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by
Ian O'Connor
Author of:
The Jump: Sebastian Telfair
March 31st, 2005
Louisville
Returns to Final Four Without Coveted Recruit
Rick Pitino spent the longest recruiting visit of his coaching life inside
the Brooklyn projects apartment of Sebastian Telfair, to no avail. Though
Pitino was convinced the 5-11 point guard was the quarterback he needed to
get back to the Final Four, Telfair would ignore the letter-of-intent he
signed with Louisville and become the shortest high school player ever taken
in the draft lottery (Kobe Bryant, at 6-6, had been the shortest) when the
Portland Trail Blazers selected him last summer with the 13th pick.
“Tiny Archibald is the fastest New York point guard I ever saw, but
Sebastian is faster than all the rest,” Pitino said. “And this young man has
something Pearl Washington, Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury did not have.
He has an unbelievable charisma. He’s lit up every room he’s ever entered.”
Some have said the same of Pitino. But on the road to the Final Four,
this is the story of how his most coveted Cardinal flew away:
***
What a day for a news conference. The adults making a larger-than-life
figure out of a 5-11 kid had been on a home-run roll, but they struck out
here. Sebastian Telfair was about to deliver his big Brooklyn announcement
four hours before the Yankees and Red Sox would meet in the Bronx in Game 7
of a playoff series colored in apocalyptic shades.
Sure to be reduced to a footnote in the morning tabs, Telfair wasn’t
about to call the whole thing off. He’d been waiting for this moment since
the first time a summer basketball coach handed him a free pair of sneakers.
He’d been waiting for this moment since the day his junior high principal
walked into his classroom and barked out his name.
Telfair thought he was in big trouble, at least until the principal
handed him a letter.
His very first recruiting letter, from the good people at Michigan
State.
The kid was too busy staring wide-eyed at the envelope to open it. He
brought the letter to his home inside the Coney Island projects and handed
it over to his mother, Erica, who would sit near Sebastian inside the
Lincoln High gym on the afternoon of Oct. 16, 2003, and listen to him
announce a decision that could
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Telfair |
secure
or squander a multimillion-dollar score.
Telfair would pick among all the Division I schools that had offered
space in their backcourts, or simply state his intentions to enter the 2004
NBA draft. There was no margin for error here. No fouls to give. After
collecting between 300 and 400 pairs of free sneakers and thousands of
recruiting letters and postcards, Telfair finally had to declare himself.
He would do so in an old gym with faded brick walls, a railed-off
running track high above the court, and the silhouette of the 16th President
of the United States gracing the middle of the floor. If the gym looked like
it belonged in the Indiana heartland, the black adidas banner signifying the
team’s sponsor and framing Telfair’s announcement reminded everyone that
this wasn’t “Hoosiers.”
A
large ‘L’ marked the midcourt podium, below the cluster of microphones.
About a dozen photographers and cameramen jostled for position with the New
York sportswriters who weren’t assigned to track George Steinbrenner’s
volcanic mood swings. Jonathan Hock, the filmmaker who did ESPN’s
“Streetball” series, had his documentary team in place.
To the left of the podium sat officials from New York’s Public Schools
Athletic League — a 100-year-old confederacy made up of the public high
school sports teams across the city’s five boroughs — and Bobby Hartstein,
Lincoln’s special ed dean and the man who coached Stephon Marbury,
Sebastin’s cousin, and Jamel Thomas, Sebastian’s brother, to the city title.
To the right sat the family of the hour. Telfair had gone GQ all the way --
navy pinstripe suit, powder blue shirt and a light gray tie. His father,
Otis, went for a less formal look. He wore a black shirt and several silver
chains around his neck, one of them dangling a large crucifix. Otis also
wore a USA cap graced by the image of an eagle, a button supporting national
child welfare, and another button carrying the word “Airborne.”
“First Infantry Division, Vietnam,” he explained to a reporter before
hobbling toward his seat with the help of
his cane.
Across the court and behind the assembled media stood various
this-is-your-life figures in Telfair’s world. Security guards who walked the
Lincoln hallways. Father Robert Lacombe, the former Providence College
teacher who had baptized Thomas. And Lincoln High faculty members. Telfair
was a solid B student who had asked his favorite teachers to share in his
big day.
But Telfair kept everyone waiting a bit, and not for any false dramatic
effect. The coolest hand in Brooklyn was on the verge of an emotional
breakdown. Renan Ebeid, Lincoln’s athletic director, saw it in Telfair’s
face in the manic minutes before the announcement, and she pulled him into
her office outside the gym and slammed the door shut.
