Bill Blair summoned Kevin Garnett midway through the first quarter of Minnesota’s season opener in Sacramento on November 3, 1995. Garnett jumped up and walked slowly. He chewed bubble gum, wore a rubber band around his right wrist, and walked onto the ARCO Arena court, becoming the first person to play in an NBA game out of high school in two decades.
He needed less than two minutes to score a basket, banking in his first attempt off a feed from teammate Tom Gugliotta. He had grown up admiring Walt Williams, the Sacramento forward. Garnett was now guarded by Williams. Williams scored 20 points in the game, some off Garnett. Garnett mostly held his own. He took only four shots in his 16 minutes, sinking all of them in Minnesota’s loss. “For a guy who’s as young as he is, you’d think he’d be out of control or nervous, and he wasn’t,” Williams told reporters after the game.
Garnett simply wanted to play basketball, maintaining the mentality of the kid shooting every hour of the day at Springfield Park. He became the ideal player to reopen the avenue for high school players to join the NBA. His interests did not include partying or burning through money—not with all the basketball to be soaked up. “He just kind of seemed born to play,” Sichting said. Garnett’s checks piled up in his locker. He simply told Clayton Wilson that he was saving them up. “Money didn’t really matter to him,” Wilson said. “If the going rate was $30,000 for an NBA player, he’d still play.” Like Isiah Thomas, McHale and Flip Saunders scripted a transition program for Garnett. They planned to place him with a host family, maybe one near the University of Minnesota, so that Garnett could be near some of his peers. “I think you can imagine Kevin’s reaction to that,” Fleisher said. Garnett moved into a three-bedroom luxury condominium in Minnetonka, a Minneapolis suburb. He lived with Jamie Peters, a longtime friend from Mauldin. “We had spent a lot of time preparing for all these contingencies that ended up being a waste of time,” McHale said. “We didn’t have to do any of them.”
The newness led to a series of light moments that reflected a teenager’s adjustment.
Fleisher once called the organization. Garnett, he said, could not attend practice with the ongoing snowstorm and all. “Snowstorm?” Wilson asked Eric Fleisher. “It’s a light drizzle outside.”
“Really?” Fleisher said. “He made it sound like a blizzard.”
Garnett tried entering one game, forgetting to change from his warm-up shirt into a jersey. He looked for it under the team’s bench as the game halted. “Kevin, it wouldn’t be under there,” Blair said. “Try the locker room.” Occasionally, Garnett would forget to pack for a road trip. The team left after home games and a friend had to scramble to gather Garnett’s possessions. “They would meet him at the airport with literally just a garbage bag of clothes,” Wilson said. Garnett racked up long-distance phone bills on the road by constantly talking to his friends. The organization finally bought him a phone card.
Clayton Wilson had also never seen someone so superstitious. Garnett barely paid attention to his paychecks. Yet, he always wore a lucky $2 bill in his game shoes. During Garnett’s rookie season, Wilson came into the locker room at halftime to find him irate. “Who’s in my locker?” Garnett asked. “You tell these motherfuckers to stay out of my locker. Someone stole my $2 bill.”
“K.G., look in your locker,” Wilson said. “You have hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of dollars in there. No one is going to take a $2 bill and leave the rest.” Sam Mitchell listened to the conversation from his adjacent locker. “You mean this?” he asked, pulling out the wrinkled bill. “Man, I found this in the hallway. I didn’t know it was yours.” Garnett returned it to his shoe. “And all is right in the world,” Wilson said.
Garnett’s playing time slowly increased as his rookie season trudged on. “You almost forget as a coach that he’s going to get bigger, he’s going to get stronger, he’s going to grow into this body to some degree,” Blair said. With Minnesota still struggling, the organization fired Blair midway through the season and named Flip Saunders as coach. Everyone talked about Garnett’s bright future. Yet he had much to learn in the present. Cedric Ceballos of the Lakers dunked over him in a game and yelled, “Not ready,” at Garnett during his descent. Still, Del Harris, the Lakers coach, made sure to introduce himself to Garnett after the game. Harris did that with all the players he considered to be on the cusp of greatness. He did not know he would be tutoring his own high school star the next season.
