Several months after my initial meeting with Gary Charles, the Panthers met at Foster Laurie, a Police Athletic League gym in Queens. When I walked in, somebody shouted, “Damn, Gary got it done! He got Lamar!”
Playing for the Panthers would be my first taste of the bitter sneaker war brewing between Nike and Adidas as they fought for players, teams, territory, and pretty much global domination. Both Christ the King and Riverside were sponsored by Nike, so naturally I just wore my Air Jordan 8s to my first Panthers practice.
“Nah, you ain’t playing in them,” Gary said as he handed me an Adidas shoebox.
After warming up, I felt pretty good about my decision to play for the Panthers. Going into the summer before my junior year, I was ranked as one of the top-five high school players in the city, along with three other future NBAers: Elton Brand, Tim Thomas, and Ron Artest. Gary felt that if he could find another top-ranked player at any position, the Panthers could have a shot at winning every tournament they entered, including the granddaddy of the summer, the Adidas Big Time Tournament in Las Vegas, which included sixty-four teams.
That player was Khalid El-Amin from Minnesota. Fast and strong, he proved why he was the number-one-ranked point guard in the country every time he stepped on the floor. I felt like we could win a national championship with me and Khalid alone.
I also started to develop a natural chemistry with Greg Nunn, a less heralded but Queens-hardened point guard who always seemed to find me in my sweet spots and picked up my game and natural tendencies really quickly. He didn’t shoot much, but we complemented each other’s games in a nice way.
Greg and I bonded off the court as well. When the Panthers went on road trips and stayed at hotels, we usually slept four to a room, but Gary always assigned Greg and me our own room. I didn’t mind because with four guys crammed into a tiny hotel room, sleep and privacy were hard to come by.
Early that summer, we were at a tournament in New Jersey, and when we got back to our room after a game, Greg asked, “What’s the deal with you? You’re always so nonchalant and laid-back. You can’t be this relaxed about everything. On the court you’re a killer, but off it, you don’t seem to care about anything.”
“That’s just how I am, I guess. I try not to worry about too much.”
Actually, I had never really thought about how checked out I seemed. I thought at the time it was a body language thing. I was never loud or the center of attention; I simply liked being in the background. I moved at my own pace, but apart from being late for school or the occasional practice, no one had ever really said anything to me about my relaxed demeanor. I haven’t changed much since then, but today I am more aware that behind that young teenager who just rolled with the flow was someone not entirely present.
As the summer of 1995 dipped into June, the Panthers headed to California to play in the Pump-n-Run Tournament at Long Beach State, where I held my own against top West Coast ballers like Paul Pierce, Schea Cotton, and Jason and Jarron Collins. A week later, we were back in New York and prepping for a tournament in Chester, Pennsylvania, which, in retrospect, illustrates just how much unsupervised freedom we had as teenagers.
At the time, Gary was only thirty-five, so he had a life of his own with plenty of obligations. With nearly every coach from the Big East and ACC at the Chester tournament, we couldn’t miss it, but Gary had to go to his girlfriend’s graduation and couldn’t make the trip. He would meet us there later on. It wouldn’t be a good look for the Panthers or any of the guys on the team if we didn’t show.
So, Gary had Greg, the most responsible member of the team, drive us to the tournament. Did I mention Greg was sixteen with only a learner’s permit? Gary put him in charge of driving me and eleven other high school players across three states. Gary organized a fifteen-passenger van, and we all piled in and made the chaotic 165-mile drive from Long Island, where Gary lived, to Chester. We laughed, joked, and made a ton of noise. No seat belts in a van swerving all over the road. Greg needed laser-like focus under dark and foggy conditions just to keep the van from careening into a guardrail.
We arrived late in the night, exhausted and starving. Of course, all the restaurants in town were closed. Half of us forgot IDs and some didn’t even bring basketball shoes. Not to mention, no one had any money.
The next day we had to be at the gym at 8:30 AM for a
9:00 game. That meant we had to be up and getting ready at least an hour before tip-off. No one even thought to arrange for a wake-up call. What do you think happened? Greg got up late and frantically knocked on doors, trying to get everyone in gear. The problem was that he didn’t know half the rooms the guys were staying in. We were still at the hotel at nine.
