Boys Among Men

by Jonathan Abrams

  “We waited and he got into the next game and within two minutes of watching him play, you could see it,” Fleisher said.

  Fleisher now prayed that Garnett would show that talent in front of the executives.

  Flip Saunders and Kevin McHale conversed among the throng. They had played together at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s. McHale was the son of a mine worker who figured he would embark on a coaching career after graduating. The Boston Celtics drafted him with the third overall pick in the 1980 draft, the beginning of a prosperous professional career and teaming with Larry Bird. It was Saunders, instead, who immediately coached after college. He started at Minnesota’s Golden Valley Lutheran College and later coached in the Continental Basketball Association. The two had joined forces again, tapped to jump-start the Minnesota Timberwolves. It was a fledgling franchise that had languished in the NBA’s basement during its first six seasons. McHale, the new vice president of basketball operations, and Saunders, the new general manager, eyed the draft as a new beginning. The 1995 draft contained four college prospects viewed as franchise players: North Carolina’s Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace, Maryland’s Joe Smith, and Alabama’s Antonio McDyess. The Timberwolves were slotted to draft fifth. “Yeah, we are going to take the high school kid,” McHale bluffed to his brethren at the workout, hoping that one of the teams choosing before him would gamble on Garnett, allowing him access to one of the coveted college players.

  John Hammond had worked out hundreds of players before and picked up on their patterns quickly. He felt that Garnett had finally calmed down enough to begin the workout. He returned Garnett to the near side of the gym. Garnett performed shooting drills. The uninterested glances he had caught from some of the executives had left him enraged. Saunders elbowed McHale five minutes into the workout. Each knew the other’s thought. They now hoped that Garnett would last until the fifth pick. He stood an angular 6 feet 11 inches tall. He moved like a player half a foot shorter. The gym was so hot that it felt as if all the city’s heat and humidity had converged on the court. Perspiration soaked through Garnett’s clothes. The executives even sweated. Garnett kept going. This kid runs like the wind, thought John Nash, Washington’s general manager. Nash’s Bullets possessed the fourth pick in the draft. Garnett had arrived late to the workout, already a strike against him in Nash’s mind. He was now intrigued. Most college players were out of game shape by the June draft. Their seasons had come to a close a couple of months earlier. Garnett ended the workout with the same enthusiasm that he had begun with.

  “Jump and touch the box,” an executive requested, meaning the square that hovers above the rim. Garnett tapped it with ease. Another asked that he touch the square’s top. He did it with each hand and screamed with each ascent.

  Hammond took Garnett to the right side of midcourt as the workout ended. “Hey, Kevin, why don’t you do this?” Hammond said. “Put the ball on the floor and be as creative as you can and then finish by giving a great dunk at the end of it.” Garnett did. Hammond smiled. Jaws dropped. They performed the same move on the other side of the court. Garnett dribbled the ball between his legs, around his back, and crossed over before finishing with a yell and a crashing dunk. McHale made a point of introducing himself to Garnett before leaving, offering some shooting tips. “Make sure you square your shoulders,” McHale said. “Don’t fade away on your shot.” McHale just wanted to be kind and thank Garnett for the show. McHale now thought he had no chance of landing Garnett.

  Garnett waited for the gym to empty. He laid down on the court, sleeping for the next couple of hours. He had literally left everything he had on it. Garnett was now expected to be taken within the first few picks. John Nash returned to Washington and huddled with Abe Pollin, the team’s owner, and Coach Jim Lynam. The franchise desperately needed a shooting guard or a small forward. Nash discussed Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse with the pair. He mentioned Garnett and described the impressive performance. “John, I would appreciate it if we didn’t draft a high school player,” Pollin said. Nash respected Pollin and was unsure himself if he wanted to assume the risk in drafting a high school player. He dropped Garnett from consideration.