“The next day in practice, it was as if nothing happened,” said Randy Wittman, a Timberwolves assistant coach who would become the head coach of the Washington Wizards. “[Garnett’s] head wasn’t down. He wasn’t pouting, which happens to a lot of players. Forget about a high school kid. This happens to the guys that are 30 years old. That was really the first sign I really saw of, This kid’s going to be special. By the end of his rookie year, he got through the war. He understood what the process was and then he just took off. He had things he had to work on. All you had to do is really get him and instruct him, because he was going to do the rest. He was going to work.”
Garnett started under Saunders and finished his rookie season with averages of 10.4 points and 6.3 rebounds. The Timberwolves barely improved on their win total from a season earlier, but the organization and the city could see a better future evolving with Garnett.
As for Ceballos?
“I remember every time that we played those guys from then on, his intensity to play was at a different level,” Saunders said. “It was one of those things where he took pride that he was going to try to dominate those guys because they questioned him when he first got into the league.”
Garnett’s body grew stronger. He looked like an NBA player and, other than a few eccentricities, acted like one. He wanted to learn and he listened. But if he had opened a door for other high school players to jump directly to the NBA, he did not want to be responsible for leaving it open. “I’ve heard that there are high school kids who are thinking about going straight to the NBA like I did,” Garnett told USA Today. “Well, they’re crazy. I’d tell them to put aside all the money, the girls and the fame…I’d tell them, There’s nothing easy about the NBA. If I could have gone to college, I would have in a heartbeat.”
The league wasn’t a joke.
4.
John Nash and John Calipari celebrated the eve of the 1996 NBA draft by hosting Joe and Pamela Bryant for dinner. Nash and Calipari ran the New Jersey Nets, a transient franchise in the shadows of the New York Knicks. They were so new to the organization that they had yet to find housing. Calipari became coach and executive vice president after guiding UMass to the Final Four. He maintained veto power over player personnel decisions and had hired Nash as his experienced general manager. Nash had left the Washington Bullets after an extended playoff drought in one of those quit-before-being-fired deals. Like the Timberwolves a season ago, they felt that the renewal of the Nets would begin through the NBA draft. No selection process in professional sports can reinvigorate a franchise like basketball’s draft. A fruitful pick enlivens an organization for years. A basketball star does not need to rely on a strong offensive line or sure-handed receivers, as a franchise NFL quarterback does. He does not need fielders to back him up, as an ace pitcher in baseball does. Basketball stars are self-sufficient. The very best can score and defend and lift a franchise nearly all by themselves. Nash and Calipari were certain they were on the verge of such an acquisition as they welcomed the Bryants inside Calipari’s suite at the Radisson Suites Hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey.
They made small talk around Italian courses. Nash had coached in summer league games against Joe Bryant, a 6-foot-9-inch forward and a member of the Philadelphia 76ers when Darryl Dawkins broke into the NBA out of high school. Pamela’s brother, Chubby Cox, also played briefly in the NBA. The Bryants were basketball royalty in Philadelphia. At the dinner, Calipari and Nash told the Bryants that they would draft their precocious 17-year-old son, Kobe. Calipari had hosted Kobe Bryant for three pers
onal workouts. One stellar workout could mean that a prospect just had a good day. Three? That forecast superstardom. The Nets drew the draft’s eighth selection. Bryant would surely tumble to them with a handful of established college players for the taking. Why risk passing one of them for a high school guard? All the other high school entrants—Dawkins, Moses Malone, Bill Willoughby, and Kevin Garnett—had been frontcourt players. Bryant was a slender guard. At 6 feet 6 inches, Bryant did not even reach his father’s height.