With the cameras and notebooks finally locked out of his Truman Show
life, Sebastian did what any 18-year-old might in the same situation. He
began crying hysterically. The AD knew Sebastian felt like a frayed rope
pulled in opposite directions by Morton and Hartstein, the protege and
mentor who were forever at odds and who were whispering conflicting words of
wisdom in the point guard’s ear.
But this problem ran deeper than the divide between past and present
Lincoln coaches.
“What’s wrong?” Ebeid asked Telfair.
“Everyone’s telling me I’m doing the wrong thing,” Telfair answered.
“What do you feel?”
“I feel like I’m doing the right thing. But Miss Ebeid, you have to
understand. It’s my family. My family’s always telling me one thing, and I
know I’m doing the right thing.”
People began banging on Ebeid’s door, shouting that the press
conference had to begin. The AD threw water on Telfair’s face to help him
camouflage his tears.
“You keep crying up there and you’re going to make me cry and ruin my
makeup,” Ebeid said in an attempt to make Telfair laugh.
“Miss Ebeid, I want to do this for you. I want to make sure that you’re
less stressful this year. So if I tell people my decision, they won’t be
calling you all year and asking what I’m going to do.”
“Make the decision for yourself. If you feel this is the right
decision, then go with it. Just know who was there for you before. People
who are popping into your life now don’t really want anything but your
money.”
Telfair finally told Ebeid he was ready to roll. She threw open her
door, and explained to inquiring minds that she was only giving her point
guard a pep talk.
“His father was against the decision,” Ebeid would say later, “but you
have to understand that his father hasn’t really been a part of his life.
Sebastian’s more concerned about his mother and little brother. His mother
is very nervous. She’s seen a lot of failures in her family. Jamel didn’t
get drafted, and she doesn’t want to get her hopes up too high.”
But this was a day of high hopes, a day when all of Coney Island would
discover where Telfair planned on representing the neighborhood next. NBA OR
COLLEGE? read the T-shirts handed out to the members of the girls and boys
teams who were sitting in the wooden bleachers behind the podium, waiting
for their cue.
The Lincoln principal, Corinne Heslin, who could’ve passed for an old
school nun, was first to the mike. “Sebastian is a wonderful young man,”
Heslin said. “He’s respectful and he works hard....But the good thing is we
have him for all of this year. You’re ours for one more year.”
Heslin gave way to Ebeid, who quickly called a dry-eyed Telfair to the
podium. The point guard had arrived at a decision. What a long, strange trip
it had been.
***
Rick Pitino had never intended to leave his Camelot at the University
of Kentucky for the Boston Celtics. He only instructed his business
manager, Rick Avare, to ask Boston officials for a record salary of $6
million, on the premise that those officials would make Pitino’s decision
easy by telling him to get lost. “In that case,” Avare told Pitino, “why
don’t we ask for $7 million?”
So they made their ridiculous request for a long-term contract at $7
million a year.
“You’re never going to believe this,” Avare told Pitino in their next
phone conversation, “but the Celtics went for it.” Six coaching years at $7
million a pop, plus four general managing years at $2 million a pop for a
grand total of $50 million.
Pitino got rich beyond his wildest dreams, but he paid a heavy price
with his aura. He drafted the wrong players and made too many moves in a
vain rush to glory. The Celtics disaster left him a basketball emperor with
no clothes until Louisville pulled him in from the cold, in part to shoot a
dagger at the Cardinals’ hated rivals in Lexington. To fully recover his
good name, Pitino needed to find that one special prospect who could return
him to the college basketball mount.
“Sebastian Telfair,” Pitino would say, “is the one who can get me back
to the Final Four.”
More than any high school freshman, Telfair understood what it meant to
be recruited. As far back as elementary school, he’d been courted by every
sneaker-sponsored summer team in New York. Out of eighth grade he’d been
coveted by all the powers inside the city’s Catholic High Schools Athletic
Association, considered the most competitive league in America.
But in Pitino Telfair had met his match. As a young Syracuse assistant
hired on his wedding night, Pitino left his honeymoon to recruit a prospect
named Louis Orr. Age never altered Pitino’s approach: He stopped at nothing
to get his man.
And in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at Lincoln
High, the 5-9 Telfair instantly became the playmaker Pitino would’ve left a
second honeymoon for.
“Tiny Archibald is the fastest New York point guard I ever saw, but
Sebastian is faster than all the rest,” Pitino said. “And this young man has
something Pearl Washington, Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury did not have.
He has an unbelievable charisma. He’s lit up every room he’s ever entered.”
