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

by Jonathan Abrams

  The family tried insulating Brown from the despair. His older brothers would tell him to walk away. He was bused to an elementary school outside of Dixville. When Dan Moore contemplated accepting Glynn Academy’s coaching job, he watched some of the middle schoolers run up and down the court one day. Upon seeing Kwame, who was already about 6 feet 5 inches tall, Moore agreed to the job. Brown’s brother, Tabari, already starred for the team and Moore envisioned a pipeline of talented Brown players for years to come. Kwame Brown, Moore found, could occasionally get upset quickly. As a freshman, he grew frustrated at one practice, punched a wall, and broke his hand. He also had problems being on time. Brown was occasionally late to practices or to the bus for away games. On those occasions, Moore would signal the driver to leave without his star player. Overall, though, Kwame was a joy for Moore to coach. He was articulate and smart. He was willing to learn. Moore sometimes even asked Brown to babysit his boys. Looking back, Moore could not recall one time they had engaged in an argument. Plus, Brown was so athletic that Moore had to design new drills to challenge him. One involved Brown jumping from outside the key on one block to the opposite block, while contesting shots. Still, nobody could successfully score over Brown. He was growing into a well-rounded player and a stable individual, aided by the mentorship provided by John Williams. Williams served as the associate director of a nearby youth ministry and his involvement with the basketball program predated Moore’s arrival. He occasionally gave the kids motivational talks and helped find them part-time jobs. For Brown, Williams filled a gaping void. He was one of the first male influences Brown came across without an ulterior motive. While Tyson Chandler drove around in his flashy SUV, Brown steered Williams’s Buick Century. Williams made a promise to Brown that he would lend him the car if he maintained high marks in school. Brown averaged 20.1 points, 13.3 rebounds, and 5.8 blocks as a senior, guiding Glynn Academy to the state’s Final Four tournament. He had 17 points, 7 rebounds, and 5 blocked shots at the McDonald’s All-American Game. Brown had previously performed at some of the sneaker camps and played decently. On that national stage at Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, North Carolina, he starred and for the first time began seriously contemplating jumping straight to the NBA.

  Moore did not weigh in on Brown’s decision. He did not believe it was his place to be involved. Brown was a teenager and Moore preferred him to remain one as long as he could. As NBA personnel filtered into his gym throughout the season, Moore kept Brown insulated from them all. “Use basketball,” he would tell Brown. “Don’t let basketball use you.” Moore believed that Brown would attend Florida until the day Brown informed Billy Donovan of his decision. Moore later accepted and rationalized the decision. “When he would be twenty-one years old, he would already be making nineteen million dollars,” Moore said. “When I was twenty-one, I was looking for a job.” Brown allowed Williams to act as his facilitator. Brown himself ducked most of the interview requests and questions about his future. Brown announced his NBA intentions with a statement. “There are those who would say that the transition from high school to the NBA will be a difficult one,” it read. “To those people, I say that difficult transitions are not new to my family and me. In fact, adversities have made my family stronger.” Clad in a black suit and vest, Brown attended his high school’s prom with his girlfriend, Joy, hours after issuing the press release.

  He purchased a home in Gainesville near Billy Donovan and asked to prepare for the draft at the University of Florida. Donovan took one look at Brown and knew he was not in the best of shape. In Donovan’s opinion, Brown loved to play basketball, but he did not seem to enjoy working out. “Kwame, you’re going to have to get in a lot better shape,” Donovan advised him. “You’re going to have to push yourself more.” Donovan no longer had any stake in Brown’s future. He still wanted to help, yet he predicted that Brown was headed into a make-or-break situation unprepared.

  The training helped. Brown performed for all the teams with the top picks and impressed at each stop. Curry was bigger. Chandler was longer. Brown was the best combination of the two and possibly the best athlete of the three. Michael Jordan worked out Brown, Chandler, and Curry on separate occasions. Jordan sometimes shared the workouts, personally testing their skills and fueling interest that he harbored an ulterior motive in wanting to work himself into shape for a comeback attempt. As the draft approached, the Wizards requested one last workout that would feature Brown against Chandler. The request initially irked Brown. He felt he had already proved himself worthy of the top selection.

  Brown was relentless against Chandler in the showdown. He powered through Chandler in some of the drills. He was faster than him in others. He could and did do it all—outmuscling Chandler in the post and skillfully maneuvering by him on the perimeter. Brown, Rod Higgins thought, could play inside and outside and possibly develop into another Kevin Garnett. Too often, Chandler floated out to the perimeter in the workout. He told Higgins that he wanted to play like Rasheed Wallace, a tall inside-outside forward with a pure stroke. But Higgins doubted that Chandler’s NBA future would be in that capacity. Higgins thought of his own NBA career. He had entered the NBA in 1982 after graduating from Fresno State. He knew that he would have never been prepared for the NBA fresh out of high school, but this was a new wave of players. It was tough, Higgins thought. The executives had to project where players would be five years into the future with a teenager now often harboring inflated expectations of his NBA career. To Higgins, that represented a guessing game that was part of the game’s beauty and curse. Chandler did not know it, but the Wizards had scheduled the workout to confirm their conviction to draft Brown. Chandler possessed a sinking feeling once it ended. He had a brief conversation with Jordan and realized he was no longer in the running to be the top selection. Brown also talked to Jordan before departing, making a bold proclamation that piqued the competitor in Jordan. It was one a younger Jordan might have made had he been granted a similar stage. “I promise you if you draft me,” Brown said confidentially, “you will never regret it.”

