“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
When you step out of your comfort zone to play a new kind of game, the rules may change, but a champion adapts and brings his or her knowledge and ability to the table in order to find victory.
After that last season with the Lakers I felt satisfied with my NBA career. I spent eleven out of fourteen seasons in the league with the Lakers and won three championships, so I didn’t need one more year with a new NBA team to prove anything to myself or anyone else. What I wanted was a bit of an adventure, so I looked into playing overseas.
My ex-wife’s father was in the army, so she had been all over the place. When the idea of playing one more season out of the country came up, she liked the idea of going to Greece.
In the summer after the 1996–97 season, I signed with Panathinaikos of the Greek Basketball League, and it was a culture shock to say the least. Off the court, my family and I were living completely out of our element. My daughter and my younger son went to school with the kids from the US embassy, and after a couple of months my daughter was able to talk to the cashiers at the grocery store in Greek. It was pretty amazing!
For me the language barrier was a bit tougher. I had no clue what the locals were saying most of the time. Luckily our coach and assistant coach both spoke English very well, but when the head coach started talking about strategies he would always talk in Greek. The assistant would always be the interpreter, but it changes your approach mentally when you are looking for help from an assistant just to understand the play.
In the United States everything just came naturally. With Riley or Larry Brown, I almost knew what he was going to say before he said it. Here I didn’t know what was going on at first. When you’re out of your element it’s like being a rookie all over again.
Each team in the Greek League was allowed to have two foreign-born players, so on my team it was me and Dino Radja, who had played in the NBA for the Celtics. Everyone on the team wanted to win, but Dino and I expected to win. The team hadn’t won a championship in fourteen years, and we were brought in to change that. From day one, that was the goal.
My time in the locker room that season was probably the only time that I felt I couldn’t really be myself as a leader, because my teammates didn’t understand me most of the time. On the court, basketball is a universal language and your eyes and expressions and motions can say it all. When you put those hands out, all around the world they know that means, “Give me the ball.” But because of the language barrier, I had to be more demonstrative on the floor and give my teammates the right looks to really get them to play hard. There were a whole lot of sign language and body language. When I couldn’t express myself with my mouth, I had to talk with my actions.
Because of this, my on-court body language was all the more important. Since I couldn’t really talk to the guys, they watched my every emotion even more carefully. If I looked upset or defeated in any way, the players would read that. Since they couldn’t talk to me and get to know me personally, that was all they really had to go by.
As a player or a coach, I’ve always had the mentality that nothing was going to bother me. That turnover, that bad call—it’s not going to bother me, because once a player sees me throwing a tantrum, then he feels that he has the right to do the same thing. Anger is contagious, and it doesn’t lead to victory.
In order to win, everyone on the team has to be calm and collected and worried only about the next play, not a past play. When you can’t speak English it’s even more of a priority. To win you have to be on the same page, and if the book is written in a foreign language, you have to speak through emotions. Sometimes the best way to lead is with a glare and a smile.
At Freshpet I was venturing down a road I hadn’t been down before. Being the chairman of the board of a start-up company was something new for me at age sixty, but as with Byron, my will to win and the skill set that had made it work in the past were still the same.
One of the early difficulties was getting the refrigerator into the pet food aisle and the tremendous amount of work required to run electrical to an aisle that hadn’t had electricity before. While that was a new problem, I was able to immediately draw comparisons to the water industry, where we’d had to pay for the water cooler, buy route trucks, put in more manufacturing lines, and spend money to make money.
I understood the cost of buying all these refrigerators. I knew the difficulty of getting a store to want to put a refrigerator in, because it was very much like getting a store to put in a vending machine for water. It’s a very difficult sale. But I was also very familiar with the benefit of owning that refrigerator, because once it was in the store it was our real estate for as long as we wanted it.
The key to getting new customers is that you’ve got to go fishing when the fish are biting. There was a period in the evolution of the bottled water industry when it was the real poster child for growth. Sugar and soft drinks were the bad guys and water was the good guy because it was all natural with no calories. During its height, bottled water was the fastest-growing beverage category, so sales outweighed expenses, and getting the vending machines in stores and coolers in homes and offices became an easy sell.
This time the pet industry was similar. The pet food aisle was the fastest-growing aisle in the grocery category. The whole trend of the humanization of pets was something that I thought would have a long shelf life, so I saw this as being a fabulous opportunity, and it was really only a matter of time before it would click.
Yes, there were setbacks. The stock market crash hurt the growth rate of Freshpet because it raised doubts from the retailers that we would be able to continue to raise funds to survive. We were selling a premium product, and in general such products take a hit when the economy is in trouble.
When that happens, you have to be honest with your investors and remain calm. Our fundamentals of the business were still strong. The barrier to entry of number two, the fact that we’d never lost customers, and the continued growth (albeit at a slower rate) were all still reasons to stay the course. Fear and losing confidence in management are the main reasons people don’t stay the course, so when stock is dropping, you can’t run away from it. You have to be honest with yourself and your team about what’s driving the plummeting stock, attack it head-on and prove that the company hasn’t changed. It’s still a strong company. The growing trend of feeding pets like humans was not changing, and there wasn’t another competitor coming with a better mousetrap. We were still growing at 20 percent a year, even though we had said we were going to grow at 30 percent. Wall Street considers something that’s growing at 5 percent a year a fast-growing company, so we were still in very good shape.