This mass appeal made Telfair the eye of every college coach who would
dream of landing that one career-making talent. Every college coach except
the one next door, Mike Jarvis of St. John’s.
Jarvis was on his way out, anyway, before his program became engulfed
in a sex scandal. But a Telfair signing might’ve guaranteed the coach a new
contract at St. John’s, a fact that didn’t influence Jarvis’ thinking.
“Even though he’s the biggest high school name in the country, we’re
not really recruiting Sebastian,” Jarvis said. “He really seems to want to
go to the NBA, and we’ve already been down that road with Omar Cook, who
played one year for us before making a disastrous decision to turn pro.
“Sebastian should definitely go to college. It’s a potential tragedy if
he doesn’t go to school, but we hear he’s leaning toward the NBA.”
By passing on the Telfair sweepstakes, St. John’s opened the door for
other suitors. Duke showed early interest. Georgia Tech was the one-year
home to Stephon Marbury, only Telfair wasn’t about to follow every step of
his cousin’s career.
Syracuse appeared an ideal fit. Jim Boeheim had just won the national
title, his first after an endless wait. But he had to keep feeding the
beast. He had to keep filling up the Carrier Dome, meaning he had to find a
successor to Carmelo Anthony.
The Syracuse coach twice visited Telfair. “A terrific kid,” Boeheim
said. But as big as Boeheim scored with another Brooklyn sensation, Pearl
Washington, something was telling him to leave Telfair for someone else.
“I don’t want to get involved in a long, drawn-out process where
Sebastian ends up in the NBA, anyway,” Boeheim said.
Boeheim’s experience recruiting Telfair’s cousin also played a role in
that decision. On a muggy September night in 1998, Boeheim and his
assistant, Wayne Morgan, met up with Lincoln assistant Gerard Bell. Bell
played chaperone for their home visit at the Marbury residence, as Bobby
Hartstein was in the hospital with stomach problems.
“I remember it was hot as hell in the house,” Bell said. He also
remembered that Stephon’s father and two of Stephon’s brothers, Donnie and
Eric, sat in on the visit. “Donnie and Eric took Wayne back to the bathroom
and left me in the living room with Mr. Marbury and Steph and Boeheim,” Bell
said, “and we continued talking academics. When Wayne came back, he was
definitely frustrated. He was angry. You could see it on his face. You knew
something came down. He was looking to get out of there.”
Now the head coach at Iowa State, Morgan declined to comment on the
content of his conversation with Donnie and Eric Marbury. Morgan did confirm
Bell’s claim that Stephon’s older brothers took him into the bathroom for a
talk. Morgan would not reveal the nature of that alleged bathroom
conversation.
Marbury signed with Georgia Tech.
College recruiters didn’t chase after Telfair like they had after
Marbury, in part because Telfair was weighing the NBA option more seriously
than his older cousin had. But there was more to it than that.
“Some people were scared off by what happened with Stephon,” said
Louisville assistant Kevin Willard. “That was a wild circus, and that was
not the case with Sebastian. Once you got to know Sebastian, he’s a great
kid and fun to talk to on the phone....It wasn’t a wild circus.”
But enough major Division I coaches either figured it would be, or
figured they’d be wasting their time recruiting a kid who would never step
foot on a college campus.
“Listen,” Boeheim said, “Sebastian’s one of the best point guards I’ve
ever seen at that level. But Sebastian’s problem, as far as the NBA is
concerned, is that he stopped growing.
“How’s a skinny six-foot teenager going to play Jason Kidd at 6-4, 220
one night and then Gary Payton at 6-4, 190 the next? We’re not talking about
LeBron James here. LeBron is the most ready player I’ve ever seen coming out
of high school. LeBron’s a 6-8 chiseled freak of nature, as physical as
anyone playing the wing in the NBA. He gets up and down the floor better
than anybody in the league. So Sebastian should go to college. It didn’t
hurt Magic, Bird, Jordan or Isiah to go to college.”
Boeheim’s former assistant couldn’t have agreed more, but Rick Pitino
knew the trick would be convincing the precocious playmaker to at least tap
the brakes on his high-speed career. The Louisville coach was burdened by
the same thoughts that drove so many recruiters out of this arms race. While
shadowing Telfair’s every move for more than two years, Pitino wondered if
he was wasting his time.
But Pitino kept pushing, prodding and selling against hope. He was the
leader in the clubhouse for Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal before they
decided to skip college, and yet Pitino decided Telfair was worth the risk
of an unwanted three-peat.
