Pitino quickly responded to Dawkins’s text. “We would love to have him,” he wrote.
Pitino has vehemently and repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with—or knew anything about—money changing hands in return for Bowen’s decision to attend Louisville.
The meeting between the Bowens and Pitino was in one sense routine, because the coach had been through this same drill hundreds of times at four different college programs, beginning at Boston University in 1978. Bowen, like most high schoolers, wanted to know how he would fit in with the returning players and incoming freshmen and if he had a chance to crack the starting lineup. No player wants to make what at that point is the biggest decision of his life and then find himself with a seat on the bench. Pitino replied as he had to every kid he had recruited over the last four decades—that Bowen had a chance to start if he worked hard, but there were no guarantees. He told him he had great size for a perimeter player and good enough ball-handling ability that he might even be able to play a little point guard in a pinch, but he would have to become a better defensive player. No one came to a Pitino team truly ready for the defensive intensity he demanded. Those who rose to the challenge were rewarded with playing time.
What made the meeting unusual is that Pitino had not seen much of Bowen on the court. Louisville expressed interest early in his high school years, but it was not reciprocated. When Pitino attended AAU events where Bowen was participating, he was more focused on players he seemed to have a realistic chance of signing. In the meeting, he found Bowen quiet and respectful, and his parents seemed pleasant enough. He sold the attributes of the program, as he always did, but the deal seemed to have already weirdly come together. The last five-star in the class of 2017 was coming his way.
Dawkins took an active role in the conversation, and near the end expressed a concern: What about the sanctions still looming over Louisville from the sex parties in the basketball dorm? Would Bowen get a chance to play in the NCAA tournament during his time at Louisville, especially if he stayed just a year or two before bolting for the NBA?
It was a reasonable enough question, though in hindsight the fact that Dawkins was the one asking it seems ironic in the extreme.
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On June 3, 2017, Bowen finally revealed his choice: Louisville and its Hall of Fame coach, Rick Pitino. The Louisville Courier-Journal attributed the “surprise twist” to decisions made by players at Arizona, Michigan State, and Texas to stay in school rather than bolt for the NBA and speculated that Bowen did not want to have to compete against established talent for playing time. But players with NBA ambitions and Bowen’s pedigree—MVP of the Jordan Brand Classic, a high school team that was ranked the best in the nation, rarely a pickup game he could not dominate—usually figure they will bust their way into any coach’s starting lineup. And even if they don’t, they can contribute. Coaches almost always give significant playing time to at least two or three players who come off their bench—and it is not that unusual for non-starters to be chosen high in the NBA draft.
The stories gave no real clue about Bowen’s timing or motivation, other than that he seemed to be more strategic than most other prospects. In earlier stories, he attributed his delay to there being “a lot more to it” than most people would understand, with so many variables about who might end up on certain rosters. The impression he gave was that he was weighing everything, like a handicapper at the track who keeps his head down in the Racing Form until the last possible moment and then finally makes a wager just as the betting window closes.
The announcement sent Louisville fans into ecstasy. Pitino’s move to lure a coveted recruit at the last possible moment, and one who did not even have Louisville on his list, was hailed as a masterstroke. Bowen was celebrated as the last piece on a championship team—and a sign that Pitino, as was one of the websites that follows the team put it, was “serious about getting back to the big dance.”
Tugs’s parents had moved with him to Indiana when he enrolled at La Lumiere—just as they had moved to East Lansing to follow Jason Richardson. They lived only a few miles from Lake Michigan. After he committed to Louisville, the family drove to their favorite spot near the water and took one last photo at sunset.
The next day they set out for Louisville. They took another sunset picture, this one in the park beside the Clark Memorial Bridge, which spans the Ohio River and connects Louisville and Jeffersonville, Indiana. One night they attended an Ed Sheeran concert at the Yum Center. (Tugs had an allergic reaction to something he ate and ended up in the emergency room.)
Some members of their extended family came to visit in Louisville. It was a celebration of Tugs’s milestone. He had moved from the basketball court in his Saginaw backyard, up through the grassroots circuit, to MVP of the Jordan Brand Classic, and now onto the roster of the Louisville Cardinals.
When Brian Bowen Sr. and his son walked into the basketball locker room for the first time, Tugs’s name and his number 20 were already on one of the big wood-paneled locker stalls. It was not yet mission accomplished, because the NBA was the ultimate goal, but Tugs had fulfilled the first part of the plan. He was at a big-time program and he would be playing on TV just about every week for one of the most famous coaches in America.
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To anyone who has spent time around basketball, Christian Dawkins is a recognizable type. He is the kid who has no game but wants to be involved, so he figures out another way into the action. He knows the good players and can talk to them about their best moves, about some fool they made look bad in a recent game, and some other hotshot on the circuit who thinks too highly of himself. He stokes egos and promotes rivalries—You believe he’s talkin’ that shit about you?—and serves the purpose of making everything seem bigger. He has the scouting report on the next game, a ride there if you need one, and entry to the party that night.
