Vaccaro faintly remembered Jennings, who had played at a couple of Vaccaro’s sneaker camps. Once, Vaccaro recalled mentoring Jennings because he felt that the youngster was showing up his opposition during a blowout win. But Vaccaro had not talked to Jennings in more than a year before the phone call. Early in the conversation, Jennings expressed his frustrations over trying to gain collegiate eligibility. In high school, he had transferred from his school in southern California to Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy. In Virginia, his game continued to progress until he became ranked as one of the country’s top point guards. He planned to attend the University of Arizona. The Wildcats had a rich history of steering talented point guards into the NBA. But Jennings was now on his third attempt to gain minimum SAT scores, set by the NCAA. He did not achieve the needed scores his first time. His second attempt showed such a jump that the NCAA flagged it, instructing him to try a third time. A dismayed Jennings randomly came across Vaccaro’s radio show. He asked Vaccaro if he really thought playing overseas was a viable option and whether he would be a candidate. “He was so damn strong-willed and that was his personality and still is,” Vaccaro said. “To a fault sometimes, but that’s who Brandon is.”
Vaccaro wanted to see Jennings in person to judge whether or not he would be up to the challenge. Jennings told Vaccaro that he was in New York. Vaccaro planned to be there for that week’s draft. He left a day early, meeting Jennings at an Italian restaurant.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Vaccaro asked. “They’re going to beat you up.”
Vaccaro believed that the first person who tried bypassing college basketball to play overseas would be held to an unfair standard. The player could be viewed as a pioneer or as an outcast. Some NBA teams, Vaccaro cautioned, would shy away from him for that reason alone. Jennings remained steadfast. He did not want to attend college. He wanted to become the best basketball player he could as quickly as possible. “It was one of those days in my life that I thought would never come true because I always advocated that and then he was the right kid at the right time because he was strong enough to do it,” Vaccaro recalled.
They ended the dinner. Vaccaro left excited. Now, he had to get the ball rolling. He knew that after the draft, basketball’s interest would shift to Las Vegas, where the NBA hosted its summer league. He only had a few days to make it all work. Vaccaro called teams, lining up representatives to watch Jennings work out in Las Vegas. Jennings impressed quickly by showing off his lightning-quick speed up and down the court. An Italian club, Lottomatica Roma, made an offer Vaccaro thought would be too good to pass on. In all, Jennings would make $1.2 million—which included a quickly arranged shoe contract with Under Armour, a burgeoning athletic apparel company.
“Brandon, this is a lot of money,” Vaccaro told Jennings. “We can work out for the Israelis, the Russians, the Greeks. But shit, this is a lot. Let’s go for it.” Jennings agreed and signed the deal. “It wasn’t the NBA,” Jennings said. “But it was close enough.” At the NBA offices, David Stern found the move interesting. How a player came to the NBA—from college or overseas—made little difference to him. “I was supportive,” Stern said. “The NBA’s rules were not a social program telling young men, predominantly African-American, that they had to get educated. In fact, it used to rile me because no one raised it about white tennis players, only raised it about young, black basketball players, which is a total fault line in the NBA’s history. And so I was like totally torn because, goddamnit, this guy is allowed to do whatever he wants to do. He’s earned it. He’s a great talent. Apparently, he’s going overseas. Great, why not?”
Jennings moved to Rome with his mother, Alice Knox, and his half-brother, Terrence Phillips. Together, as a family, they experienced the city. Knox learned how to navigate the area and drove Jennings to his two daily practices. A couple of other Americans also played on the team and Knox occasionally hosted them for dinner. But basketball was different. Playing time was sporadic. Sometimes Jennings played. Sometimes he did not. During games, Jennings’s main objectives were to pass the ball and only shoot when completely open. For the most part—beyond a couple of hiccups when he complained to the American press—he listened and performed the tasks asked of him. Allan Ray was one of his teammates. Ray had played college ball at Villanova and the pair became friends. “During the whole year, Brandon never said anything or talked back to the coach,” Ray said. “He just kept it cordial. He came to practice and worked hard every day. It was obvious how good he was. He would show glimpses in practice. I wish he would have played more. That experience alone prepared him mentally for life on and off the court. I really admire him for the way he handled himself in Rome. He was a true professional, even at a young age.” Jennings averaged just 5.5 points and 2.3 assists in only 17 minutes per game. The meager numbers did not reflect his growth behind the scenes. Jennings grew as a basketball player through the tough, grinding practices. He grew as a man by experiencing life so far away from home. At times, he wanted to quit and leave it all behind. Instead, he persevered and entered the NBA draft once the season ended.
