“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
—Aristotle
In any aspect of life, being a team player is a necessary trait of a champion. Earning your stripes leads to acceptance, team unity, and ultimately a winning organization. The best time to become that team player, of course, is your first day on the job.
My rookie year got off to a rocky start, because I was drafted by the then–San Diego Clippers and traded before the season to the Los Angeles Lakers for Norm Nixon, who was a popular guy in LA. Everyone in the city was pissed off about it—the players, the fans, Jack Nicholson. Before they even saw me play one game I was disliked in my own hometown.
I was born in Utah, but I grew up in Inglewood, California—a neighborhood that was gang infested but also filled with a lot of good people who were often overlooked and underappreciated. Most of the guys who grew up on my street and the neighboring streets were athletes, so we’d play touch football in the streets or basketball at my friend’s house nearly every day. It was rougher than most neighborhoods, but I knew early on that I wanted to play basketball, so I was able to stay focused and avoid trouble most of the time. My younger brother was always in trouble and getting into fights, so from time to time I’d have to throw down, but I spent more time hitting jump shots than hitting faces.
My team was the Los Angeles Lakers. They played only a few blocks from where I’d grown up. So getting traded to them right away was a dream come true. Finding out that no one else was thrilled about it was kind of a nightmare, but it motivated me to play my best and prove people wrong.
The night we finally got the deal done, and the contract was signed, the Lakers actually had a game, so I watched it in GM Jerry West’s office.
“Listen, I’m getting all this crap about making this trade, that it was one of the worst trades I’ve ever made,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something right now—in three to five years, these people are going to be kissing my butt, because then they’re going to be saying it’s one of the best trades I ever made.”
It was great for me as a rookie to hear the GM have that confidence in me. As a leader he wanted to challenge me to live up to his expectations, but also let me know that he had my back. It made me think, This man stuck his neck out for me, and I’m not going to let him down. I’m going to bust my butt every day. I’m going to make sure he’s right. It gave me added motivation to make sure I went out every single day and played as hard as I could, and to be the best ballplayer I could be.
In graduate school at Northeastern University, I was on a work-study program that was six months of school and three months of working, followed by three months of school and six months of working, and a final three months of school. In that time I got a job with the Scott Paper Company.
For the first three months I worked for someone whose area of responsibility was Cape Cod, and it was his job not only to sell the product to the stores but also to negotiate how and where the product was displayed. As a graduate student I was basically executing what that salesman had organized with the store managers. I would go in the back room for product and put it on the shelf and build the displays.
Cape Cod was interesting because the population expanded dramatically in the summertime. In the wintertime it was pretty empty, so a good time for a worker to leave was the fall, just before both sales and temperatures dropped.
True to form, the salesman did just that, and instead of replacing him, the regional manager handed me the reins. If you have somebody you can follow and observe interacting with people, then that’s a real benefit, especially if they’re good at what they do. Watching for a while before you’re thrown into the fire has a lot of positives to it, but in this situation that wasn’t an option.
“You’re a smart guy, figure out how to do it and do it,” the regional manager told me, and he asked me to meet certain targets—more displays, more facings, more stock in the back room—that the company had budgeted for that area of the country.
Back in those days, with the supermarket chains, you often had flexibility within a given store to put a display up on the corner of an aisle, called a wing display, or you might get a full end-aisle display. You could sometimes get a store manager to give you more facings for a product and reduce somebody else’s facings if you had an appropriate argument based on sales movement or, as my manager pointed out, if you simply had a good relationship with the store manager.
“The job is really about cultivating relationships with the store manager,” he said as he explained my responsibilities. “The first time you go in, he doesn’t know who you are and you don’t know who he is. Don’t even attempt to sell anything. Introduce yourself, tell him your background, and explain to him that you’re going to be running the region for the next three months. Find out what his needs are and how you can be helpful to him.”
After the game was over, they took me to the locker room and introduced me to my teammates. I went around the room, and when I went up to Magic Johnson, he was putting on his shirt and barely making eye contact with me.
“All right, nice to meet you,” he said. “You ready?”
“Yes, I’m—”
“All right, all right. You’ll be at practice tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah, so I—”
“See you tomorrow.”
It wasn’t the warmest welcome that I’ve ever received, but I understood where he was coming from. The only one on the team who talked to me at all that first week was James Worthy. It was only his second year, and we had been in the same graduating class in college, so he wasn’t yet in the position to be giving me the cold shoulder.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the patriarch. He was older and wiser, and it wasn’t in his personality to try to mold me into a champion. He wasn’t trying to give me a hard time, but he wasn’t trying to be my buddy that first year either. When he talked to me it was to say, “Get me some water, rook.”
