Smith was put in another home after eighth grade to start the transition from boyhood to adulthood. He was without his brother and felt like a stranger. He occasionally tried to return to Lydia, only to be turned away. Sometimes, he opted to sleep on park benches instead. Carl Bauer, Doris’s son, heard of Smith’s new predicament and Smith again changed homes, this time to the Sullivan House on the city’s South Side. Smith did not like his first high school and asked to transfer to King College Prep, one of the city’s powerhouse basketball programs. He had not played basketball beyond pickup games until a five-inch growth spurt the summer before eighth grade made him perfect for the sport. Meanwhile, he continued visiting psychiatrists. They could see his problems—anyone could spot the root of his pain as the lack of ever feeling loved. But he did not like to take medication. At King, Smith would become a moldable player for its coach, Landon “Sonny” Cox. Cox took over the school’s basketball program in 1981 and would produce 15 All-State players and more than 500 wins. But his success brought scrutiny. Opponents complained that he recruited players and the Illinois High School Association always seemed to be investigating him and the King program. Many of Cox’s players went on to college, but few graduated. “I can’t control their lives after high school,” Cox once told a reporter from the Associated Press. “They got a college experience and went on from there.”
Smith would not get that experience. To Doris Bauer, Smith was often laid back and lethargic. Yet he seemed to harness an unseen energy when he stepped onto the basketball court. It was as if nothing else mattered, the court a safe haven where he could block out all of life’s woes and release his pent-up frustration. At King, it took him more than a year to feel comfortable enough to eat lunch in the cafeteria with his peers. Oftentimes, he ate with an assistant coach in the basketball office. His basketball progression was initially slow, but by his junior season, his potential seemed limitless. Smith was not just adept at powering through opponents on offense. He also blocked shots with impeccable timing, draining an opponent’s will to drive the ball toward the basket. Smith soon drew the attention of Mac Irvin, a well-known power broker of an AAU coach in Chicago, and joined Irvin’s summer team. Irvin was an Adidas coach, so Smith earned an invitation to the ABCD Camp and won MVP honors. Later, at another of Sonny Vaccaro’s camps, Vaccaro called Smith over. The two talked for hours and Vaccaro found Smith to be fascinating. Smith recited random definitions from the dictionary to Vaccaro and quoted the famed poet Langston Hughes. Vaccaro asked Smith what he wanted to do with his future. “I want to go pro,” Smith responded. Vaccaro asked how he had done on his college entrance examinations. Smith said he had not taken any and actually was unsure of his own grades in school. Still, Vaccaro liked the kid. “I’m going to help you,” he promised. “I’m going to get you drafted.”
Then, in November 1998, Smith disappeared from school and the Sullivan House. Reports surfaced that Smith planned to transfer all the way to Centennial High School in Compton, California. Over the summer, he had befriended George Borthwell, a volunteer coach at Centennial, at a basketball camp in Las Vegas. Borthwell had watched Smith get the better of Tyson Chandler, a tower of a prospect known throughout California coaching circles for years. A member of the Sullivan House filed a police report about the missing Smith. Smith had just turned 18, but still had to petition to gain emancipation as an adult.
Years later when he discussed Smith, Borthwell said he was on the verge of crying over the memories. “The kid had no one to talk to,” Borthwell said. “No one cared about the kid. No one gave a shit about that kid. Nobody. They were using that kid.” Borthwell had promised Smith that he could join the team and that he would get an education. But just a season earlier, six of the team’s players had been ruled academically ineligible. Borthwell took issue with being characterized as someone who attempted to lead Smith astray. “They put it in the paper like I kidnapped the kid,” Borthwell said. “Like I met him on the AAU circuit and kidnapped the kid. I’m like, ‘What the hell? This kid is seven feet, two hundred seventy-five pounds. I’m like five feet seven, one seventy. And I kidnapped him?…The only problem with Leon is that I did not understand the law at the time. We were waiting for him to be emancipated as an adult, but the process takes a little while and instead of starting the process earlier, we didn’t.”
