Darkness to Light, page 5
At some point, Sonny, always persuasive and persistent, convinced me to go, but I had one condition: I didn’t want to go alone. I asked Greg Nunn to go with me. Even though he had graduated in the spring, Sonny and Gary could hook up his prep year easily enough. Greg agreed to go, especially since a year at a prep school would better prepare him to play in college. And just like that we were headed to Mount Zion. Tracy was already enrolled and getting settled in. I had never seen Sonny so excited as he watched his master plan unfold just as he’d envisioned.
I backed out on the Tuesday before Greg and I were to leave for North Carolina. Greg was pissed.
“What do you mean you’re not going?” he shouted at me on the sidewalk in front of my house. “Well, if you’re not going, then I’m not going either.”
“Man, it’s my bad, but I can’t leave,” I reasoned.
“You fucked me.”
He had a right to be pissed. All I had to do was head straight back to the familiar surroundings of Christ the King and stay on the path I was already on. He didn’t enroll in college or another prep school because he had committed to Mount Zion. He had no other options.
Gary was furious, too, because he felt he’d let Sonny down and couldn’t collect on delivering me to him. But he couldn’t be that mad because it really wasn’t a bad situation for him. I still played for his Adidas-sponsored Panthers, he was getting money from many other sources, and he knew he would have a hand in my college decision. Sonny also got over it pretty quickly, and I enrolled back at Christ the King.
Over the next few weeks, I began to feel more depressed than usual. Even though I was happy to be staying home, I just kept thinking about my mother. Wondering why she was taken from me. Not having any answers while keeping everything bottled inside. I had always felt a deep, raw, almost crippling sadness since she passed, but now I was having trouble keeping all my emotions in check. I survived by pushing it down, and when I started to feel like it was no longer working, the only thing I wanted to do was hide. Disappear from the rest of the world.
I would stay in my room a lot or hide away with close friends. Liza always knew what to say, and even though she got over her frustration with me, I couldn’t shake the feeling of depression.
I started skipping school. A lot of it. In the first sixteen days of my senior year, I only attended twice. I didn’t complete a single assignment or so much as crack open a book. It was only September, and I was already in jeopardy of being academically disqualified for my senior season.
Gary was again furious with me.
“They’re gonna fail you off the fucking team!” he exclaimed.
I wasn’t worried about it. Gary would think of something. He had too much riding on my success.
Gary ended up finding a prep school for Greg called Redemption Christian Academy in Troy, New York. It was about 160 miles upstate in the middle of nowhere and not that different from Mount Zion. It was a bare-bones boarding school where it seemed like the administrators made up the rules as they went along. The place was a dump.
It wasn’t all bad for Greg, however. Early in the summer, Gary paid for Greg to take a summer-school class at a college preparatory school in New York. Gary had a hookup where someone could just sign Greg in so he didn’t need to attend the class or do any work. That way he could still attend tournaments in Las Vegas and California. Now, all Greg had to do was finish the one prep season at Redemption and he’d be qualified academically to attend college without having to stay for the whole school year.
Eventually, I had dug myself too big a hole with my absences and failing grades. Greg convinced my grandmother to pull me out of Christ the King, and then he shipped me off to, you guessed it, Redemption Christian Academy.
First, I called Greg at Redemption.
“How is it up there?” I asked.
“It’s a real shithole,” he said. “You’ll fit in great.”
We both laughed. I hung up and three days later, without even letting Liza know where I was going, I was in upstate New York, surrounded by nothingness and chaos. I thought Greg had been kidding.
The place was an unorganized circus. It was a fledgling boarding school that was falling apart. How the hell did Gary find this place? There was no heat in our room or the classrooms. When students arrived, they had to make their own bunk beds out of two-by-fours. The food tasted like cardboard. We did everything ourselves but grow our own crops. There were forty kids sharing three showers. If the hot water ran out, you were shit out of luck.
Of course, Gary and Greg failed to tell me any of this. Greg was still pissed over the Mount Zion fiasco, and I guess this was his way of payback. I knew as soon as I saw the place that I was gone the moment the buzzer sounded after the season’s last game.
The founder of Redemption was Pastor John Massey Jr. He was a real wildcard, praise-the-Lord type whose shiftiness seem to fit in perfectly with the rest of the amateur basketball world. He had a cordial griminess and took advantage of having one of the top ballers in the country at his school.
He founded the school in 1979, but it hardly had a reputation for basketball and couldn’t be found on the basketball map with a magnifying glass. The year prior to our arrival, future Georgetown star Victor Page occupied the same halls that we would.
Once I got up there, Greg and I were assigned to the same room. We immediately established rule and took the place over. It felt like a lockup, so we ran the school like a jail. Greg was the hardnosed prison guard and I was the laid-back, softhearted warden. The students were in awe because they had never met someone they’d seen in newspapers before. There was a group of African students who called me “MVP” and would hit me up for autographs and advice.
Greg started to get a little too into it.
“I’m running this school,” he declared. “Nobody can fight unless I say so. Nobody can get extra food unless I say so.”