“OK, Cap. Sure thing, Cap. Whatever you say, Cap.” Those were the only appropriate responses to anything your captain asked of you. When you’re a rookie you do it. Maybe it’s a little demeaning. You start a job, making real money for the first time in your life, playing the game you love, and your teammate is talking to you only when he wants water. But then you stop and realize it’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and you get the damn water.
That was the first time I really understood that negotiation has to be a two-way street. You need to know what the person wants and what their hot buttons are in order to get them to be interested in what you’re trying to sell. Little by little I would go into these stores—probably once every two weeks—to make a sale and do aisle resets.
Sometimes I would be asked to reset products I wasn’t even selling. They needed hands and feet to help them with the aisle if they were doing a major reorganization of the entire section. Sometimes they’d say, “Could you come in on Tuesday and help us, because we want to reset this whole aisle.” It wasn’t a hazing situation such as Byron was going through, and it wasn’t a lack of respect; it was merely a request for a favor.
As a young professional you can read that the wrong way and make a wrong decision. In my first job out of school in the early 1970s I was working in the United Kingdom for Rank Hovis McDougall, commercializing a protein product intended to enhance the quality of diets in third-world countries. On one occasion I flew to Mexico with the chief scientist to give a presentation to a Mexican government-owned company called CONASUPO that controlled all the sugar plantations and bakeries at the time. At the end of the week, when we were ready to leave, the scientist realized he’d forgotten something in his room. He casually told me to run upstairs and get whatever it was that he’d left.
I turned to him and said, “I’m not your butler.”
The guy never spoke to me for the rest of the time I was at the company, and he was somebody I had to work with a good amount. It was my first job out of graduate school, and he was the top guy, and that’s what I said to him… the top guy.
He had spoken to me in a very dismissive way, and it just didn’t sit well with me at all. But that was a rookie mistake on my part. I should have just done it. I was a young guy, just getting started, and he—whether on purpose or not—was testing me. It was a simple task that would have changed our relationship for the years to follow, but instead I was labeled as the young guy with the bad attitude. Sometimes you need to swallow your pride when you are just getting started and be a leader by showing you can take a little heat.
Magic and Michael Cooper—they brought the heat. During the first week of practice they tested me. During scrimmages, with Coach Pat Riley nearly working us to death, Magic and Coop were being physical and really putting me through it to see how I was going to react. It’s different from what players do to rookies nowadays. The guys on the Lakers last year made the rookies bring doughnuts to practice, and collect all the balls when practice was over, and things like that. The rookies also had to come to practice and the game with backpacks on and strollers with Cabbage Patch dolls in them. In Cleveland they filled Dion Waiters’s car with popcorn. It’s silly hazing and a rite of passage—these rookies do it because the players before them did it as rookies, and to be in this fraternity you’ve got to pass the test.
When I was a rookie, though, there was none of that. I got water for Kareem because the man wanted water. The veterans weren’t interested in silly games. Rookies came in and the veterans would just push them around, play them hard and throw them a couple extra elbows. They wanted to see how well the new guys could handle physical play. In my case they were also genuinely mad that the Lakers had traded Norm, so the elbows were real. It wasn’t fun and games.
It was a tough adjustment for me at first—everyone giving me either the cold shoulder or a sharp elbow. In college at Arizona State University I had been a star. People had loved me. It was a rude awakening and a huge blow to the ego to have to start from scratch and earn that respect and admiration all over again.
What really helped me was that I was at home. After practice I could go and talk to my childhood friends, who are still my friends today, and my family, and be like, “These dudes is tripping.” They’d tell me I was going to be fine, and that the guys would eventually embrace me if I just kept doing my thing. It’s great to have a mentor or someone up top with confidence in you, so I thought about Jerry West’s words often, but it’s also nice to have support from friends and family when you are just getting started. That kind of encouragement is priceless.
When I was at Scott Paper it was a different story. I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, and I hadn’t yet developed any sort of ego. At that point in life I had done some work for a food broker and I had bagged groceries at a store, so I knew the industry a little bit, but I wasn’t too good for any job—which ultimately is how you should feel throughout your career, no matter what level you are at. If it helps the team, it’s always worth doing.
During my time on Cape Cod, I saw the benefits of being a team player. When I did the store manager a favor, he’d do me a favor in return. I could say, “Can you throw up five cases on the wing here? I need to get to a certain total sales volume at the end of a quarter,” and he would do it.
