Paul Pierce had many reasons to believe that his day to be traded was on its way. He understood that, technically, the NBA didn’t have any franchise players. There were magnetic and impactful players, attractive showmen for marketing, merchandising, and TV ratings, but even they got traded or forcefully pushed aside. This was business: The players moved, and the franchises—most of them, anyway—stayed put.
It happened just last season. Shaquille O’Neal, seven foot one and 370 pounds, literally the league’s biggest star and three-time NBA Finals MVP, was traded from the Lakers to the Miami Heat. He and teammate Kobe Bryant clashed, very publicly, and the Lakers kept Bryant and parted with O’Neal. Phil Jackson, whose championship rings grew from six to nine while he led the Lakers, was fired, so he went from coaching the game to writing about it in a memoir. Their departures had come weeks after their fourth finals appearance in the last five years.
Pierce grew up in LA. He knew how people there adored the Lakers, especially the iconic ones. If O’Neal and Jackson could be dismissed after what they’d done in the league, so could he.
This was only a conversation because of the last two games of the 2005 season. A couple of images from that next-to-last one, in Indianapolis, would play and replay all summer and fall.
Pierce had been fouled late in game six against the Pacers, inadvertently slapped in the face by an opponent. It was an obvious hit, but the officials either didn’t see it or didn’t think enough of it to respond. Pierce reacted with a high swing of his elbow, one that missed his defender but still looked bad. The officials were no longer thinking about the slap that Pierce took. They saw that elbow, looked at the replay to confirm it was what they thought, and then handed him his second technical foul of the game. Automatic ejection. From a playoff game.
Once Pierce realized that he’d been thrown out, he responded to the jeers of Pacers players and fans by removing his jersey and swinging it over his head as he walked through a tunnel toward the locker room. It was his version of a middle finger to them all: players, fans, officials. That was the image that people, loyal Celtics fans among them, couldn’t get past. Why did he act like that after being thrown out of a game? Why did he put himself in position to be thrown out? What if the Celtics had lost (they didn’t) and that was his final act of the season?
It got worse later that night, following a Celtics overtime win that forced a game seven in Boston. He decided to play a joke, a sight gag, that missed its mark. He attended his postgame press conference with a bandage wrapped around his head. He announced that he had a broken jaw, which he didn’t, and he said he did because he was trying to bring attention to the poor officiating.
Between the swinging jersey and the head wrap, Pierce had driven a lot of people to conclude that his time in Boston was done. They felt that way before game seven. Then when the game itself played out, with the Celtics being heckled by their own fans in the second half of a 27-point loss, the talk intensified and became more personal: Immature. Unprofessional. Not a Celtic. Get what you can for him, Danny, and start over.
Grousbeck heard the talk as well. In public, he said Pierce was evolving and that he would learn from his mistakes. He was much more direct in private: Pierce wasn’t going anywhere. Grousbeck was open about the nuances of the NBA that he didn’t understand, but he knew better than to make a reactionary move with the team’s best player. Whatever the conversation was, he made it clear that he’d slow it down—or veto it, if necessary—if the solution was to trade Pierce.
They wanted to keep him, and he wanted to stay. But after three straight years of early playoff exits, they were both on the clock. Could the Celtics continue to build this patiently around a star? They’d just used the eighteenth pick in the draft on a six-foot-eight high school forward, Gerald Green. Could Pierce continue to patiently wait?
There’s a period in an NBA star’s career, say, the first three or four seasons, in which the accomplishment of making the league and the lifestyle that comes with it is sufficient. The money, the travel, the attention, the platform. It’s intoxicating to play in the best league in the world and be recognized as one of its top players. It’s hard to know a real thirst for winning that early in a career because you’re often thirsting for other things first: recognition, increased fame, an even bigger contract. It’s hard to be at the beginning of a career and think of its ending or even its decline. The only players who actively thought like that were the former ones who were now in front offices.