It wasn’t mean-spirited, but that’s what that place sort of did to us. We were New York City boys and we talked big. It just sort of happened. We didn’t want to be there. Everything felt like a survival exercise.
Meanwhile, Pastor Massey was up to his own backroom dealings. He’d let low-level agents fly me in private jets to AAU tournaments in Florida and keep it hush-hush. It’s like we were just checking off NCAA violations on purpose.
Greg was assigned by Gary to be his man on the inside: to keep watch over me and report back with everything that related to Lamar Odom, particularly if Massey was involved. The information Greg provided kept Gary and Sonny abreast of the situation, despite the fact they were hundreds of miles away.
While Gary and Sonny were looking out for their interest in me—making sure no one got too close or influenced my thinking—Pastor Massey began to do the same. In other words, he wanted to prevent Greg from being Gary’s informant in order to protect his newfound interest in me. There was a lot of money to go around, but college coaches were highly motivated to limit their payments to just Gary.
With me in his stable, Pastor Massey became a very important person in the basketball community, if only for a while. NBA teams started to call with cash offers to set up private workouts. This was a huge no-no, and both Gary and Greg were vehemently opposed to setting up these clandestine workouts. There was nothing to gain. The problem was that Gary couldn’t tell Massey he knew without compromising Greg’s status as a spy.
With everything swirling around me, it was actually becoming more and more like prison culture with everyone looking over his shoulder while trafficking in a very valuable commodity: information.
Our only way to communicate with Gary was with a pay phone in the school lobby, which we were certain Pastor Massey had tapped. After one call home, Greg was suspended for a week without explanation. It was Massey’s way of getting to me without Greg’s watchful eyes. It also effectively cut Gary out of the equation while Greg was on a bus for the four-hour trip back to Queens.
Of course, Gary was getting frustrated, and after Greg’s second suspension, he threatened to pull me out of school. When Greg returned, Massey separated us as dorm mates and bunked him up with a supervisor.
“Man, I feel like I’m in the hole,” I remember him saying.
At the time, I was heavy into my recruitment with UNLV, and our main contact was an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator named Greg “Shoes” Vetrone, a tough basketball lifer from my home borough.
Shoes had a cozy relationship with Gary and had been on the recruiting scene for nearly twenty years. His ties with Gary had been scrutinized by many media outlets and basketball insiders over the years. Regardless of what Shoes was doing, he was not a big fan of Massey and felt (rightly so) that the pastor was using me to hustle him and line his own pockets.
One day in early 1997, Shoes flew to New York and picked Greg and me up from Redemption. He warned us about Massey, but we were already leery of him. Well, at least everyone around me was. I never let this sort of stuff bother me too much. I had become so used to being hustled, bought, and sold by adults that nothing was very much of a surprise. And I was never opposed to having a wad of cash in my pocket.
In the car on the way to a restaurant where Shoes was taking us, he picked up his car phone and dialed Pastor Massey. “I’m gonna show you what he’s really up to,” said Shoes with a voice like something out of The Sopranos.
He put the phone on speaker. Massey picked up his home phone with no idea we were in the car. Vetrone was concerned about my grades. I was struggling badly, and Shoes wanted to make sure I was going to be eligible next fall by the time I got to college.
“The good Lord is going to make sure Lamar has his grades,” said Massey, as if reassuring a large congregation.
But it seems the Lord worked on retainer. After that call, which just proved to Greg and me that Massey was crooked, it seemed I needed three grades changed. And Massey wanted $15,000 for three Bs. And so it was done. At the end of the week I had my report card filled with fraudulent As and Bs. By that time, the living conditions had become unbearable. Greg and I got what we needed: report cards indicating that we were college eligible. Despite the fact there were two weeks left in the season, we left Redemption. But to our surprise, when Redemption sent my transcripts, I saw nothing but Fs. I had been had. And so had Greg. We weren’t eligible to play in college.
Gary quickly arranged for me to enroll at St. Thomas Aquinas, a prep school in New Britain, Connecticut, whose boys’ team was coached by his longtime friend Jerry DeGregorio.
Despite how tumultuous, confusing, and uncomfortable my last year in high school was, I still ended up with a truckload of honors. In the spring of 1997, I was named Parade All-America First Team for the second year in a row, including being named National Player of the Year. I also received invites to the McDonald’s All-American Game as well as the Adidas-backed Magic’s Roundball Classic.
My high school career was finally over. I won’t lie, a little bit of sadness came over me, but I was excited about what lay ahead. I was ready. And even if I wasn’t, there was no turning back.
Although I never even played at the last school of my three-high-school senior year, something sticks out. St. Thomas Aquinas, established in 1955, with its red-brick façade, now sits abandoned on an overgrown lot. An empty building, it is now home to discarded school desks, ancient science equipment, and rusty lockers. On the wall of the art room was a mural with a mountainous landscape against a blue sky over which read “Climb high, expand your horizons.”
That’s exactly what I planned to do.
10
Less than a year before, it had been Sonny’s grand plan to unite me and Tracy McGrady. So, it felt kind of ironic that in my final high school game, I would be matched up against T-Mac.
