Andre Iguodala - The Sixth Man

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 Id 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 couldnt 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 couldnt. 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 dont know how you compare to the entire world that is out there. Thats 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 didnt 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 didnt 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, dont 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 Ive 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 cant 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 childrena 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 spine for the rest of your life.