John Amaechi may not be a household name in the NBA world. Playing in just five seasons, he is probably best remembered for coming out after his professional career. In his New York Times bestseller autobiography, Man in the Middle, Amaechi talks about his journey from an overweight kid to playing in the NBA while being gay. If Amaechi could have it his way, he wishes this weren’t the case.
With his third book, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, the licensed psychologist and University of Exeter leadership professor shares practical lessons on leading in business and everyday life. In a wide-ranging conversation with HoopsHype, he goes in-depth about his basketball peers, his thoughts on the league today, Doc Rivers, and more.
You’ve talked and written about how most people only give 70 percent in your last book. Would this book be sort of a sequel to that, or is it something entirely different?
John Amaechi: So I suppose this is to build on what was in the previous, which had three sections. One was introspection, one was interpersonal – dealing with individuals, and then one was influencing the broad environment. This book is building on some of those elements.
I would suggest that if you want a person who’s done any introspection and you don’t know yourself, you don’t have good self-awareness, then you’re going to be a bad leader right off the bat. But then this is about building up some of those other elements that are so important about understanding how to reframe other people’s experience and weakness.
You’ll have seen this in the conversations you have with really great coaches who have helped people through moments where they have underperformed, failed, not done as well as they’d hoped. Those coaches who just come down like a ton of bricks and say you’re terrible, you’re awful. And there are other coaches who say, “How can we build from this?” I remember losing a game for the Orlando Magic. I wasn’t in a position to win and lose games my entire career, but with the Magic, occasionally it happened. And I lost a game in Toronto, I think, by missing a free throw. And I walked off the court and one of the assistant coaches came up to me and I didn’t know what to expect. But he said to me, “I know you must be devastated right now, but remember you’ve won more games for us than you’ve lost.” And just in that moment, that reframing of this weakness, this loss was a huge thing for me and it let me come back the next game and perform better.
So there’s like a sequence of these things, how to be more reflective, how to use your experience to enable your leadership to pattern-recognize. We’ve also met those leaders, right? People who somehow seem to have a prescience, have a view into the future, but it’s mostly because they’ve really examined their experiences and now they can recognize patterns as they appear in front of them and then respond more quickly and often before they’ve kind of fully materialized. So it’s that type of thing.
You said you knew you would be a psychologist when you were seven. So was playing in the NBA sort of like a sidequest for you?
JA: It’s way too difficult to do to be a side quest. I think my career is a good example of how nowadays you can expect to have very different phases in your life. Even if you’re just in business, you can just expect to do something for a period. The world will change radically, and you will either prepare yourself to do something different and join that new rat race or not.
I like to prove to people that I can do things that other people think are impossible. That’s what I like to do. So playing in the NBA, my physics teacher in high school in England, set out this paper in front of me when I told everybody I was gonna play in the NBA, which I did after about six weeks of touching a basketball. And he set out on this piece of paper how statistically speaking, I’ve got more chance of being hit by a meteor than playing in the NBA, right? And it’s real, it’s true. Because whatever you know the stats to be for Americans, the stats for a fat kid from Stockport are even worse, right? I literally had more chance of walking out the front door and being hit by a meteor. And I think that that is just something I’m interested in. When people tell me stuff can’t be done, I’m interested in it. There are about 1.2 percent of the professors in the United Kingdom who are black in higher education, and I’m one of them. I like the odds of doing what people think is impossible.
Doc Rivers did a blurb for your book. And he was a first-time coach who plucked you out overseas and onto the Magic. What does he mean to you?
JA: He was amazingly generous or amazingly good at spotting an opportunity, depending on your perspective… and open and warm in that he understood my perspective on basketball in a way that very few other coaches did.
Other coaches felt threatened by the fact that I was studying for a doctorate, that I sat on the board in Orlando of the art museum, that I did other stuff. Many other coaches felt threatened by that. Whereas Doc understood that just because I didn’t live, breathe 24/7 basketball, I was still committed. I will say that he had an opportunity to let me go at many stages in the early part of the season. We had really good veterans on the team who could have been really solid players, and he kept me on the team – I was cheap, bear in mind.