Vaccaro had not been as nervous for a draft since the Nets passed on Kobe Bryant back in 1996. His insides twisted in knots. He called around and surveyed his NBA contacts, trying to figure out where Jennings would be selected. He feared that Jennings would be punished by teams for initiating an alternate route into the NBA. Vaccaro sighed when the Milwaukee Bucks drafted Jennings with the 10th pick of the 2009 draft. He believed the teams that passed on Jennings would later regret the decision. That conviction gained traction early in the season. Jennings stunned professional basketball in just his seventh NBA game. He poured in 55 points against the Golden State Warriors, breaking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record for points scored by a rookie in a game.
Fresh off the success of Jennings, Vaccaro tried shepherding another prospect overseas the following year. It began the same way—with an unsolicited phone call. This time, Vaccaro received a call from the father of Jeremy Tyler, a young prospect in San Diego. Vaccaro had not heard much about Jeremy Tyler. Tyler’s father, James, drove up to Santa Monica to fill Vaccaro in on the rest of the story. Jeremy Tyler was an early prodigy, having played varsity basketball as a sixth grader and advancing to dominate at San Diego High School. He had committed to playing at the University of Louisville, but his high school team encountered a myriad of issues. The San Diego Section of the California Interscholastic Federation had launched an investigation, finding that Tyler had become dissatisfied with the talent level of his teammates and threatened to change high schools if he was not surrounded by better players. (Tyler denied the allegations.) The talent started transferring into San Diego soon after, including two players from Washington and one from Oklahoma. By the time the investigation ended, two coaches—including the high school’s head coach, Kenny Roy—had been fired and the federation had suspended three players. The family became disenchanted with the high school and trying to maintain college eligibility. Tyler was a high school junior with plans of becoming the first basketball player to skip his senior year of high school to play professionally overseas in hopes of entering the NBA in two years.
Tyler was a 6-foot-10-inch center. He had always been bigger and better than his opposition. For years, those around him had inflated his ego. “He’s one of those guys that come along once in a lifetime. He’s a [general manager’s] dream and a marketer’s dream. He could model or do movies. On the court, he does things you can’t teach and has a fire that burns within him that you can’t teach,” Olden Polynice, an NBA veteran who was a volunteer coach at Tyler’s school, told the New York Times.
Soon, coaches found they could not teach Tyler much of anything. Vaccaro again acted as a liaison, lining up representatives of teams from Israel, China, and Spain to watch Tyler work out. They settled on Maccabi Haifa, a club in Israel’s top basketball division, and Tyler signed a contract for $140,000. The club believed Tyler would be a pioneer and offer a pipeline
between them and other American teenagers who wanted to bypass college. Instead, Tyler acted his age. He had no support system around him. His brother, James Jr., initially hoped to move with him, but those plans fell through.
Tyler’s teammates viewed him as soft. His coach, Avi Ashkenazi, found him uncoachable and lazy. How could a player of Tyler’s reputation arrive with so little basic knowledge of the game, like how to box out and rotate on defense? Ashkenazi wondered. Tyler felt as if no one treated him with the respect he deserved. Frustrated after not playing in the first half of a game, Tyler ditched his uniform during halftime and spent the second half watching from the stands in his street clothes. Soon after, he quit without telling the team’s management or his agent, Arn Tellem, and booked a flight back to the United States. Tyler lasted just 10 games in Israel. A daily newspaper in Tel Aviv described Tyler as averaging “two points, two rebounds and two temper tantrums a game.”
Tyler still had the advantage of time. The following season, he played in Japan with the Tokyo Apache, under the auspices of Bob Hill. Hill had coached in the NBA in Indiana, San Antonio, and Seattle. He was a disciplinarian and would not accept laziness from his players. Hill’s son, Casey, worked as an assistant coach for the team. Sometimes, he would play good cop to his father’s bad cop in their dealings with Tyler. Once, Tyler messed up a play in training camp. Bob Hill yelled, making the team run the play over. This time, Tyler successfully finished it with a dunk.