By some miracle, we all piled in the van and got to the game by the middle of the second quarter. They’d started the game on time and the Madison Broncos, a powerhouse team in their own right, were up 17–0. Tournament organizers had started the clock and for every minute we were late, they gave the Broncos a point. The Broncos were just shooting around on one end of the floor. We walked into the gym disheveled, and all these future hall-of-fame college coaches stared at us in disbelief. UMass head coach John Calipari couldn’t help but laugh.
We hit the floor with Greg as our coach and went on a tear. In six minutes of the second quarter, we mopped the floor with the Broncos. I think they were so stunned they forgot their plays. By halftime the game was tied at twenty-four.
Gary showed up just then and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He couldn’t be that mad at us because the whole weekend was his doing. He was just glad we were alive. We ended up winning by nineteen.
John Paul Vincent “Sonny” Vaccaro wanted to be a running back. At five feet eight with broad shoulders and a curly Italian afro, his bowling-ball-like style seemed perfect for the gridirons of 1950s western Pennsylvania. But after blowing out his knee, he enrolled at Youngstown State and began organizing local amateur basketball events.
In 1965, he founded the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, which was an annual spring exhibition game featuring twenty-four of the best high school players in America. This gave top coaches from around the country an opportunity to evaluate players. It was a radical idea, but the game would run for forty-three years and change the course of the sport. Basically, Sonny invented the high school all-star game. Through his street-smart brand of ingenuity, his charming gift of gab, and an uncanny ability to gain trust and see the big picture, he created what would become the system of modern amateur basketball and everything (good, bad, and ugly) that came with it.
It was his idea to sign basketball players to endorse major sneaker brands. In 1984, Sonny signed twenty-one-year-old Michael Jordan to be the face of Nike, forever changing sports marketing. That same year, he founded the Academic Betterment and Career Development (ABCD) Camp, a weeklong summer showcase for the best players in the country. After getting fired by Nike in 1991, Sonny took his camp to Adidas and vowed to challenge Nike for domination of the high school basketball world. Sonny Vaccaro became known as the godfather of high school basketball, and his impact on amateur basketball will forever be felt.
He was basketball’s biggest power broker because he invented power brokering. Getting an endorsement from Sonny was like being touched on the shoulder by a great king. It was the seal of approval. He wasn’t just the man . . . he could make you the man. He could shift the landscape of a high school or college basketball program with a phone call.
If there was one man to know, it was him. And one man who knew him was Coach Gary. Because of Gary’s ability to land the top players in the country, Sonny sponsored the Panthers, providing the team with $15,000 worth of shoes and clothing and arranging for the Panthers to travel the country. The trade-off was that Gary would steer players toward Adidas-related events. And the ultimate endgame was to win the loyalty of top high school athletes, so if they made it to the next level, they did so wearing Adidas gear.
When I agreed to play for the Panthers, Sonny nearly threw his back out jumping for joy. In the next three years, there would be few players Sonny and his beloved wife of thirty-seven years, Pam, spent more time around than me.
To be invited to ABCD Camp meant you were the cream of the crop. So that’s how, in July 1995, I found myself in the tiny brick gym on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey for Sonny’s annual showcase.
That summer produced one of the most talented groups of players in recent memory. There was Kobe Bryant, the consensus overall number-one player in the country. Vince Carter was a high-flying small forward from Daytona. Jermaine O’Neal was a six-foot-ten center from a small town in South Carolina and considered the best big man in the country. Rounding out the top was Tim Thomas, a do-it-all six-foot-nine senior forward out of Paterson Catholic in New Jersey. He had just come off a junior season with an average twenty-five points and fourteen rebounds per game. Out of any of the top players at the camp, Tim’s game most resembled mine. Of course, I thought I was better than him, despite the fact he was a year older than me.
The competition that year was incredibly fierce. Everybody was out to prove they were the top dog. Rankings were always up for grabs, and every player wanted that “No. 1” next to his name. Kobe walked around like he owned the place. He shaved his head bald back then as a tribute to his hero Michael Jordan, and there was always a confident smirk on his face and a little extra swag in his step. Kobe had come from such a different background than I had, and we barely had anything in common, but I liked him right away.
On the first day of camp, things got heated quickly. Thomas and O’Neal were matched up in the last game of the day, and a buzz reverberated through the gym. Even the campers gathered courtside along with the coaches to see the first big matchup of the week. Tim liked to talk big on the floor and carried himself with a certain kind of edge. He wore New Jersey on his sleeve.
