Even with the Bulls preparing for the playoffs and Chicago abuzz over the team’s remarkable resurgence, Tyson Chandler wants you to know he’ll never forget.
He’ll never forget the 172 losses he endured during his first three seasons here.
He’ll never forget the nights he lay awake in bed, suffering through his routine of staring at the ceiling and replaying the previous night’s loss over and over in his head.
But most of all, he’ll never forget the looks in the eyes of Bulls fans, who saw in him the promise for better days that never seemed to arrive.
“You could look in a person’s eye [and it was] sad, like you lost your puppy,” Chandler said during a morning practice this week at the Berto Center.
Well, the dog days are finally over.
After six dreadful post-Michael Jordan seasons, and a 0-9 start this year, the Bulls will make a triumphant return to the playoffs on Sunday–and Chandler, 22, will finally get a chance to move to the next stage of his career.
“I’ve been thinking about this my whole career,” Chandler said. “And every year I’ve gone home and watched the playoffs sitting on my mom’s couch and watching the other teams saying, ‘Hey, I can be there. I can beat that team.'”
When the Bulls made Chandler and Eddy Curry the second and fourth overall picks in the 2001 NBA draft, both straight out of high school, a playoff spot was thought to be a year away, maybe two. That it’s taken so long has gnawed at Chandler from the beginning, when he was a suddenly displaced 18-year-old whose family and friends were far away, back home in Compton, Calif.
In retrospect, things might have been a little better for Chandler if only he had hired an interior decorator.
“I was young, I was a bachelor, so there was nothing in my house anyway, but a big screen, a big couch and a pool table,” he said. “So there was nothing in there anyway, and it didn’t feel homey. It just felt like I was staring at four white walls.”
Soon, Chandler was battling insomnia and had stopped calling home so often.
“Losing to me was really hard,” he said. “It was hard for me to sleep. I wasn’t contacting any of my family members. I didn’t talk to any of my friends. I pretty much isolated myself because I was that much into trying to figure out how I can win.”
Meanwhile, the losses kept piling up. Individually, Chandler continued to improve his game, but the team was spinning its wheels until John Paxson was hired as general manager in April 2003.
Paxson jettisoned productive but selfish players and brought in newcomers like Chris Duhon, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng and Andres Nocioni, who had played on winning teams in college–or, in Nocioni’s case, in Argentina with the gold-medal-winning national team.
As for Chandler, Paxson never wavered in his belief that the 7-foot-1 forward/center only needed more experience.
“Tyson was like a lot of young guys,” Paxson said. “They want to come in, and they want everything quickly. This is a business where you have to earn it. Even if you’re good at a young age, you have to still earn the respect of your teammates, the other players in the league, the officials, other coaches in the league.”
After the terrible 0-9 start this season, the team began to steady itself, winning seven of nine games during one stretch in December. In January, the Bulls went 13-3, pulling themselves above the break-even mark; by the end of that month their record stood at 22-20. For the first time in Chandler’s NBA career, he was tasting some success. Then tragedy struck.
Over a two-day period in February, one of Chandler’s closest friends was killed in a car accident and another, whom he affectionately calls his “little sister,” was a gunshot victim of random gang violence in Compton, Calif. She remains in the hospital and is paralyzed from the neck down, Chandler said.
“Nights when I’m hurting, I’m aching, I have injuries, I think about what my little sister’s going through,” he said.
“How can I be sitting here complaining about my knee being sore when she’s laying up fighting for her life?”
The tragedy in Chandler’s life won’t soon be forgotten by him, but neither will the success he’s had on the court or in his personal life. Last summer, he asked his girlfriend, Kimberly, to marry him. They are planning a July wedding. In the meantime, the bare walls now have art on them, and the empty floors don’t look so empty, thanks to an assortment of potted plants.
“[Kimberly] is a big part of the reason why there’s life in my house,” he said.
And Chandler is a big part of the reason why, after many NBA teams have started their summer vacation, there is still life at the United Center. It’s been a long time coming for Chandler, but it was worth the wait.
“If I would have always been on a winning team I would have never known what it was like to suffer,” Chandler says. “And I wouldn’t appreciate winning as much as I do now. I’m not going back to losing anymore.”
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jgreenfield@tribune.com
