Tuesday, May 15, 2001
Too many teens chase NBA dollars
By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service
Here's a winning lottery ticket for you. But first, need we remind you of the basket cases some winners turned into, unprepared to handle the fortune and the fame? Ruined family relationships, distrust, hard feelings, soured lives.
The check comes with risk. Still want it? I thought so.
You can understand, then, Kwame Brown.
He is a Georgia high school student with seven siblings and a mother unable to work because of a degenerative disc in her back.
The NBA is waiting with wads of dollars. Millions of them.
You do the math.
Brown is the latest phenom to say no to waiting. And no to college. A decision easy to question but
impossible to condemn.
39 underclassmen
He is part of the parade of teen-agers rushing by, enchanted by the NBA Pied Piper. With Sunday's deadline past, 39 underclassmen declared for this year's draft, five of them freshmen, another six high school seniors. The migration of the impatient grows only younger.
This is not good news, but neither is it incomprehensible. The dreams are too vivid, and the money too real.
And not just for the 6-11 Brown. There is a 7-foot high schooler from California, another from Virginia, a 6-11 lad from Illinois. Big kids with enormous promise.
All four could be taken in the top half dozen picks. The fast lane now goes from puberty to the pros.
The NCAA is aghast. The public wonders what the world is coming to. NBA commissioner David Stern sounds warnings. “School,” he moaned the other night, “is (becoming) an irrelevancy.”
The agents ask what the fuss is all about. This is free enterprise at its high-commission best. The players' union shrugs. The general managers fret, but they are paid to find talented prospects, even if they just came from the prom.
The kids? A lot more of them have a poster of Kobe Bryant or Tracy McGrady on their wall than Shane Battier.
They see those who became wealthy by 21. They see the value of hurrying.
Not all make it
Of course, they do not see Korleone Young, a prep draftee who has disappeared. Or Leon Smith, who jumped from high school and became a psychological blowout.
They do not see Corey Maggette, on the bench for the Los Angeles Clippers.
This is what makes the issue so treacherous. There is no clear answer, but only shades of gray.
The NBA talks of installing an age limit of 20, a proposal that would probably be effective in the three hours it would last before a court overturned it. Do they keep 19-year-olds out of Wimbledon?
But at least Stern and the NBA are floating ideas. The union would appear to have none.
Brown, bred amid hardship, is not fearful of the jump. “Difficult transitions,” he said, “are nothing new to my family and me.”
He thinks he is ready. They all do. So many are wrong. They are prepared for neither basketball nor life. The game suffers in the end, as do many of them.
Yet more and more come. You can't stop them, and you understand why they come.
But someone — NBA, NCAA, someone — needs to help them see better, think better, plan better. As they race to a fork in the road where a young man can make one of the best decisions of his life, or one of the worst.
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Too many teens chase NBA dollars