Jermaine didn’t know what was about to hit him, but I did, because I had history with Tim. The previous summer, when I was as hungry as I was naïve, I had matched up against Tim at a tournament in New York City.
I lined up to guard him as he brought the ball up the floor. There were ten seconds left in the game, and I steeled myself while staring at Tim as he controlled his dribble. I was not going to get embarrassed.
“Young fella, how do you want this?” asked Tim. “You want a dunk or a three in your face?”
“Shut the fuck up!” I countered, partly because I was so surprised by his audacity.
“I warned you, young buck.”
With that, he raised up and shot a three directly over my head that splashed into the rim at the buzzer. “It ain’t your time yet,” he said coldly as he walked off the floor, leaving me standing there. I was pissed, but what could I do? It was Tim Thomas.
Against Jermaine at ABCD, Tim came out firing the same way. He drilled a three in the game’s opening moments right in O’Neal’s face. “Bang!” Thomas shouted at Jermaine. “All day. That’s for you.”
“Ooh!” the onlookers said in unison with an almost hushed tone.
Jermaine, who was a soft-spoken please-and-thank-you kind of guy, had made his first mistake. He didn’t respond. From then on Tim thought he was weak. He was all over him. The next trip down the floor Tim caught the ball in a triple-threat position, offered up a couple jab steps, and when O’Neal bit, he put the ball on the deck and pulled up for a jumper that ripped the nets.
“That’s cash! That’s cash!” said Tim, backpedaling down the floor.
After Jermaine responded with a couple inside buckets of his own, Tim caught a pass at the foul line while trailing on a break. He took one dribble, drop stepped, and threw down a nasty tomahawk dunk right on Jermaine’s head. The gym exploded.
“You my down-south bitch!” shouted Tim directly at Jermaine. “My down-south bitch!”
It was as dominant a performance as I have ever seen of one top-ten player against another on the summer circuit and certainly one of the most embarrassing. But Tim pretty much coasted the rest of the week, leaving the race for camp MVP wide open. Kobe didn’t mind, as he easily won the honor.
I got overlooked a bit at ABCD, but my stock was still high as I finished as one of the top-twenty players in the camp. Maybe Tim was right. It wasn’t my time just yet, but there was a lot of summer left.
After ABCD, it was off to Las Vegas for the Adidas Big Time Tournament. Another brainchild of Sonny’s. Of course, all the big stars came out—Tim Thomas and Kobe Bryant among them. Based off his showing at ABCD, Kobe was ranked the overall consensus number-one player in the country heading into his senior year. When Kobe moved from one court to another during camp or a tournament, dozens of college coaches would pick up their chairs and move right along with him. In other words, wherever sixteen-year-old Kobe was, that’s where the action would be as well. And that’s where you’d find Sonny.
In order to see everything, Sonny put Kobe’s team on the court next to the Panthers, and the games would be lined with a who’s who of amateur basketball. Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski studied Kobe intently. Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim did his best to make eye contact with me. Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun and Florida’s Billy Donovan jostled for the best sight lines all while making nice with top AAU coaches to try to get a feel for which way their star players were leaning with regard to their college decisions.
During the day in the hot gym, it was all business, but at night it was on. Remember what I said about lack of supervision? There wasn’t a group of parents who made the trip with the Panthers to watch over us like what happens today. It was just a bunch of sixteen-year-old kids from New York who were used to being on their own from dawn till dusk. There’s no way Gary could keep his eye on us, plus, he had a ton of meetings . . . usually some sneaker executive wining and dining him. Sonny was shaping him to be the next big power broker, and there were always deals to tend to.
Oh, and another thing. We didn’t have to worry about social media. There was no Twitter or Instagram. The iPhone wouldn’t be invented for twelve years, so people weren’t walking around with a camera in their hand trying to score a viral video. Today, if a player leaves his hotel room, there’s a good chance he’ll end up somewhere on social media, but back then, luckily, that didn’t exist.
One night, early in our Vegas trip, we decided to go out and hit the Strip. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before. I mean, we had been to Times Square in Manhattan, but that didn’t compare. The flashing neon lights were hypnotic. There were fountains springing up from in front of five-star hotels. It just felt like opportunity was in the air all around us. But mostly, there were women. We weren’t old enough to gamble but that hardly mattered. We wanted women.