In the spring of 1997, at the end of my senior year, I headed to Auburn Hills, Michigan, to play in Magic’s Roundball Classic, an All-American showcase that Sonny sponsored. There would be at least a half-dozen future NBA players putting on a show. Naturally, Sonny put Tracy and me on opposite teams and breathlessly hyped the showdown in the weeks leading up to the game.
But the would-be storied matchup fizzled. McGrady played like the best player in the country. Damn, he looked like an NBA All-Star. He knocked down pull-ups, hit threes, made ridiculous passes in transition, and was on the receiving end of one highlight alley-oop dunk after another. One particular play stands out in my mind to this day. I controlled a left-handed dribble at the top of the key, hit T-Mac with a head fake, and blew by him. I had nothing but space in front of me. Opportunity was calling on me to throw it down with authority.
I just couldn’t elevate for some reason, so I laid the ball up softly with my left hand. Out of nowhere McGrady swooped in and swatted the shot, which ricocheted violently off the backboard. In a microcosm of the game, McGrady got the rebound and was off and running to orchestrate another highlight fast break while I stood and argued with the ref. What’s more, McGrady seemed to develop an instant rapport with the speedy six-foot point guard Greedy Daniels, as if they had played together all their lives. Greedy had just committed to UNLV and wondered if I was going to join him.
“What’s the deal? You coming to Vegas?” asked Greedy earlier that week.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said. “I’m going to decide soon, I think.”
“You know we need you, man. Let’s do it.”
Truth is, I didn’t want to think about it. Big decisions intimidated me, and I tried to avoid them as best I could. There was a lot of pressure, people constantly in my ear, and the fear of making the wrong decision gnawed at me. Regret seemed to linger with me, and I didn’t want to add to the existing pile of woes.
Meanwhile, big decisions weren’t a problem for McGrady. Although he was quiet and reserved off the floor, he had a certain swag and confidence about him. Shortly after he dazzled his way to MVP honors at Magic’s Roundball Classic, McGrady confidently declared for the draft. From complete unknown to future NBA star in nine months. I was in awe, but I had my own future to figure out.
In fact, that very weekend in Michigan I was going to make my college decision. My family flew out. Gary Charles and Greg Nunn made the trip. I had no idea where I wanted to play my college ball.
Sonny, Gary, Greg, and a group of family members gathered in my hotel room. On the counter in the bathroom of the suite were four hats: Kentucky, UNLV, UConn, and a Knicks hat representing the NBA. I had to go in the bathroom, lock the door, make a decision, and then come out wearing one of the hats.
Everyone in the room offered their opinions about where I should go. Gary liked Kentucky. So did one of my family members, largely because they had accepted money from the school. Greg and Sonny wanted me to go straight to the NBA, which, back then, didn’t happen very often. I wanted the college experience, as I was looking forward to a year or two of bulking up and playing against tougher competition.
I went into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I didn’t want to look at the hats. I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself. Who am I? I thought. I often struggled with that question. I only knew that I didn’t have much of an answer. Would I find answers in one of the hats? Would one of them make me a complete person? Would I satisfy people? Would I disappoint them? What if I lifted up one of the hats only to find more regret? Would the things I’d done come back to haunt me? Or worse, the people I loved?
I let out a breath and turned on the faucet to splash water on my face. I looked at myself with the water dripping off my cheeks. It made me look like I was crying. Was I actually crying? I wanted to feel something and nothing at the exact same time. Again, that would become a recurring theme in my life.
I didn’t want to put any of the hats on, because I didn’t want to make a decision. I flipped the seat down, sat on the toilet, and stared straight ahead. I paced back and forth. I lay in the tub. I curled up on the floor. I did push-ups. Splashed more water on my face. I tried to picture myself winning a national championship. It would have made a great movie montage.
But mostly I pictured my mom, Cathy. She would know what to do.
“Just be nice to everyone,” she would tell me. “Go with what’s in your heart.”
Outside in the hotel room, I could hear people coming and going. No one ever knocked on the door. I must have been in there for two hours.
I picked up the Kentucky hat and stared at it.
In December of my junior year at Christ the King, Kentucky played Iona at Madison Square Garden. Kentucky coach Rick Pitino scheduled the game so I could see them up close. They were the number-two team in the country and had a roster full of killers. Antoine Walker. Derek Anderson. Tony Delk. Ron Mercer. Four NBA players right there. They drilled Iona 106–79 as we sat in the front row. Kentucky won the national championship that year, making Rick Pitino’s pitch even easier.
The reality is, I knew exactly where I wanted to go: UCLA. But there was no Bruins hat on the counter . . . for a reason.
Okay, let’s back up.
Five months before, to the day. That’s when the course of my life and basketball career quietly changed. UCLA head coach Jim Harrick was fired for covering up details about an improper dinner. He had taken star twin centers Jason and Jarron Collins from Los Angeles, and Earl Watson from Kansas City, out to a recruiting dinner along with several members of the coaching staff and five current UCLA players including Jelani McCoy, Cameron Dollar, and present Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers.
