a defining moment for our franchise. And proof positive to the sporting world that anything can be worked out, between anyone, at anytime, when you want the outcome bad enough. -- PC
|