“That’s bullshit,” Tyler said as he ran back up court, still upset over having to run the play again.
Bob Hill blew his whistle and stopped play. Spit fired from his mouth. “You haven’t done anything in basketball yet,” he said. “Why are you acting like this?” Tyler did not respond. Casey Hill recalled Tyler simply staring back with an expression on his face that reflected, Oh, shit. Is this what it’s supposed to be like? Is this it?
Casey Hill tried to work with Tyler on harnessing his emotions. “He couldn’t just play,” Hill said. “The fact that he was playing against players who were strong and knew about him and wanted to beat him—he just wasn’t used to that. He was just used to dunking on everybody in high school. And it had an effect on him. The way that those frustrations manifested themselves in him [was] not good. He would try to think of the meanest thing he could say to someone to piss them off. That’s how mad he would be. It hurt relationships, and it gave him this bad reputation.” To Hill, Tyler had simply skated by on his talents for years. No coach had ever held him accountable. “That persona allowed him to place the blame on everyone else but himself,” Hill said. “The team in Israel—they never really disciplined him. He would just kind of go in there and have his emotional outbursts and they didn’t know what to do with him, so they didn’t play him. That was the worst thing. They didn’t talk to him, [and] they didn’t play him. It left him confused.”
Tyler showed some of his promise in Japan. He averaged nearly 10 points and 7 rebounds before a catastrophic earthquake brought the season to a premature end. Tyler once expected to be one of the first players to shake David Stern’s hand. Instead, on draft night of 2011, the Golden State Warriors paid $2 million to the Charlotte Bobcats in exchange for the 39th selection and the right to draft Tyler. The Warriors expected Tyler to be a project. Tyler did not view himself that way. He sounded like Ndudi Ebi during his downfall in saying a demotion to the NBA Development League “isn’t in my membrane.” The Warriors dealt Tyler to the Atlanta Hawks in a salary-slicing move in 2013. Atlanta waived him after just one game. Tyler has had trouble sticking in the NBA since. “The only thing I do think about is five years ago, I was the best player out of all these guys,” Tyler said in the summer of 2013. “I’m a man of history repeating itself, so I just let it come to me and just keep playing hard and play poised and play with confidence and I’ll be that guy that I always was.”
Vaccaro once believed that a handful of the country’s best players would annually choose playing professionally overseas instead of serving a season in college purgatory. That route never panned out, with Tyler’s outcome serving as a cautionary tale for subsequent high school stars. Emmanuel Mudiay bypassed college to spend a year playing professionally in China before the Denver Nuggets picked him seventh overall in the 2015 draft. But the vast majority of talented teenagers elect to spend a year in college at institutions like the University of Kentucky instead of playing overseas. “My mistake was I didn’t know Jeremy well enough,” Vaccaro said. “I still think to this day, if he had started out right, he would have made it. But he doesn’t like to play basketball. Unfortunately, that’s not a solo thing. A lot of guys don’t like playing the sport. They play it to make money.”
23.
Kobe Bryant smiled after hitting his second free throw against Minnesota in December 2014. The beam was a rarity for someone who had preferred playing most of his 18 seasons through snarls and clenched teeth. With the shot, Bryant surpassed Michael Jordan’s career point total. He now stood behind only Karl Malone (36,928 points) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (38,387) among the game’s all-time leaders. The moment was not lost on Bryant. He would have been hard-pressed to pass Jordan had he attended college for two or three years. He had appreciated the chase and the journey—trying to match Jordan gave him a new obstacle to chase down as his career drew to a close. Jordan had been his idol. Bryant seldom disclosed this publicly, but he had carved his game in Jordan’s image and spent nearly two decades in pursuit of a player many believe could never be replicated.
The Timberwolves, his opponent that night, stopped the game and hugs ensued. Bryant embraced his teammates on the court—none of whom had been a teammate when Bryant had last won a championship in 2010, when the Lakers outlasted the Boston Celtics in a hard-fought seven-game series. Glen Taylor, Minnesota’s owner, walked onto the court and looped his right arm around Bryant’s back. The two shared some brief words and Taylor, with his left hand, gifted Bryant the ball he had just used to pass Jordan’s mark. It had been seven years since Taylor made the decision to trade away his own former high school star, Kevin Garnett. Minnesota had tired of treading water after several years, while maintaining one of the league’s higher payrolls. Garnett preferred to stay in Minnesota. He was loyal to a fault. He had to be convinced to accept a trade to Boston and only relented when Taylor described the long rebuilding plan Minnesota had mapped out. In Boston, Garnett teamed with Paul Pierce and Ray Allen and in 2008 gained his elusive championship in a win over Bryant’s Lakers. For their troubles, the Timberwolves received two first-round picks and five players for Garnett. Three of them happened to be players who bypassed college for the NBA—Al Jefferson, Gerald Green, and Sebastian Telfair.