So, we got a bright idea: let’s buy some pussy. I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket that Gary had given me for this trip, and it was itching to be spent. So, Kobe, Greg, Tony Lee (a guard from Boston), and I headed out to the Strip. There were mostly young white girls walking up and down the Strip, and because none of us had ever been with a white girl, we pretty much had our mission for the night.
Since we were black and mostly over six feet six, we told every girl who would listen that we were in the NBA. But Kobe was a little bit different from us. He came from the pristine suburbs of Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line neighborhood and wasn’t quite as street-smart as a bunch of kids from Queens. He was pragmatic and careful. He would think things out and worry about the consequences. He was always so aware. We just did things without thinking. Halfway through our pursuit, Kobe wasn’t feeling it and decided to go back to his room.
“I’m just gonna roll back with Kobe,” said Tony.
“Man, you better roll with us,” I said. “You’re gonna miss out.”
Immediately, Greg and I picked up a couple girls without having to dig in our pockets. Our NBA story worked. Tony would have been much better off rolling with us, because next thing you know, Kobe’s got a pretty young girl on his arm and peels out, leaving Tony standing in the dust by himself. We still laugh about that today. Greg and I stayed up all night, but the Panthers still managed to make it to the semifinals the next day.
When the summer AAU circuit ended, everybody went their separate ways. Since Greg lived close to me, we wound up hanging out for the rest of the summer. He lived in Far Rockaway with his mother, fifteen minutes away on the other side of Kennedy Airport in the Five Towns. If we weren’t playing ball at Lincoln Park, our agenda was very simple: video games, weed, girls . . . preferably at the same time. But since we couldn’t bring girls back to either one of our houses—and smoking at home was completely out—we always ended up at an older friend of Greg’s, far from any kind of supervision.
By this time, Greg and I were hanging out pretty regularly. When we weren’t at school, practice, or a game, we were usually at one of our homes getting something to eat. No one in my family owned a car, but it hardly mattered because I didn’t have a driver’s license. So Greg would often borrow his mom’s beat-up money-green 1994 Mazda MX-6 coupe. We’d cram four basketball players in that tiny little car. I’m six feet ten, but we made it work. It beat riding the bus, but it was always an adventure since there was usually weed in the car and Greg still only had a permit.
Back then, it seemed like everyone we knew smoked marijuana. It was just a normal thing in the neighborhood. I always had access to it and being the most recognizable high school basketball player in the city didn’t hurt. There was always somebody offering me some. I’ve never paid for weed in my life. But that’s as far as we took it. Hard drugs were frowned upon. It wasn’t cool, and we never touched anything stronger than weed from small-time pushers.
As the summer wore on, and I didn’t have a tournament or a big game to prepare for, Grandma Mildred worried about me more than usual. Throughout my teenage years, I stayed out of trouble and wasn’t into mischief or running with the wrong crowd, but with my mom dead and dad who knows where, my grandmother was all I had. The only real stabilizing force in my life. And I think she felt that way about me, too. I still hadn’t opened up to anyone about how devastated my mom’s death left me. I didn’t talk about my depression or anxiety—hell, I didn’t even have those words in my vocabulary yet. I was consumed with fear and panicked whenever I thought about losing another family member and being left alone.
Without a ball in my hand, I was consumed by loneliness. To deal with it, I isolated myself. I’d go into my room, close the door, and make myself cry. I thought that if I cried enough, I could make the pain go away. I would drain it from my body. But it never worked. I only felt more helpless. Being in the house made me sad. Seeing Mom’s clothes hanging in her closet that she would never wear again. The mirror she looked into to get ready for work. The pots she used to cook from. Everything that reminded me of her was still and gathering dust. Every time I turned the corner a small part of me hoped I’d hear her voice calling me. But I never did. I had to get away from the things that reminded me of her.
And it was easy to get away. All I had to do was say I had a game or practice. Even if I didn’t.
“Coach needs to see me, Grandma.”
And just like that I’d be gone. I would try to come and go as I pleased while Grandma Mildred did her best to rein me in. If I came home at three in the morning, I wasn’t allowed to go out the next night. She always hugged me the next day, but I knew she felt she was losing her grip on me. Junior year couldn’t start fast enough for the both of us.