The league would face no more contracts like Garnett’s. In the end, his contract had less of an impact on him and more on the group that trailed him. Stephon Marbury, Minnesota’s point guard, had once been Garnett’s close friend and ally. As a rookie in 1996–1997, Marbury averaged 15.8 points and 7.8 assists per game and teamed with Garnett to lead Minnesota to the playoffs. “[Celtics legendary point guard] Bob Cousy and those guys must be sick to their stomachs,” Marbury said to reporters upon learning about Garnett’s contract. Still, Marbury viewed himself as Garnett’s peer. “After Kevin’s deal, he was never going to be able to get paid the same as Kevin and he thought he was worth every bit that Kevin was able to receive,” said Fleisher, who also served as Marbury’s agent. The relationship between Marbury and Garnett soured. Marbury occasionally refused to pass the basketball to Garnett. He represented a young, entitled class of players who judged themselves in comparison to the paychecks of others more than by their play on the court. Garnett had not done much in the league, but had displayed the promise for more. Players of lesser caliber and potential still clamored for what had been deemed “Garnett money.” “Steph had a tough time dealing with the fact that Kevin was maybe going to be making twice as much money as him, yet they were basically equals on the court with what they did for the team,” Saunders said. “Ultimately, the contract alienated Stephon.”
9.
Most of them started with the same dream. The thought could have been rooted in watching Michael Jordan plant his feet and rise on television. It could have spread by wanting to lift themselves or their families out of poverty. The dream of one day making it to the NBA was like one day winning the lottery. The odds were ridiculously minuscule. The payoff was laughingly lucrative. But Kevin Garnett proved everyone wrong. His success provided a blueprint for a new generation. If he could do it, others could also beat the odds, forsake college, and become instantaneous millionaires.
They became the favored few, the ones who experienced that huge growth spurt and towered over their peers. They could dribble a basketball, shoot, pass, and jump from an early age. They were the prodigies and phenoms allegedly bound for greatness. National magazines wrote glowing profiles about them. Ranking analysts placed them high on their lists from an early age, sometimes right around puberty, sometimes even before it. The competition had their eye out for them now. But they could handle it. Their skills topped those of every other teenager. The dream was sustained, nurtured, and encouraged. They were special. They focused their energy and time on basketball: playing it, practicing it. Why not? It was fun. It was a game. Schoolwork and social integration got pushed to the background. They were the lottery winners, the ones in a million, the needles in the haystack. The best since Wilt Chamberlain. A lot of slick-talking people lobbied for their ears. They made promises about the future and how they were the best equipped to steer these young athletes toward that payday. The advice may have come from a friend, an uncle, or a coach. It could have come from all of them and, sometimes, even more people came to comprise their inner circle. They got whispered to by runners and agents who sought the next Michael Jordan with the same fervor exhibited by the sneaker companies. The high school coach, a pillar of the community for years at a lot of high schools, was once the guiding conscience for prep athletes. After McGrady’s contract, summer league coaches gained more credibility and influence. Those were the hot months when players would get ranked and pad their budding resumes, while traveling the country and receiving the attention and adulation of the shoe companies. The idea of delayed gratification evaporated after Garnett. The path of least resistance to the riches and fame of the NBA became the preferred route.
The system weeded out the weaker players, the ones who did not develop, who hit that early growth spurt and did not continue to sprout. As Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and others assimilated into the NBA, the few failures who tried leaping into the NBA from high school became nearly as widely known as the players who successfully made the transition. While still in high school, Garnett played in a summer league game against a teenager named Taj McDavid. Garnett casually told McDavid afterward that he was “a player,” a compliment McDavid took to heart. McDavid was a rail-thin 6 feet 6 inches who did it all for the Palmetto High Mustangs in their red-and-white jerseys. He scored. He rebounded. He defended. But the Mustangs played in the second-smallest classification in South Carolina. He was unknown even within the state. Jermaine O’Neal, the state’s premier player in McDavid’s class, had not heard of him. Neither had most college coaches or NBA personnel.
McDavid was a good high school player who ignored his schoolwork. He may have even become a decent lower-level college player. Still, McDavid entered his name right alongside O’Neal and Bryant into the draft class of 1996. Marty Blake ran the NBA’s scouting service. He could not have been more off base in his prediction about Kobe Bryant. He was dead accurate when asked about McDavid, however. Blake had to phone his sources in South Carolina when he first heard the name. He had feared that a quality player, a premier prospect, had somehow slipped beneath his radar. Nope. “He can’t play,” Blake told the Boston Globe. “Who is filling these kids with these dreams?” The decision stunned McDavid’s principal and high school coach. They counseled against the decision. “What’s wrong with dreaming?” McDavid told the Globe. “My day will come. I know that. I know that it’s going to come. People around here don’t think I’m crazy.” An uncle told the newspaper that no one in the NBA could stop McDavid, that his stock was low only because he had played at a small school.