Smith returned to King, scoring 25 points a game as a senior and averaging 15 rebounds and 8 blocked shots. He left the Sullivan House, drifting from place to place, eventually moving in with his friend Steve Brown, an associate of the agents Carl and Kevin Poston. Smith and Brown had a falling-out and Doris Bauer found Smith temporary housing. “He had a mattress on the floor that we brought him and a couple of chairs and not much else,” Bauer remembered. “He had no money, of course, so I would give him twenty dollars or whatever every week. And then a month or two later, he signed his contract for over a million.”
In the end, despite whispers of agents, runners, and other influences, Smith decided for himself to jump straight to the NBA. All his life, he had felt that others had made decisions for him. Rarely, by his estimation, had they helped. “I’m young enough to make a mistake,” Smith told the Chicago Tribune. “I don’t want to wait until I’m twenty-one or twenty-two and then finally figure out that’s what I want to do. I already know what I want to do with my life. People nowadays don’t want to accept who they are and their roles in life. This is my role in life.” Now, he would be in charge of his own destiny and this small declaration would allow him to realize his dream. “I hear these fools on the radio and in the paper saying he’s stupid for doing this,” Landon Cox told the Tribune. “Listen, if [NBA teams] are going to give him the money, he has to take the money. Until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, you should keep your mouth shut. This kid’s life has been a horror story.” It was doubtful Smith would have been eligible for college anyway. Few schools recruited him, due to his shaky academic record. He went through a new principal seemingly every year at King and was allowed to coast through school.
Smith was not pegged to be drafted in the first round. But the Dallas Mavericks decided to trade two second-round picks for San Antonio’s pick at the end of the first round and used it on Smith. Don Nelson, a member of the Celtics dynasty as a player and an outside-the-box thinker as an innovative coach, was at Dallas’s helm. Neither he nor his son Donnie had seen Smith play. But they had heard of his size and potential and feared that the rival Lakers would take him with the first pick of the second round, thus getting bigger, stronger, and deeper, already having Shaquille O’Neal on the roster. They asked Smith to play overseas for a year and develop, but Smith refused. To Smith, someone asking him to play anywhere other than the NBA was just somebody else trying to get in the way of his dream. As a first-round pick, his contract was guaranteed. Dallas signed him for three years and $1.45 million. Doris Bauer took him to open his first bank account. Smith arrived in Dallas with just a bag of dirty clothes.
Bill Peterson met with Don Nelson and Donnie Nelson after the organization selected Smith. “Spend some extra time with Leon,” Don Nelson advised Peterson. “He’s got a long way to go, but he’s got a lot of raw skills.” They soon encountered trouble with Smith. At one of his first practices, Donnie Nelson told the team to run another set of sprints because a player had finished too slowly. “You run it,” Smith shouted right back, removing his jersey and heading toward the locker room. He’s not ready for the NBA yet, Peterson thought. He’s got a long way to go. Smith returned to Chicago, where his girlfriend, also a budding basketball player, broke up with him. He was arrested for throwing a rock through the car window of his girlfriend’s mother—a vehicle that he had purchased for her. Peterson realized that Smith had trouble handling pressure. It built and bubbled up quickly inside him before bursting out. Peterson often picked Smith up from his apartment and drove him to practice. He found a player who wanted to do well, but had little clue as to the effort and diligent work needed to arrive a
t that destination. The pace of the NBA’s games and practices was fast and unrelenting. A player could not allow his emotions to rise too high or dip too low. He had to play and forget, not allowing a bad play to affect the next one. Too often, Peterson found, Smith was incapable of that. A bad play led to a bad day and affected his mood the next day, turning one misstep into a bad week. Away from basketball, Peterson tried to help Smith grasp life’s practicalities. “You’ve got to eat,” he would tell him. “You’ve got to go downstairs to the restaurant or order room service. You can’t just go to 7-Eleven and buy a bunch of junk food and eat it all the time.” Peterson was a religious man. Everyone makes mistakes in life, he thought. He prayed that Smith would come around. But he could not be with Smith all the time. No one could. “He’s not a baby, you know,” Peterson said. “He still gets to make his own decisions. He’s just trying to be a man in a man’s league.” The Mavericks deemed Smith unready for the NBA. Smith turned down their request that he play in the minor leagues. With the sides at an impasse, they told Smith to stay away from the team and work with Peterson and a couple of other coaches on his own time. He was placed on injured reserve with a phantom back injury. Smith felt he had fulfilled his dream, only to have it unfairly ripped away from him.
