Free Character Driven by Derek Fisher, Gary Brozek Page A

strengths and weaknesses, but it often takes someone else to help us to refine our personality and to bring out elements that we may not see in ourselves.
    Another distinct advantage that I had, though I didn’t always appreciate it, was my father. As an ex-military man, my dad was old-school in a big way. He believed that if you were going to do something, it didn’t matter what, you should put everything you possibly could into doing it well. The work ethic that he and my mom exhibited was instrumental in my development, and my dad also did more than just lead by example. He pushed me in certain ways that I can never forget or thank him enough for. I was a typical kid, and sometimes, if I had been allowed to, I might have chosen to just hang out. Yes, I loved playing basketball, but I wasn’t the most driven person in the world back then. I also wasn’t the toughest kid either, and standing up for myself wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I needed someone to push me to develop the personality traits necessary to succeed at the highest levels.
    I use the word push , but just as I had a natural inclination to be left-handed, I had a natural inclination toward basketball. My father never demanded that I play. He simply recognized that I had chosen to play that sport, so he wanted to make certain that I did whatever I could to be successful. Some of the ways my father influenced me were subtle. By the time I was playing organized ball, shoe companies such as Adidas, PUMA, and others had come along and transformed the world of athletic footwear, with all kinds of trends and fads and newfangled innovations. To put things into better context, the first Nike Air basketball shoes came out in 1983, when I was nine years old. That groundbreaking achievement represented a refinement in the concept of basketball shoes—a much needed and appreciated advancement.
    The first basketball shoes I wore were Converse All Stars, the basic Chuck Taylor high-tops. Canvas uppers and rubber soles. White. No stripes. No swoosh. Unadorned classics as plain as white bread, and now that I know better, about as supportive as that sandwich staple. I still laugh a bit whenever I see old photos from those days. I look as if I’d stepped out of a photo shoot with Elgin Baylor and Bill Russell—which had interrupted my practicing my set shot. At the time, I didn’t think much about it. I was just glad to have a new pair of kicks and to be out on the court. Those shoes are representative of where we were as we entered the 1980s. Baby boomers were really coming into their own in the 1980s, and the “me generation” label that had been applied to them didn’t really fit my dad. I also realize now that he was also probably concerned about some of the influences that preyed on urban African-American young people. I’m not talking just about the gang violence and the number of kids killed for their Starter jackets, but the number of young people who felt a sense of entitlement. My dad was part of the “me-ager” generation. He had grown up, by some standards, poor in Louisiana, and while we were never deprived of anything we needed, I cannot imagine him warming up to spending lots of hard-earned cash on trendy basketball shoes. The only thing that would have got warm was my behind if I had so much as got five notes of a whining song out of my mouth about what the other kids were wearing and then launched into a “Why can’t I?” refrain.
    I played with and against plenty of kids who looked the part with the most expensive shoes. My dad knew that it wasn’t how good you looked out on the court but how well you played. Those shoes were one of the reminders that the old-school ways—mastering the fundamentals, playing unselfishly, not drawing attention to yourself through playground flamboyance—were the real path to achievement. There were no shortcuts, and lacing up the latest pair of Nikes or whatever was not going to have me magically