Framed basketball certificates covered every corner of McDavid’s room at the mobile home he shared with his uncle and his mother. Pictures of the Bulls and Michael Jordan also decorated his wall. The family waited and watched on draft night. John Nash was not the only one who had his bubble burst during the 1996 draft. McDavid, to no one’s surprise except that of his family, went undrafted, caught between a kid’s dream and an adult’s reality.
At the time, Steve Lytton coached at Anderson College, a junior college transitioning to play in Division II athletics. He had awakened one morning and read an article in the Anderson Independent-Mail headlined, “Palmetto’s McDavid Takes Shot at Draft.” Anderson College stood roughly 20 minutes from Palmetto High. Lytton had watched McDavid play a handful of times. McDavid had a future somewhere in the college game. That, Lytton was sure of. McDavid was athletic. He did not shoot particularly well, but was quick and cagey enough to often field his own miss and lay the ball home. Years around the game had taught Lytton the wonders of how just a couple of months playing against stiffer college competition could improve and toughen a high school kid. He worried that McDavid had received tainted advice and would be hurt by missing a crucial step in the maturation of a player, but he did not think it was his place to go out and give him his opinion.
Instead, Lytton wished McDavid the best. “I know you have some things going for you and I know you have some aspirations,” Lytton told McDavid. “I just want you to know that if you have a problem with that and you don’t get the offer you’re looking for, let me have the chance to work with you.”
McDavid remembered the talk when he went undrafted. He decided to attend Anderson with his college eligibility still in limbo. He did not bother informing Lytton, who learned of McDavid’s enrollment from a member of his team. He brought McDavid into his office. “You need to get into the weight room,” Lytton told him. “You need to get started working on your basketball drills and I’ll help with some of the things when the season’s over. You need to get in here and play with our guys and go through the workouts with them. That’s going to help you as far as where you go from here and what you’re going to do with your basketball future.”
That ended up being the last meaningful conversation Lytton had with McDavid. McDavid petitioned and regained his college eligibility from the NCAA, but never played for Anderson and mostly vanished from sight. Every once in a while, Lytton would hear th
at McDavid had visited the gym, but never on a regular basis. Lytton soon accepted an assistant coaching position at Virginia Tech and was never even sure if McDavid had finished out the semester at the school. Lytton had always liked McDavid during their brief interactions and sometimes wondered if he could have helped McDavid reach his ultimate goal. “There were some bad decisions, perhaps some inaccurate advice,” Lytton said. “But a lot of people make bad decisions in their lives, myself included. But rarely do we pay the type of price he did in this particular instance.”
As McDavid tried restarting his career, he made his way out to Los Angeles and played against a high schooler named Ellis Richardson. McDavid passed down the same compliment to Richardson that Garnett had once awarded him. While McDavid was the linchpin of his high school team, Richardson did not even really fit into the dynamic of his squad at Sun Valley’s Polytechnic High School in California. Richardson had changed high schools and spent most of his junior season sidelined with an ankle sprain. His teammates were a tight unit and could do with or without him. Richardson would often tell them about how he was congregating with other stars like Schea Cotton, another phenom, during his off time. He was aloof and his own coach considered him strange.
“Ellis, do you want to play or do you not want to play?” Sun Valley’s coach Jay Werner would ask. Werner could have gone either way.
Werner went on vacation during the late spring of 1998. Upon his return he was shocked to learn that Richardson had faxed his name to the NBA as an early draft applicant. But Garnett had applied to the NBA when Richardson was a high school freshman and he had decided at that impressionable age that, one day in the future, he would do the same. Richardson had called the league, asked what he needed to do to apply for the draft, and filed the required paperwork. A couple of NBA teams called and inquired about him, just to cover their bases. They found out that Richardson was not ranked among the top 100 high school players in California.
“He was an athletic kid—there’s no doubt about it,” Werner said. “But the NBA? Even Division I?” They had talked about the process briefly, once. Werner had advised him to attend a junior college. “You’re not ready,” Werner said. “You can go there and work on your game.”
“But he got some advice from other people,” Werner recalled. “I kind of just said, ‘You have to be kidding me.’ ”
Richardson’s name went uncalled in the 1998 draft. The Los Angeles Times caught up with Richardson two years after his NBA declaration. By then, Richardson had served eight months in prison after being convicted of a robbery in the San Fernando Valley.
“After the draft was over, that’s when I realized I made a mistake,” Richardson told the paper. “What I’ve learned over the past two and a half years is a lot. I’ve learned the people I was dealing with, who were telling me I was going to get drafted, were bogus people. I should have waited.”
In prison, he prayed, did push-ups, and tried to steer clear of the surrounding violence. He played at a park upon his release, telling anyone who would listen that he had a tryout with the Dallas Mavericks or the Los Angeles Clippers coming any day now. That day never arrived and he relocated to Florida.
