Though we’re a night removed from LA Times columnist TJ Simers baiting Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni to distraction, on Wednesday Simers shares the results of a Hard Rock Cafe luncheon with C Dwight Howard, who the former claims, “wants only to please people, so much so that it’s almost crippling” (“he’s now working with Kobe Bryant to learn how to not care so much what people think. He has found the master.”)
Howard says he won’t shoot the jump shots in games that he routinely makes in practice.
“I hate missing,” he says. “I hate missing so much, I miss. You know why? I’m always thinking I’m going to miss this and then disappoint everyone.”
He’s a head case, I suggest, and he replies, “In a nice way,” his desire to make others happy a lifelong way of life.
He says that when LeBron James won the championship he cried, thrilled for LeBron and upset he wasn’t playing.
When Orlando lost to the Lakers in the 2009 Finals, he says he cried himself to sleep listening to Eminem sing about getting only one shot in “Lose Yourself.”
He says he recently saw the new Tom Cruise movie, “Jack Reacher,” and when some people were killed, he nearly cried.
He cries a lot.