They thought of three- and five-year organizational plans. They spoke of those multiple years without having to play those years. Ainge and Rivers, for example, didn’t have to worry anymore about the minutes they had left in their legs or taking advantage of their peak seasons. It’s part of what allowed Ainge to oversee three drafts in a row in which at least one of his first-round picks was eighteen years old. A general manager dreams about that player maturing into a star in three or four years; a veteran teammate is praying that the player can help immediately. Pierce was stuck. He was twenty-seven, a few months away from turning twenty-eight.
Each year, there were fewer and fewer people around him who could understand all the things on his mind. There was his frustration on the court, which was easy for all to see. But there were other things, invisible things that others had moved on from or perhaps had never fully grasped. He had a devotion to the city, never asked to leave it, and wanted to experience a championship celebration down Boylston Street, just as the Patriots and Red Sox had recently done. Though, at times, his devotion to Boston was accompanied by his occasional fear of it.
In the image from Indianapolis that his critics kept returning to, his swinging of that jersey, few focused on the scars on his back. They were the constant reminders of the most frightening moment of his life, just after one a.m. on September 25, 2000.
He’d gone out to Boston’s Theater District with one of his teammates, Tony Battie, and Battie’s brother, Derrick. There had been a hair show at Symphony Hall earlier in the night, with models displaying the latest hairstyles and fashions. Many of the people there decided to attend the after party at a place called the Buzz Club.
Pierce and the Battie brothers walked in together and were quickly separated: Pierce went to the dance floor, Tony Battie had to go to the bathroom, and Derrick, acting as their muscular six-foot-ten security guard, waited outside the bathroom. He did that to make sure his younger brother, a wealthy professional athlete wearing a diamond necklace and expensive watch, had protection from those who might want to target him.
As Derrick waited, Pierce had moved from the dance floor toward an area with two pool tables. He had a pleasant conversation with two young women. He thought nothing of how this conversation might look to someone who might be jealous of the attention given to a pro athlete. He was just having a good time when a black man, standing about five foot eight, approached him.
“What up, nigga?” the man said.
There was nothing friendly about the question. Pierce was in conversation with a man who was unfamiliar to him but known by the court system. In the previous seven years, the man, twenty-eight years old, had been arrested for numerous charges, including assault with a dangerous weapon, cocaine trafficking, breaking and entering, assault to kill, possession of firearms without permits, and assault and battery on a police officer.
He said it again, and before Pierce knew it, he was falling backward. The man had punched him in the face, and then Pierce felt someone else with arms around his neck, trying to bring him to the floor. There were at least two more men on him now, and he was being attacked in a blur of violence. Someone, he wasn’t sure who, hit him in the head with a bottle. The first man who hit him wasn’t done. He reached into his back pocket and emerged with a serrated switchblade. He moved forward and began to stab Pierce from the front while someone else, behind him, had another knife and brass knuckles.
On the ground now, at the center of a melee, the Celtics star was being kicked and stabbed. Both Batties returned from the bathroom area and noticed that there appeared to be chaos in the middle of the floor.
“Where the fuck is Paul?” Derrick Battie wondered.
Battie took his role as a protector seriously, and he was adamant about keeping his guys out of fights. He grabbed his younger brother by the arm, pulled him behind the bar, and stood in front of him. I’m not going nowhere near that shit, he thought.
With his size, he could see over the crowd, but all he noticed were backs and arms congested in the middle of the room. There were three hundred people in the club, and many of them were running to the corners or out the doors. It was chaos. Seconds earlier, Battie had wondered about Pierce.
He got his answer from the bartender, who shouted, “I think your man is in the middle of that.”
The Batties took off through the crowd when they heard that, pushing their way toward the area where the action had been. Pierce was no longer there. With the help of security, he’d been carried away to a back room. Even then, as Pierce was flanked by club personnel, the first attacker was able to land one more punch to his face. Pierce was hurt, feeling the most pain in his stomach.
