All of his cell phones were turned off, Paul Pierce was snug asleep in his new home in Walden Pond country, and the clock was turning midnight when his land phone started to ring.
At first Pierce rolled over and buried his head in a stack of pillows. But the ringing persisted. It was the night of Oct. 19, and Antoine Walker had just been traded.
“It was him on the phone,” Pierce said. “He told me, and I didn’t believe him. It was midnight. I was half asleep. I just couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘You’re kidding.’
“I was just stunned,” said the 26-year-old forward, now in his sixth season with the Celtics. “I didn’t know what to say to him. He just told me about what happened, and I didn’t have much to say. I just listened. This was just crazy. But after last summer, Antoine and Danny (Ainge, Celtics’ executive director of basketball operations) had their thing going on.”
As Pierce later told a couple of close friends, his first thoughts upon hanging up the phone were not good:
There go the playoffs.
“Sure, that was my initial reaction,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out what this meant. Were we now trying to rebuild? During the summer everyone had heard about how they would maybe trade Antoine, and I just kind of looked out there at possible trades, to figure out what might happen.
“There just didn’t seem to be anything out there that could work.”
Though Pierce said he never heard Walker’s name connected to a move for Raef LaFrentz, Celtics coach Jim O’Brien asked Pierce for an opinion on his former Kansas University teammate. Pierce gave an enthusiastic review, though he said a LaFrentz/Walker swap was never part of the conversation.
By Oct. 22, however, the gloom started to clear. Pierce started to recognize the balance behind the move. In the Celtics’ first game in seven years without Walker on the roster, Pierce strafed Minnesota in an exhibition game with an economical 29-minute performance — 14 points, nine assists and eight rebounds.
The assists were especially revealing, and, make no mistake, Pierce wanted that triple-double as badly as he wants to put a new stamp on his team.
“I’m an optimist, anyway,” he said. “I feel like we can be a better team now. The last few days I’ve been looking back at the rest of the Eastern Conference teams, and I feel that we’re just as talented as any of them — even Jersey.
“I look at Raef and Vin Baker and I think that we have some very skilled big men. We’re a little bit behind with our young point guards, but up front we’re going to match up with anyone.”
Pierce is also the first to admit that the Celtics now enter a brave new world without their caretaker of the last seven seasons. Both the beauty and weakness of Walker’s game was his distribution and domination of the ball.
It now occurs to Pierce that he could easily morph into the new Antoine, albeit with a more egalitarian attitude.
“I guess that could happen,” he said. “I’ll take on a lot more of the responsibility because of this. More of my playmaking is going to come out.”
The Timberwolves game comes to mind.
“It shouldn’t have surprised anyone,” he said of the near-triple double. “I got the first triple-double of my career against Orlando last year in a game that Antoine missed.
“We ran everything through Antoine. All of the plays for me ran through him. He would have his opportunities while getting us into the flow, and then the clock would work down. The cons of this were that it was too demanding on Antoine. Look at his game — he could do everything, and coach wanted to utilize everything he did, instead of Antoine focusing on one thing, like playing in the post, and trying to do it great.
“And that took away from the flow of the team. He tried to handle the ball, and to set me up. And when you’re in a situation like that with us two, then everyone else ends up standing around. I won’t take anything away from Antoine — he took care of so much on this team. But he claimed so much responsibility, it took away from the others.”
So there is a tomorrow, with yet another career-altering shift.
Quaking moments like this have ripped through the surface of Pierce’s life before.
No one suffered more from the failures of the 2002 U.S. national team than its leading scorer, who thanks largely to pass-the-buck warblings from coach George Karl, was cast as a miscreant who didn’t get along with his teammates.
“There were times in games when I didn’t think guys were playing hard enough, and I’d get on them to try and motivate them — to try and be a leader,” he said. “(Karl’s) comments really took me by surprise, because after each loss I was the one up there on the podium accepting the blame for things. No one else offered to get up there. I answered the questions when the others wouldn’t. At no time did I get into an argument with any of them. But what hurt me more than anything was that I was one of the first people chosen for this team, and we didn’t get it done.”