The pressure around him kept mounting. Doris Bauer’s children visited Smith in Dallas and could not believe the number of phone calls he received during the visit from people in Chicago asking for money. Bauer thought she could help him save his new fortune. “Leon, you know I’ve known you for all these years,” she said. “You can trust me. You can give me some money and I’ll put it aside for you. When this is over with, you’ll have money to buy a new house or apartment or something in the end that you can call your own.” But Smith, she knew, could be strong-willed, and he declined the offer.
Bauer was in Dallas with Smith at the time of his suicide attempt in November 1999, having driven his car for him from Chicago to Dallas. She left the apartment when Smith started acting strange. He had painted his face and was more withdrawn than usual, even for him. She later rushed to the hospital and said that medical personnel originally prevented her from seeing him. After handing a social worker her business card, Bauer said she was finally allowed to enter his room. Smith was upset and crying. Doctors had pumped his stomach. Everyone, even people he did not know, had wanted something from him. He once felt like he had no family. Now, he had too many, people who always had their hands out. He saw his NBA career as already being taken away. That, capped with the ending of the relationship with his girlfriend, proved too much. “I was trying to get rid of the pain,” Smith later told a Houston television station. “There are plenty of ways to commit suicide, but I thought that would be the least painful because I was already in pain from the inside. There was no need to have it from the outside.” Smith had left two suicide notes, one for his ex-girlfriend and one for the Nelsons. “We went down there then and I think he was so overwhelmed that he just tried to end it all,” Doris Bauer said. Afterward she found her contact with Smith limited. She said the NBA and the Dallas Mavericks were practicing “damage control.” She saw her role as altruistic. “They knew I was white,” she said. “They asked, ‘What do you have to do with this person? Why do you care?’ I said, ‘He’s one of my kids. I loved him since he was five years old.’ ’Course everybody thinks we’re getting rich. We never got a penny. We just wanted to do for him whatever we could.”
The players union helped Smith enter a psychiatric care center in Atlanta, but he landed in more trouble by threatening his ex-girlfriend. Don Nelson said Smith needed help and had for quite some time. Landon Cox said that the Mavericks had treated Smith like garbage. No one took responsibility. Smith and Doris Bauer rebuilt their relationship as Smith tried resuscitating his career, Bauer said. Smith played in the minor leagues in St. Louis, Sioux Falls, and Gary, Indiana. He performed in 14 games with the Atlanta Hawks in 2002 and in a game for the Seattle SuperSonics in 2004. In Seattle, Smith one day looked admiringly at Robert Swift, who was at a practice with his father, Bruce. The SuperSonics had drafted Robert Swift in the first round, fresh out of high school in California. “I think it’s really great that his father’s around, watching everything that’s going on and taking steps with him,” Smith told Steve Kelley, a veteran basketball writer. By then, Smith was 23, long past the age where he had wanted to decide what he would do with his life, still struggling to figure it out. “He’s still a kid and he still needs that fatherly advice.”
Smith would never come close to realizing that tantalizing potential he had so briefly flashed and, more devastatingly, never appeared settled in life. To Jack Sikma, an assistant coach with the Seattle SuperSonics, Smith was talented, yet disconnected. “I’m not so sure Leon was comfortable at that time after being burned or making bad decisions on trusting people,” Sikma recalled. “He just threw in the white flag one day.” Smith moved around, drifting from place to place. Every once in a while, Bauer heard that he was sleeping on one of her daughter’s couches. She last heard from Smith a few Christmases ago. “He has since kind of gone off the grid,” Bauer said. “I’ve heard that his brother doesn’t even know where he is. It’s a very sad story in my mind because how many people get to live a dream and get a chance to play in the NBA? I wondered, How do you go from sleeping on a mattress to this classy, upscale apartment in a matter of weeks or months? It just breaks my heart that he’s not successful in life. I don’t mean that he’s not a millionaire. I just mean that he’s not comfortable.”
