For my second year with the Clippers, I rented a house in the exclusive Strand neighborhood along the canals in Marina del Rey. Liza had had enough of life in Los Angeles and returned to New York. She wanted to finish school as well as be close to family who could help with Destiny. I had told her back when we were kids that I was going to marry her someday, but we never did get married. Our rocky on-again, off-again relationship suffered for many reasons, my infidelity included, but throughout it all, even when we weren’t together, we remained close and parented as a team.
With Liza back home, I had two of my friends from New York move out with me, Alex Harris, who had played football at Bowie State, and Kamal McQueen, a former high school teammate at Christ the King who we all called Mally.
Going into the 2000–01 season, I felt like I was getting my bearings, and things were about to take off. Jerry DeGregorio had finished his first season as Rhode Island’s head coach when Jeff Schwartz called the Clippers looking for a job for Jerry. He was quickly hired as a player development coach and moved to Los Angeles. Everyone thought it was a good idea that Jerry was close so that he could look after me. Greg still had one year of school and wouldn’t move out until the following year.
My new house became a playground for me and my friends. There was a revolving door of women week in and week out. With Liza back in New York, it was so much easier to meet other women, and I was down to meet women. Lots of them. And even though I was being drug tested for the first time in my life, it didn’t stop me from smoking weed throughout most of the season.
I was so excited with my new life. I had never expected to be in this position. I’d walk out my front door and marvel at the fact that I lived in this fancy neighborhood and had come so far from Queens.
The 2000–01 Clippers were in the midst of a youth movement, giving the squad an entirely new look. In the NBA draft the previous June, we selected three young athletes who would change our style of play, look, swag, and results on the floor. The most heralded among them was nineteen-year-old, six-foot-eight small forward Darius Miles, who went straight from East St. Louis Senior High School to the NBA. He was fast, athletic, and fearless and tried to dunk everything he could. His best friend, Quentin Richardson, was a six-foot-five wrecking ball of a shooting guard who already had one of the best combinations of strength and shooting touch in the NBA despite never having played a game. Keyon Dooling was an athletic point guard with maturity beyond his years who could develop into the franchise point guard of the future.
Like me, they were all twenty years of age or younger, and overnight we became the NBA’s most exciting team. We were fun and full of so much promise. We were so young that people jokingly referred to us as the best AAU team ever. We pushed the ball whenever we could, resulting in as many turnovers as highlight plays. It elevated my game to run alongside the young guns. I could make the kind of plays distributing the ball I couldn’t with the previous year’s team. I was so happy with the influx of youth and how well everyone bonded and got along with one another. We were just the coolest bunch of kids in the NBA, and we knew it.
My numbers jumped up across the board to 17.2 points, 7.9 rebounds, 5.4 assists, and 46 percent field-goal shooting. Unfortunately, my numbers weren’t the only thing that increased. I was smoking marijuana more regularly. It was everywhere—in my pockets, my car, my house. I thought I could anticipate the random drug tests, but I couldn’t.
I failed a drug test in the spring of 2001 and was suspended for five games in March. I really felt like I let people down. For the first time, my pot smoking affected someone other than me. Trust me, I did not feel good about that. Although head coach Alvin Gentry was disappointed, he and the team were very supportive.
When I addressed the media, I said:
This will definitely not happen again. The fans have been great to me since I’ve been here, and I hope it continues. I hope everyone doesn’t pass judgment on my mistake. I’ve made a couple and I may make a couple again, but hopefully they won’t be as big as this one.
People believed me, but the words felt hollow. I used the phrase “my mistake,” but it wasn’t a mistake. It was a habit. A lifestyle. I was surprised it actually took this long for someone to catch me, but I knew I wasn’t going to stop. I just figured I had to be more careful or at least wait until the summer when there would be no random tests. While I was suspended, I took part in an aftercare program, but I didn’t take it seriously and eventually stopped doing it.
The Clippers improved to 31–51 that year—sixteen more wins than my rookie season—and even though we failed to make the playoffs, we were headed in the right direction.
Going into the 2001–02 season, my third year, the buzz around Clippers basketball had reached a fever pitch. We acquired my former Riverside AAU teammate Elton Brand and were predicted to win forty games and have a real shot at the playoffs for the first time in ten years. The number of season ticket sales skyrocketed to a record 12,000. The sellout opening night crowd was a Clipper record 19,445. In some ways we were getting more buzz than the Lakers.
Then three games into the season the bottom fell out. I failed my second drug test in eight months and was suspended for another five games. This time support did not flow from every corner of the franchise like it had the first time. People were angry, disgusted, and fed up. Their faith in me was waning, and for the first time, my future with the franchise was in doubt.
“I am very disappointed,” Elgin Baylor, the Clippers general manager, said in a written statement. “Lamar has let his teammates down as well as our entire organization.”
“It’s ridiculous that it’s happened,” added Coach Gentry. “We’re very disappointed. I don’t think mad is the right word. I’m more disappointed.”
I was down. I mean I was hurting and embarrassed by my lack of professionalism. The day after my twenty-second birthday, I delivered a tearful press conference. I was more disappointed in myself than Coach Gentry ever could have been.
“This time you can trust me,” I told my coaches and teammates. It would not be the last time I used that line. I didn’t give much thought to the aftercare program I was required to go through. I rarely even showed up. No one questioned me about it, so I wasn’t worried.
Along with the five-game suspension, a bruised foot and sore shoulder held me to just twenty-six games and a career low 13.1 points per game on an inefficient 41 percent from the field.
The only highlight of that time of my life was the birth of my and Liza’s son on January 1, 2002. We named him Lamar Jr.