Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution

by Jonathan Abrams

  The basis for an age minimum was simple, Stern said. The rule provided for a better product to enter the NBA, a player more mature physically and mentally, and for teams to make better-informed decisions on a player to whom they were obligated to offer a lavish contract. Stern had once said that the rule would tell communities that a kid would be more likely to become a scientist or a professor than an NBA player. In later years, he tried removing the societal implications of the change. “We’re not in, and shouldn’t be in, [the business of] telling people why what we’re doing is good for them,” Stern said. “I have never wanted to buy into that approach. So we’re not going to [establish] rules so we don’t have the next Lenny Cooke. I don’t mean to be heartless about it because I’m not. I think it’s horrible what happened to Lenny and I think they were let down by the system of sycophants and society professionalizing them. But that’s not where my mind-set is on the way the NBA should interact. There’s a difference between me, the person, and me, the CEO, on this. As a person, maybe you should have a set of rules that says you’ve got to do something to enable you to live. It isn’t about school. It’s about technical training. It’s about skills for a job. It’s about anything. But that’s more for the high schools and the colleges. It’s not for a professional sports league to spread its gospel and enact legislation.”

  Stern was present near the beginning of the migration of high school players into the NBA. He was practicing law, working as an outside counsel for the NBA at Proskauer Rose in 1975 when Bill Willoughby jumped straight to the NBA. Stern followed Willoughby’s progress—or lack of it—closely once Willoughby entered the NBA. They grew up in neighboring New Jersey towns. “Willoughby was a—not a bust—a lesson,” Stern said. “He made people think about it. And the college game had a certain allure for people who wanted to take advantage of using their skills to get an education. The bloom wasn’t as quite off the college rose as it is now. Youngsters were more geared to focusing on continuing their careers in collegiate terms, and because the college game and the great reputations were made in college at that time.” Kevin Garnett’s declaration and success two decades later transformed that mind-set. Stern recalled reading about this extraordinary, rail-thin teenager, and that Garnett planned to take advantage of the rules available to him at the time. The thought of professional scouts milling around high school gyms, Stern said, always made him uncomfortable. “The word unseemly comes to mind,” Stern said. When the Timberwolves selected Garnett fifth overall, they made a huge leap of faith to take a high school player that early in the draft. “What’s good for the league is, on balance, to have nineteen-year-olds, rather than eighteen-year-olds,” Stern said. “These are valuable picks and to use a pick on Korleone [Young] or Lenny Cooke or whatever is not a great thing. And we’ll have the same players a year later, and there may be some advantage to them being more mature because having exercised their pick, it’s more likely that we’ll be able to judge their talent better, we’ll be able to take a more mature player, we’ll be able to make all kinds of interesting things. And, I don’t know how fast Kevin Garnett was great, OK?” The flood of high schoolers entering the NBA started just a few years later. “It wasn’t good from the league’s perspective, from a business perspective,” Stern said, adding that he did not really enjoy the influx of high school players from a personal perspective, either. “It wasn’t good from a societal perspective, but I can never allow that to— I suppress that. The idea that we were not sure how good people were and people felt the pressure to draft such an athlete, because he was going to be great.”

  Stern has always argued that the age minimum was not based on financial motives. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players, Stern said, stated how the financial pie was to be divided up. Players were given a set percentage that did not change, no matter how it was divvied among them. “Billy Hunter was not constructive in this debate because he put out there, together with the union, that somehow this was designed to affect the cycle of how players were signed and keep them from becoming free agents a year earlier or something like that,” he said. “The factual challenge underlying that assertion is that we’re committed to paying fifty percent out. So all you’re talking about is how it’s distributed.”

  The conversation turned to Kwame Brown. “Poor Michael [Jordan],” Stern said. “That’s the system we had. We had a lot of people who were going to be untried, we’ll have to see how it works out. It wasn’t an optimal business situation where we were going to expend these valuable picks and careers were going to be made or unmade on guesswork, really.”

  The same type of statements were made over and over again, like a mantra, by some of the most influential people in the NBA.

  Said Phil Jackson, who coached a young Kobe Bryant: “You point to LeBron James, who came into this league and was there. He was comfortable. He was mature physically and relatively mature mentally. So there are exceptions to the rule and I think we make exceptions for that person or those particular people, not knowing there’s another seventy-five percent, eighty percent of them that aren’t going to be mature at the level or perform and they may get lost in the process.”

  Jerry Colangelo: “If the floodgates opened, there are going to be a lot more bad stories than good stories, because most kids are not ready emotionally. They may look like they have the physical talent to step in and do it, but they are not ready.”

  Rod Higgins, the general manager who drafted Kwame Brown with Michael Jordan: “For every success story, you probably could write a horror story.”

  They were wrong.

  You cannot.

  21.

