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

  The NBA had seen robust growth in recent years, gaining greatly in popularity and profitability. When Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league in 1979, it “was seen as far too black, and the majority of its players, it was somehow believed, were on drugs and willing to play hard only in the last two minutes of the game,” wrote the journalist David Halberstam. Interest in the college rivalry shared by Johnson and Bird carried into their professional careers. Still, CBS continued airing some NBA championship games in the early 1980s on tape delay. The network played the games near midnight, when people who did watch television that late routinely tuned in to NBC’s Johnny Carson. Nearly the whole country watched The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas in 1980, instead of the sixth game of the NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. A fresh-eyed Johnson played all five positions in the absence of an injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and put on a masterful, transformative performance. But few had watched it. An ambitious David Stern sought to change the league’s image as its commissioner four years later. Stern cracked down on the league’s drug problem and promoted the All-Star Game as its signature event. His ascension as commissioner coincided with Michael Jordan’s NBA arrival. Jordan became the vehicle Stern used to vault the game’s popularity into the corporate stratosphere. Jordan played gracefully on the court and, at times, appeared to defy gravity. He evolved into a worldwide icon, more recognizable than most actors and politicians. Companies enjoyed partnerships with Jordan and, in turn, with the NBA, and lucrative television deals resulted in surging salaries.

  By the summer of 1995, the average NBA salary had ballooned to nearly $2 million. That provided a monetary incentive for collegiate players to declare for the NBA before their amateur eligibility expired. Among the first 15 picks of the 1990 draft, 13 had been college seniors. By 1994, only one college senior was drafted in the first seven selections. The NBA had become a high-stakes, cutthroat business. Executives drafted players based on potential as much as on proven talent. A younger prospect meant a higher ceiling. A higher ceiling meant a prospective star in a sport where one dominant player can carry a franchise. The high school–to–pro route was thought to be closed, but no rule prevented a player from trying. Shawn Kemp had become a star by jumping to the NBA in 1989 after leaving the University of Kentucky and Trinity Valley Community College without ever having played a game at either school.

  The storyline of a talented prodigy proved too tantalizing for NBA executives not to evaluate Garnett’s workout. Garnett had been compared to everyone from Bill Walton to Alonzo Mourning to Reggie Miller. Hammond had spent his life around basketball as a player and coach. Players, in his experience, usually masked their nervousness with an overabundance of confidence as they got older, wearing it like a cheap cologne. Garnett did not disguise anything. He couldn’t. He was what he was, a kid who would have his entire future determined over the course of the next precious moments. The workout had not even started. The boy could not catch his breath. His heart thumped. His chest heaved up and down, up and down. Hammond walked Garnett away from the executives to the court’s far side. “Stand here and get your breath,” Hammond advised. He positioned Garnett at the free-throw line. Garnett leisurely shot a couple, trying to regain his composure. He had once dreamed of playing college basketball. So many people told him he could jump straight to the NBA that he had changed his mind. Garnett glanced at the executives. Some looked bored, as if they had come out of deference to Fleisher, who had player clients scattered throughout the league. Maybe they were right. Maybe he and Bill Willoughby were wrong. Willoughby had encouraged Garnett to opt for the NBA in a telephone call arranged by Fleisher. Garnett was a historian of the game and listened intently. Many, after all, considered Willoughby the primary reason no high schooler had attempted the sizable jump in years.

  •••

  College coaches recruited Bill Willoughby in 1975 with the same fervor used on Moses Malone and Darryl Dawkins. Willoughby stood 6 feet 8 inches tall and played forward. Yet he snaked in and out of the lane like a guard. Lefty Driesell’s sermons to him landed on deaf ears. Willoughby nearly ended up at North Carolina. But Kentucky’s Joe B. Hall became the coach who ultimately got Willoughby’s signature on a letter of intent. “Big arena, beautiful women, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, watching horse races” is how Willoughby described Lexington. He returned to finish his senior year at Englewood’s Dwight Morrow High School in New Jersey, intent on becoming a Wildcat.

