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" Originally published in the March 2001 issue When I was in college, a friend invited me to a bar mitzvah. There was a game of musical chairs for the kids. Most of the kids were about thirteen or fourteen. Skinny. Some of them had braces. They were dressed as if their mothers had made them put on ties. I was much bigger than all of them -- almost six-six, the size I am now -- but I got in the game. It started with twelve chairs. The rounds passed, and it was down to three chairs -- me and three kids. Suddenly, the music stopped, and there&amp;#039;s one open chair between me and this little guy. We both lunged for it, and I bowled him over. He went flying, landed on the ground holding on to his butt bone, and everybody just cracked up. My first thought was, I&amp;#039;m still in the game. But after a while, I felt guilty knocking him down like that. I don&amp;#039;t play musical chairs with kids anymore, because my reaction when the music stopped would be exactly the same. If I get into a game, I&amp;#039;m going to win. There&amp;#039;s no backing off. Because if you back off when you&amp;#039;re playing musical chairs, how do you know you&amp;#039;re not going to back off when you&amp;#039;re going for a loose ball in the playoffs? There are so many good players in the NBA, and I just want to be at the top of the talent pool. I want opposing coaches and players to fear me. I can&amp;#039;t compete at that level and not be competitive off the court. It&amp;#039;s all connected. Where I am right now, you can never accept defeat. Even when my girlfriend and I are playing spades and she&amp;#039;s beating me, I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;Hey, I&amp;#039;m just setting you up.&amp;quot; Without my success in basketball, I&amp;#039;m nothing. My family, my daughter, my teammates, my foundation, my acting career -- they all depend on that success. Many people see my life and say, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s at the height of his career.&amp;quot; Strange as it may seem, this is one of the toughest points in my life. At this stage, 90 percent of my life is my job. That&amp;#039;s all I do. A lot of twenty-five-year-olds are probably the same way. To be the best, you have to be completely focused. Fortunately, I have people helping me deal with any distractions and allowing me to concentrate on the court. Money can make people look at you in strange ways. You get phone calls from people you haven&amp;#039;t spoken with in a long time, and they&amp;#039;ll leave a message saying, &amp;quot;Do me a favor, call me back. I have something I want to ask you.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m not going to answer those calls, because there&amp;#039;s always something behind it, like a loan. Women, the same. You meet women, and they&amp;#039;re acting like they don&amp;#039;t know who you are. Like they were just bumping into you, when, in fact, they were trying to position themselves all along. You know how I know when a woman has integrity? When she doesn&amp;#039;t come up to me. It&amp;#039;s hard having a brother who you&amp;#039;ve been competing with all your life, and then suddenly he doesn&amp;#039;t have what you have financially. I tell him that the twenties is my window to make money. His might be the thirties, forties, fifties -- who knows? We haven&amp;#039;t stopped competing; we just use stakes other than money. We make bets so that the loser knows that he lost. Not long ago, my brother and this guy Tyrone were with me at the bowling alley. We bet so that later on, the losers would have to go to a club wearing sweat suits. They lost. When they went to the club, where everybody was dressed real nice, they couldn&amp;#039;t say why they were in sweat suits. Believe me, that hurt. After I retire, I hope that my level of competitiveness goes down a little. But right now, it can&amp;#039;t. Everyone is watching. The last thing I can afford to be is the guy getting knocked to the floor or getting beat on someone else&amp;#039;s highlight reel. That was the thing about what happened with me and Vince Carter. Everyone understood the whole controversy when, at first, I was named to the Olympic team and he wasn&amp;#039;t. But I understood how he felt pretty well when he hit me in the nose. I&amp;#039;m guarding him under the basket, and he comes flying through for the ball and catches me with his elbow. Next thing I know, I&amp;#039;m lying on the ground, bleeding, thinking, We&amp;#039;re losing this game and I&amp;#039;m getting my ass beat. You just feel like you&amp;#039;re worthless. I went home, and the phone was ringing like crazy. &amp;quot;What kind of crap was that? That man knocked you in the nose, and the referees didn&amp;#039;t even call a foul?&amp;quot; Hey, if you don&amp;#039;t get caught, it&amp;#039;s not cheating. That&amp;#039;s what you call being competitive. I couldn&amp;#039;t sleep that night. Couldn&amp;#039;t stay in bed. It&amp;#039;s this nasty gut feeling. It never goes away until you play them again and beat them. It&amp;#039;s not personal. I just knew the next game I wanted to kick his ass. We played them the next night and I did. But it wasn&amp;#039;t about outscoring him. More than anything, it was that we won. When he walked off the court, he knew. We&amp;#039;re even now. And we&amp;#039;ll see about next time. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a4722/ray-allen-0301/>