But he did keep me on the team and gave me an opportunity. And when I showed promise, unlike other places where coaches can be a bit churlish about it just because you’re playing better doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get more minutes. Every time I played better, I got more minutes. And to a point where I was then a starter and a really key part of the team. So I’m very grateful for the fact that he looked past what might have been a deceptively non-basketball accent and outside interests and saw that I could be a contributor.
You just mentioned how he let you have other interests besides basketball and a lot of other coaches might not be like that. Do you think that’s more of a stigma from the past compared to today?
JA: I would hope not. I would hope it’s not still a stigma. I would suggest to you, though, that the real challenge for other coaches that I had was not that I had outside interest because Karl Malone hunted and went on treks on his bike and on his horses out into the mountains. Other players went to clubs and other players dabbled with music and whatever else.
My suggestion to you is that – I don’t know if this has changed or not – but the problem with my pursuit was that people saw, some of the coaches who were threatened, thought that what I was doing outside of sport might be more purposeful and therefore more distracting. Studying rather than playing PlayStation for four hours a day. Thinking about psychology and thinking about my next career when other players were thinking about Jacob the Jeweler. These were the contrasts and one of those things felt threatening to the kind of primacy of basketball. And one of these didn’t. And I think my approach felt threatening to some coaches, not to Doc.
With the amount of distractions these days with social media and just how different information flows through compared to back then when it was just straight up reading a newspaper, do you think you could have studied for a doctorate while still playing in the NBA today?
JA: Yeah, sure, there’s still four hours on a plane. There’s still evenings. These are choices, right? If you decide that what you want to do is scroll TikTok until two in the morning, that’s just a choice. I would suggest to you that’s not a good choice for a basketball performance or for study outside of your sport, but yeah, I don’t think it would be harder now and I think many people would understand it as a sensible choice for people who are going to be quite young by the time their careers are over.
The infamous turning down $17 million offer from the Lakers. In a 2007 radio interview, you said, “There are many people who are asked what their word is worth, and when people ask me that I can say, ‘At least $17 million.” Do you still hold with that principle?
JA: Yeah, that decision wasn’t about other people, it was about me. And so the mistake people make is to suggest that it’s a form of loyalty, but I don’t really believe in loyalty. Even in the context of leadership, I think loyalty is a pretty weak phenomenon. The idea that I’ll do for you if you do for me feels a bit transactional. Because that’s what most people would think of as loyalty, the idea of quid pro quo.
But great leadership and organizational success relies on pro-social behaviors without necessarily a sense that something will come back to you in any immediate sense, in any kind of, because I did this today, I’ll get that tomorrow. I thought that my opportunity with the Magic was one that was singularly down to the decisions of a couple of people within the Magic. And I thought that that was worth honoring with a decision that was not in my best interest. The only thing that I regret about it is the fact that in the United Kingdom, I am, what’s the American term? Chopped liver.
I’m not well known within the basketball community here, but the people who do know me all seem to think that they could have beaten me in my prime. There’s no sense that I was ever a player of any accomplishment. And I recognize I was really average in the scheme of the NBA, but, you know, in my kind of 1999, 2000 era, I would have kicked any British player’s ass, right?
And the only regret I have, I suppose – and this is not a large one – Is the idea that if I’d have been with the Lakers, even if I hadn’t have played, I would have got myself four championships. So, it would have been pretty hard to be chopped liver in the United Kingdom. But I don’t do that much with sports nowadays, outside of my NBA ambassador role across Europe and Africa. So, I don’t do much with the UK now anyway.
You just mentioned how you don’t abide by the principle of loyalty. In terms of business, or anything, why do you feel people do it? Why is this held in such regard? You look at a lot of leaders nowadays, a lot of them are yes men, they’re all about loyalty, do you feel like that’s damaging?