  Even with Garnett’s name on the tips of every NBA executive’s tongue, Shirley Irby wanted Garnett to attend college. For an urban kid, college was a dream, not a realistic destination. But now, schools wanted to pay for her son’s education if he qualified. It seemed like too good a deal to pass on. Nelson explained another offer too good to pass up. “If he went to college and got every degree in school, he wouldn’t be making the kind of money he could make right now,” Nelson told her. “I wouldn’t advise him to go to college at this point. Hell, he can buy the damn college if he wants to.” Garnett scheduled a press conference at the Home Run Inn, a pizza restaurant on Chicago’s Southwest Side. “Um, I declare myself eligible for the NBA draft,” Garnett began in front of an assembly of family, media, coaches, and teammates. “Recently I received my ACT scores, which was not high enough to play Division I ball…” He said he would like to keep his options open, should he qualify academically. An NCAA spokesperson told the Chicago Tribune that Garnett would lose his college eligibility if he declared for the NBA. But he could petition for reinstatement as a Proposition 48 student-athlete if he paid his first year of college expenses and did not play basketball. The NCAA had enacted the regulation in 1986 in an effort to raise eligibility requirements and respond to criticism of undereducated athletes who rarely graduated. A freshman now needed a 2.0 grade point average and at least a combined score of 700 on the Scholastic Assessment Tests to qualify for eligibility. Blacks became disproportionately ineligible because of the regulation. Garnett seemed like another casualty among hundreds until he decided to bypass the amateur route into professional basketball.

  At the press conference, he looked uneasy. The confidence he showed on the court eluded him.

  “Why not go to junior college?” a reporter asked.

  “Why go?” Garnett responded.

  He was 18 years old and he looked like it. Another journalist asked if he would like to be the role model for others to enter the NBA out of high school. “Oh, man,” he answered. “I don’t want that on me. All I’d do is wish them good luck.”

  The question remained: Which team would pull the trigger on a high school player? Fleisher declined private workout requests from NBA teams—afraid that a knee injury Garnett had suffered at the time would scare teams away. Instead, he allowed franchises to interview Garnett. Some still questioned Garnett’s maturity after his transfer from South Carolina to Illinois. Doug Collins, the Pistons coach, had one of the first sit-downs with Garnett. “In a nice way, he really peeled back some of the layers,” Fleisher said. “I walked away from that day with a real sense that Kevin was going to go very high.” Fleisher offered an interview with Garnett to Isiah Thomas. Thomas declined. He was formerly the dynamic point guard who played under Bob Knight at Indiana before piloting the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons. In 1994, he became a part owner and executive of the expansion Toronto Raptors. He knew Garnett inside and out. Thomas first saw Garnett play at a camp in South Carolina and monitored him closely once Garnett emerged in the Windy City. Anthony Longstreet, a childhood friend and assistant coach at Farragut, provided him with updates. Thomas envisioned Garnett evolving the game, a big man who could play outside among the guards. Thomas promised that Garnett would not slip beyond Toronto’s seventh pick.

  McHale phoned Thomas before the draft. The two shared a long-standing friendship. McHale had heard the rumors of Garnett being immature and asked for Thomas’s input.

  “Whatever you’re hearing, don’t believe,” Thomas told McHale. “If you don’t take him, I’m definitely taking him. What you’re seeing in him is all true. What you’re hearing about him, none of that is true.

  “Kevin, you and I have known each other since high school. He would be the perfect guy for you and he’s the perfect guy for me. I wouldn’t te
ll anybody else that, but out of respect for our friendship, I would [tell] you.”

  The honesty seemed misplaced in a competitive business. Truthfully, Thomas had minimal concerns about Garnett’s ability. He worried more about his own organization’s impact on the teenager. The Raptors had inherited the players that other teams offered to give away through the expansion draft. Thomas did not want any jaded players rubbing off on an impressionable teenager. Had he drafted him, Thomas would have insisted that Garnett remain home during some road games and enroll at a university to ease into adulthood in a spotlight. “Garnett, coming out of high school to a foreign country in Canada, I didn’t know,” Thomas said. “I was going to have to put a totally different type of program around him to make sure he had success and make sure he was comfortable because he was such a young player. The mentoring and tutoring that was going to be required was going to be different. I had put together a plan for Garnett.”