  One recruiting trip still nagged at Willoughby. He had visited Maryland during the summer when Malone still thought he would attend the university. Willoughby spied Malone working at a construction job. The image of Malone, nearly seven feet tall, wearing dirt-caked clothes and a hard hat, remained with Willoughby. Driesell had secured Malone the gig so he could have a bit of spending money. “He had to be at this guy’s house at 6:30 every morning,” Driesell recalled. “These college kids with jobs, you tell them to get there at 6:30, they don’t show up. He said that Moses was sitting on his front porch at 6:00 a.m. every morning waiting for him, never missed a day, was never late.” Malone had no use for that hat now, Willoughby thought. He had become a pro and made hundreds of thousands. “This guy went to the ABA,” Willoughby said of his thinking at the time. “He’s playing against George Gervin and Julius Erving. I could be next.” Willoughby instructed Bob White, his high school coach, to return interest should any pro scouts inquire about him.

  One NBA executive had paid close attention to Malone’s assimilation before training his eye on Willoughby. Pat Williams had inherited the hapless Philadelphia 76ers, a once-proud franchise fallen on troubled times. The team slipped and staggered to a record 73 losses in 1972–1973. Williams, Philadelphia’s general manager, tried everything to revive interest in the franchise. Long ago, he had played minor league baseball, where players would be routinely drafted into the sport from high school. He assumed basketball players could not take the same route.

  That is, until he saw Malone on the Stars. Malone more than held his own, Williams mused. No college prospect enticed him in the approaching draft. Williams wondered if another Malone was out there somewhere. If so, he could outsmart the rest of the league and jump-start the franchise. Williams homed in on Bill Cartwright and Darryl Dawkins. Cartwright stood taller, but was also much thinner. Word trickled back that his mother insisted he attend college. Dawkins, an Orlando native, was about 6 feet 10 inches tall with a chiseled frame. “Man-child” was the oft-used description. Williams selected Dawkins fifth overall in 1975, making Dawkins the first player drafted directly from high school who would immediately play in the NBA. Williams pointed Dawkins toward Herb Rudoy, an agent who did not share the same moral concerns as Moses Malone’s agent. “I am a believer in capitalism, that if a young person has a talent that’s good enough, he ought to go to the pros,” Rudoy said.

  Williams figured he had one-upped the league and could draft all the top high school talent, develop them, and field a super team in a few years. He told Willoughby that he would pluck him as well with Philadelphia’s next pick. A reporter called a surprised Willoughby and alerted him that the Atlanta Hawks, instead, had chosen him 19th overall. In some ways, the Hawks had outsmarted themselves. Atlanta took David Thompson and Marvin Webster in the first round. Thompson and Webster chose the ABA and Willoughby now merited more money. The ABA’s Denver Nuggets had also selected Willoughby.

  He had choices, and college looked less likely among them. Willoughby’s mother worked at a factory. His father was a mechanic. They left the decision to him, Willoughby said. He went to the NBA, signing for $1.1 million over five years. “I had clothes,” Willoughby said. “It didn’t strike me until I turned 18 that I didn’t have no money in my pocket. You want to go to the movies, you have to ask your mother or father. I never had a job. I wasn’t allowed to cook. I wasn’t nothing.”

  The move stunned Joe B. Hall. The Kentucky coach had also recruited Malone and Dawkins, losing all
three to the professional leagues. Hall blamed some of the people around Willoughby for trying to capitalize off him and pointed a finger toward his high school coach. “[Bob White] wanted to go with him [to Kentucky],” Hall said. “I had no place for his coach. I was real surprised about Willoughby because we had talked it over with his parents and they were happy that he was not going to turn pro. They didn’t feel he was ready. Not basketball-wise, but just socially mature to handle it.” Willoughby lacked life experience. All he had done in his first 17 years of life was play ball, first in New Jersey and then on the famed courts in New York. His parents offered to move to Atlanta with him. Willoughby decided he wanted to learn and live on his own. He took his driver’s test after purchasing his first car, a Lincoln Town Car. He only used it to drive to the arena, home, the airport, or a diner. “I just felt by myself,” he said. “I was a loner.” He still thought about his future. Willoughby received a $500 monthly allowance from his agent and wanted to preserve the bulk of his earnings.