JA: That’s amazing, right? Because look at how you describe them, yes men. How useful is that in an environment where everything is changing? I’m a scientist. I want my people to tell me when I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I want my people to tell me when they know something better than I know something, because they will. I’ve got younger psychologists who work with me, they’ve just graduated, they’ve just done their dissertation. There’s a ton of new stuff that’s fresher for them than me. I have to look it up. And I don’t want to be surrounded by yes people. I want to be surrounded by people who challenge with evidence and who never want me to make a mistake that they can prevent. And that’s not about loyalty, that is about creating an environment where they feel safe to speak up, safe to tell me that I’m wrong, safe to tell me to shut the hell up before I make a huge mistake, all of these things. And so people being loyal, I want them to care about me. I want them to care that I don’t embarrass myself, that I don’t harm the brand, that I don’t do harm to our clients. But that, to me, the reason they must do that is because they know that’s in the best interest of everybody in the organization and our clients, rather than just because they have some strange connection to me.
So, do you think it’s more that they feel threatened if they don’t have people around them that are loyal to them. They’re more concerned about feeling threatened than growing as a person and learning about certain aspects of life that they wouldn’t understand.
There are lots of very senior people who grew up in an era where the only interesting relationship with junior people was one where they feared and adored them. And I’m not interested in being feared, even as that would be relatively simple for a 6-foot-9 heavy bloke. And I’m not interested in being adored. I think it’s a very fragile thing.
And if you look through history, the line between being adored and being thrown on a pyre is pretty thin. So instead, I want people to respect me and want me to be the best possible version of me that I can be. And I want them to feel like they can make a contribution to that at any point. And that’s not loyalty. That’s some deeper connection than the transaction of loyalty, I think anyway.
You just talked about not wanting to be adored. When you came out publicly, was it more for yourself or was it more to help the gay community? Maybe a kid didn’t feel comfortable until someone like you came out in that public space, and they felt more comfortable being who they were.
JA: If my goal was to help people feel more comfortable coming out in sports, I’ve been a spectacular failure in that. There’s always one, right? We use this terminology a lot. It was in the last book. But everybody’s a giant to somebody, right? I know I’m not Ian McKellen. I know I’m not, insert name of gay hero. I know I’m not that person. But there will be people who, because of their demographics and circumstances, will look at me and I will resonate more readily than others. Maybe not in a way that it kind of changes their life dramatically, but maybe just a shaft of light in an otherwise somewhat dim existence. And if I’ve done that once with somebody, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool.
But it wasn’t about making some point for me because I left America. I came back to England. I don’t think there was anybody in my life in 2005 or frankly in 1999 or frankly in 1995, who didn’t know that I was gay. It wasn’t a big surprise to the people who care about me. It was only a surprise to random people who wanted to yell at me from sidelines. Or from bar stools.
Back when you played, did your teammates or team staffers have an inkling?
Yeah, loads of them did. People asked about it during my career and I told them. So there’s only one time that I didn’t give a direct answer to the question, “Are you gay?” And that was Greg Ostertag, because he asked me as we walked onto the court to play a game. I was like, “This is just not the time for this conversation.” Otherwise, the truth is not many people ask, but if anybody did even intimate, then there were people who met my partners, the people I had as partners back in the day. So it’s not like that’s a surprise.
Do you think there are more players who just haven’t publicly come out?
JA: I’d encourage fans and people who watch at a distance to reconsider coming out, right? Because if you are a stranger to someone, so for example… There is a world of things that I don’t know about you, right? But it’d be weird for me to suggest that you have withheld this from me, whatever information it is, right? You’re a crypto expert, right? I don’t know that. I’m gonna, because I now am talking to you, I’m gonna suggest that you’ve withheld being a crypto expert. But it’s like, you haven’t withheld with strangers.
We don’t know each other. There is absolutely no reason why I should have access to that information. So coming out is contextual. And so while the world may have thought I came out in 2007, what that really means is a bunch of strangers knew something about me that they didn’t know before. But family, friends, teammates – not all of them – but the ones who I thought cared about me and who I cared about, knew. So I was already out. And right now, and maybe you’ll know this or not, but right now, there are a bunch of gay people in the league who are out in that very same way. To some of their coaches, some of their colleagues, some of their training staff, and some referees. I remember meeting a referee in a gay bar once in Phoenix. And so you just end up knowing some of these people that way.
