by Vin Baker
“You know what?” he said, his voice suddenly quieter, which had the odd effect of being even more unsettling. “I don’t know if you’re good enough to play here.” There was a long pause as he prepared to deliver the kill shot. “In fact, I don’t even know if you’re good enough to play on our women’s team.”
He stood there for a moment, letting the words sink in, probably waiting to see if I would give it back, waiting for me to demonstrate something resembling toughness. Instead, as my eyes welled with tears, I looked right through him. I could see my teammates and coaches just a few feet away, watching and listening, but feigning indifference. This was still relatively early in the season, so I wondered what they thought of me. Coach Phelan picked on everyone, but I was rapidly becoming a favorite target. And my response, fostered while I was growing up, was one of naked emotion. At Old Saybrook High School people knew that I was passionate because they dealt with me on a daily basis.
Passionate.
That’s the way I like to think of it. Sounds better than “immature” or “hypersensitive” or “soft.” I was passionate on the basketball court; I was passionate about my game. I was passionate about school and friendships and life. As a result, coaches and teachers had given me a wide berth sometimes. They treated me gently. Now, though, I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman thrown into the meat grinder of Division I athletics. Even at the mid-major level, there is a sink-or-swim approach to college basketball; this was especially true a quarter-century ago. Sensitivity was not high on any coach’s priority list. Jack knew that I had talent but questioned my heart and probably my work ethic. Tactically, his approach to dealing with my shortcomings was rooted in old-school, militaristic wisdom: break him down, build him back up. I understand the logic; it’s worked with countless athletes over the years, and eventually it worked with me. But, man . . . was it a struggle. As I blinked back tears, I could see the disappointment on Jack’s face. I could almost hear his thoughts:
Seriously, Baker? You’re crying again?
Jack didn’t understand that the tears were the result of anger, not weakness. I was pissed off. There were tears, yes, and that’s all anybody seemed to notice, but if they had looked at my body language, they would have seen the rigidity, the tight back, and the hands balled into fists. The tears indicated softness and a propensity for quitting, but the body language said, I’m getting ready to do something to somebody and I’m not even exactly sure what it’s going to be.
I survived Jack Phelan’s version of boot camp, though just barely. Trust me—if you were to have looked at me as a college freshman, averaging a measly 4.9 points and eleven minutes per game playing in one of the weakest conferences in college basketball, you never would have imagined that I’d end up being a productive college player, let alone a top-ten NBA draft pick. But opportunities came my way, and I tried to make the most of them.
First, in the summer of 1990, after my freshman year, I was invited to take part in an overseas trip on a team composed entirely of North Atlantic Conference (NAC) all-stars. Now, I wasn’t an all-star. Not even close. But Jack was coaching the team, and he got to pick two of his own players. Our leading scorer, Lamont Middleton, had transferred to Saint John’s, and another player turned down the offer. So Coach Phelan invited me. Training camp would be at Hartford over the summer, he explained, a couple of weeks before we left. There would be games in Finland and Sweden. Good competition, good chance for growth, Jack explained. But it would be hard. He made that point clear.
“No problem, Coach,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
The NAC would never be confused with the Atlantic Coast Conference, but there were some good players on this team—big, strong guys, in some cases three or four years older than me. Guys like Kevin Roberson of Vermont, who had led the country in blocked shots. Less than a year after graduating, Kevin was killed by a drunk driver in his hometown of Buffalo, and I think most people have forgotten just how good a player he was. But, man, he kicked my ass all over the floor in practice. So did the coaches, Jack and Karl Fogel of Northeastern, another fast-talking tough guy. They were on me from the jump, especially Coach Phelan. I was his whipping boy in the pretournament practices, and even after we got overseas. I’d come back to my room after getting humiliated and berated in front of the whole team, and I’d wonder why I’d even been invited. I also questioned Jack’s motivational techniques.