In the end, using the skills and knowledge that we’d had all along, we were able to make Freshpet a success, even though I was working outside my comfort zone. It was a new environment, but when you play your game, you can walk away a winner in any arena.
Everything is different about playing overseas. The rules are different: the ball is live on the rim, so when you shoot a free throw and it bounces around, you can slap it off. That was one of the rules that I didn’t get used to. When you play your whole life one way, it’s hard to adjust to a different way. The key was also shaped differently. It was wider, to open up the game. And the three-point line was closer, which didn’t make things easier for someone who’d spent his whole life in a rhythm from a certain distance.
The facilities were also very different. The top-notch gyms and practice facilities we had in the NBA and the all-around accommodations were head and shoulders above what the Greek League had to offer. It didn’t have the funds to create the environment that the NBA did night in and night out either. All I cared about was winning, so that wasn’t too much of an issue for me.
The biggest difference, though, was the fans. They were crazy. I had never seen fans like that. The first road trip we took was to play P.A.O.K., a team led by a young kid named Peja Stojakovic. That was the first time I was ever frightened on a basketball court. The fans in the stands were burning flags, giving us the finger, spitting at us when we were on the court, and throwing drachmas, which are about the size of a quarter.
They had little BIC lighters they would use to burn the coins before throwing them on the court. The bench had Plexiglas over it, and at first I wondered why, but I found out real quickly. We would just hear all these coins hit the Plexiglas while we were sitting on the bench.
I went to get the ball one time after it rolled off the court, and one of my teammates grabbed me. “No, no, no, no,” he said. “Don’t go get that ball. They will start spitting on you.”
“Really?” I couldn’t believe it, but he was right.
It’s tough to remain focused when all these things are going on around you. If you’re thinking about getting hit with loose change, you’re not exactly going to play your best basketball. Needless to say, I played my worst game that first night. I think I had six points.
I just wanted to get the hell out of there. At one point somebody threw a lead pipe on the floor. This wasn’t basketball; this was ridiculous! I’d never witnessed anything like that. On the way to the locker room a coin hit me right in the head. I was literally afraid for my life. Everyone else seemed to be used to it. After years in the NBA, this was not what I was used to, and it was standing in the way of my performance.
When you’re out of your element you are prone to mistakes. When I was at Nestlé and going to various countries, I spent a month in Malaysia determining how best to introduce textured soy protein into the local cuisine. I was there with a Swiss experimental chef who worked in the research labs at Nestlé, and who was a true food connoisseur. The two of us were invited to dinner by the most important food broker Nestlé had in Malaysia. It was a dinner to die for—fifteen different dishes, one after the other, everyone drinking Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch. Anytime we took a sip, the waiters were there refilling our glasses. I’m not a big Scotch drinker to begin with, but everyone was making toasts and having a good time, and the liquor flowed.
At the end of the evening, in an attempt to be funny and clever (and when I was a bit under the influence of alcohol), I said, “This meal was fabulous, but where were the spareribs?”
To me it was a joke, but they took it seriously. The room went silent.
“We’re picking you up at eight tomorrow morning to take you for spareribs for breakfast,” the broker said, breaking the silence.
I was the most senior person from Nestlé at the table, representing Nestlé Swiss headquarters, and in a matter of seconds I completely embarrassed the company and myself by insulting the hosts.
I was just making a joke, but it was a huge faux pas in their culture. You have to be very careful what you say and when you say it. When you are in a new country or even just a new environment, humor rarely translates.
Another time I was invited to the home of the Swiss experimental chef after we had traveled the markets together for months. Everybody in the office was oohing and aahing about the fact that he had invited me to his house and was going to cook a meal for me.
The main course was white asparagus with a beurre blanc sauce that he’d made from scratch. I didn’t realize that this was one of the finest delicacies in the world, and that the white asparagus season in Switzerland is only two weeks long. Plus, for many great chefs, the true measure of a chef is his sauce. So what he did was actually spectacular, but I was sitting there thinking, “What is this? Where’s the main course of the meal?”
I was gracious about it, but I wasn’t overwhelmingly ebullient. When I came back to the office the next day, everyone asked about the meal.
“I was really a little disappointed,” I said. “It was white asparagus with this special sauce.”
My office friends looked at me as if I were a complete idiot, because I was clueless about how exceptional this meal had really been. Apparently everyone else in the office knew something I didn’t, and once again I stepped in the wrong hole. Both of these were tremendous learning experiences. When you are working in a new environment, you can’t assume your way is always the right way. If you go to another country assuming the American way is the only way, you’ll never be successful.
One of the best lessons I learned was from a man named Rudy Tchan, a Swiss German who was the second-highest-ranking executive in Nestlé’s Asian zone. He told me, “Don’t assume that because a person doesn’t speak English, he or she is not bright.” Some of the brightest people I’ve ever met I needed a translator to talk to.