  Arn Tellem thought he had pulled it off again. A year earlier, in 1996, the agent had deftly orchestrated Kobe Bryant’s path to Los Angeles. Bryant wanted to continue working out for teams, showcasing his talent and proving his NBA readiness in the days leading up to the draft. Tellem was one of the first to realize one of the quirks in the new rookie salary scale. Bryant’s rookie salary would be determined by his draft position and there would not be much salary difference whether a team took him high or closer to the middle of the first round. Bryant’s second contract would be much more lucrative when he could sign a rookie extension worth $70 million during his third season. Tellem recognized that the organization Bryant went to was of far more initial importance. When Tellem learned the full depth of the Lakers’ interest in drafting Bryant, he declined subsequent workout offers from teams, gambling correctly that ill-prepared organizations would not draft Bryant without viewing him privately. To Tellem, the Lakers’ organization manufactured stars in one of the game’s biggest, most glamorous markets. He pictured Bryant trailing in the image of Magic Johnson. “This is one of the few rights we have,” Tellem told Bryant. “We don’t have to go to every workout.” The maneuvering to land Bryant in Los Angeles culminated in Tellem running interference with John Nash and John Calipari, the Nets pair who would have changed the face of the NBA for much of a generation had they drafted Bryant after hosting him for three workouts. Tellem shared a relationship with both, but the future of his client trumped any collegial friendship. “It was extremely painful to go through that, but I did,” Tellem said years later.

  The following draft, Tellem believed that his new high school client, Tracy McGrady, would be drafted by the Chicago Bulls and paired with Michael Jordan. This too would require some outside-the-box thinking. Jerry Krause, Chicago’s general manager, went so far as to sneak McGrady through a hospital’s back doors in the middle of the night for a physical. Krause wanted questions answered about the durability of McGrady’s back. But Jordan, of course, intervened and effectively killed the deal for McGrady that would have broken up his partnership with Scottie Pippen. “That’s when it started to unravel,” Tellem said. “I thought going into the morning of the draft, this was going to be the greatest thing. I’d have done it with Kobe in LA and now I’d have Tracy in Chicago.”

  The type of sys
tem manipulation that Tellem employed to maneuver Bryant to the Lakers and McGrady nearly to Chicago became impossible in subsequent years. There is little chance Bryant would have made it to the Lakers had he declared for the draft a few years later. By then, teams had to keep up-to-date on the best high school prospects or risk losing out on the next Bryant or Kevin Garnett. “Teams would take him, even if they weren’t sure [about him], on hope and belief that you can’t pass [him up],” Tellem said. “Then, with teams, there was enough doubt. Teams had the mind-set that they could take Todd Fuller over him. I don’t see that happening in today’s environment.”

  Among NBA agents, Tellem was one of the most powerful. He loved baseball while growing up along Philadelphia’s Main Line and adored the Phillies. He filled most of his childhood by playing APBA Baseball, the mail-order board game, and poring over statistics. He came to the conclusion that his future would not involve a baseball playing career—or any sports playing career—and graduated in 1979 from the University of Michigan Law School. He was working at an LA firm, drowning in mundane work, when he one day thumbed through the pages of the Los Angeles Daily Journal and found a help-wanted ad for general counsel to the Clippers. The franchise was owned by Donald Sterling, the eccentric lawyer and real estate developer, known initially for his frugality and, in recent years, his racism. Tellem wanted his job application to stand out. He mailed his resume packed inside a deflated basketball. The Clippers hired Tellem, where he learned the inner workings of an NBA franchise through the prism of working in a dysfunctional front office. Sterling and the Clippers always seemed to be suing someone or being sued themselves. Tellem left the Clippers and began his own sports agency in 1989. He struggled initially, attending baseball’s spring training to pitch clients. But his client list grew fast and coincided with the rising salaries of professional athletes, of which Tellem earned the standard 4 percent cut of each contract. A friendship with Sonny Vaccaro benefited both. They met while Vaccaro still worked with Nike to negotiate a shoe deal with Cheryl Miller, the great women’s basketball player and the sister of Reggie Miller, another of Tellem’s clients. Vaccaro felt he could trust Tellem. He was easygoing and they both loved to eat. Vaccaro advised players like Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal to sign Tellem to represent them. Meanwhile, Tellem’s firm continued to expand rapidly. SFX Entertainment paid nearly $25 million for Tellem & Associates nearly a decade after Tellem started it with little more than his law degree, experience with the Clippers, and his avid interest in sports.

  Tellem represented many of the players who jumped to the NBA from high school as they broke into the league. Some, many years after washing out of the NBA or not making it at all, regret the decision they made in not signing with Tellem when they originally declared. DeAngelo Collins was a mammoth talent who dominated his opposition through both skill and physicality. He went undrafted in 2002 after declaring for the NBA out of Inglewood High School. Teams shared concerns about his character and Collins believes an agent like Tellem would have bolstered his image. “The only reason why I’m probably out of the NBA, I was supposed to sign with Arn Tellem,” Collins said. “I didn’t, I didn’t do that.” Instead, Collins signed with Immortal Sports & Entertainment, the same agency that initially represented Lenny Cooke during his failed NBA bid. “The only reason I was signed into that place was because of my other talent, as far as movies, music,” Collins explained. “There were other talents that I had that I wanted to [pursue]. You only live once and I wanted to live. So that’s what I was trying to do. And it didn’t work out like that.” Korleone Young shared similar misgivings. “I was gonna get with Arn, too,” Young said. “Arn was honest. A lot of the real good agents were the most honest. But when you’re from Wichita, I’ll just keep it real. I hadn’t really done a lot like this with white people, so that’s part of the business. So I didn’t trust them, long story short. How many of us do just trust them all the way?”