You’re going to go at me in front of all these guys, when you know I have to play against them next year?
He sure did. I came back to my room one night seething with anger, looking for a little compassion from my roommate, Ron Moore, who was also my teammate at Hartford. Ron was older than me, tougher, and at the time a much better basketball player. He’d also been through the wars with Coach Phelan, and along the way had earned Jack’s trust and respect.
“I can’t believe the way Coach is treating me,” I whined.
Ron just laughed. “No, man, you don’t get it. You’ve got to be stronger.”
He was right. And Jack was right (although I still don’t necessarily agree with his tactics).
I stopped feeling sorry for myself and decided to outwork everyone—not just in games, but in practice as well. When Coach Phelan yelled at me, which he continued to do, I feigned indifference. Inside, the anger remained, but I channeled it properly. I wanted to prove to Jack, and to anyone else who may have been watching, that I was neither weak nor overmatched. I was one of the first to arrive for practice each day, and one of the last to leave. In games, I played with a chip on my shoulder. I embraced the idea that you get out of life (and sports) exactly what you put into it. It was such a simple formula, but it worked.
By the end of the trip Ron was the leading scorer on the team, and I was the second-leading scorer. I remember standing outside a club one night, talking to a girl from Finland, trying to communicate and make a connection despite the fact that she spoke almost no English. Coach Fogel walked by, did a double take, and stopped. As he looked at the girl, he pointed at me.
“NBA,” he said. And then again, slower. “N-B-A!”
The girl smiled. I just kind of threw my hands in the air. Coach Fogel laughed and walked away. I figured he was trying to help me with a hookup. Turns out he was making an honest prediction.
Things happened pretty quickly after that trip. I moved into the starting lineup, averaged 19.7 points and 10.4 rebounds per game as a sophomore, and was named first-team all-NAC. As a junior I took another jump: 27.6 points, 9.9 rebounds, and 3.7 blocks. Our team was awful—we won only six games—but I was the second-leading scorer in the country. That’s kind of the way it went for me throughout my college career. Somehow, through a combination of effort, luck, coaching, and timing, I became one of the best players in the country. But basketball is a team game—maybe the ultimate team game—and Hartford was still a fledgling program. Unless you’re LeBron James, capable of going off for 50 or 60 points, you can’t win games by yourself. I wasn’t that kind of player. Opponents knew that even if I scored 30 points and had 10 or 15 rebounds, it usually wouldn’t be enough. I tried to be a good teammate and not let the frustration show, but for the most part I had to be content with focusing on my own development. The final score just wasn’t much of a factor.
At the beginning of my senior year, Sports Illustrated did a story on me with the headline “America’s Best-Kept Secret.” For the photo shoot on campus, the University of Hartford wanted to have some other student-athletes around me in the stands. I was actually embarrassed by the attention: You’re going to get students out of class for me? Come on . . . By this point I knew I’d have a chance to play in the NBA, but I didn’t know where I stood in the pecking order. I was at Hartford, not Michigan. Other guys who figured to be drafted high that year were household names: Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Bobby Hurley, Calbert Cheaney. Great players. Blue-chip recruits out of high school, college all-Americans. Stats notwithstanding, I was a nobody by comparison. Wheneve
r I had a chance to play against better competition, I did just fine. But it wasn’t like there were agents swarming all around me.
Later I heard that the Celtics were ready to take me in the top twenty of the draft after my junior year, but somehow the message—or at least the sincerity of the message—never got through. That was probably a good thing. I had played well at some camps in the summer before my senior year, and considered the possibility of entering the draft, but the truth is, I was terrified by the prospect of leaving school. It wasn’t just that I had doubts about whether I could handle the level of competition in the NBA, I also questioned my own maturity, and I feared the great unknown. I wasn’t much of a partier at all in college—didn’t start going out until my junior year, even then only once a week or so, and didn’t drink very much. I was hopelessly inexperienced with women as well—didn’t lose my virginity until I got to college, and even then I was more of a steady-girlfriend type than a player.