The stories of McDavid and Richardson serve as cautionary tales for those opposed to the inclusion of high school players in the NBA draft. The league was a huge carrot that many kids would aspire to and few would reach. Skeptics predicted more flameouts on the horizon and that those kids would ruin their chances of playing college basketball and gaining an education. But McDavid and Richardson would have struggled against college competition, let alone professional players.
The legitimate next wave of high school superstars, the ones who had tested themselves at Sonny Vaccaro’s camp and drew recognition from the shoe companies, would provide a tougher case study for the NBA. They would blossom into many NBA success stories. But, occasionally, others diverged from the path to stardom. The combination of youth and potential often proved toxic. The media overestimated the mix. What a prospect may become was more tantalizing than what had been established. The ending only sometimes synced with the prediction. Yes, they got drafted—the ones who did—by an NBA team. They lived the dream, but it did not feel like one anymore. Basketball became work. It involved sweating hard, bending over and tugging at shorts, puffing-for-air–type work. Kevin Garnett knew this. So did Kobe Bryant. But some of the other kids who attempted to jump to the NBA in their shadows remained clueless. The transition was tougher than anyone ever told them it would be. They encountered men on the court who fought to feed their families. In high school, they had never played against someone at that level. In the NBA, everyone was better than they were. They could no longer get their shot off as easily as they once had. Someone jumped higher for the rebound that had fallen in their lap in high school. The offenses were complicated. The defensive assignments may as well have been a foreign language. Their coaches had mandates to win now. Those coaches had little time to develop players who would probably only reach their physical maturity once the coach had been fired or had moved on. The games came one after another. In high school, they played about 30-something games in a season. In the NBA, teams played almost every other night. They were constantly traveling and adjusting to new beds. They were always tired, even though they hardly played. They lost more games in their first couple of months as professionals than they had in their entire lives. The media built them up, they thought, just to tear them down. They wondered why the kid they had written about for years was not playing like the next Jordan. The fans had their expectations inflated and now constantly derided them. Their confidence slipped.
Those were just some of the on-court adjustments they had to deal with. Off the court, the kids swore they had not changed. Everyone and everything around them did. A friend or a few usually accompanied them to the big, new city. But they were just as directionless as the players themselves. Balance a checkbook? They had never had a bank account until their first NBA paycheck. But they had made it, so their family made it. If the family made it, the extended family made it. If the extended family made it, the newfound cousins made it. Everyone needed something. If the athlete bought them clothes, they wanted cars. If he bought them cars, they wanted houses. Yes, the money was nice. But they burned through it. The peripheral benefits—the women, the adulation, the fame, the respect, and more women—were nice, too. But they had two feet in the adult world with no clue as to what it meant to be a man and to truly dedicate themselves to developing their talents. They needed more ears for all the people who tried lending advice or gaining their favor, only they never had the opportunity to find out who they actually were and what they stood for. The 32-year-old man with the locker next to them did not want to be a friend or a mentor. That man wanted the scant minutes of playing time the kids did receive, so he could furnish his family with the same lifestyle for a couple more years. Opponents would not provide any favors or tips, either. They wanted their contracts. Why should these kids come into the league as millionaires with a guaranteed three years of job security without having done anything to earn it?
In a year or two, their NBA careers were close to ending. They never had a chance. They were individuals with stellar talent and stunted growth. They needed to continually work on their game for it to advance. Like a blooming plant that receives no water, sun, or manicuring, their careers withered without that sustenance. Most NBA coaches and executives advised that the real dream, the one with substance, was not to make it to the NBA. That was just the beginning. The goal was to make a mark in the league, one worthy enough to receive a second and third contract. Instead, their 15 minutes of fame may have lasted a couple of years, maybe three. The rest of their lives, which they had never bothered concerning themselves with, now loomed.
No matter. On to the next phenom. So-and-so was a flop, a bust, a dud. But this next kid? Why, he was the best since Jordan.
10.
The shifting demographic of younger players entering t
he NBA troubled Jerry Colangelo. Colangelo was self-made, an athlete turned sports tycoon, revered and respected in Phoenix. He was general manager of the Phoenix Suns until 1987 when he led a group of investors that purchased the organization for $44.5 million. The team had sold out every game since downtown’s America West Arena first opened in 1992. That season, Charles Barkley propelled the Suns to the NBA championship against his close friend Michael Jordan. Chicago bested Phoenix in six games, capping its first of three straight championships.
If it was sports and Phoenix, Colangelo had his hands in it. By 1994, he had been named the NBA’s Executive of the Year four different times. He spearheaded a group that brought a baseball expansion team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, into existence. Football? He held a financial stake in the Arena Football League’s Arizona Rattlers. Hockey? Colangelo headed investors who brought the Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix in 1996. In transforming the sports landscape, he also revitalized the downtown, parking his teams there and breathing life into the area’s economy.
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