  15.

  The first phone call Butch Carter received after being appointed coach of the Toronto Raptors in 1998 came from Alvis Smith and Joel Hopkins. The call surprised Carter, but Smith and Hopkins had much invested in the organization and in one player in particular. They had groomed and cultivated Tracy McGrady into a phenom, only to watch him gain rust and lose confidence during Darrell Walker’s coaching tenure in Toronto. Smith and Hopkins fretted that McGrady would likewise seldom play under Carter, who had teamed with Isiah Thomas at Indiana before embarking on an NBA playing career. “Give me a little time,” Carter told them. The NBA, he immediately realized, was a much different league than the one he had played in several years before. Coaching was a juggling act of different agendas that extended beyond his players. “When the high school guys came in, they brought all these high school coaches and AAU coaches with them and they wanted the quickest pot of gold they could put their hands on,” Carter recalled.

  Carter came to judge McGrady through a different prism than Walker had. Carter had coached at his alma mater, Ohio’s Middletown High School, upon retiring from professional basketball in 1986. Those players were fragile, with their bodies and minds both still in development. Carter doubted McGrady, no matter his talent, was much different. He decided that he would not judge McGrady based on his progress in practice against men. You can’t throw Tracy McGrady against teammates like Charles Oakley or Doug Christie and expect to get a positive result, he reasoned. McGrady, Carter figured, had all the attributes to be a star. He was as athletic as any player he had ever seen. But he was still a kid. He could fall asleep anywhere at any time, a trait that his teammate Damon Stoudamire did not attribute to laziness but to the fact that he was still growing. Carter decided he would evaluate McGrady based on the work he did around practice, like the time he put in on the treadmill and watching videos. “They don’t run two-year-olds in the Kentucky Derby and th
at’s for a reason,” Carter said. On the court, he asked McGrady for one solid hour of work a day. He wanted to transition McGrady’s body into the NBA, getting him through 30 injury-free games his rookie year, comparable, somewhat, to a college season, and 60 games the following year. McGrady also started attending sessions with DeNita Turner, a personal management consultant, charged with helping McGrady learn to budget his time and establish professional goals. Carter considered the meetings with Turner vital. He wanted Turner to teach McGrady the need to be selfish. “Most coaches who don’t understand young players view selfish as something bad,” Carter said in recalling his reasoning. “My thing as a coach is, I can’t get a player to be at the level he needs to be at unless he is selfish. He’s got to be selfish to invest in himself sometimes.”

  McGrady improved, only to stumble on roadblocks. McGrady still did not know what it meant to be a professional. Carter fed him a steady diet of playing time, telling him that no matter what the score, he was to check into the game with six minutes remaining in the first quarter. Carter would routinely call a play for McGrady after he subbed in, designing it to quickly allow McGrady to take a shot and to ease into the flow of the game. A player, Carter believed, only gained confidence through playing and not if he was fearful that a coach would yank him out at the first mistake. But after one All-Star break, McGrady had returned to practice sluggish and was merely going through the motions. His body is here, Carter thought, but his mind is still somewhere in Florida. Carter instructed McGrady to miss all of his rotations in their next game. McGrady again found his back stuck to the bench. After the game, Carter told McGrady that this would be the result whenever he put so little effort into practicing. “Right then, he and I came to an agreement,” Carter said. Smith and Hopkins soon came to appreciate Carter’s push-and-pull approach in maturing McGrady. “I wanted Tracy to play,” Smith recalled. “But ultimately, Butch was right. I was wrong. He wasn’t playing, but with a young talent like that, you’ve got to bring him along.”

  Butch Carter’s tactics yielded results sooner than Smith could have hoped, as McGrady quickly morphed into a star, seemingly overnight. In 1998, McGrady united with Vince Carter, his distant cousin, and the two become a potent combination. McGrady flashed all the signs of becoming a franchise player: he could shoot, handle the ball, and play defense. He was long and still young. McGrady’s belief in himself had been built under Butch Carter’s stewardship. “He cared more about the person than the player,” McGrady said. “He made sure my mind was right. He knew that if my mind was right, then everything else would take care of itself and it helped me a lot.” McGrady started being touted as a Sixth Man of the Year award candidate midway through his third season. He played magnificently in a first-round playoff loss to the Knicks, sometimes outshining Vince Carter, who had taken the league by storm with his otherworldly athleticism. “On that team, Tracy was the best defender, he could guard three positions,” Butch Carter recalled. “He knew all the plays. He knew all the counters. He just wasn’t strong enough to make a play in the fourth quarter the way Vince was.”