  Meanwhile, McHale told Glen Taylor, the owner of the Timberwolves, that Garnett would develop into a good player, likely a star. “I just don’t know when,” McHale said. Taylor left the decision to McHale and Saunders. Celtics legendary coach Red Auerbach once advised McHale that everyone fumbled draft picks. If he did not, he would become the first executive in NBA history not to do so. “Hey, if we pick guys who don’t work, we’ll just tell them we don’t know any better and it’s our first draft,” McHale joked to Saunders. The pair decided that if Garnett was available with their fifth pick, they would take him. They had once declared that they coveted him when they did not. They now told others that they wanted a college player who could contribute immediately in hopes that Garnett would fall to them in the draft.

  Toronto hosted the NBA’s draft in 1995. Garnett, as one of the top projected selections, attended at the NBA’s request. Nelson called him moments before the draft. “You passed,” Nelson said. Passed what? Garnett wondered. Nelson had not bothered opening the results of Garnett’s last and latest SAT once Garnett had declared for the draft. Nelson had unsealed it on a whim. Garnett had earned a qualifying score, but it was too late for college now. His professional career beckoned. The college players went as expected. Golden State drafted Joe Smith first overall. Antonio McDyess went second to the Clippers (which traded him to Denver) and Philadelphia selected Jerry Stackhouse. Nash eagerly took Rasheed Wallace, a versatile forward. McHale alerted Clayton Wilson, Minnesota’s equipment manager, that the organization would take Garnett. Garnett rose to greet David Stern, passing several older, more established college players on his walk to the podium. He said a prayer of thanks as he walked, he later told Sports Illustrated, and finished it as he took Stern’s outstretched hand.

  Wilson had packed the shorts of Terry Porter, a guard, and figured he would have some fun with the teenager. He requested that Garnett take a picture in full Timberwolves garb. Wilson held up Porter’s shorts that would have resembled Speedos had Garnett worn them. “The bad news is, I thought we were drafting a guard,” Wilson said. “The good news is, next year, we can get you some longer ones.”

  “Word?” Garnett said in amazement. He was not offended, as Wilson had predicted. Garnett admired the shorts. Wilson laughed, pulling out a Timberwolves jersey. “This is the first jersey I’ve ever had like this,” Garnett said, running his hands over his name. “Look at it, it’s stitched in.”

  A tear formed. His life had changed so much the past couple of years from the rural, choking spotlight in South Carolina to the urban, gang-packed Chicago streets to becoming a NBA draft pick in Toronto on his way to being a professional in Minnesota. Basketball remained the common thread.

  Saunders, in the years to follow, would recognize Garnett’s display of nervousness in that first workout from a different perspective. “His shaking is not that he’s scared,” Saunders said. “It’s his adrenaline pumping. He always drank two Gatorades, one in each hand, and they would be almost coming up over the edge he would shake so much. It’s not nerves. It’s an unbelievable adrenaline rush.”

  3.

  Kevin Garnett slouched on a bench. Ice and tape left his body mummified. Everything hurt. Everything. “The league ain’t no joke, man,” he mumbled to himself again and again. “The league ain’t no joke.” Garnett had just begun his first NBA training camp with the Timberwolves at St. Cloud State University deep into the fall of 1995. Minnesota opened with grueling twice-a-day practices. The veterans could coast. Rookies and others with playing time to earn and reputations to make went full tilt each session. League turmoil had nearly delayed Garnett’s debut. The NBA’s first lockout threatened the 1995–1996 season. An agreement between the league and the players union in September ended the three-month standoff. The arrangement closed loopholes that creative teams used to circumvent the league’s salary cap in adding players. The deal birthed a sliding salary scale that specified how much rookies earned, based on their draft position. The increasingly enormous contracts that rookies signed before having ever played an NBA game—Glenn Robinson had signed with Milwaukee a year earlier for $68.2 million for ten seasons—ended. Garnett inked a comparatively paltry contract, three years for $5.6 million. But Garnett could enter unrestricted free agency after three years, a provision that proved to be a windfall for many players—himself included—in the future.

  That would come later, much later.