On the day of the meeting in Pitino’s office, he was immersed in the business of basketball recruiting in two different ways: as a matchmaker between high school players and college coaches, and as a runner, or go-between, for agents and financial advisors seeking to sign up players with NBA potential. It is one business, really, because in the one-and-done era, the best players choose a college, play their 30-some NCAA games, and are sitting in the greenroom of the NBA draft, all within a span of about twelve months.
Dawkins could get it all wired on the front end: Negotiate with the college program on behalf of a player, and, for the best ones, get payments into the six figures. Establish the shoe company affiliation. And have the financial team in place for when the kid is ready to jump to the NBA.
He had no college education, but Dawkins could carry himself like he had been through law school. He spoke the language of the boardroom as well as the street. He was, of course, a walking, talking violator of NCAA regulations and a dispenser of “impermissible benefits,” but he dwelled in a realm in which the rules were not followed and not respected as having any moral authority. Not by the recruits themselves. And not by their families, their AAU coaches, or many of the NCAA coaches seeking their services.
The indefensible nature of the NCAA itself, a multibillion-dollar enterprise resting on a pool of unpaid labor, created a gray market and an opportunity for under-the-table deal-making. And it gave power to—and put money in the pockets of—practitioners like Christian Dawkins.
His employer at that time was Andy Miller, a top NBA agent who over the years represented dozens of players, from now-retired stars Kevin Garnett and Chauncey Billups to current Knicks forward Kristaps Porzingis. Dawkins had previously been a recruiter for a firm of financial advisors who represented NBA players, but left that job in rancor and litigation, including an allegation that he somehow ran up $42,000 in Uber bills on the credit card of an NBA player. That’s a lot of rides, but it also gives a sense of Dawkins’s energy and style—constantly in
motion and always working.
Agents, especially the older and more settled ones, need runners who can melt into the grassroots scene. Even if the agents were once good at it themselves, they are less likely as the years go on to want to work the sidelines at tournaments and the hotel lobbies at night. White agents are particularly in need of young, African American operatives like Dawkins in what is largely a milieu of black players and their families. Dawkins referred to the young men he had brought to Miller as “my players,” though they were not technically that since he was not a registered NBA agent.
He did not have to go far to find Brian Bowen Jr., because they grew up within a couple of miles of each other and their families were close. Even though he was not much of a player himself, Christian Dawkins came from Saginaw basketball royalty. His father, Lou, was a legendary high school player in the city who went on to play at Tulsa University, where he hit a shot that is still considered the highest moment in his alma mater’s basketball history—a last-second three-pointer that put Tulsa into the Sweet 16 of the 1994 NCAA tournament. It was the first NCAA tournament for his coach, Tubby Smith, who would go on to win an NCAA title at Kentucky.
Lou Dawkins hoped for an NBA career, but when no NBA team drafted him, he returned home and went to work as a teacher and coach at Saginaw High, first paying his dues by working six years as the junior varsity coach. In seven seasons as the varsity coach, he won two state championships and coached eleven players who went on to play Division I basketball. His teams were ranked as high as second in the nation, and he won a couple of Michigan coach of the year honors. When he moved on in 2013 for a job in college coaching—he is now an assistant at Cleveland State—one of his former players who attended the press conference in Saginaw was NBA all-star Draymond Green, who referred to Lou Dawkins as his “teacher, mentor, and father figure.”
Looking at Christian Dawkins through the prism of his family and their accomplishments, it is possible to view him as both an underachiever and an overachiever. His father, in addition to his coaching role at Saginaw, was a teacher and the school’s athletic director. His mother is a high school principal. Christian took a few classes at Kishwaukee College, a two-year school in DeKalb County, Illinois, before dropping out. And yet he traveled the nation and world, sat courtside at NBA games, and mixed with multimillionaire athletes. He had the private numbers of NBA general managers in his phone—his phones, actually, as he had three of them—and when he called, they picked up.
His social media posts celebrated this dazzling existence: On his Facebook page is a screen grab of him on ESPN during the 2017 NBA draft at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. From a fancy-looking hotel pool, a selfie is captioned, “View from the corner office this morning.” A close-up of a lobster on a plate at a restaurant in Sint Maarten is tagged, “This is a long way from Red Lobster, slim.”
One of the comments on that post was, “Naw, Cuz, that’s a long way frm Saginaw #proudofyouyoungmn.” That seemed to be a goal of Dawkins—to be, or at least appear to be, a long way from Saginaw even while remaining immersed in its basketball culture.
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Dawkins had a younger brother, Dorian, who was a gifted player like their dad, perhaps even better. The stories of his exploits make him seem like a young Paul Bunyan of the hoops world. By the sixth grade, he was the first one chosen in any pickup game, even when the other players included members of Saginaw High’s varsity team. In the first game of his eighth-grade season, he had 36 points, 20 assists, and 22 steals—and it would have been an even more impressive stat line if he had not sat out the fourth quarter because his team was so far out in front. He was known as “The Future” from just about the first moment he first touched a basketball.