  McGrady’s future was bright, but not in Toronto. He had just started showing signs of his future stardom by the time rumors surfaced that he wanted to be the team’s main option, a role he could never fill while being Vince Carter’s wingman, and that he craved the additional exposure he would receive by playing for a team in the United States. He reached stardom at a juncture that worried every team nurturing high school players. Their understanding of the game and their fledgling contributions to a team would coincide with when they arrived at free agency, and the team had groomed them only for them to sign and peak elsewhere.

  Jerry Krause waited to pounce. He came to believe that he had made a mistake in not obtaining McGrady outright as a rookie when he had the opportunity and now planned to lure him during free agency. His Bulls desperately needed McGrady. The collapse of their championship team was striking and swift. The Bulls slogged through the lockout-truncated season, winning 13 games, the worst in the Eastern Conference. They were rewarded with the draft’s top pick in 1999 and took Elton Brand, a talented forward who became one of the first players to leave Duke University with remaining college eligibility. Brand played capably, but Chicago again faltered, finishing the season with a dismal 17–65 record. It was painful, but the struggle played into Krause’s plan. A championship team could not be built overnight. He was biding his time, stockpiling high draft picks, preserving salary cap space, and awaiting the summer of 2000. He would recruit McGrady and other talented free agents like Tim Duncan and Grant Hill. McGrady had not been a starter throughout the bulk of his Toronto tenure. He wanted to be wooed and made to feel wanted. He had options. Toronto desperately wanted McGrady to stay put and even fired Butch Carter once dissension between the coach and his veteran players fractured the team. The Orlando Magic, like Chicago, had stockpiled salary space in hopes of landing a marquee player and reestablishing the team as the dominant franchise it had been before Shaquille O’Neal departed for the Lakers.

  In July 2000, Tracy McGrady and Alvis Smith exited their plane from Orlando and walked out of Gate C-20 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The city, not just the Bulls, gave them a hero’s welcome. Two cheerleaders and the team’s mascot, Benny the Bull, waved a banner, reading “T-Mac, Chicago’s No. 1.” A band performed “Sweet Home, Chicago,” as fans shouted, “T-Mac! T-Mac!” Jerry Krause and B. J. Armstrong, Jordan’s former backcourt mate who had become Krause’s assistant, awaited the pair and embraced. Krause regarded the meeting as more of a reunion than anything else. For McGrady, the scene was surreal. He imagined stepping outside of Vince Carter’s shadow, taking Michael Jordan’s torch, and leading the Bulls again into relevance. The trip spanned two days. McGrady listened to Krause’s pitch, followed by one from Elton Brand; attended a Cubs–White Sox game; and cruised around Lake Michigan.

  They dined him and piqued McGrady’s interest. Krause did not know it, but McGrady had already made up his mind. He chose Orlando, making a deal for $67.5 million over six years at the age of 21. “Tracy never should have left Toronto, but there were two reasons: his guys couldn’t get the deal he got with [McGrady’s agent] Arn [Tellem] with the owners in Toronto because the owners in Toronto don’t know jack about basketball,” Butch Carter said. “They don’t know anything about how these young guys are making their decisions and that it’s the people around them. We brought Alvis Smith up there to see if he could sit down and cut a deal with [minority owner Larry] Tanenbaum, and Tanenbaum didn’t have a clue. Everybody forgets that the league puts in these salary caps, so everybody says, ‘OK, how do you manipulate the salary cap?’ You get into the league sooner and you move your guys where you can get the greatest endorsement dollars.”

  The Magic possessed better role players, a dynamic young coach in Doc Rivers, and had also added Grant Hill. McGrady envisioned the duo as the next Jordan and Pippen. Most importantly, Orlando was home. “I worked for two years on Tracy,” Krause recalled. “Through people around him, through him. But at the last moment, if I remember right, Tracy’s mother killed the deal because she wanted him in Florida.” McGrady recalled making the decision for himself. “Nothing was really going to take me away from signing back home,” McGrady said. “Hindsight looking back? Of course, it would have been a perfect situation to stay right there [in Toronto].” The move was against the wishes of Alvis Smith, the first significant crack in their relationship. Smith told McGrady that he did not think the Magic would win and his body would be punished by absorbing a heavy workload. “I didn’t want Tracy to go to the Orlando Magic,” Smith recalled. “We had the choice to come here to Orlando or go to Chicago. I wanted him to go to Chicago, because I felt like their strengthening program was so much better than everybody else’s.” In Orlando, McGrady developed into one of the game’s most dynamic scorers. But his penchant for not practicing hard had also trailed him home. “He was getting by just on ability, not abil
ity and work ethic,” said Johnny Davis, an assistant coach under Rivers in Orlando. “He didn’t have the combination. It wasn’t natural for him. Had he had a work ethic, maybe the standard of excellence for him would’ve been higher, both individually and in his ability to raise a team with his play.” Hill suffered injuries that undermined his promising career. He was never again the premier player he had been in his early career in Detroit. True to Smith’s prediction, McGrady was tasked with shouldering Orlando’s workload and the team, with him, never made it out of the first round of the playoffs.