Few, even today, accept blame for Smith’s sad trajectory. “Dallas didn’t do anything wrong,” Sonny Vaccaro said. “They drafted him because of his ability. No one, including me, knew he had mental problems…No one failed him other than his school district and his coaches in Chicago. That’s who failed him. They allowed it. It wasn’t going pro. That had nothing to do with it. He was allowed to play high school basketball…It was there for everybody to see. But no one wanted to see because they just wanted him to play. Don’t blame Leon Smith and say he was a failure. He did everything he could to the best of his ability. He just shouldn’t have been put in that position. He needed help long before he got to camp and the Dallas Mavericks.”
Years later, Robert Swift’s career would also collapse. He won Seattle’s starting center job in 2006, but landed awkwardly, twisting his right knee in a preseason game against Sacramento and tearing his anterior cruciate ligament. Swift’s NBA career ended three years later. In 2013, his home in Sammamish, just outside of Seattle, was foreclosed upon. For weeks, Swift ignored orders to vacate the property until one day he simply left without most of his belongings. Jon Humbert, a reporter for KOMO, a television station in Seattle, wrote about the home’s utter disarray: Animal feces clog the deck. Walls are punched out on different levels of the house. One even has an autograph. Pizza boxes and beer bottles are piled on the kitchen granite. Multiple guns were found in the home…A box of letters from colleges around the nation sat pushed against a downstairs wall. It looked like another trash box. Crests and logos of UCLA, Arizona, UConn and others are jammed together as untold memories of what could have been for Swift. In 2015, Swift was arrested for his involvement in an armed home-robbery attempt.
Those once close to Robert Swift labeled his parents as a roadblock toward his maturation in trying to steer his professional career. Though both are tragic cautionary tales, Smith was not better off than Swift without parental guidance and Swift was not better off than Smith with parental influence. That is why one blanket rule in either allowing or disallowing high school players entrance into the league was difficult to forge. The separation between a high schooler who succeeded in the NBA, like Amar’e Stoudemire, and one who vanished, like Leon Smith, could oftentimes be small, despite their similarly difficult upbringings. Bryan Colangelo, Phoenix’s general manager, accurately pinpointed the source of Stoudemire’s problems as external factors beyond the teenager’s control. The same could be said of th
e root of Smith’s troubles. Stoudemire succeeded. Smith did not. The ones who developed into great players were united in viewing the NBA as a starting point toward achieving their goals, not the end point, a pursuit that Kobe Bryant took to the extreme in his maniacal pursuit of championships and accolades.
•••
Kobe Bryant raised his arms to the sky. He then brought his left hand to his right, and pointed to his ring finger. He had just calmly sunk two free throws, cementing the Lakers championship win—his first of five—over the Indiana Pacers in Game 6 of the 2000 finals. “Can’t wait to do it again,” an exuberant Bryant told NBC’s Ahmad Rashad as purple-and-gold confetti drifted from the Staples Center rafters. Bryant was 21 and concluding his fourth NBA season. He had continued to simultaneously amaze and frustrate teammates and coaches with his talent and perceived selfishness. He was like a boxer with a devastating knockout blow who went for such a punch at every opportunity he could. The same gift that led him on a path to greatness also ostracized him within the organization. But everything came together that season. Phil Jackson had arrived to coach the Lakers, the organization providing a soft landing for him after the nasty breakup of Chicago’s dynasty. Jackson immediately saw the similarities between Bryant and Michael Jordan. Jordan had already come into his own by the time Jackson became Chicago’s head coach and was a reluctant but willing member of a participatory offense. In Bryant, Jackson saw an immense talent who still wanted to do too much on his own too often. Jordan also never had an interior force, like Shaquille O’Neal, to play alongside, one who needed the ball and his own space to be effective. Jackson spent much of that season tutoring Bryant on when and where to pick his points of attack.
Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution Page 17