So I liked the University of Hartford. I was comfortable and happy. I was close to home. At the time, I couldn’t imagine giving all that up to take a shot at playing in the pros. Sure, it was flattering to know that people in the NBA were looking at me seriously, but I was more concerned about how I would tell my parents that I was dropping out of school to play professional basketball. And if you’re not confident and mature enough to tell your parents you’re leaving school to play in the NBA (for millions of dollars), then you’re probably not ready for the job.
Instead, I stayed in school, got my degree, and continued to grow and improve. I averaged 28.3 points per game as a senior (fourth best in the country), finished as Hartford’s all-time leading scorer, and wound up being taken eighth by the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round of the 1993 NBA draft. In every way imaginable, especially from an economic standpoint, it was a life-altering development. Today, thanks to salary caps and the collective bargaining agreement, rookie contracts in the NBA are strictly regulated: a maximum of two years, with a team option on years three and four, and a ceiling that prevents anyone from backing up the Brinks truck right out of college. But in 1993, you got what you could get, as quickly as you could get it. My first contract was for ten years and a total of $18 million. Most of the guys around me in the draft thought that was crazy. Six years was more common, with a couple of players opting for eight. The negotiating of professional sports contracts has always been a risky proposition, for both players and management. The player wants long-term security, of course, but if he signs for ten years, as I did, and he becomes an all-star in year three, with significantly greater market value . . . well, management naturally would prefer not to renegotiate that deal. My agents made sure that I had an option to leave after the third year, but I didn’t care. I was looking at $1.8 million a year: more money than I had ever dreamed of earning.
My parents were shocked. In fact, it wasn’t until the night of the draft that they truly came to believe that I could make a living playing in the NBA. And a good living at that. I don’t mean to sound like they were unsupportive; they weren’t. But they were far from helicopter parents. I didn’t have a soccer mom or a dad who coached biddy ball. My parents were not invested in my athletic career, they were merely casual observers. Early in my college career they didn’t attend many games, and even when I was a senior and they were fixtures courtside, smiling proudly and enjoying themselves as loyal Hartford fans, I don’t think they understood what they were seeing. When I would talk about playing professional ball, they would express quiet skepticism, as if to say, Can you really make a living doing that? Playing a game?
Their ambivalence was understandable. My father was a mechanic and a preacher. Mom worked an office job. They did hard, honest, tangible work, and on Friday afternoon they would pick up a paycheck and deposit it in the bank. They knew and trusted a hands-on employment experience. If someone asked my father, “What do you do for a living?” he could say, “I fix cars.” Very straightforward and easily understood. So all this stuff about the pros . . . it was foreign to my parents; it was fantasy. What they knew of the NBA consisted mainly, if not exclusively, of guys like Michael Jordan and others near his level. You were either a superstar or a bust, a multimillionaire or a guy playing for meal money. They had no idea that everyone in the NBA was a tremendous athlete being very well compensated for his services. And they certainly didn’t think I had an opportunity to be one of the elite members of an already elite fraternity.
For all of us, though, it became reality on that June night in 1993, at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit. For my parents, especially, I think it all started to make sense when they entered the building and got a strong whiff of success. This was a big deal, and their son was part of it.
As expected, Chris Webber, the gifted power forward from Michigan’s Fab Five, was the first pick overall, selected by the Orlando Magic. BYU freshman Shawn Bradley, a seven-foot-six center, was the second pick, for the Philadelphia 76ers, followed by Penny Hardaway of the University of Memphis (Golden State Warriors), Jamal Mashburn of Kentucky (Dallas Mavericks), Isaiah Rider of UNLV (Minnesota Timberwolves), Calbert Cheaney of Indiana (Washington Bullets), and the point guard Bobby Hurley of Duke (Sacramento Kings).
That brought us to the eighth pick, which belonged to the Milwaukee Bucks.