It’s kind of like, it’s not your business. I don’t know who you are, so why do I have to tell everyone about my business kind of way, right?
JA: Yeah, yeah. There are some things that shouldn’t be withheld from other people, depending on the context. And so, if you get fired from your job and you have a partner, you should probably tell your partner that you’ve been fired from your job. That’s the kind of information you should share proactively. If you play for a team and you’ve hurt yourself. You twisted your ankle falling down, coming off a curb or something. That’s the kind of information you should share with your team. You shouldn’t pretend it’s not real.
But I’m not sure where I’m a gay person and I’ve got a relationship with somebody who loves me, and I’ve got friends and other things. I’m not sure where that fits into the scheme of that bloke in 27D, in the bleachers. You know what I mean? I’m not sure where that fits in. And this is not me saying that nobody should know this information, because it’s not sacred information. It’s just irrelevant information. If there’s something I regret about that era, it’s the idea that I started playing this game at the age of 17 in a country that didn’t play basketball and six years later I played in the NBA. Who else in the history of the league has that record? And it’s mind-blowing to consider it, right? Fat kid from Stockport who eats steak slices ends up in the league. It’s so incredibly improbable that to me, the idea that somebody thinks that the most interesting thing about me is that I happen to be gay, something that I didn’t choose and can’t really control. That’s a weird world to me. I think I’m still the only undrafted free agent to start at the beginning of the season.
The NBA is considered the most progressive pro sports league in North America. There’s been a few female assistant coaches who have been coaching now. Would you say these are similar things compared to gay players who have been publicly out. Is this comparing apples to oranges, or do you think there’s something to that correlation?
JA: I think progressiveness is siloed. Just because a league allows, permits, promotes, women coaches doesn’t necessarily mean that it hasn’t got other issues. And I would also suggest to you that even as it is, even as a progressive league – and I think it is – it has gay people in it who are perfectly comfortably out in the way that most gay people are out. They have a partner who they spend time with. I don’t live with my partner. It would make me crazy. But I see them three, four times a week, and there are people in sports leagues who have that exact same relationship. Imagine any average gay person in every average workplace, not everybody in that place will they talk to and tell. Now some people might assume, but they won’t be saying to everybody that. There’ll be people who they build a relationship with, who they share more with, and people they don’t, who they don’t. And that’s our work. I wish it wasn’t such an interesting topic for people. Because I always think that what people choose and work on is more interesting and informative about a person than things that they don’t choose and just happen.
Even about ethnicity, right? In some aspects, there’s a bigger deal. Maybe in terms of certain stereotypes. And that way it’s kind of similar. Instead of focusing on what the person can do skills-wise, you’re talking about how they look.
JA: But sports still has that problem, right? It still has that problem of black athletes being described one way and white athletes being described another way. I saw this with an analysis of point guards. And how they were described as variously intelligent and athletic, depending on their ethnicity. So this stuff still happens to this day.
I don’t know where it is, but if you look it up, there’s a pervasive language that is used to describe different athletes of different ethnicity. It’s such a strong trope in sport that up until probably 15 years ago or 10 years ago, it defined who could be a quarterback and who couldn’t be a quarterback, right? And so it’s a properly pervasive thing. And I don’t think the analogy between ethnicity and sexuality is important, except that both of these suffer from perceptions that create harm, right? Whether you’re a black person in sport and the lazy trope or the uneducated trope or the inarticulate trope or the sexist trope or the violent trope, all of these things. Or you’re a black person in a workplace where the lazy trope and the uneducated trope and the you-didn’t-earn-your-place-here trope, which is the one different one. Because most people still think that if you’re black, it’s easy to get in the NBA somehow.
Some players are steadfastly against the concept of playing alongside gay players. When you played, did you feel that or had experiences that dealt with that?
Yeah, I mean, I heard teammates say insensitive things about gay people. I remember in Utah passing a billboard on the side of the street that said, someone you know is gay. And hearing the murmuring from players who ostensibly love me as a colleague, as a teammate, say some pretty awful things. I would suggest to you that – again, because I’m a nerd – the research would tell you that the relationship between this idea that black people and African Americans are more homophobic is actually about religiosity. Because black families tend to have a high level of religiosity, whether it be Islam or various forms of Christianity. It is that nexus that is related to the homophobia as opposed to the blackness of it. Because there’s also plenty, when it comes to one-to-one relationships, you often see how that, even that inbred religious homophobia, is overwhelmed by a cultural compassion.
