For the past 27 years, theres been a constant presence in the Lakers training room, occupying the seat next to the head coach during games while holding the clipboard: head athletic trainer Gary Vitti.
Vitti joined us on Thursday to discuss a motley crew of topics including Kobe Bryants health, why he once had to (lightly) head butt Bryant, Derek Fishers Iron Man streak, having six guys play all 82 games in 2010-11, how it broke his heart to see Phil Jackson struggle with physical ailments, his favorite part of being Phils trainer, why L.A.s fatigue leading to this past seasons Round 2 loss was simply normal in the NBA and more.
MT: Kobe Bryant said in his exit interview that he wasnt able to reach his physical peak this past season since he came into the season off knee surgery, couldnt strength train how he would have like to, and had to build up strength despite not really practicing. How did that affect his season?
Vitti: Just logically its going to affect anyone that doesnt participate in training camp. It all starts there. Coming into camp, were still doing rehab, so Kobe was behind all the time and could never really catch up, which has something to do with the surgery, something to do with the sheer miles of wear and tear and the attrition the game has on him. So when we do look at an entire season, we look at how what what were doing in October and how that will affect the player in February, March, April and so on. Theres no exact science to it, but its about having a feel for an NBA season and that player and Ive had Kobe since he was 17. He and I operate on another plane together where theres trust, and he knows his body quite well, so through that we decided we had to hold him back from practices to look at the longer term. We didnt want to leave what he had on the practice floor, so we could have it for games. And of course that was not ideal.
MT: Bryant said theres another level he can reach physically, the one were so accustomed to seeing where he creates separation from defenders and so on. So the question is, how does his having a chance to come in healthier balance out with the attrition you mentioned?
Vitti: We have to do some things so that he feels more comfortable and explosive with that right knee that hes had repetitive surgeries on. Once we get to that place, then wed like to see him practice more, but we dont want the time that he spends on the court being spent on frivolous things. You gotta get him out there when he needs to be out there, and get him off the floor when he doesnt. Its more about quality time than quantity time.
MT: Can he be stronger if those things are followed the right way?
Vitti: Yes, I do think he has more progression there, but structurally there are some issues that cannot be reversed, but can be dealt with. There are a couple of cards we have up our sleeve that we plan on playing, and he and I have been in daily communication about that.
MT: What more can you tell us about the specifics of knee injuries for players with so many miles on the court as it might apply to Bryant?
Vitti: What happens with older players -- and this isnt Kobes situation is that tendinitis turns into tendinosis, and the tendon doesnt have the same properties that it used to have. As a result it slows them down, and once you become a step slow in this league, its very, very difficult to compete. Thats not Kobes problem, however. His is an articulating cartilage problem. The way I describe that to people is that if you look at the end of chicken bone where its nice and white, well, thats not bone, its cartilage. Sort of like a Teflon surface that when two bones come together, that cartilage is there so that bones dont rub on each other. Now, the fact that its nice and white tells you it doesnt have a good blood flow to it, and that means it cannot heal or regenerate. So, over time, as that cartilage wears away, you end up with osteoarthritis. Kobe doesnt have an arthritic knee, but he has a knee that has some joint degeneration to it. His issues and his age are such that it eliminates some procedures, like microfracture and that type of things. But he is a candidate for certain other things, and we know all the procedures all around the world that are available to him, and the appropriate decisions will be made, hell have the best care.
MT: There was a New York Post report out in January in which Peter Vescey quotes Kobe as saying his right knee was almost bone on bone. Is that going too far?
Vitti: He does have cartilage left, so it was an inappropriate line (in the report). Its just a question of preserving what is still there.
MT: As a training staff, what are the first signs you get of how well a player is able to deal with injuries, and how does that impact respective treatment plans?
Vitti: You get a pretty good feel for a player when you know that theres something bothering him but hes not in (the training room) asking for help with it. Some guys work through their aches and pains, some guys come in with really, really minor aches and pains, and are in the training room all the time. Other guys that are really, really injured that have to come in here, but they get through it better than other players. Its a feel. Pain threshold is a very interesting thing. We usually have a pain scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst, and there are guys that are an eight, but are out there fighting, and other guys that are a 1-2 that say they cant practice. That tells you something. Sometimes with younger guys, you cant really teach toughness, but you can give them the confidence to play through certain injuries. Some guys just want to know, Im OK, right? I just need to know that Im not going to jeopardize my career with this.
MT: OK then, circling back to Kobe it seems obvious, but how tough is he?