Improving the relationship went beyond the store. While stocking the shelves, I’d get to know him as a person, and I could go to my manager and say, “I’ve gotten to know Frank very well, I bet he would love to go to a Red Sox game. If I can get two tickets for the Red Sox game I think I can get him to give me X, Y, and Z.” Every region had money for discretionary spending. If I could use it in a certain way, I could significantly increase what we were doing in a given store or even sometimes in small chains. One Red Sox game could mean the difference between a successful season and an unsuccessful one.
So I took the pushing and shoving for about a couple weeks, and then one practice I got an elbow from Coop and I snapped.
“All right, that’s it, next time any of y’all throw an elbow at me there’s going to be a fight.”
Coop, with his little high voice, said, “Oh, it’s like that?”
“Yeah, it’s like that.”
That was a turning point, and later Magic told me that they had been testing me to see if I had any heart. That’s what they wanted to find out, and I guess I passed the test.
A few weeks later, on one of our road trips, Magic called me over.
“Baby B, what you doing tonight?”
“I have no plans, man. I don’t know anybody in any of these cities that we’re going to.”
“Wanna go to the movies with me and Coop?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I felt like a little kid, all happy that I was accepted. That was the start of the so-called Three Musketeers. After that we were like brothers, close as could be. We hung out on the road, hung out at home.
The bond carried over onto the court as well, and those elbows helped in game situations too. In actual games you get elbowed and pushed around by guys who aren’t your friends. The second I put on that Lakers uniform I was an enemy of the Boston Celtics and guys like Danny Ainge. I couldn’t stand him, and I’m sure he couldn’t stand me.
One of the first times I played against him, he elbowed me, but I kept my composure. My experience in practice certainly helped with that. Once Magic and Coop had put me through the wringer, there was nothing I couldn’t handle from a guy like Ainge.
But I’ve always had the mentality in basketball and in life that when someone knocks me down, I’m going to wait until they forget about it and then knock them down even harder. I think that comes from my mom. She was a fireball. I saw my mom get challenged by another woman after my sister got into a fight with her daughter, and my mom said, with switchblade out, “I’ll cut you up, y’all.” She was not a confrontational person, but if you stepped to her she would never back down. She’d get you—sometimes when you least expected it.
So when we met the Celtics again months later, Magic knew that Ainge had it out for me and gave me some advice on how to get him back. I was ready to bring out the switchblade on him, so I would take all the advice I could get.
“Next time you’re going to the basket, he’s going to be on your left side,” he said. “As you shoot, bring that elbow right to his chin, and watch, they’ll call a foul on him.”
Sure enough, it happened exactly as he’d said. I ripped through the lane, Ainge was on my left, and I clocked him in the chin and made the shot. The referee blew the whistle and said, “Count the basket.”
“I told you,” Magic screamed. “That’s what I’m talking about! Yeah!”
I think all the ups and downs are good for rookies. They help with team chemistry and camaraderie, and they make you appreciate being part of the team more. Every rookie who comes in is different. Some think they are already the best player in the NBA. Some go through training camp and are overwhelmed. All this hazing, if you want to call it that, takes the attention away from the grind, puts every rookie on the same page, and ultimately makes them all part of the team. Then, before you know it, you’re best friends with Magic and Coop, and it’s Danny Ainge getting the elbows.
Anyone in management benefits from some time in the sales force, because on the front line you learn more about the people you are selling to and also the end consumer. When you’re in the store, you’re looking at your aisle, and you can talk to people about why they selected your product instead of Kimberly-Clark’s or Procter & Gamble’s. You learn what the competition is doing to take facings away from you, and you’re right at the front line trying to protect your space. It becomes a game in which you figure out how to outmaneuver your competition at the store level, where you’re displaying and selling your product.
That experience sets you up for a lifetime of understanding how the game works, and when you’re thrown right into the mix, you learn on the job. But you also need a leader you can go to and feel confident in asking dumb questions. You have to be secure enough in your own capability that you know it’s OK, because asking dumb questions is always better than making big mistakes.
I went to my supervisor with a number of questions, but still there were growing pains. During that time I was probably too quick to want to sell something, even though I had been specifically told not to rush into a sale. I had only a three-month window, and I wanted to show that I could get it done. I spent a lot of time building relationships with the important people in each store and learning who the decision makers were in the paper aisle, and I wanted to leave making sure I’d made the most of those relationships.
But I didn’t need to rush. After the time in Cape Cod, I worked for Scott Paper Company for six months at its head office in Philadelphia in the advertising and promotion department, where I was involved in analysis of the different promotional vehicles the company was using. I was trying to determine what was working and what wasn’t working. Eventually Scott offered me a full-time job, but I decided to go to England instead, where all of a sudden I was too good to be someone’s butler.