Here’s the thing about the draft: If you’re among the top players—let’s say, the first five to ten—you usually know ahead of time where you are likely to land. There is too much at stake for teams to leave much to chance. If a team is seriously interested in a prospect, that player is brought in for extensive interviews and usually a serious workout. By the time a coach and general manager settle on a draft pick, they have done their due diligence and are as confident as possible that the player will fill a need for many years to come. Unless of course the goal is simply to acquire that player and trade him for someone else whom the team really needs. But it goes without saying that when your business model (and your job) is predicated on predicting the reliability and potential of young men barely out of their teens . . . mistakes can be made.
As they said in Sports Illustrated, I was college basketball’s best-kept secret, but by the time the draft rolled around, everyone in the NBA knew who I was and had determined whether my small-school stardom would translate to professional achievement. Like every other potential high first-round draft pick, I had been poked and prodded, quizzed and questioned. Ordinarily, mid-major players (those not from the power conferences) will play in several senior showcases at the end of the season. These are typically a way for small-college players to get exposure to scouts who may have overlooked them during the season. My agents, however, steered me away from the postseason showcases, their theory being that I was a lottery pick, not a kid just hoping to hit the board sometime in the late first round; and lottery picks did not play in these events. They ended up being right, but in retrospect I’m pretty sure that their decision was based primarily on inexperience.
My agents were Walter Luckett and Lou Albanese. Walter was a legendary baller out of Kolbe High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The guy graduated in the early 1970s and fifty years later was still the all-time New England career prep scoring leader. He averaged a triple-double in his senior year and was named national high school player of the year; in his freshman year at Ohio University, he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Although he played briefly in the NBA, a knee injury shortened Walter’s career, and he eventually returned to Connecticut and built a successful business career.
My connection to Walter? He had gotten to know my mother through work. Walter would occasionally talk to Mom about me and how I was doing. Eventually he and a business associate, Lou Albanese, an investment broker from Westport, offered to help with the management of my basketball career. In the beginning their plan was to simply introduce me to the proper parties—which they did, including Bob Woolf, who was one of the top sports agents in the field at the time. In the end, though, Walter and Lou decided they cou
ld handle the job themselves, which was fine by me. They were exactly what I needed, a couple of guys with only one client, and a connection to my family. I wasn’t ready for Bob Woolf or David Falk or anyone else of that magnitude. And I loved the fact that they were so excited to be representing me; I could see it on their faces.
Lou and Walt decided that in the months leading up to the draft, my time would be better served by working out for individual teams, rather than participating in showcase events designed for players who weren’t even assured of being drafted, let alone being potential lottery picks. So they arranged several workouts and interviews, in the hope of generating even more buzz. A good individual workout can do that, as GMs and coaches tend to share information. A bad one, of course, can kill you, as can a poor interview performance. I didn’t know much about the whole process, but I had faith in Walt and Lou, and in my own ability.
Some people thought we were making a huge mistake. Chief among those was Marty Blake, who at the time was the NBA’s director of scouting.
“This is ridiculous,” Marty told me. “You need to go to these tournaments and show that you can play.”
But I believed in my agents, and in the path we had chosen. Marty was one of the most respected evaluators of talent the NBA had ever known. He knew the game, both on and off the court, and I’m sure he felt like he was giving me sound advice. But I was willing to gamble that my agents were right.
“You know what, Marty?” I said. “I think I’m comfortable.”
The only problem was, I may have been a little too comfortable. You see, I didn’t really understand the intricacies of the entire process of working out and interviewing with individual teams. Today the top college prospects are well versed in the proceedings. They are trained not only for the rigors of a physical test, but they also practice interview techniques. The idea is to demonstrate exceptional athletic prowess and fitness on the floor, and maturity and intellect off the floor. A strong workout will convince coaches and front office personnel that an athlete represents a solid investment over the long term.
