Changing the game

The plight of the professional basketball fortunes in Chicago and Boston are strikingly contrasted by the Bulls’ shocking mediocrity and the Celtics’ resurgence. The presence of one player, Kevin Garnett, starkly embodies those divergent paths. In Boston the talent coalesced around him to powerful impact and in Chicago the lack of a singular personality proved incapable of fusing the different talent.

Now, Garnett is the defensive player of the year and a leading candidate for the league’s most valuable player. Garnett’s professional career has long been individually brilliant, though he has been criticized for his lack of playoff success. Only once, in 2004, the year he won the most valuable player, has a Garnett team won a playoff series.

By making the league’s most storied franchise relevant again, Garnett altered the very foundation of the game, as he did when he arrived in Chicago 14 years ago. The moment seems appropriate to reflect on Garnett’s time at Farragut, how he ended up here and what he meant during the time he was here.

Interestingly, Garnett’s Chicago debut occurred at the Bulls’ own facilities that summer of 1994. Nike staged its All-American camp at the team’s BertoCenter, an action that unleashed a sequence of events that shocked the system.

The year before, in the summer of 1993, Nike held the camp at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis. Farragut coach William Nelson worked it as a counselor and coach. The first time Nelson saw the ridiculously skinny Garnett,with his floppy ears, a thin face and the surreal extended arms, he thought: Where’s the rest of him. Watching him in the individual drills and coaching him in the scrimmages, Nelson realized immediately his talent, intensity and maturity of focus. His floor vision and his passing out of the high post were astonishing for somebody so young.

Ron Eskridge, who helped Nelson out at Farragut, also worked the Nike camp.  Eskridge struck up a friendship with Garnett and equally crucial, Ronnie Fields, a sophomore at Farragut, who was placed on the same team with Garnett that Nelson was assigned to coach. Garnett was riveted and awed by Nelson’s manic intensity, especially given these were ostensibly summer league games.

“That dude’s a fool. He’s not your real coach,” Garnett told Fields in amazement. 

“Kevin kept saying, ‘He can’t be the real coach,’” Nelson says, laughing. “I was just getting pumped.”

In 1993, his junior season, Garnett averaged 29 points, 19 rebounds and seven assists and became the first junior to win the state’s Mr. Basketball honor. That spring Garnett was one of five people charged with second-degree lynching in a reportedly racially charged hallway incident at his high school that resulted inthe injury of a student.

That August Garnett and his mother Shirley Irby moved to Chicago.

The question of ownership over Kevin Garnett and his legacy is a fascinating one. In the years since he has left, many have pondered and debated whether Garnett is part of the heritage and tradition of the Public League or whether he boldly utilized the media nexus of the country’s third-largest market to nationalize his name and make the world aware of his existence. The consequences of Garnett’s time here brought an instant legitimacy, or cachet, to Chicago high school basketball and it provided Garnett the chance to really test himself, moment to moment, in a manner that would anticipate the start of his professional career.

Garnett unambiguously changed every level of basketball—high school, college and the NBA—in 1995 by becoming the first prep player in 20 years to bypass college and enter the NBA draft. Nelson recalled during one of his first conversations with Garnett of advising him to treat his time in Chicago as though it were a business trip.

“I didn’t know getting out of here was going to the NBA,” Nelson says.

Garnett’s time here was marked by historical significance and cultural change. In retrospect, it is clear he never would have contemplated such a leap had he stayed in Mauldin, a quietly nondescript Greenville suburb of 12,000 located in western South Carolina.

In an interview with the Boston Globe last October, Garnett said: "Chicago gave me a different flair. Chicago gave me attitude and swagger and confidence, like, 'This is how you have to be out here on the court. It's kill or be killed.' You learn that right away. Someone's always looking to embarrass you or say that they kicked your [butt] or something . . . Now that I look back on it, I was a young boy turning into a man. It was definitely a grow-up kind of year for me.”

Like music and boxing, the culture of basketball operates between divergent fields of the established and the self-styled. Basketball attracted people of shifting and fluid identities, of people who existed outside established roles of parent, teacher, coach or journalist. The social distinction between the mainstream and the street was being dissolved.  Garnett’s time at Farragut also illustrated the unstable line between amateurism and professionalism.  Keith Pickett, a St. Louis-based businessman and high school basketball promoter, staged the KMOX Shootout.  Pickett secured a position for Farragut in December 1994, and that was the first time ever NBA scouts requested credentials for the event.

Garnett’s options were limited by his failure to achieve a qualifying test score to be eligible as a college freshman. Garnett also played under the surveillance of two shadowy cultures, the NBA scouts that evaluated his skills and the street agents who were trying to direct him to a sports agent.  Nelson found it exceedingly odd that he had the number one basketball player in the country, but almost no college coaches came to watch him or inquire about him.  

“When [Garnett] first came in, the vultures started circling,” Nelson says.“That’s when the street agents started coming. A guy came in that was one of my former players, not for Farragut, but he was one of the kids from the park district.  He started asking me all these questions about Kevin, and it dawned on me what it was all about,how the street agents would trade information. My former players were starting to visit me all of a sudden. My first thought was: I have to worry about people I already know.”

The corporate presence of Nike in the maneuvering was probably not accidental.  Garnett’s arrival in Chicago dovetailed with profound changes governing every level of the game. At the Barcelona Olympics two years earlier, the Dream Team destroyed the field in men’s basketball and accentuated the conquest of image.  The grassroots of Nike and Adidas sought to find and identify the top undergraduate prospects and establish an early brand loyalty.

The time that Garnett played in Chicago also followed the murder of Michael Jordan’s father and his unexpected first retirement. That Bulls team was still a very good and fundamentally sound team, but they were no longer the social phenomenon that Jordan made them. That role was increasingly thrust on Garnett and his Farragut team. At Farragut, Garnett was accommodating though somewhat distanced with the press.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to relax and concentrate on whatI have to do,” he said just before the season started. “Where I come from was a lot smaller, and sometimes it seemed like I was the focal point of everything. “It put a lot of pressure on me to be a certain person, and I couldn’t always be myself.”

Garnett was magnificent on the court.

Farragut won the Proviso West tournament and went undefeated in the state’s deepest conference, the Red-West. In the Public League final at the Pavilion, Garnett scored 32 points, grabbed 12 rebounds and blocked five shots to power the Admirals past Carver 71-62.

Matched in opposite brackets with then-defending Class AA state champion Peoria Manual, who administered their only loss in the second game of the year, Farragut seemed poised to play for a state championship.  A deep and talented Thornton team led by Tai Streets stunned Farragut 46-43 in the Class AA quarterfinals. In his final game for Farragut, Garnett had 17 points and 16 rebounds.  Farragut finished 28-2.

Garnett averaged 27 points, seven rebounds, six assists and five blocked shots and won the state’s highest individual honor, Mr. Basketball. 

The day after the Farragut loss to Thornton, Michael Jordan’s agent sentthe notorious fax: “I’m back,” announcing his return to the Bulls. 

Kevin Garnett did not recede to the background.  In the space of less than a year, Garnett arrived, played and made his intentions of turning professional known.  That June, Minneapolis selected Garnett with the fifth pick of the draft.

Garnett remains a fixed presence at Farragut, particularly the elaborately drawn mural on the gym’s north wall. Garnett also financed a computer lab at the school. Indeed, Garnett’s time in Chicago was brief and mercurial and revealing. Had Garnett never arrived, Chicago basketball would be poorer and the recent history of basketball is likely to be radically different.