  But first Garnett had to survive training camp. Clayton Wilson figured he would play another joke on the aching teenager. Garnett had just gone through two practices and was more ice than man when Wilson approached him. “Young fella, it’s your cardiovascular night,” Wilson said. “You’ve either got to do an hour on the treadmill or walk back to the hotel.” Garnett glared incredulously at Wilson. “I can barely walk,” Garnett answered. “The league ain’t no joke, man.”

  The entire NBA wanted to know if Garnett could adapt to the league’s physical play, frequent travel, and lifestyle. The curious included Minnesota’s staff. Jerry Sichting had played with Kevin McHale in Boston before becoming Minnesota’s director of scouting. Garnett had stated that he wanted to be the Deion Sanders of basketball, a flashy prima donna, in an article Sichting had read. Sichting anticipated the worse when Garnett arrived. “When he got here, he was the most humble, shy person,” Sichting remembered. “Clayton Wilson gave him a bag of ’Wolves gear and he was like a kid in a candy shop. He was totally different than the persona he was trying to project.” Garnett missed his first workout with the Timberwolves because of a sprained ankle, sustained while shooting a Nike commercial. He debuted a couple days later with a number of free agents, journeymen, and others looking to break into the NBA. The game’s pace hit Garnett like a wall. He could not take in oxygen fast enough. His chest heaved in and out. He finally settled into a rhythm. Then his nerves kicked in. His shot continually fell short. He muttered curses to himself up and down the floor. Bill Blair, Minnesota’s coach, saw in him a prodigy who possessed the total package, years away from knowing how to use it. “He had some toughness,” Blair said. “He would get mad quick. He had that thing that the special ones do about being such a good competitor.”

  Garnett needed it when the rest of the team convened at St. Cloud State. Minnesota had never finished above 29 wins in its short history and wanted to turn the bleak past into a better future. The team’s veteran players quickly introduced Garnett to the NBA one hard pick and tough foul at a time. Garnett only weighed about 215 pounds and each one of them felt sore after those first few practices. Eric Fleisher knew the transition would likely be jarring and he would have to be at Garnett’s disposal more than he would be for other clients. He urged Garnett to call whenever he wanted. Garnett phoned after his second practice. Fleisher heard muffled crying. Garnett had gone up for a layup earlier in the day when Sam Mitchell, a six-year veteran, roughly rerouted him back to earth.

  “Kevin, what do you expect?” Fleisher asked. “You’re trying to take their job. This is a business now. You’ve got to understand that.” />
  “I didn’t think it was going to be this way,” Garnett said.

  “Guess what?” Fleisher promised. “It’s going to get worse.”

  Kevin McHale devised a weight-lifting program with Sol Brandys, the team’s strength and conditioning coach. They hoped Garnett would add about 25 pounds to his boyish frame by the end of his rookie season. Skinny players carry less muscle mass, leaving them more prone to injury. But Garnett despised lifting weights and figured he would take the bumps and bruises as they came. McHale trained a close eye on Garnett during those nascent days. He approached Garnett between practices one day. Garnett rested his back against the bleachers. His body would have collapsed without the support. “This is really hard,” Garnett told McHale. “How did you do this for so long?” McHale wanted to walk the fine line between coddling and nurturing Garnett. “You’re supposed to be tired,” McHale said. “Training camp is tiring. The first one is always the toughest.” McHale left Garnett alone to prepare for the day’s next session. He figured Garnett would deliver a lackluster performance. “Then practice started and you would’ve never known he was exhausted or tired because he had a motor to play that was so impressive,” McHale said. “I remember thinking at that moment that he was going to be OK.” Garnett’s exuberance rejuvenated the rest of the team. Mitchell had only wanted to test him out with the hard foul. He became a mentor to Garnett and their lockers were next to each other’s. “We all knew about Kevin Garnett,” said Mitchell, who later became an NBA coach. “We had read about him. The thing that we didn’t know was how intense, how dedicated, how motivated he was to become a great player. The very first practice we had, we kind of turned to each other and said, We’re going to look back at this day and realize we played with a truly great player.”