  He planned on dominating the NBA as he had in high school. “They thought I was going to be the next Dr. J,” he whimsically reminisced. His adolescent body did not allow it. Willoughby’s pushes against high school kids became gentle nudges to his grown opposition in the NBA. He suffered in the face of the game’s physicality and withered when he encountered any coaching criticism. He had always been the star and critiques were foreign and unwelcome.

  In an early game, Willoughby drove toward the basket and dribbled through his legs. The ball bounced helplessly off him, out of bounds. “This isn’t the playground,” said Cotton Fitzsimmons, Atlanta’s coach, as he yanked him from the game. Fitzsimmons’s departure the following year did not improve Willoughby’s outlook or up his playing time. The Hawks hired Hubie Brown away from the ABA. Brown was a disciplinarian and a tactician, known to time his practices to the second. He had little use for a player unprepared to treat the profession like a job—even if that player was only a year out of high school. The coach, Willoughby said, relentlessly cursed at his team and played favorites. But Hal Wissel, Brown’s assistant coach, recalled those days much differently. Wissel said Willoughby had “potential with no fundamental skills.” Brown once asked Wissel to teach Willoughby a few post moves before practice. Someone from the front office interrupted practice a couple of days later, telling Brown he had an urgent phone call. It turned out to be Willoughby’s agents complaining about his having to arrive early, Wissel said. Brown requested two things from every player: be on time and do your job. “Bill Willoughby didn’t do number two,” Wissel said. “He didn’t do his job. These are pros. These are men. And he wasn’t ready for that.”

  In Philadelphia, Darryl Dawkins also came into the league unprepared. Without school, he suddenly had money in his pocket and hours of the day to fill. “The hardest part is what are you doing during idle time?” he said. “I started writing poetry. I stated cooking and tweaking recipes. I’ve always had a fetish for cars and I did like women. So I occupied my time that way, besides playing basketball.” Dawkins offered colorful quotes, wore even more colorful clothing, and shattered backboards with his thunderous dunks. He named his finishes: the Rim Wrecker, the Go-Rilla, the Look Out Below. He claimed he came from the planet Lovetron. Dawkins volunteered whenever the team needed someone at a community event. He was also the first to attend parties. He wore a lime-green suit to his 19th birthday celebration. “You could see him coming from five miles away,” said his teammate World B. Free. Dawkins’s mind seemed forever split between the game and what to do after the game. “Present,” he once called before realizing Coach Gene Shue was not taking roll call, but subbing him into a game. Dawkins was good. Many expected him to be great. But he considered the game to be a game, while his older teammates regarded it as their livelihood. Entering the NBA early prolonged his adolescence, instead of hastening his maturity. “He was immature when he came in,” said teammate Steve Mix. “The physical part was there. The mental part wasn’t.”

  Dawkins at least enjoyed the game. Willoughby had an undistinguished career, meandering through six teams in eight years. He had trouble accepting that he would never become the star he was once projected to be. His career highlight arrived in 1981 as a Houston Rocket when he did the impossible and blocked Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook in a playoff game. Del Harris, his coach in Houston, remembered Willoughby as softhearted and likable, but, also as an introvert who masked his feelings. Harris once requested that Willoughby run sprints when he sustained a hand injury. “He insisted to my assistant, Carroll Dawson, that I was punishing him for being hurt,” Harris recalled. “He could not accept that I was trying to keep him in shape while he was out.”

  Life had come full circle. Bill Willoughby had started as a phenom in New Jersey. He tried to hang on to the tatters of his NBA career by appearing with the New Jersey Nets in their 1985 summer camp at Princeton’s Jadwin Gym. The roster featured rookies and free agents, players with little chance of making a regular-season roster. Willoughby glanced across the court during a summer game against the Knicks and noticed some unwelcome faces. Willoughby said that he had been battling concussions and that some of the Knicks players sought to inflict further injury on him during the game.

  Willoughby played four minutes and ran into a hard screen. He remembers hearing Knicks players saying, “Get this motherfucker.” Bob MacKinnon, the Nets general manager and acting coach, tried reinserting Willoughby into the game’s second quarter. “I don’t want to,” Willoughby said. “Then go home,” MacKinnon instructed.

