The invitation came through Infinite's philanthropic arm, which by 2001 had quietly become the largest private funder of inner-city youth sports leagues in the state — gyms, coaches, shoes for kids whose parents couldn't afford them, the kind of giving that generates goodwill instead of headlines, which was exactly the point. The Lakers' front office had noticed. Phil Jackson, fresh off back-to-back titles with Shaq and Kobe and running his roster through the kind of disciplined, almost meditative practice sessions that made you forget he coached professional athletes and not monks, sent word through a mutual contact that the ten-year-old funding half the youth leagues in Los Angeles County was welcome to sit in on a shootaround.
I said yes before Ron had even finished reading the fax out loud.
The El Segundo practice facility smelled like rubber and floor wax and the specific ozone tang of an HVAC system working overtime against a hundred sweating professional athletes. Jackson introduced me around like I was a visiting dignitary rather than a fourth-grader, and to his credit nobody in the room treated it as strange for more than the first ten seconds.
"So you're the kid buying my forwards shoes," Kobe said, not quite smiling, sizing me up the way I imagine he sized up every rookie who walked into that gym thinking they belonged there.
"I'm the kid making sure some ten-year-old in Compton gets a pair of shoes that fit," I said. "You're welcome to come watch that gym sometime. Different kind of shootaround."
That got the smile.
Shaq, for his part, treated the whole thing as an excuse to be enormous and charming in roughly equal measure, and spent most of warmups asking me increasingly specific questions about how a company owned by a fourth-grader actually filed taxes, which I answered in more detail than he probably wanted, purely to watch his face do something complicated.
The scrimmage itself was never going to be a fair fight, and I didn't try to make it one. Six years of a body built on a thousandfold multiplier and however many thousand hours of martial arts that had compressed into gave me reflexes and a first step that had no business belonging to a ten-year-old — I could read a crossover before the hips had finished committing to it, could close the space Kobe left open by half a second that felt, to him, like I'd cheated somehow. But reading a crossover and actually defending a professional shooting guard's release point are different sports entirely. He hit four straight over me before he even broke a light sweat, not unkindly, the way a teacher corrects a student who's shown real promise and needs to be told the gap is still enormous.
"Not bad, little man," he said, after the fourth one dropped. "You've got the feet of someone twice your size. Where's that from?"
"Martial arts," I said, which had the enormous advantage of being completely true.
"Keep at it. Feet like that, wrong sport." He meant it as a compliment. I let him.
I didn't dominate the gym that afternoon, and that was the right outcome — the version of this story where a ten-year-old walks into an NBA practice and out-hoops the reigning champions isn't a story anyone believes, including me. What I walked away with instead was a standing invitation, a working relationship with an organization that would matter later for reasons that had nothing to do with basketball, and Shaq's genuine, repeated insistence that I come back before the playoffs.
I did. That June, from a suite two levels up rather than the hardwood, I watched the Lakers close out the Finals against Philadelphia in five games — the one blemish being Game 1, an overtime loss in which Allen Iverson, playing on a bad ankle and sheer accumulated spite, dropped forty-eight points and, on one particular possession late in the extra period, hit a jumper over Tyronn Lue and stepped over him on the way back down the floor in a moment that ESPN would replay for the next decade. The Lakers won the next four in a row and the title as comfortably as anyone wins anything against a team that good. It remains, to this day, one of the two best single-game performances I've ever watched from a losing team, and I've since watched quite a lot of basketball.
March of that year gave me the other half of the sport I'd come to actually love, separate from any of the business reasons I told myself justified the hours — Duke against Arizona in the national championship game, Shane Battier playing the kind of complete, unselfish, two-way basketball that made the sport's coaches weep quietly into their scouting reports, Jason Williams and Mike Dunleavy filling in around him, Duke closing it out 82-72 over an Arizona team that had no answer once the second half got away from them. I watched that one from the floor of my own living room, Ron next to me with the specific rapt silence of a man who'd raised his kid on a game he loved and was quietly thrilled the kid had actually caught the bug rather than just the business plan attached to it.
That same September, Michael Jordan announced he was coming back — a third act nobody had asked for and everybody, including me, was going to watch anyway, this time in a Washington Wizards uniform instead of the one that had made him a myth. I filed the date away the way I filed most dates that year: not because it mattered to the mission, but because it was, on its own uncomplicated terms, one of the more interesting things happening in the world I was supposed to be quietly running from the shadows.
Skye's file — Before They Were Anybody — had one new entry that spring that I kept coming back to more than any of the others, a name pulled off a regional recruiting bulletin board out of northeast Ohio: a sophomore at a small Catholic high school outside Akron, already the best player most local coaches had ever personally scouted, with a wingspan and a basketball IQ that read, in the scouting notes Skye had scraped together, like a description of someone considerably older than sixteen.
I didn't reach out. Didn't need to, didn't want to, and there was a version of restraint in that decision I was proud of even at ten — some things are better left to happen on their own schedule, without a rich stranger's fingerprints on them before they've even had the chance to become themselves. But I had Skye keep the file open and updated, quietly, the way you'd keep an eye on a stock you believed in long before the rest of the market caught on.
"In a couple of years," I told her, "half the country's going to know that name. I just want to be able to say I knew it first."
Filed, she said. Shall I flag his game film for continued monitoring?
"Every game you can find," I said. "Call it market research."
It wasn't, not really. But it was close enough to true that I let myself enjoy it as exactly what it looked like — a kid who loved a sport, keeping a scrapbook of the future, the same as anyone would.