The stress of acquiring Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in the summer of 1996 sent me spiraling downward and into the hospital for exhaustion for a few days. The elation of what should have been—and eventually was—one of my greatest accomplishments as general manager simply did not last. When I returned from Atlanta and the press conference that announced the signing of Shaquille (he was there to play in the Olympics), Karen and my sons had made up signs that welcomed me home as if I were a conquering hero. I was excited, that’s for sure, and even went so far as to say that, aside from the births of my children, it was the happiest day of my life. But then I experienced such an emotional letdown, and my depression, which has plagued me all my life, reared its ugly head once more.
The whole process of acquiring those two players had been tedious and nerve-racking. In the case of Shaquille, it felt as if we were being teased all the time, that a carrot was being held out that I couldn’t quite grab hold of. ... I was on the phone constantly, at all hours of the day and night, trying to clear cap space, my son Ryan by my side. Shaquille was upset that Orlando and its citizens didn’t seem to think he was worth $100 million (the team took a poll, and the results were overwhelmingly against), and he was aware that Alonzo Mourning had just gotten a new contract for $115 million from Miami. The problem was that the best we could offer was $98 million (and Orlando went up to $99 million), and yet I had the sense that Shaquille wanted to come to us, and also have the opportunity to be in Hollywood and get into the entertainment business. Every time we thought we were reaching an accord with Shaquille’s agent, Leonard Armato, another roadblock emerged, something else seemed to be conspiring against us. Eventually, though, with the full support of [owner] Jerry Buss (who essentially told me to do whatever it took) and our eleventh-hour success in persuading the Vancouver Grizzlies to acquire Anthony Peeler and George Lynch, we were able to make the deal for seven years for $120 million.
In order to get Kobe, which we’d done first, we gave away our starting center, Vlade Divac, a crazy thing to do and a point of personal sadness to me. We had drafted Vlade in 1989 based on reports coming out of Europe and our watching his Yugoslavian national team play the Celtics, first on television and then, repeatedly, on film. All of our scouts were opposed to drafting Vlade, thought I was nuts, but Vlade turned out to be a terrific player—his hands were like a spider’s web—and an even better person. I will never forget picking him up at the airport. He had two brown duffel bags full of personal belongings and little else (reminding me a little of myself when I’d gone off to college). Vlade turned out to be the embodiment of the American Dream.
I’ve already mentioned this but it can’t be emphasized enough: trading a player—one asset for another, or two or three others—or releasing a player was the thing about my job I despised the most. You become attached to the players, you get to know their families. In an ideal world, a deal benefits both sides. Sometimes that was the case, but often it was not. In any event, the deal for Kobe almost didn’t go through. Mark Fleischer, Vlade’s agent, suddenly announced that Vlade was going to retire. Bob Bass, the general manager of the Charlotte Hornets (who were going to take Kobe with the thirteenth pick), phoned to say that they were backing out. “Bob, we have a deal, goddamn it,” I told him. “Vlade is not going to retire. Trust me.” I got Mitch [Kupchak] involved because I was so irritated that Bob would go back on his word and I didn’t want to deal with it any longer. I’d had it, and so I asked Mitch to carry on. There was also a future first-round pick we were supposed to get, which very few people know about and which we never got anyway. Vlade did not want to leave the Lakers, and eventually, Vlade’s wife talked him out of retiring; when he later played for the Sacramento Kings, he made our lives miserable.
But Vlade wasn’t Shaquille. Nobody was.
The thing that angered and upset me the most in the Shaquille situation was the growing suggestion—from Orlando Magic executives—that we had tampered with him. When I learned that the commissioner’s office was investigating that possibility, I considered resigning. I was interviewed on Charlie Rose that November and said as much. I had been at Leonard Armato’s Santa Monica office and he’d been at my house only when we were allowed to begin talking, and not one second before (just as would happen in 2010 with LeBron James, when teams had the official green light to trek to Ohio and make their case). How in the hell is that tampering? When the All-Star Game was played in Cleveland in February of 1997, the fifty greatest NBA players of the league’s first fifty years were honored, and I didn’t go. I had recently had surgery on my nose for a deviated septum and didn’t feel up to attending. At least that is what I said, and my family was angry with me. The real reason was that I was still upset about the tampering allegation, the notion we had done something illegal. If you work for Jerry Buss, you are not going to cheat. So to be accused of that and for them to want an investigation, I just couldn’t believe it. I’d always loved Red Auerbach—hated him too—but I never loved him more than when he came out and said it was sour grapes. It may not have been reason enough for me not to attend, but I still didn’t go, and David Stern, the commissioner, and other people in the league office were not happy about it. The other two players who didn’t show up were, ironically, Shaquille (who was injured) and Pete Maravich (who was dead).
The deal for Kobe Bryant could not have been completed, would never have gotten done, were it not for Arn Tellem, Kobe’s original agent and my close friend. When we had the sense that the New Jersey Nets might take Kobe with the eighth pick in the draft, Arn helped persuade them not to; basically, he told them, and had Kobe’s parents tell them, Kobe had no interest in playing for New Jersey. I didn’t need to watch much of Kobe’s workout at the Inglewood YMCA, going one-on-one with Michael Cooper (even though he was forty, he was still in good shape), to know that he was someone I coveted, that we had to have him. Earvin Johnson said he had never heard me more excited about a prospect. In fact, I thought that Kobe was possibly better than the players we had on the team at the time. Never in my life have I seen a workout like that. When I said I had seen enough, I meant it. I knew who he was, and just from looking at his eyes, I knew what he wanted. Even though he was only seventeen years old, Kobe was a once-in-a-lifetime player who could cast his shadow on the franchise for years to come. His fierce competitive drive was innate, could not be purchased on the street or in a store or anywhere. You need to possess more than a little nastiness to play basketball at the highest level, and Kobe had that in abundance. You need to have the cold-bloodedness of an assassin, and he possessed that too. He clearly modeled himself on Michael Jordan, which was fine. But I had no idea how long it would take him to mature and develop, and I did worry that it might take him a while to fit in.