Vitti: Kobe is the toughest player that Ive ever worked with in any sport. Its a fact. Kobe, no matter what happens to him, tries to figure out a way to play with it. Maybe his greatest asset is when he steps on the floor, he focuses on the task of playing basketball, instead of focusing on the injury. For instance, somebody tweaks or rolls their ankle and is still on the court trying to play, but they keep looking down at their ankle. Well, looking down at it isnt going to make it feel any better. You can look at it all you want, its not going to change. But obviously, the fact that theyre looking down at it means theyre focusing on it. Kobe seems to be able to block that pain out. The ankle still hurts, but he doesnt focus on it. He focuses on catching and shooting, the tasks of the game.
MT: He had a few bad looking injuries this season, first in Dallas back in March, ankle literally touching the ground, and then in Round 1 against New Orleans. How do those conversations go when you head out onto the court?
Vitti: Its interesting initially, our conversation is just OK, what do you have? He has to tell me how he feels, if there was a pop, that kind of thing. After that, the more I talk, the more he just tells me, Just give me a second. After I know what were dealing with, he goes into this, sort of, mental state where the more you talk to him, the more youre distracting him from getting to a place where he can go out and do what he has to do. Hes in his mode, hell look at me, and well know whether he can go or not.
MT: Id imagine that he has considerably more leeway than anyone else?
Vitti: Thats right. You have to trust him, for the most part, and thats just not the same trust level you have with everybody else. I dont know how to tell you that I know, but I know. I just know. He looks at me, I look at him. Weve only had maybe one or two episodes where weve (butted heads). I cant remember where we were, but he sprained his thumb. It looked pretty bad, and he came to the bench and said, Tape my thumb. I go, Let me take a look at it. He says, Just tape it! We kinda went back and forth, because I didnt want to put him out there with an unstable thumb, because if he really hurt it, it could be a serious issue. So he kinda yelled at me, and I yelled back at him, and I kinda just looked at him, and said, Hey, Im your guy, and gave him a little head butt, which kinda snapped him into reality that I needed to look at it. I looked at it, and he was right, he was OK.
MT: Wait you head butted him?
Vitti: Yeah, just a little tap. It wasnt like, bam!* Just a, Wake up for a second and listen to me! Then he did, he let me look at it, and he was right. Maybe I should have trusted him, but I felt like this one I needed to know for myself. I have a responsibility to protect him from himself. But in that case, I taped him, he went out and played and was great.
*Vitti acted out the head butt, though thankfully not on me.
MT: Who were some of the other more notable tough guys youve had in your 27 years as the teams trainer?
Vitti: Derek Fisher. Michael Cooper. A.C. Green. All Iron Men. These guys were tough, man, they played no matter what. And there were a lot of guys, so you hate to single guys out. But Ill tell you who was a tough kid: Chris Mihm. As bad as his situation was, that kid went out and tried.
MT: The Lakers had six players play in all 82 games this season. What does that mean to you and your training staff, who literally dont take an off day from the start of the preseason to the final loss?
Vitti: We work seven days a week during the season, and when you hear that you had six guys that played 82, and it makes you feel really good inside but you dont want to get to full of yourself about it, because theres luck thats involved with that. As soon as you start patting yourself on the back, thats a dead sure jinx that the next season that youre going to have guys that dont play 82. The way my father raised me, he didnt look at the six guys who played the 82, he looked at the guys who didnt play 82. So it depends how you look at it. Yeah, Im proud that six guys played 82, but I want to know about the guys that didnt play 82. I think thats the appropriate way to look at it. And more importantly, you really have to give the credit to the player, because hes the guy who went out there and played the 82. Some nights they just didnt want to, but they did. They had the intestinal and physical fortitude to get out there and do what they are paid to do.
MT: The current king of this category, Derek Fisher, has now started 495 straight games after another 82 this season, dating all the way back to April 15, 2005. Your thoughts?
Vitti: It just is what it is from an impressive standpoint. Most players dont play that many games in their careers, let alone consecutively. There are a couple of things about Derek: number one is that no one, no one takes care of their body better than him. Period. People ask me all the time about training programs, nutrition and things like that, and my general answer is that the NBA is a microcosm of society. Some guys take everything you say, 100 percent, and apply it to their lives. Other guys take some of it, but cant seem to modify their behavior 100 percent and some guys dont do anything right. Derek Fisher is one of those guys that does every single thing right. The way that science tells you to do it, he does it to a T. And on top of that, hes tough as nails, so when you combine those things together, he becomes the Iron Man.