  It is debatable whether Tellem was a skilled enough agent to resuscitate the careers of those who floundered for reasons beyond their choice of representation. But their belief in Tellem all these years later is a reflection of his sterling reputation. Allan Bristow, a former player and executive for the Charlotte Hornets, once allegedly became so incensed with Tellem during discussions over a new contract for Kendall Gill that he choked Tellem. Bristow, standing 6 feet 7 inches, denied choking Tellem, nearly a foot shorter, but said both had acted unprofessionally. “Bristow told the press that we’d had a ‘heated, eye-to-eye discussion,’ ” Tellem later joked to Sports Illustrated. “That’s true, but he lifted me a foot off the floor to conduct it.” Bristow then asked if Tellem needed a ride to the airport. If so, Bristow could drive him. Players knew that Tellem would vehemently defend them in their darkest hour. He represented controversial players, like Latrell Sprewell, when he choked his coach, and Albert Belle, once baseball’s bad boy. Tellem looked for the soft spots among his clientele—ways in which he could relate to them. Many of Tellem’s clients developed an easy rapport with Tellem’s three sons. Tracy McGrady would race back from workouts on many days to play Wiffle ball with Eric, Matty, and Mike in Tellem’s backyard. The boys are grown now, but that doesn’t mean Tellem’s house is empty. Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian big man who spent a year playing at Kansas, signed Tellem to represent him in 2014. Embiid fractured a bone in his foot prior to the draft and spent the summer at the home of Tellem and his wife, Nancy, while recovering. He discovered how to order online food during his stay. Every 15 minutes or so, one of the Tellems would hear their bell ring late at night, signaling another deliveryman with another one of Embiid’s orders—a drink from one restaurant, an appetizer from another, an entrée from another—until finally his meal was complete.

  Despite the altercation with Bristow, Tellem tried avoiding confrontation. He preferred calling contract talks “discussions” instead of “negotiations,” and tried to make any executive understand that he was acting in the team’s best interest, as well as his client’s. Tellem assumed the mantra of politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, saying, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” In that way, he was still the boy who obsessively studied baseball statistics. He overprepared for each meeting with team executives, trying to figure out every possible outcome. “Their career length is higher compared with every other group of players,” Tellem said of players who entered the NBA out of high school. “Put aside earnings, which are also off the chart, their [average] length of career is close to ten years. That’s what bothers me. You’re entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts. If you don’t want high school players to go and you believe that’s not the right thing, fine. You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. The facts are the facts and let’s talk about the facts.”

  Tellem and Bryant parted ways after Bryant developed into one of the game’s best players. However, most of Tellem’s relationships endured. Tellem enjoyed watching as Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal evolved from shy teenagers into stars and team leaders. O’Neal hardly looked up from his seat when he and Tellem met for the first time. Over the years, he became one of the game’s more eloquent spokesmen. “I don’t think anyone I’ve had came as far as him,” Tellem said. “The other thing that he learned to do, which a lot of players can’t do, is if he had an issue where something was bothering him, he could articulate it and tell you. That’s huge. To have a client that can do that, it gives you the ability to forge a much better relationship.” The players most deem as failures? Tellem still labels their careers as successes. Kwame Brown and Eddy Curry lasted longer in the NBA than most players. They drew lucrative salaries, even if their predicted stardom did not pan out. Brown was paid more than $60 million through 13 seasons. Curry made more than $70 million in 12 years, but still faced crippling financial problems. “With Tracy and Jermaine, in particular, what separated them from others who didn’t succeed as long or as well, they’re willing to list
en,” Tellem said. “They wanted to learn. The challenge with Kwame and [Eddy] Curry is it was much more difficult to reach them. They’re very nice guys, really good people. I’m not blaming them. I’m not blaming us. It’s not just high school players. It’s anyone. There are some players where it’s much more difficult to reach them.” While Tellem guided several high school players into the NBA, one of the most well-known had branched off on his own. Aaron Goodwin had helped LeBron James secure more than $120 million in endorsements before he had played a single NBA game. Yet, James shocked the NBA when he severed ties with Goodwin in the summer of 2005. James joined Leon Rose, an agent with Creative Artists Agency, yet entrusted the bulk of his marketing future to his longtime friend Maverick Carter. In 2012, James turned to another friend, Rich Paul, to become his agent. “He used to listen to me and how I was going to get out of the inner city and make a difference, and I used to listen to him say how he was going to get out and make a difference,” James told the New York Times about Paul. “Those conversations turned to how we are going to do it, and then to, why not do it together? I wanted him to be with me.” News of both moves were initially met with skepticism and raised eyebrows across the league. Here was another example of a player having misplaced faith in those close to him. However, both Carter and Paul handled their newfound power and responsibility deftly, earning other clients across the league. Now, the moves are an example of how James has worked to comfortably steer his own future.