When the Batties got to Pierce, sitting on a table in a back room, they thought he was hurt from fists alone. Security asked for ice and towels, but this was much more serious than that. Pierce removed his shirt so he could wipe his head, but he also used it to stop the bleeding near his stomach. That was where he felt the most pain. He repeated the same word—damn—as he sat in that area away from the crowd, which had begun dispersing; some people were fleeing.
Derrick and Tony Battie’s focus was on Pierce and the help he needed, so they told security to stay with him as they retrieved the silver Cadillac Escalade that they had left with a valet just fifteen minutes earlier.
“Get the keys!” Derrick Battie yelled. “We gotta go. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Quick, quick.”
He was thinking about Pierce and how they were going to help him, but he couldn’t help noticing a group of people near a silver Mercedes. One of the men there moved hurriedly, as if to avoid being caught. Battie told himself that he wasn’t going to forget that man’s face and clothing. But the in-the-moment priority was help for Pierce.
There was a witness who said she heard more disturbing words from the first attacker. “I’m the only man around here,” she heard him say. “Fuck them bitches. Fuck Paul Pierce.” Later, she also heard him ask, “Who will be the next victim?” He had blood on his hands and went to the bathroom to get it off. Then he left the club. When Derrick parked his car in front of Buzz and then helped Pierce down the stairs, he placed his hand on Pierce’s back. When he pulled his hand away, it was covered with blood.
Derrick Battie began to understand how life-threatening the situation was. He helped Pierce into the Escalade and told Tony to drive to the hospital. The Batties were from Texas, not Boston, so they had to ask where the nearest hospital was. They were told that they were close to a place called Tufts New England Medical Center. But they were on Stuart Street, going in the opposite direction of it, and they were jammed in club traffic.
They didn’t have time for this.
Derrick Battie jumped out of the car and sprinted several feet ahead. He stood in traffic to stop it, direct it, and create enough space so Tony could make a U-turn. Then he jumped back into the vehicle and reassured Pierce. He called 911. Pierce was alert in the car, but there was a lot of blood, and Derrick needed specifics on exactly where the hospital was.
At one point, Derrick got out of the truck and walked with Pierce toward what he thought was an entrance. It wasn’t. Once they figured out that they were a block away, Tony got them back into the truck and drove against traffic to the entrance. Derrick ran ahead of them into the hospital and bellowed, “We got a delicate situation here! Can we get him in quickly?”
Pierce had been stabbed eight times in his abdomen and back. They were life-threatening injuries. One wound track, for example, extended from Pierce’s spleen to past his liver and stomach, hitting his lung. It caused a partial lung collapse and, even more dangerously, stopped just short of his heart. The whole episode was hard to reconcile eight hours later when a stunned Pierce, recovering in intensive care, was awakened by two Boston police officers who wanted to get a victim statement.
Did you know those guys?
Do you remember what the first man who hit you looked like?
How tall was he?
The Celtics star remembered some things, but he was unclear on others. He knew that at least four men had jumped on him but didn’t realize that police estimated that at one point it was as many as eight. He was foggy on details. He was pressed for names, faces, and specifics, and he ultimately gave an answer reflective of a West Coast kid—he was twenty-two—at the beginning of a career in an unknown East Coast city.
“I don’t even know,” he said. “I don’t remember. I don’t know people in Boston.”
He never wanted anyone’s pity or sympathy from that incident. That didn’t even occur to him. He didn’t think anything that they did to him would affect his career, and he was right about that. He played eighty-two games in that 2000–2001 season and averaged 25 points per night. He played wearing a flak jacket, similar to ones worn by NFL quarterbacks. That wasn’t an issue.
Why did it happen? There’s the side of fandom from the commercials, where the locals are excited to be around their great athletes. Obviously, there was another side to that, a side that he’d never considered. Could he ever go out again without wondering who was coming his way and why?