Few would dispute that Pierce returned from his soured offseason a more driven player. He averaged more than 40 minutes per game last season, and absorbed punishment like a running back. The Suns’ Amare Stoudamire knocked Pierce teeth-first into the parquet last Dec. 11, and after missing a day of practice to recover from emergency dental surgery, he returned to action without missing a game.
In just over a week, during a Dec. 21 game in Cleveland, an awkward Zydrunas Ilgauskas raked a paw across Pierce’s right eye. He later questioned the Cavs center’s motives, but after a few nights of pleading for protection from the refs, the words dissipated and Pierce continued to split double teams like Richard Seymour.
Pierce can remember feeling this urge — this determination to improve his stake — as far back as his sophomore year at Inglewood High in Inglewood, Calif.
“The coach (Patrick Roy) didn’t think I was good enough to make the team, and he wanted to cut me,” he said. “My opportunity came when only six guys showed up to play in this Christmas tournament. I averaged something like 14 or 15 points in that tournament, and then everything changed.”
Similar indignation fueled him to strike back after drifting to the Celtics with the 10th pick of the 1998 draft.
But nothing compares to what he drew out of that dreadful week three years ago, when many wondered whether Pierce would live, let alone play basketball again.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Pierce’s recovery from his near-fatal stabbing Sept. 25, 2000, is he didn’t miss a game because of his wounds. Indeed, he was the only Celtic to start all 82 games that season.
He now believes the horrible attack in Boston’s Buzz Club — with Pierce requiring over 100 stitches, including at least 50 to close up head and face wounds — made him a better basketball player.
More to the heart of the matter, it galvanized his will.
“You go through a life-changing experience like that, it’s going to motivate you or tear you down,” he said. “My revenge to that was my revenge on the basketball court.
“When it first happened, there were two things on my mind,” Pierce said. “The first was would I live, and the second was would I play basketball again. It was crazy, but when I thought that, I looked right past my family and everything else going on in my life at the time.
“I already knew how important basketball was to me, but you don’t always realize the extent, I guess. They tried to have me talk to a shrink about everything, and I talked to him twice, but all I could think was, ‘I don’t need this guy.’
“It was hard for me. Every day I’d go over there and put on my uniform, even though I couldn’t practice. It was tough on me, man.”
If the coaching staff needed any indication of Pierce’s raging need to return to the floor, it came on the day then-assistant O’Brien walked into the gym and found Pierce shooting jumpers. Pierce was under orders to refrain from any activity that might stretch the stitches covering his body. O’Brien, shocked, ordered him to put down the ball.
But O’Brien understood the conflict within Pierce in a way that Boston police never could grasp.
Up through last year, when three suspects in the crime were acquitted in a trial, several investigators privately expressed dismay with Pierce’s inability to identify his attackers.
Pierce maintains he never saw them clearly.
“The only thing I regret is not being able to see a lineup,” he said. “It’s totally different when you try to identify someone through a picture, and that’s how we tried to do it, through pictures. But it all happened so fast. It was hard to see.”
Indeed, the haze only lifted once Pierce stepped back onto the court.
“It doesn’t haunt me now, though I still use it as a motivating factor,” he said. “Something like that helps you to remember how hard you work just to keep going.”
Pierce has had little contact with Walker since that phone call.
But once again his world had been altered. Another test to make him stronger.
“It’s definitely a new chapter, and a lot is gonna be put on my shoulders,” said Pierce. “I could be the lone starter on the floor from the team we had a year ago. In five years I’ve never had to shoulder the load that I shoulder now.
“I just tell myself that I’m the kind of player who can thrive on this. Initially, after the trade I thought I’d have to shoulder the offense, and people were saying that I’d have to lead the league in scoring to be successful. But I don’t believe that now.
“A lot of our players feel more comfortable right now. We’re going to expand their roles, and open things up a little bit more. You’re going to see that with Vin, Kedrick Brown, Eric (Williams) — they’re all going to feel more comfortable in this offense. Look at Walter McCarty — he started on this team before I got here.”
But most of all, look at Paul Pierce, the guy with tremendous heart. His life wouldn’t ring true if there wasn’t another crisis or rip in the pattern waiting to make him stronger.
“It always happens that way for me,” he said. “That’s just the way it is.”
