Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, Renaldo Major was convinced that he would one day be a professional baseball player. He wore number 30 and was the centerfielder for the Meyering Park Mets, a local youth team. He was good too. Really good. Good enough to be singled out by coaches as a potential future star, even though he was just in elementary school. For a brief time, Major thought he was destined to become the next Ken Griffey Jr.
That all changed at a family barbeque in May of 1991—right around Renaldo’s ninth birthday. His uncles were all huddled around a small television, watching the Chicago Bulls game. Little Renaldo wedged his way into the crowd. He stared curiously at the screen. He didn’t know much about basketball, but the announcer kept repeating the same name, over and over again: Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan.
“Who’s Michael Jordan?” Renaldo finally asked.
Michael Jordan—the eventual five-time NBA MVP and six-time NBA champion, widely considered the greatest basketball player to ever walk the earth—would soon become Renaldo’s hero. More than that, Jordan would completely change the direction of Renaldo’s life. The Bulls legend grew to be so famous and so idolized that it became almost cliché to say, “Michael Jordan inspired me to become a basketball player.” But Michael Jordan inspired Renaldo Major to become a basketball player, without a doubt.
Not long after that family gathering, Major quit baseball forever—no more centerfield, no more Meyering Park Mets, no more worshiping Ken Griffey Jr. Instead, basketball became his obsession—the sort of obsession that drowns out everything else in the world. Major’s life was basketball. And soon, his dream was to make it to the NBA. “They say don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but I kind of did that,” he said. “I wanted nothing but the NBA. I had my mindset stuck on the NBA. NBA or nothing. NBA or nothing.”
Though rail thin, Renaldo had the physical tools for basketball. He was tall, long-armed, fast, and athletic—just like his father, Ronald, had been. His go-to move was a little midrange jumper, catching the ball around the foul line and rising over smaller defenders. Renaldo became a good player at Carver High School, but not that good. Not the kind of player who dreams of making it to the NBA. Not the kind of player who puts all his eggs in one basket.
Still, despite a high school career that caused about as much splash as a rock tossed in the ocean, he fully, albeit foolishly, believed that basketball was his purpose. So much so that he neglected schoolwork—he had to scramble in the last few months of his senior year just to graduate from Carver—and any semblance of a social life.
“I was weird in high school. I had no friends,” he remembered with a laugh. “It’s funny—I didn’t want to pay attention to anything else. All I wanted to do was just play basketball.”
His confidence was admirable, sure, but also delusional. He was a zero-star recruit in a pre–social media era. Even at six feet seven with solid skills, how was Major going to get noticed? How was he going to make it to the pros? What miracle path existed? And here’s the thing: Major didn’t just dream of a life in the NBA, he prepared for it as if it were inevitable. As a teenager, he would practice talking to imaginary reporters.
“What were your thoughts on your performance today, Renaldo?”
“I did well. I could’ve gotten my teammates more involved, and I could’ve played better defense.”
“Walk us through that play down the stretch.”
“Well, I tried to turn baseline and uh—”
Stop. Jordan never said “uh.”
So Major would start over, rehearsing lines about a nonexistent play for a nonexistent team in a nonexistent game—sometimes for over an hour. “I knew I was going to be a basketball player. I knew I was going to make the NBA,” he said. “I was put on earth to be an NBA player. I always envisioned that. I just knew it was going to come.” He just didn’t know how.
Major graduated from Carver in June of 2000 without any college scholarship offers. He had no thoughts of going to school strictly for an education. Sulking at home all summer, his father ultimately presented him with two options: get a job or enlist in the army. In other words, it was time for Renaldo Major to face reality. To move on.
Right around the same time, then NBA commissioner David Stern held his annual state-of-the-game press conference during the 2000 NBA Finals. Among the topics addressed was the formation of a new minor league for the NBA. The National Basketball Development League (NBDL) would begin play for the 2001–2 season, Stern announced. Players had to be at least twenty years old to participate in the league, with one noteworthy exception: players under twenty who had been drafted and subsequently released by an NBA team were also eligible.
