Free Character Driven by Derek Fisher, Gary Brozek

being left-handed? When I first started playing the game, few of the kids I played against were quick enough to figure out that I dribbled the ball in a different hand than they did. They were so used to seeing other right-handed players that they expected a player they were guarding to go right, shoot with the right hand, etc. I was able to blow past a lot of defenders just because I was doing something they didn’t expect. Anticipation is key in any sport, and my being left-handed gained me the upper hand immediately. In many of my first games, I was the top scorer. I can remember some games when our team had 22 or so points and I had either scored all of them or the vast majority of them. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I was only successful because I was left-handed—my passion for the game, that I was naturally strong and stout for my age, the genetic influence of my parents, also chipped in big-time to help me.
    My early success on the court gave me confidence. So much of success in sports and in life generally is a matter of attitude. I had a natural passion for the game, and I had early success at it, so that motivated me to get better. I’m no different from most people. I enjoy doing things I’m good at and avoid things I’m not successful at. I can’t say that if I hadn’t had that early success or that if I were right-handed, I might not have succeeded to the degree that I did, but I sometimes wonder just how large a role that “choice” I made to be left-handed figured in what I see as someone else’s master plan. I put quotation marks around choice because, of course, I didn’t choose to be left-handed. That characteristic was handed to me by someone or something other than me.
    I never considered myself the da Vinci or Michelangelo of basketball, and though I enjoyed that early success in youth-league games, eventually things mostly evened out. Maybe because I was more conscious of handedness and its effects, I was always aware which was the stronger side of my opponent. If I was hustling back on defense, I anticipated better which direction a player was likely to drive. One of those small things, but I believe that since the majority of players in the league are right-handed, they didn’t think as much as I did about it. When you are the majority, you simply assume that everyone else is like you. Having to think about hand dominance is just one small example of how I had to think differently and more often than kids I was playing against and with. Being more thoughtful on the court could sometimes be a disadvantage of course. In sports you want your body to take over, and in time most of my thinking would submerge into my subconscious, but from the very start, having to think out there, having to pay attention to those little things, paid immediate dividends.
    When I say “developing your other, or off, hand,” I mean that in a couple of ways. First, I mean it in the basketball sense of having to learn to use your nondominant hand to dribble and to shoot. That was one of the first things I had to learn and to practice in youth leagues, but don’t think mastery of that comes easily or is a minor element of the game. Going into my senior year in college, when I had more firmly set my sights on a possible NBA career, I devoted a lot of time to refining my right-handed dribbling. I walked to and from classes and practices dribbling with my right hand exclusively. I also use “developing your other hand” to refer to learning other skills and developing interests outside of basketball. I was not just a little basketball-playing machine. I had other interests: other sports, music, video games, television. I was also a good student and eventually attended a fairly progressive arts-oriented high school. Finally, I use “developing your other hand” to refer to working on parts of your character and temperament that don’t seem to be your natural inclination. We all have