Fish and the Lakers go back to the grind tonight with a chance to take a 3-0 series lead over the Utah Jazz in Utah.
The Lakers have struggled in Utah in the recent past. They dropped their trip there this season and lost games three and four of the Western Conference Semis there last season.
As the Salt Lake Tribune reports, there are some striking similarities between last season’s playoff series and this one to date:
The scores to date are almost eerie. In that second-round series with the Lakers, they dropped Game 1 by 109-98 and Game 2 by 120-110, after being five points down in the middle of the fourth quarter.
This year, they’ve lost by 113-100 and 119-109 in L.A.
Last season the Jazz sent the series back to LA tied at two, but the Lakers came up with a win in game five and returned to Utah to exorcise their demons and secure a series clinching Game 6 last season.
Still the Lakers have lost seven of 10 in Utah and have a 30-34 all-time record in the less than friendly confines.
The Jazz and the Lakers tip off tonight at 7:30 p.m. EST and all the action can be seen live on TNT.
UNWELCOMING HOSTS
As his fans know, Derek played in Utah for one full season, 2006-2007, before being let out of his contract by owner Larry Miller so that he could pursue better care for his daughter Tatum, who was suffering from a rare form of eye cancer.
Derek got a dose of cruelty in his return to Utah last season when the fans, holding a grudge for Fish’s exit from Utah, regardless of the reason, went personal in their chants and actions toward him. Brian Kamenetzkty of the LA Times Lakers Blog and Kevin Ding of the OC Register asked D-Fish about the reaction after practice yesterday:
Q: Did some of those “personal” boos that you talked about stick with you for a little bit? Because obviously some of the things you heard were pretty cruel.
DF: The first time (we were there), yeah. It was shocking and caught me off guard, and was disappointing, but between the first time we went back (last season) to the second time, there was a huge difference just in the way I saw it, the way I felt it. I think I had come to grips myself with the fact that there wasn’t anything else that I was going to be able to say or do, and even better, I don’t have to feel obligated to try and convince somebody of the reasons why we made the decision we made. So I think once I got to a place where I was okay with it, it didn’t really matter how other people responded.
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU…
D-Fish believes that the heckling, however hurtful, was actually more helpful to give him a different type of mindset, as noted by Ding:
Fisher has a calm inside about dealing with people who don’t understand him now, something he didn’t possess before the horrible response he got on Nov. 30, 2008 in his first return to Salt Lake City to face the team he left in search of the best localized health care for his daughter.
It dawned on him that he should just save his breath about the value of being near his wife’s family or explaining how many millions of dollars he surrendered. He came to realize it’s impossible to understand everybody else and for everybody else to understand him. As much as a politically correct people-pleaser such as Fisher inherently yearns for the world to sing in perfect harmony, it just ain’t ever gonna happen.
That was a level of wisdom he reached only through enduring that initial harshness – an experience he still calls “shocking” and “disappointing” – from fans in Utah’s arena. So given what he was able to get out of this with a little introspection, Fisher did what is so difficult but so special about life in taking the bad and redeeming it. For that, he might even say thanks to those crass souls.
In fact, the experience really strengthened him.
I think that game was good for me personally, just to have that experience and understand that our world is not created in a way where you can please everybody, you can do things that are going to be what everybody likes for you to say or do,” Derek said. So I think it was good for me to have that experience. And it probably took a couple weeks after that to really gain some understanding in terms of me looking at myself and what I was feeling, and then from there, it’s been really smooth in terms of feeling comfortable with what has happened and why it happened and that life really has moved on in a major way.
But when D-Fish takes the floor this evening in Utah, he thinks any heckling he’ll hear will be directed at Derek Fisher, the Laker, not Derek Fisher, the person:
“I think it’s transitioned from more of a “personal” boo to a “you’re on the Lakers” boo. I think people have had time to deal with my not being on the team, and my family transition away from Utah. I think all that’s behind everybody for the most part. Everybody knows the story, and knows the deal. Now it’s Jazz-Lakers, so there’s always been that basketball hatred from one team to another, and it’ll definitely be there tomorrow.”
TATUM IS PROGRESSING
The important part about it all is, Tatum got the care she needed, as Ding notes:
Far beyond all that, Fisher can look at his daughter and know he got the job done for her. “The update is that everything’s up,” Fisher said.
Tatum, who is two months shy of her 3rd birthday, has progressed from comprehensive checkups at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles – exams, scans and MRIs that are so overwhelming that they shake Tatum both in body and spirit – every three weeks to now every eight weeks.
Eventually it’ll stretch out to every 12 weeks, and at age 4 she will reach the proverbial finish line for the fears, as Fisher puts it, “to have something return and become fatal quickly.”
Fisher happily estimates Tatum has about 50 percent vision now in the eye with the tumor. More children’s eyes than ever are being saved as a result of the publicity Fisher generated for a new treatment for retinoblastoma, a rare disease that develops in early childhood.
Derek also cautions, don’t judge a book by its mean heckling fans:
“The crowd at the game doesn’t necessarily represent the people of Utah.”
RELATED STORIES
Lakers brace for ugly Utah fans (OC Register, April 23, 2009)
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/fisher-utah-game-2372780-fans-jazz
Playing in Utah? Sounds like fun! (LA Times Lakers Blog, April 22, 2009)
http://lakersblog.latimes.com/lakersblog/2009/04/wednesday-practice-video-chatter-before-takeoff.html
Pivotol Game 3 (Silver Screen and Roll, April 23, 2009)
http://www.silverscreenandroll.com/2009/4/23/849881/preview-pivotal-game-3
Lakers are braced for real test in Utah (LA Times, April 23, 2009)
http://www.latimes.com/sports/basketball/nba/lakers/la-sp-lakers23-2009apr23,0,7769041.story?track=rss
For Jazz, duplicating 08 is asking a lot (Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 2009)
http://www.sltrib.com/sports/ci_12200808
Keywords: Derek Fisher, Derek, Los Angeles Lakers, NBA, Basketball, 2009 NBA Playoffs, Utah Jazz, Tatum Fisher