At the turn of the century, teenagers were flooding into the NBA like it was Daytona Beach on spring break. An increasing number of players were entering the NBA with little or no college experience (in the 2001 NBA Draft, for example, three of the top four picks came straight out of high school). Of course, not all of them were ready for the big stage—not yet. Dwain Price, longtime writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, presented the dilemma: “How does the league improve while at the same time develop young players into veteran professionals?” he wrote in June of 2000. “And what happens to the young players who don’t make it?”1
Those players couldn’t return to college basketball, having forfeited their eligibility. Minor leagues like the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) and the International Basketball League (IBL) were options, as was going overseas. A lot of players ended up just buried on an NBA bench somewhere, waiting for an opportunity. Many faded into irrelevance.
Enter the NBDL. The league would be all about development. Development of young players, coaches, referees, managers, executives, PR reps—everyone. The goal was to foster a system that functioned similarly to Triple-A baseball. Organizations such as the CBA and IBL served as pipelines to the NBA, yet it was critical, in Stern’s view, to build something more closely intertwined—where players could move freely up and down.
“I think [the NBDL] can be a real good thing. I certainly know that in the time I’ve been coaching in the league, I’ve seen all kinds of players that aren’t quite ready and have no place to go,” then Seattle SuperSonics coach Paul Westphal told the Star Tribune. “And sometimes they’re on a roster, and they need more playing time. Hopefully this developmental league will address a lot of the people that have fallen through the cracks.”2
Ronald Major, Renaldo’s dad, liked to reference a specific passage when talking to his son about the future, written by noted author Carlos Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, as a quote from don Juan:
“There is something you ought to be aware of by now,” don Juan said. “I call it the cubic centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up.
“Chance, good luck, personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us and invites us to pluck it. Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it.”3
Ronald encouraged Renaldo to be a warrior—to be ready for his cubic centimeter of chance. And Renaldo listened. He was a fan of Castaneda’s passage. He trusted its message, so he remained alert, deliberately waiting. And time and time again, when all hope seemed lost, a door suddenly opened up for him. It happened first at the end of his high school career, when Renaldo had no scholarship offers. Just as he was considering a future in the army, the phone rang. A small community college in Levelland, Texas (South Plains), had heard about Major and was willing to give him a shot. His dream was alive.
Major didn’t hesitate. He went down to Levelland, worked furiously on improving his game, and dominated the competition right away. “Sometimes you see someone or something happens and you think, I got a real prospect here,” said Steve Green, who coached Major at South Plains. “There was something about him. He was kind of like a praying mantis—all arms and legs and skinny—but he had a beautiful jump shot.”
Green’s star player eventually transferred to a bigger program at Fresno State, but when he finished college in 2004, all hope seemed lost again. Though Major went to several camps throughout the summer, not a single professional team expressed interest in signing him. He accepted a job at a Ford manufacturing plant in Chicago and was just about to start when the phone rang. It was Coach Duane Ticknor from the Gary Steelheads, a team in the Continental Basketball Association, inviting Major to try out for their 2004–5 squad—another cubic centimeter.
That was all Renaldo needed. He beat out seven other players to make the Steelheads’ final roster and used that season as a stepping-stone to keep chasing his dream.
The NBDL had kicked off in mid-November 2001 with eight teams owned by the NBA: Asheville (NC) Altitude, Columbus (GA) Riverdragons, Fayetteville (NC) Patriots, Greenville (SC) Groove, Huntsville (AL) Flight, Mobile (AL) Revelers, North Charleston (SC) Lowgators, and Roanoke (VA) Dazzle. They were all based out of the Southeast in cities with modest populations. That was part of Commissioner Stern’s vision—to bring basketball to more remote locations, helping to grow the game at the grassroots level.
The first few seasons were rocky. Introducing a new league, especially a minor league, was a huge undertaking. A challenge that required patience. Triple-A had been around since 1946. Before then, Double-A had been the highest classification of Minor League Baseball since 1912. It would take time for the NBDL to build trust with the people and institutions essential to its success: players, coaches, executives, fans, media companies, television networks.