MT: Many of the Lakers cited fatigue as the main reason for this past seasons flame out, the sheer weight of three straight trips to the Finals eventually becoming too much. Could you actually see, or feel mental or physical fatigue building in the training room?
Vitti: You can feel the fatigue even from 2008 to 2009, but there was a psychological push because you lost (to Boston in the Finals) that you push through that fatigue. From 2009 to 2010, you saw more fatigue, but it was Boston again, so we had something to prove. Thats a psychological advantage. And then this season, we just ran out of gas. Its normal. When you play through June, it doesnt give you a lot of time to get your body and your mind right before youre back in training camp. It just doesnt, thats the way it is and its why so few teams repeat, let alone three-peat. There just wasnt enough left in the tank. There was just no way to refill it and we tried. Its not like we didnt try to do things. Psychologically, we have a team psychologist who worked very hard with our players to overcome these types of barriers, to break through. We had some fresh blood with Matt Barnes and Steve Blake, we hoped that gave us a little bit of a push. But we just ran out of gas.
MT: You were Phil Jacksons trainer from 1999 to this past season; what stands out to you as you reflect on all that time spent with him?
Vitti: The relationship between the head trainer and the head coach is very special. The only way to understand it is to have been a head trainer or a head coach. There is a lot of trust both ways that has to go with those two positions. The head coach has to trust me that Im telling him what he needs to know, and not telling him what he doesnt need to know. Phil and I had a great relationship that way, and he never put me in a difficult position. If he asked me something that I wasnt comfortable with, Id just tell him that, and he was fine*. On another level, Phil was a good person to be around because hes very, very well read and very bright, and you could talk about things that had nothing to do with basketball. It could be history, current events, politics, travel hes a very, very interesting guy to be around, and I was not only surprised about his intellect, but he actually taught me a lot, things that Id never heard of. Im Italian, Im emotional, and Phils not. Hes able to keep it together all the time, and I think he was very helpful to me as Im getting older and wiser watching him in extreme situations, not yelling and screaming and losing his mind, that was valuable to see. Even though it was not my position to yell and scream, I may have been doing that internally, and he was the same person whether we were losing by 30 or winning by 30.
*Vitti explained this comment as him being privy to everything that happens and is said in the training room when Jackson isnt necessarily there, some of which should or can be kept between the players and training staff only, for example. Its his job to be discerning.
MT: Especially considering what you know about the human body, it must have been difficult for you to see Phil going through the various physical ailments, from his back to his knees and hips, throughout the past several years.
Vitti: It broke my heart. When the team was on the road, Id look at a bus, and some are lower and some are higher, and Id see that first step was it a big one? Then Id think, Oh boy. Phil was always the first one off the bus, and I right behind him, and for many years Id carry his bag so he could use the rails to pull himself up and down with his arms. Then the (team security staff) started helping out with that, and I think that Phil felt badly, he thought that he was a burden to us, so he just stopped carrying a bag. He started carrying a little tiny bag with a big shoulder strap, and get up the stairs that way. He stopped carrying a briefcase. I felt bad about that, because I was happy to do it for him. It wasnt a burden at all. I would have done anything to make his life easier. Most of the time, I personally brought his bags to his room with the bellman, and put them on his bed for him.
MT: Final thing here. Aside from your training room duties, you handle all the planning for the Lakers when the team goes on the road. Could you describe what that entails, specifically?
Vitti: The way it works here is that the schedule comes out, and on the very first day, I go through the entire thing in terms of when we go, when we stay in a particular city, how were going to go through it. Its not as cut and dry as you might think. You figure out what nights you want to stay in a city, and what night you want to leave from the arena. If its a back-to-back, its a no-brainer. You have to go. So I work that out on an excel sheet, pick all the hotels, and (the head coach) and I will have conversations about possibilities in cities were not sure about. I put it all on paper, give that to the head coach, and he modifies it however he wants, then gives it back to me. Once I get it back, I give it to (basketball operations assistants) Kristen (Luken) and Tania (Jolly), and they make all the actual arrangements. Kristen calls the hotels, Tania calls the bus companies, and Tania schedules all the practices at home and on the road. I give them dates, times and places, and they do all the footwork, which is a lot of work those women work hard. For example, on the road, just because we want to practice at 2 p.m. doesnt mean the other team is going to let us use the facility at that time. Once all that is set, it comes back to me again, so that I have the contact for each hotel, bus and so on. Then I become the main contact between the airline/bus/hotel/practice site and the team.
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