There were still some realities of the case that were going to be there forever whether he thought about them or not.
That night, after the Batties had gotten Pierce to the hospital, they started to realize how serious things were when they looked in the back seat of the Escalade. It, too, was covered in blood. “We need to go back over there,” Derrick said to Tony. “Ya know, get some answers to what’s going on. Come on. Let’s go.” They went back to the club and tried to find out who hurt Pierce. What they got was what amounted to a preview of the trial itself. Did some people know the perpetrators? Yes. Were they going to say all that they knew until justice was served? Not quite.
The club had emptied when the Batties returned. They double-parked their truck in front and remembered that there was a back door that security had used. The brothers went to that door, which was closed, and banged loudly until someone opened it. When they walked in, they saw a group of security guards huddled near the bar. Everyone else was gone.
“I need some answers on who did this,” Derrick said to the huddle. “I just need one name. Just one.”
Heads turned away.
“Come on, man,” he pleaded. “One of our fucking key guys, star guys, just got attacked in this fucking joint. And you all don’t know?”
The brothers looked around and made eye contact when they could. They saw information in those eyes. And fear.
“Just give me one name of somebody you saw put their hands on Paul. Just one fucking name…”
Finally, one security guard responded. “When I got there, it was already over, man. He was already slammed.”
Derrick Battie, an NBA bodyguard now, made his living by reading people. He didn’t buy it. “One of my guys is laying all fucked up right now. Ya know you got to give me something.”
“I make fifty dollars a day bouncing,” one guard responded. “We can’t. We have to live here.”
Tony Battie asked the guard to talk away from the group. He pulled out a roll of $100 bills and slipped one to the young man. He got a name.
“Thank you,” Derrick said. “I really appreciate, you know, you doing the right thing. By stepping up.”
During the trial, the prosecution’s major witness recanted the testimony that she first gave to detectives a day after the attack and to a grand jury a week later. She told the detectives and grand jury that she had seen a man named William Ragland initiate the attack; in court, she said she saw Ragland there but didn’t see him do anything. She said she had seen the knives, the brass knuckles, the punches; in court, she said she couldn’t remember those details. And so it went.
There had been some justice in the case, but not full justice.
Pierce didn’t think of it most of the time, and playing a professional game he’d mastered, with his friends, brought him joy. He was fine professionally. But he had bouts of paranoia and depression after the attack. He had twenty-four-hour security guarding his house in the suburbs. He became anxious in crowds. Once, while he was out to dinner in Boston, the restaurant manager approached his table with what he said was an urgent phone call from a family member. Instead, when he put the phone to his ear, he heard a stranger promise, “I’m going to kill you.” It was only basketball, and the joy that it brought, that provided solace. He believed it would lead to professional fulfillment because he was convinced, in 2002, that the Celtics would keep growing and getting better. Then the job became more challenging.
Antoine Walker was traded in 2003 and reacquired in February 2005. He told Pierce that he was happy to be back with him and wanted to stay in Boston again. He told Ainge the same thing, but Ainge was not motivated by a reunion tour. It wasn’t personal from Ainge’s perspective, but it was from Walker’s.
Back in Boston sixteen months after his first trade, Walker found himself heartbroken again. He loved playing for Rivers and being alongside the youthful Celtics, but he’d have to see them from Miami. Free agent Walker decided to go there, although officially he was part of a sign-and-trade deal. In less than a year, Walker had been included in three Ainge transactions. It really wasn’t personal. The organization both welcomed stability and rejected inertia.
Between 2003 and 2005, there wasn’t anything close to that Boylston Street parade that Pierce had dreamed of. This was the other kind, the parade of players that he knew and trusted leaving, and some new guys—some talented, some not so much—coming in to see who could stick around for a while.
The slight positive in the basketball side of his story was that he wasn’t alone. That was obvious in early 2006, when he was one of at least three great players searching for something beyond individual dominance.