From the very beginning, the primary goal of the league was a one-to-one affiliation model, where one NBDL team would exist for every NBA team—a true minor league farm system. That way, the NBDL would be relied upon heavily, and its importance to the NBA would be undeniable.
With that goal in mind, the league made some tweaks in 2005. First, it rebranded from the National Basketball Development League to the NBA Development League. Distinct NBA affiliations were also established—each D-League team was shared among multiple NBA teams. Rules about sending players down to the D-League were instituted. NBA teams could assign guys with less than two years of experience a maximum of three times throughout a season.
By the 2006–7 season, none of the original eight teams remained, as the D-League had garnered momentum and expanded out of the Southeast. The CBA was slowly dying, and a handful of their teams jumped ship before the inevitable demise. The Dakota Wizards, Sioux Falls Skyforce, and Idaho Stampede all joined the D-League in 2006, along with the American Basketball Association’s4 Bakersfield Jam and three completely new organizations: the Anaheim Arsenal, Colorado 14ers, and Los Angeles D-Fenders. There were now a total of twelve teams, divided up among the NBA (Bakersfield, for example, was affiliated with five NBA teams at once). New policies also allowed NBA franchises to own and operate D-League franchises—an option that the Los Angeles Lakers took advantage of with the D-Fenders.
Amid this period of growth and transformation, Renaldo Major, then twenty-four years old and playing in the United States Basketball League (another small pro league that would cease operations in 2008), entered the D-League. He was selected in the fourth round of the 2006 D-League Draft by the Dakota Wizards. At long last, the NBA was right within reach. Major was one step away from his dream.
Life in the D-League was far from glamorous, however. The NBA—an association of million-dollar contracts and billion-dollar TV deals—might have been one step away, but it felt like another universe. Players in the D-League were earning between $12,000 and $25,000 during the 2006–7 season. Players in the NBA were earning between $412,000 and $21 million that same year. “I thank the Lord that the D-League allowed us to play, but the resources weren’t as good,” Major said. “It was tough. The checks you got would be gone in like two weeks because most people had families and kids to take care of.”
Teams flew commercial—not private. If bussing to away games was an option (meaning the distance wasn’t completely absurd), then they took busses. Some road trips lasted more than ten hours. Hotels were, at best, Holiday Inns, and sometimes motels with stained red carpets crawling with bugs. Cities that hosted teams were remote and unexciting—no Miami, no New York, no Chicago. Per diems were enough to buy fast food or stock up on cheap options from a local grocery store. Games had crowds in the hundreds—not thousands.
At home, everyone had a roommate. The Wizards shared two beat-up vans—which, according to Major’s teammate Richard Hendrix, “looked like the Mystery Machine off of Scooby Doo”—to navigate around town. The gas tanks always hovered around E, as none of the players wanted to pay the full cost of filling them up. When it snowed—not a rare occurrence in Bismarck—players had to get up early to shovel the driveway. One morning, the guys headed out for practice, only to find one of their vans stuck on a sheet of ice. “We’re trying to push it down the driveway, but we can’t get any footing,” remembered Rod Benson, another of Major’s teammates. “So it’s literally ten of us moving this car like a quarter inch every five minutes. We were an hour late to practice.”
Still, Major was thrilled to be a part of the D-League. He knew that several guys in his position had been called up to the NBA in previous years, including Chris “Birdman” Andersen, Rafer Alston, Ime Udoka, Smush Parker, and Will Bynum. He would be next.
I was put on Earth to be an NBA player. I just knew it was going to come.
Just being in the D-League was extra motivation. Major could finally see the finish line, which turned his marathon of a journey into an all-out sprint. He wasted no time with the Wizards, immediately proving to be one of the most dynamic forwards in the entire D-League and leading his team to victory after victory. Dakota entered the 2007 D-League Winter Showcase—an annual scouting event attended by representatives from every NBA team—with a 13-3 record, the best in the league. And Major was the Wizards’ best player.