What was the most interesting thing to you when you played in the league for five years?
There are lots of things. So I saw some really great examples of leadership by players, really great examples that were part of my foundation, because I was learning about leadership and psychology at the time. And it really played into that.
I often talk about Michael Cage as a really good example of that, a veteran who really took that example. But broadly in the league, the behavior of veterans towards rookies and more junior players, I invariably found that to be a responsibility that players, veteran players took on with real seriousness. Which is not always the case, right? Oftentimes, there’s this threat, this young player’s coming, he’s gonna take my minutes. And I was really warmed by this idea that even players who are in the same position would wrap an arm around a player and help them to develop their game and give them a career in the league. So that’s one side of it. The other side of it was the nature of sport broadly and the fact that being able to see people from a distance can create fans whose civility is diminished.
I remember the kinds of things that I saw people in very expensive seats behind the players, and this is before the era, by the way, of players being able to report to stadium staff and get people kicked out. This was before that. But I remember looking at these people who are clearly very rich… and the kinds of things that they would say to athletes would be so unbelievably uncivil, so diminishing of their humanity – often so stereotypical – would be remarkable. And the fact that they could say stuff that was even racist, for example, against a player from an opposing team and not realize that the thing that they’re saying about that black player, for example, would have an impact on the players of their own team who are also black. It was a remarkable thing to watch. But it’s a pervasive myth in the world that crowds are wise, and that’s not true. Small groups of people, 12, 15, maybe 20 if you’re lucky, there’s a real advantage to that kind of diversity and size. Once you get up to a few thousand people, that’s a mob, and they’re not wise.
You mentioned how a lot of veterans took it upon themselves to mentor the younger players. Nowadays, a lot of these roster spots are filled up with younger guys trying to prove they belong, so there’s not even a lot of veterans left in the NBA. I think that’s actually a problem right now in the league. It might make sense if each team had a designated roster spot, just to have an older player that can mentor younger guys. What are your thoughts on that?
I think that any high-performance organization that wants to be sustainable has to find a way to maintain organizational memory. Because otherwise, powerful lessons are lost. Like that time on the bus when there was an argument and the coach solved it this way. That stuff is lost.
I don’t know if it needs one player, but I think there needs to be a consideration of how we are passing on the norms and the rules, the kind of ethical and other rules of this organization to the next generation. And if it isn’t by a more senior person sat next to a more junior person in the locker room saying this is how we do this. Culture has a thousand different definitions and that’s why we know mostly the work that’s done around culture is b*llshit. Because if it’s something that can be defined a thousand different ways, if I asked you what culture was, you’d give me a different answer than the person next to you, right? But what we do know is a couple of things. It is about the way things are done here. And it is about, it is defined by, if you like, the worst behavior tolerated. And if there aren’t people around to tell you what behaviors are tolerated, and if there aren’t people around who can tell you the ways that things are done around here, then organizations will find themselves culturally adrift.
This extends past this. It could be a corporate life, it could be anything, right? It can even be a family dynamic? A kid doesn’t have a mom or a father around, or maybe an uncle or someone older, right? Just kind of tell them the ins and outs of what you should or shouldn’t be doing?
JA: Don’t forget, it’s not even just the presence of a parent or the presence of this older teammate. It’s that woven within the way you work is the idea that people should pass these messages on.
I grew up in a single-parent household. My mom was out of the house before I woke up in the morning, came back after I was supposed to be in bed. But we knew how things were done. There was a rota, there were expectations that were explicit, there were boundaries that were explicit, there were sanctions that were explicit. There were all these dimensions that helped us all to understand that even when we were not within line of sight of each other, this is how things are done and this is what defines who we are as a family. And teams can do that, whether they’re sports teams or business teams. And the teams that do that are gonna be more successful. They’re gonna be more connected, and they’ll win more.