The key to limiting mistakes is to be really sensitive to people and try to understand what they’re saying. But when you don’t understand, ask questions rather than forming opinions on your own. And don’t make jokes!
When I left that game, I looked in the mirror and said, “That will never happen to me again. I will never be that frightened on a basketball court again.”
When I was with the Lakers, there were plenty of hecklers. There was Leon the Barber in Detroit who would sit behind the bench about five rows up. He knew every player on the team, and he would call your name out and just talk. He knew stuff. Personal stuff.
Then there was a guy in DC, a lawyer who sat right behind the bench and just never let up. That guy heckled Charles Barkley one time and Chuck turned around and threw water at him.
In my playing days with the Lakers, there were always two places James Worthy didn’t want to go, DC and Detroit. During shootaround in DC, James would look around, and I could tell he was distracted by the thought of the heckling lawyer.
“He ain’t coming tonight,” I said. “It’ll be cool.”
“Aw, man, he probably is coming.”
At the two-minute mark before the game started we were doing layups, and as soon as the buzzer rang, we turned around, looked over, and the guy was just taking his seat.
“James Worthy!” he yelled. “James Worthy! James Worthy, who do you have in your little black book here in Washington, DC?”
He heckled James the whole game. James finally turned around and just said to him, “Hey, man, I don’t come to McDonald’s and mess with you.”
The guy just smiled at him and kept going for the rest of the night.
All of that is nothing compared to what I experienced in Greece, but after growing up in Inglewood, California, I knew I could handle anything. By the time we were back playing Peja’s team again, I was talking and having a good time, mainly to show the crowd that they couldn’t scare me. Every now and then I was giving them the finger right back.
I was back playing my game, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t mess me up at first. Outside forces can mess with your head. If you’re supposed to be focused on winning, there will be people who try to stand in your way. When you’re in a new environment, the opposition will do its best to make you uncomfortable.
But you can’t intimidate me. That’s not going to work. I’m sure there have been players who have packed their bags and just said, “Hell no,” and walked out the door after game one. They don’t want to deal with it, because it’s scary. And they are right. The first time you go through something like that, it is scary. I will admit that.
Once you block out the noise (and the flying drachmas) it becomes just basketball again. Peja destroyed us in the first game, but when we met them again in the championship series, I guarded him. He still had a good night, but he didn’t kill us as he had in the beginning. Even though I had a few years on him—I was almost twice his age at the time—I was still able to make him work for everything. He didn’t beat me one-on-one off the dribble.
My energy and body language helped lift the other guys’ play as well, and in the end we beat them 3–2 in the series and walked away champions. On a team where I’d started out feeling strange and out of place, by the end there was that familiar joy of success that made it all worthwhile.
Many believe it’s best to bring a person into your world when negotiating a business deal. Maybe there’s an intimidation factor or some sort of power play that comes with sitting behind your big desk while the other person sits in a small chair on the other side. That was certainly the plan of the union heads when they invited me in to chat about a collective bargaining agreement with the water delivery drivers.
As a business leader, that’s not how I operate. I find that I am more likely to get a deal done when I make the other person feel comfortable. I’ll talk to them on their turf and walk away with what I want more often than not.
One time I was trying to buy a water company in the Central Valley in California. The owner of the business was reluctant; he felt we would not be good stewards of his employees because we were coat and tie, more sophisticated businessmen than he was accustomed to. His was a family business with maybe six or seven routes, so it had thirteen or fourteen employees in total.
He took us around to see the plant and the small headquarters, and introduced us to a number of people, but I wanted him to understand that we were no different from him. When it was time to make a deal, I said, “Let’s just go sit on the back of your flatbed instead of being in a cramped office, and we’ll talk about what you need for the business.”
Dennis Blue, my head of route operations, was with me, and he was shocked when I said that. It was a tactic he had never seen before. Needless to say, we ended up sitting on the back of the flatbed and negotiating the deal.
I wanted it to be on his turf and on his terms. It’s more comfortable for a route sales rep to talk to me if I’m riding the route with him in his truck than if he comes to my office. People are more insecure when they’re outside their usual area.
By the time I got to Deer Park, I recognized that if I was going to be successful with what was largely a blue-collar workforce, I couldn’t be the coat-and-tie person sitting behind a desk. I had to be able to get the employees to appreciate that I liked sports, that I wasn’t afraid of doing manual labor, and that I could understand their problems. My efforts clearly resonated with people, and once that started, it snowballed.
Most of the water industry was made up of small companies, ones where the owner or the owner’s parents had started the business, and they rode the route trucks. They were in the bottling plant. They were in the warehouse riding the forklift. They knew everything about that business from the ground up. I wanted them to understand that I also knew the business, and that they were talking to somebody who understood their concerns.
When you are a stranger in a strange land, you have to do your best to understand different cultures. If you’re on the other side of the table and have the ability to make someone feel comfortable, you’ll end up winning more times than not when you can adapt to their needs. Let the other person feel comfortable, and you’re one step closer to making the deal on your terms.