The Showcase, held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that year, was a vital opportunity to impress NBA higher-ups and decision-makers. Major had no sense, though, that any of those bigwigs were interested in him. He didn’t have an agent or any communication with people in NBA circles. There was no social media, no constant stream of rumors and reports. Major was just focused on basketball, which is why what happened next, at the Sheraton Sioux Falls, came as such a surprise.
Major was finished for the day. In Dakota’s only game, a 95–94 win over the Albuquerque Thunderbirds, he had scored a team-high 23 points on 7 of 14 shooting. Now it was evening, and he was prepared to crash. As he plodded through the hallway to his hotel room, his phone rang. He picked it up. On the other end was Chris Alpert, the D-League’s vice president of basketball operations.
“Are you sitting down?” Alpert asked.
“Should I?”
“Yeah, I think you should.”
Major got to his room and plopped down on the side of the bed, a bit fearful. What was this about? Had he done something wrong? Was he in trouble with the league? He still didn’t suspect what Alpert quickly blurted out: the Golden State Warriors were calling him up. Renaldo Major was going to the NBA.
“Honestly, I kind of blacked out. I didn’t see that coming at all. I didn’t see that—that was—” Major struggled to find the words. “I bowed twenty-five to thirty times, just thanking the Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord! Then I called my dad and told him, like, ‘Yeah, pops, I got called up to the NBA.’ And he just instantly started crying. ‘You did it, son! There’s gonna be a Major name on the back of an NBA jersey. I know it was tough, and it was a long road for you, but you did it.’ And I just sat there and cried.”
Ronald was one of the few people who truly understood what Renaldo was feeling—how thrilled and excited and relieved his son was. The transaction barely made the news—it got a line or two in select newspapers—but it meant everything to Renaldo. This was the moment he had waited for his whole life, the moment he had dreamed of sharing with his father since he first watched Michael Jordan play basketball more than a decade earlier. It was the moment Stern had envisioned when he established the D-League in 2001.
Short-handed due to injuries, the Warriors signed Major to a ten-day contract, for which he was paid nearly double what he received for the full D-League season. He played in the team’s very next game—an away game against the Los Angeles Clippers.
“I remember at the start of the game, I was sitting on the bench, and it still seemed surreal,” Major said, smiling wide. “I’m, like, I’m really in the NBA. I just kept saying that to myself. I’m really in the NBA. Wow. I just kept telling God, This is only you. Only you could make this happen. This wasn’t me; it was you. No lie, I can say it now, but I’m on the bench thinking, like, Sam Cassell! Elton Brand!”
Major was in awe of his peers. As he sat there, mesmerized, Warriors head coach Don Nelson suddenly called his name. Renaldo sprung to his feet and sprinted to the scorer’s table. In his haste, he forgot to remove his warm-up shirt and had to be reminded by Nelson.
Waiting at the table to check in, Major tried to calm his nerves. Just breathe, he thought. Breathe, Renaldo. You’ve been doing this your whole life. Breathe. “I swear I thought I was about to pass out,” he would later describe. “I was so excited that I couldn’t breathe.”
He missed his first few shot attempts—in hindsight, it’s amazing that he didn’t shoot them into the stands with his adrenaline pumping as it was—but eventually got on the board with a baseline dunk. He logged twenty-seven total minutes, finishing with 5 points, 2 rebounds, and 2 steals in a 115–109 loss.
Ten days came and went in a blink. Major didn’t get another opportunity to play. His contract expired, and it was time to head back to the D-League. No big deal, he thought. I’ll be back. It was certainly reasonable thinking. Major was just twenty-four years old, on the rise, and clearly on the radar of NBA teams now. And his stock would rise even more when he returned to Dakota and guided the Wizards to the 2007 D-League championship, averaging 18 points, 5.5 rebounds, 4.5 assists, and 4.5 steals in the playoffs.
Everything was about to change though. Major went to training camp for the Denver Nuggets in 2007, where he first had to pass a routine physical. During that appointment, team physicians discovered that Renaldo had an irregular heartbeat, the product of a loose aortic valve. Left untreated, the condition could be extremely dangerous. Major would require open-heart surgery right away.