Off the court, Dorian shared his brother Christian’s ability to connect with people. “He had a rich personality, above average amount of confidence for a kid that age, and incredible versatility in terms of using it,” Curtis Hervey, one of his former coaches, told the Lansing State Journal after his death. “In sports, in class, in dealing with nonathletes, across racial lines, he was just a really smooth guy to be that young.”
Dorian just naturally drew both kids and adults into his circle. In grade school, his parents would sometimes go to pick him up at the end of the day but have to wait because he was locked in a chess match with the principal.
Christian spoke of his brother’s physical courage. “There would be stuff I was scared of, he wouldn’t be scared of. Say you were around the neighborhood and somebody would do something like steal your bike or take your next game in basketball. I’d think, ‘I don’t want to fight that dude.’ He’d say, ‘Let’s just fight them and get it back.’”
In the summer of 2009, Dorian was fourteen years old and playing in a grassroots tournament on the campus of Michigan State for his father’s AAU team. Lou Dawkins had another commitment and the team was being led by his assistant coach. Christian, two years older than his brother, was also along on the trip. Late in a game, Dorian stepped to the foul line and made a shot that tied the game—and then collapsed on the court. Christian rode in an ambulance with him to the hospital. “He just said that he was hurting, and he didn’t know what was going on and just to call Momma and Daddy,” Christian recalled. His parents sped the hundred miles from Saginaw to East Lansing, but Dorian died before they reached him. An autopsy revealed that he had a congenital heart defect and had suffered a series of heart attacks that day.
Dorian was ranked among the top incoming ninth graders in the country, and the tournament, called the Tom Izzo Shootout, was one of the summer’s big AAU events. Michigan State coach Izzo spent much of that night with the Dawkins family and released a statement. “As a coach and even more so as a parent, I grieve, pray, and suffer with the Dawkins family, and the many people in Saginaw and beyond who mourn the passing of a wonderful young man.”
Lou Dawkins would later say, “When he died, I died.” When he and his wife left Saginaw a few years later and Lou took his first college job, as an assistant at Northern Illinois, he said the move was as much to get away from the memories as it was to chase a career goal.
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As his brother was establishing himself on the court, Christian Dawkins was laying the foundation for his own future in the game. By his mid-teens, he was publishing a recruiting newsletter, Best of the Best Prep Basketball Scouting, that charged $40 a subscription. Few people paying for it realized it was the work of a fifteen-year-old. He formed a company called Living Out Your Dreams Enterprises.
He made his father’s high school team, but he was a bench player—about six feet tall, with a soft physique and not much in the way of skills or grit. But he ranked himself the third best player in the state of Michigan in his own recruiting sheet. His self-rating won him a tryout with one of the top AAU teams in the Boston area, the New England Playaz, which paid for his airfare. They took a one-day look at him and realized they’d been tricked.
The tryout coincided with Dawkins’s transfer to St. Mark’s School, a tony prep school in Southborough, Massachusetts, west of Boston. He told people he was recruited to play basketball, but the coaches there were no more impressed by his talent than the New England Playaz had been. He seemed to like talking about basketball—arguing about the relative merits of players he watched on TV—more than actually playing.
Dawkins struggled academically in his freshman year at St. Mark’s and might not have returned anyway, but when his brother died that summer, he transferred back to Saginaw. He also took over his father’s AAU program. He had heard somewhere that a person “never dies unless they are forgotten,” so he renamed the team Dorian’s Pride. He began running tournaments for the best local AAU teams and all-star events that drew players from a wider area. One was called the Showdown in the Valley, another the Show Your Heart Memorial Classic.
His events became important
destinations on the grassroots circuit, and he was able to attract top players and sponsorship money from three different shoe companies. He started getting some press as well. The website MaxPreps, in a 2010 profile, surveyed the breadth of his basketball involvement and observed, “Not a bad resume for a 17-year-old.”
The tournaments served as business development. Dawkins was gaining access to people from every level of the industry—from young players and their families to scouts, agents, pro and college coaches, and all the way up to NBA general managers. “There are a lot of Dawkins figures out there, but they’re not as persistent and aggressive as he was,” says an NBA scout who has been dealing with Dawkins since he was a teenager. “It’s a job like any other job, but he worked really hard at it and he thought really hard at it. He was on kids before other people were, and by the time anyone else showed up at their front door, he had them signed, sealed, and delivered.
“The sad thing is he had good intentions in the beginning. He genuinely loves basketball. He wanted to honor his brother and I think he wanted to do good things. But he got so big in such a short amount of time, bigger than someone his age and with his experience should ever have been.”
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By the time he graduated from high school, Dawkins was so deeply immersed in the grassroots culture, and so familiar with its customs, byways, and dark corners, that college was not of great interest. He made a halfhearted stab at it, then tried to raise money to start his own agency, promising prospective investors that he could immediately deliver clients. Even for someone as self-confident as Dawkins, that was too audacious, and he was not successful in setting up his own shop. He continued to run tournaments as he established himself as a broker in recruiting—someone who could navigate an unfamiliar landscape for high school recruits and their families, speak the local language, and get the best possible deal. At the same time, he introduced NBA agents and financial advisors to the players he had befriended, so he could have skin in the game when his recruits left college.
The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino Page 12