  “And he did,” MacKinnon said to the Record, a newspaper in New Jersey. “I have no explanation for it.”

  Willoughby asked the team’s athletic trainer to open the locker room so he could collect his belongings. “You’re not going to make the pros going down Route 80,” the trainer told Willoughby. “They can take my money,” Willoughby responded. “But they’re trying to hurt me.”

  Willoughby had a couple of other tryouts. He later waited day after day, week after week, year after year for a phone call that never came, one from an NBA executive offering a last chance. Willoughby’s basketball career ended when he was 28 years old. Retirement did not treat Willoughby any more gently. His agents—whom he had awarded power of attorney—had embezzled most of his savings. Willoughby won a judgment for $1.1 million, but could not collect the majority of the sum when one of the agents declared bankruptcy. Willoughby lost his home, moved in with his parents, and battled depression. He came to symbolize everything that could go wrong when a franchise hitched its hopes to a high school player. Willoughby was a man among boys in high school. He was a boy among men in the NBA. The Hawks saw Willoughby’s potential and predicted his future. They did not factor in his physical immaturity and emotional instability as significant hurdles. Years later, Willoughby took steps to straighten out his life. He enrolled in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s regular day program on the persistent advice of a close friend and with assistance from the NBA’s Retired Players Association. He kept cramming his frame into his 1984 Mercedes-Benz, day after day, to attend class.

  Willoughby graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson in 2001 at the age of 44. He cried upon realizing that Continental Airlines Arena was hosting the commencement—the same building where Willoughby had played his final NBA game in 1984. False hope and faded dreams had followed that appearance until now.

  The school asked Willoughby to address the graduates.

  “I chose basketball over education,” he said. “I chose a big contract over education. I soon found out that life is about so much more than money and that success on the court lasts a very short time.”

  Willoughby had just started to emerge from his troubles in 1995 when he offered Garnett much different advice.

  “Yeah, I’m broke,” Willoughby said. “I’m scared because the guy is saying he’s bankrupt and I could win and still not get anything. Know what’s happening. You got your agent. You got your business manager. You go
t your mother, your father, sister, brother, girlfriend. What’s really yours? Even if you buy them a house, now they want a car, now they want jewelry. Now they want clothes.” Garnett told Willoughby how much money he expected to make should he declare for the NBA. “And you thought twice?” Willoughby asked. “What are you going to do in school? Take wood shop? Ceramics? Theater? You’re still thinking? I’m in school now. You can go to school in the off-season and take classes. Then, you can finish when you retire.”

  2.

  Today, he is known as the Kevin Garnett who scowls, growls, and talks trash, not as the bundle of raw nerves that showed up in 1995 before the executives. But Garnett’s nervousness had bubbled over before. His formative basketball education took place at Springfield Park in Mauldin, a city outside of Greenville in South Carolina. The park housed a playground, benches, and baseball fields. Garnett only cared for the blacktop basketball court and its chained nets that rang like a cash register whenever a ball snapped through them. One measured his manhood in points and his self-worth in aggressiveness at the park. No one was more man than Baron Franks. They called him Bear for good reason. Franks stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds. Garnett was about 13 or 14 years old, with no discernable skills, when he mustered enough courage to play at Springfield. Franks was about four years older and light-years ahead in the art of trash talk. He saw Garnett and sized down another victim. “I’ve got your mind in my pocket,” he told Garnett after he scored. “I own you,” Franks said, scoring again. He talked about Garnett’s mother, Shirley Irby, and his sisters. “Get off my court,” Franks yelled to Garnett after each inevitable loss. Garnett did not verbally retaliate. He maintained a straight face and returned daily. He leapfrogged Franks in height within a year. Garnett still wondered why Franks seemed to have it in for him. The trash talk never stopped. Word of Garnett’s frustration over Frank’s verbal assaults filtered back to the source. Franks addressed it by wrapping his arm around Garnett. “Basketball, it’s my love,” Franks explained. “When I play, nothing else matters. I take it seriously, whether it’s a pickup game or not. It’s that big.”