Jerry West, the legendary Lakers player turned general manager of the franchise, wanted to trade for New Jersey’s pick. He offered his center, Vlade Divac. “I love Divac and wish I had drafted him in 1989 when I was with the 76ers,” Nash told West. Every league executive knew West’s intent to shed as much salary as possible to make an earnest run at Shaquille O’Neal during the nearing free agency period, when teams could sign players once their previous contracts expired. Calipari and Nash declined. They figured they would be rebuilding, a blueprint that would take a couple of years to implement. Divac played reliably but, at 28 years old, they figured he would be on his career’s downside by the time they righted the team. West would have to continue his search elsewhere if he wanted to trade Divac. Nash and Calipari wanted the pick and they wanted Bryant.
With the news divulged, the Bryants smiled and appeared eager at the prospect of Bryant beginning his professional career close to home, Nash recalled. Calipari asked Joe Bryant what he expected from Kobe during his rookie season. “I expect that he’ll be a starter in his rookie year and I expect he’ll make the All-Star Team in his second year,” Bryant responded.
They said their good-byes for then. A bright union lay ahead for both parties. “Joe had some pretty lofty goals for Kobe right out of the box,” Calipari told Nash. Nash believed in Kobe Bryant, but did not necessarily share those immediate high expectations. “Yeah,” Nash rationalized, “but that’s a father talking.”
Nash slept that night believing the Nets would draft Bryant and be fast-tracked toward NBA relevancy. He awoke to a day he would remember in another way, one that, he said, contained “the biggest regret of my professional life.”
•••
“I’ve seen a better high school player than you,” Debbie Lucas told her husband. She announced it in a casual tone that instantly whetted John Lucas’s curiosity. Since his abbreviated stint as Moses Malone’s roommate at Maryland, Lucas had become the first overall pick in the NBA’s 1976 draft, by the Houston Rockets. He battled cocaine and alcohol abuse before straightening himself out and successfully counseling other substance abusers. He coached the Philadelphia 76ers in 1994 and had recently returned from a long road trip when Debbie Lucas informed him of the mystery skilled player. “Who are you talking about?” he asked. There was a kid at their daughter’s high school, Lower Merion, everyone raved about, she said. “We’ve got to go see this guy named Kobe Bean,” Debbie Lucas added.
The legend of Bryant, only 16, was already spreading. Most heard about him by word of mouth, doubting the hyperbolic description until confirming it for themselves. John Lucas became the latest convert. He attended a Lower Merion game at the Palestra, home to the University of Pennsylvania’s basketball teams. Lucas immediately noticed Bryant’s high skill level. Bryant started the game playing center. He ended it as a guard. She wasn’t lying, Lucas thought of his wife’s declaration when he came across a familiar face at the arena in Joe Bryant. The two had squared off during their playing days. Lucas addressed Bryant by his nickname. “Jellybean, what are you doing here?” Lucas asked.
“My son plays,” Bryant answered.
“Wait,” Lucas said. “I’m here to see your son?”
“I guess so,” Bryant said.
Pamela Bryant gave birth to Kobe in Philadelphia a year after Joe Bryant played for Philadelphia in the 1977 NBA Finals. That appearance would be the highlight of his truncated NBA career. “Joe was a very, very talented player, and a lot like Darryl [Dawkins],” said Gene Shue, who coached both on the 76ers. “But I always felt with Joe that there was a little bit more there as well.” Bryant made pit stops in San Diego and Houston before continuing his career overseas. Pamela, their two daughters, and six-year-old Kobe accompanied him. They first settled in Rieti, Italy, as Joe Bryant embarked on an eight-year European career with four different teams.
Kobe Bryant displayed the same affection for the game as his father did. John Cox, Pamela’s father, mailed him videotapes of NBA games and Kobe devoured the moves of his favorite players. He attended his father’s games and had to be shuffled off the court after putting on halftime shooting exhibitions. In his bedroom was a giant poster of Magic Johnson. Kobe performed basketball moves kids his age in Europe could only imagine. But his talents did not faze them. He played well in an American sport because he was American, they figured. He would be average against other American kids, they rationalized.
That would be one of the few times anyone considered Kobe Bryant average in basketball. Joe Bryant’s playing career ended in 1992 and the family returned to Philadelphia.