On October 18, 2007, doctors at Stroger Hospital in Chicago successfully performed the procedure, leaving a nine-inch scar across Renaldo’s chest. The recovery process would be long and grueling. Ronald was right by his son’s side the entire time, waking up at 6:00 a.m. every morning to check on him. Renaldo missed the entire 2007–8 season but was progressing toward a return and feeling hopeful for the future. Then, in May 2008, two days before Renaldo’s twenty-sixth birthday, his father suffered an unexpected stroke and died.
“I went through a dark phase,” Renaldo said. “I didn’t really want to play basketball anymore.” He had just overcome an incredible hardship, then this—something even more devastating and inconceivable. Basketball was the last thing on his mind. He was broken, physically and emotionally. In that state, he couldn’t imagine doing anything.
As the summer crawled by, and the next D-League season approached, Major’s will to play gradually returned. He wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. Ronald would have wanted him to keep going. He rejoined the Wizards in October 2008, got back in tip-top shape, and began his race to the NBA again. Only this time, that race would never reach its finish line.
Age was not on Major’s side. The NBA sought younger players, not veterans. Teams invested in potential—what might become, not necessarily what was. Renaldo was still a solid big man, but he wasn’t getting any better. He had reached his ceiling, and his ceiling wasn’t quite good enough.
Major never got another call-up. He never appeared in another NBA game. He remained in the D-League for nine more seasons, 356 more games, 10,040 more minutes played, eventually setting a number of league records (most points, field goals, free throws, steals, and win shares) that still stand today. Though it wasn’t the plan, the D-League became Renaldo’s home. His career. His fate.
Thus, Major saw and experienced the growth of the league firsthand. More fans started to pay attention, especially as games became more accessible on television and online. More teams, spread out across the United States, joined almost every year—the total rose to sixteen by 2011–12, then to twenty-two by 2016–17, Renaldo’s final season. More teams meant more one-to-one affiliations with the NBA—a major reason that the number of call-ups and assignments continued to climb. Major was one of twenty-two call-ups in his first D-League season; in 2016–17, there were fifty-one call-ups. Throughout Major’s decade in the D-League, some big names came through on their way to successful NBA careers: players Jeremy Lin, Hassan Whiteside, Seth Curry, Danny Green, Shaun Livingston, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Quinn Cook and coaches Dave Joerger, Quin Snyder, Taylor Jenkins, Nick Nurse, and Luke Walton.
When Major entered the NBA’s minor league system, it was transitioning from the NBDL to the D-League. When he retired, it was about to transition from the D-League to the G League, a byproduct of a new groundbreaking partnership with the sports-drink company Gatorade.
The real question many wondered was, why did Major stay that long? Practically no other players did. They all, including Major, received numerous offers from organizations overseas, where they stood to make significantly more money. D-League salaries had increased over the years, but only slightly. Major never took home more than $30,000 a season. A team in China was prepared to pay him $30,000 a month after his return from heart surgery.
He stayed, in part, for the competition. Every game, every practice, in the D-League was war. The talent level was far higher than anywhere else Major could have played. D-Leaguers couldn’t afford to mess around or take days off—they were fighting for their dreams, jockeying for a few select spots each year. That kind of competition brought the best out of Major. Like his hero, Jordan, it was why he loved the game.
Even with that ruthless competition, a unique camaraderie was in the D-League—a sense of brotherhood. Everyone shared the exact same goal. There was something about being in it together, about going through the arduous grind of a season together, that felt special. It was a feeling that couldn’t possibly be replicated somewhere else.
And, of course, Renaldo was chasing his dream. Logic says he should have jumped at one of those contracts overseas. Logic says only around 450 players are in the NBA at a given time, making it one of the most exclusive and far-fetched jobs to obtain in the world. But logic tends to fade away when you’re chasing a dream. Overseas, the path to his dream was hard to envision. In the D-League, it was right there.
NBA or nothing. NBA or nothing.
For Major, no amount of money was worth more than a shot at his dream, so he never gave up on its pursuit. He always believed that it might happen—that a cubic centimeter of chance might pop out again. And if it did, he would have the spring, the gumption, necessary to grab it.