Members of the Timberwolves congratulated Bryant as well. They included Shabazz Muhammad, a 22-year-old in his second season, drafted by Minnesota in the first round of 2013’s draft. Muhammad was three years old when Bryant broke into the league. Had Muhammad been born earlier, he surely would have entered the NBA out of his Las Vegas high school. Instead, he spent an underwhelming season at UCLA and surprised no one by declaring for the NBA when his college season ended.
Next, Bryant raised his right arm to acknowledge the crowd and shared a long embrace with his coach, Byron Scott. Scott, in the last year of his playing career, was on the Lakers when Bryant entered the league. As a coach, Scott found it difficult to come up with the right amount of playing time for Bryant. In his mind, Bryant could still play like the teenager who took the league by storm. In reality, at 36 years old, his body could no longer handle the physicality that the game demanded. Bryant would rest the second games of back-to-backs and his minutes would be reduced soon after he broke Jordan’s mark. The last years had been difficult on Bryant. His body no longer responded as his mind had grown accustomed to. Bryant fought off tears and stood with the help of crutches in April 2013, addressing reporters about an injury he had sustained. He had made a move that he had performed countless times in his career late in a game agai
nst the Golden State Warriors and felt a pop. Bryant asked his defender, Harrison Barnes, if he had kicked him. Barnes said that he had not and Bryant feared the worst. He somehow went to the free-throw line and made two free throws before exiting the game. Tests revealed that Bryant had sustained a torn Achilles tendon. He trained hard to return to form early the following year—only to suffer a bone fracture in his left leg in a game against the Memphis Grizzlies. The following season, a torn rotator cuff prematurely ended a third consecutive season. Bryant had entered the league nearly two decades earlier trying to make a name for himself. He never regretted his decision to skip college. He found that American players trailed in their development when compared to international players. In Europe, players like Tony Parker and Ricky Rubio played professionally as young teenagers. They devoted the bulk of their time to mastering their craft before entering the NBA as players prepared to contribute. “It seems like the system really isn’t teaching players anything when you go to college,” Bryant mused to reporters in 2014. “You go to college, you play, you showcase, and you come to the pros.
“We kind of got sold on that [college] dream a little bit,” he continued. “Fortunately, I didn’t really listen to it. Neither did [Garnett]. Neither did LeBron. I think that worked pretty well for the three of us. I’m always a firm believer in us being able to make our own decisions, especially as it pertains to working and having a job.”
Garnett’s career came full circle a few weeks after Bryant broke Jordan’s mark. In February 2015, Taylor and the Timberwolves traded for Garnett and returned him to the franchise. Garnett not only reunited with the organization, but also with Flip Saunders, who was again coaching the Timberwolves. In order to facilitate the trade, Garnett had to waive his no-trade clause with the Brooklyn Nets. In doing so, Minnesota received a different Garnett, one who was 38 years old instead of a teenager. They traded more for Garnett’s leadership abilities to mentor a young team, rather than his on-court contributions. In the summer of 2015, Garnett signed a two-year deal to remain with the Timberwolves. If he fulfills the contract, Garnett will become the first player to play in the NBA in his teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s. The young players he was charged with mentoring included Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns. Both had spent just one year in college—Wiggins at the University of Kansas and Towns at the University of Kentucky—before becoming the first overall pick of subsequent drafts. They both would have almost certainly skipped college altogether had they belonged to another generation of NBA players. Instead, both were born at around the time Garnett first made his debut for the Timberwolves as a wide-eyed and superstitious teen. “Twelve days before I was born, it was his first game,” Towns recited from memory. Garnett has said that one day he hopes to own the franchise. “It’s perfect,” Garnett told reporters at a news conference following the trade. “If you have a story, this is a fairy tale. This is a perfect ending to it. This is how you want to do it.”
Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution Page 33