Like Lucas later, Gregg Downer first heard of the exploits of a talented middle schooler in his district before he actually witnessed Kobe Bryant play. He attended one of Bryant’s games and found it difficult to fully gauge Bryant’s talent level. The coach kept yanking Bryant in and out of the game. Downer did figure out who Bryant’s father was and invited the 13-year-old Bryant to work out with his varsity team at Lower Merion.
The Lower Merion gym—long before a new one would be dedicated by Bryant and named after him—creaked and groaned under the weight of the players. Wooden bleachers protruded from both sides. Wind invaded its insides, making it “drafty as hell,” said Doug Young, a sophomore on the team when Bryant came to the practice. “For someone to inject some electricity in there, it required a lot,” Young added.
The team noticed Joe Bryant walk in first. They tried stealing side glances between drills. Every kid in Philadelphia knew of Jellybean. Not many people of his size had ever walked into their gym. The team was not exactly nationally known. “Quite honestly, we hadn’t had a guy who could really dunk in probably ten years,” Young said.
Their eyes then turned to Kobe Bryant. He stood about 6 feet 2 inches tall and maybe he weighed 140 pounds, if that. “He looked [like] a lamp,” said Rob Schwartz, Bryant’s future Lower Merion teammate.
The team ran through some exercises. Downer divvied them up for a scrimmage. Who is this kid? Young wondered. He and his teammates figured they would soon put Bryant in his place.
Bryant scored once.
The team did not have to say anything, but many later agreed on their consensus thinking: That kid’s pretty good.
Bryant peeled around the lane and nailed a jumper, displaying footwork beyond his age. “This kid is going to be a pro,” Downer prophesied to one of his assistants. Bryant made a bunch of shots. He missed a bunch, too. He played defense as fervently as he played offense. “I wouldn’t call it cockiness,” Young recalled. “But there was this kind of sense of, Who are you guys? Instead of just trying to prove himself as an eighth grader.”
How do you become elated and deflated at the same time? Young knew Lower Merion would never be the same again. The team would be better, much better in the years to come. But the upperclassmen would have to adjust to Bryant and not the other way around. Young left the practice with his teammate Matt Snider. “I guess Coach Downer’s going to have a ninth grader on the team next year,” Young surmised.
That would be only the beginning. “He transformed that place into this really loud, really warm, really buzzing place,” Young said. “People came out to the games to watch him. And you could almost feel that the first time he came into the gym, that that kind of energy was coming.”
The stories of Bryant’s competitiveness would become legendary. He once came over to play at Young’s house and tore down the rim with a dunk only a couple of minutes into the game. “I think it’s time t
o take these games to the playground, boys,” Young’s mother gently suggested. Bryant was maniacal. He often called on Rob Schwartz, a scrappy benchwarmer, to shoot with him at 5 a.m. “And when I say go shoot, I would go rebound for him for an hour,” Schwartz said. Sometimes Bryant and Scwartz played halfcourt games up to 100 with each basket counting as a point. Bryant often went up by 85 points—sometimes more. Schwartz, about 5 feet 7 inches tall, swore he once scored eight points against Bryant. “He was practicing real-game situations against me,” Schwartz said. “I just prayed for him to miss a jump shot every once in a while and that’s the way I’d get the ball back.”
Downer often paired Bryant with Schwartz in drills. Phil Jackson employed the same tactic with Michael Jordan, with the stronger player hopefully elevating the weaker one to his level. The gambit once nearly ended in Schwartz’s spilled blood. Schwartz and Bryant’s team had possession of the ball in a tied game as they closed out practice. Schwartz dribbled around the court as Bryant screamed and demanded the ball.
Everyone’s going to think I’m going to be passing the ball to him, so I’m going to use him as a decoy, Schwartz figured. Schwartz would never make the mistake of using Bryant as a decoy again. He pump-faked a pass to Bryant and drove in for a layup. An opponent nudged him in the back. Schwartz’s attempt careened out. The other team raced up court and scored the game-winning basket.
Schwartz heard Bryant slam the ball behind him. He felt him staring daggers into his back. He did not want to turn around.
“Why didn’t I get the ball?” Bryant asked. “Who do you think you are?”
Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution Page 5