If nothing else, the Louisville coach had Telfair’s academic standing
working in his favor. Unlike many recruits straddling the college/NBA fence,
Telfair had no standardized test concerns. He’d scored a 1070 on his first
SAT attempt — 184 points higher than the most recent recorded average for a
Lincoln student.
Telfair did fine in the classroom, but his high SAT score raised some
eyebrows across the city’s high school basketball scene. “Every person who
knows Sebastian knows he didn’t take it,” claimed one PSAL head coach whose
team played Lincoln. “But he did it on the first try, so nobody can
challenge it.”
Nobody produced evidence that Telfair used what is known on the
recruiting trail as a “pinch hitter,” but a culture of suspicion was created
by a tidal wave of fraudulent scores, according to Rob Johnson, the most
recognizable middleman in the street scouting market. “I’d say 70 percent of
big-time New York players use pinch hitters,” Johnson said. “The kids go to
a person he knows, a coach or whatever, and an arrangement is made to pay a
guy to take the test. In most schools in New York the proctors don’t check
IDs. It’s the easiest thing that ever happened, and the NCAA hasn’t done
anything about it. The key is to cheat on the first try, because then nobody
can compare your high score to a low one you took earlier when you didn’t
cheat.”
Telfair was universally liked and respected by his teachers, and he was
never one to cut corners. Sebastian was many things, but a liar wasn’t among
them. It was hard to believe he’d cheat on anything, never mind his college
entrance exam. Telfair called the test “long and hard” but said his high
score simply reflected his hard work and his attendance in a preparatory
course, nothing more. “I took a class that helped me because they gave us
last year’s test,” Telfair said. “That really helped me get an understanding
of what it was about. When I got the results, I was so happy. I didn’t think
I’d score that high.”
So Telfair was in the academic clear long before Pitino spent a
September night inside the Surfside Gardens housing project, the same Coney
Island building that had become the center of the major-college universe
nine years earlier, when Cremins won the fight for Stephon Marbury’s
services.
Pitino arrived at the Telfairs’ door accompanied by his assistant,
Willard, the son of Holy Cross coach Ralph Willard, himself a former Pitino
aide. Kevin Willard had been promoted into the place of Mick Cronin, who had
taken the head job at Murray State. Telfair was Willard’s first official
recruit. Telfair’s father would say that Willard “sends me something every
day. Every single day. A card, a letter. I guess he’s just trying to make a
contact.”
He was trying to make the score of a young coach’s life.
But Telfair wasn’t about to go to Louisville for the sake of Kevin
Willard. This was Pitino’s game to win or lose. And on the official
recruiting visit to the Coney Island projects, the game started over the
hors d’oeuvres’ Telfair’s mother, Erica, had cooked up for her guests.
“It was more a social visit between long, lost friends than it was a
recruitment,” Pitino said. “It was the longest visit I ever made.”
Telfair’s father, Otis, said the meeting went a good 5 1/2 hours.
Pitino brought along oversized photos of the Louisville campus, but no
matter how grim and gray life on the Coney Island peninsula could be,
Telfair wouldn’t choose a school for its green grass and fresh country air.
The kid only wanted to know if a season with Pitino would improve his
NBA stock, or if the Louisville coach was just another unnecessary middleman
to be dismissed from the process.
“You'll win a national championship at Louisville,” Pitino told
Sebastian that night, “and that will put you as the No. 1 pick in the first
round.”
Pitino went on about the veteran nucleus that would return, and about
the recruiting class he was assembling. Of course, the sales pitch to
Telfair would’ve been moot had the Lincoln star been ruled ineligible to
play at Louisville or any Division I school.
LeBron James would’ve never gained NCAA eligibility after accepting
that Hummer and those free throwback jerseys, and after engaging in a
seasonlong food fight with Ohio athletic officials who yearned for the days
when their teams weren’t cutting pay-per-view deals and riding inside white
limousines on some promoter’s expense account.
Pitino understood that Telfair would succeed LeBron as the most watched
player in America. He understood this even before a report in The
(Louisville) Courier-Journal questioned whether Telfair had compromised his
amateur eligibility before his senior season at Lincoln by appearing in a
“Slam” magazine ad for the Passtheroc clothing line, an ad that showed
Telfair wearing the company’s clothes above a caption that read, “It’s no
secret. Just ask Mr. Sebastian Telfair. The No. 1 and hottest point guard in
the country!”
Telfair explained he received no payment for the photo and never
authorized it to be used in an ad, claims that apparently satisfied the
NCAA. “But I don’t think Sebastian realizes that the NCAA is going to follow
him everywhere his senior season,” Pitino said. “I spent a half hour of our
recruiting visit conversation reminding him of that.” Pitino told Sebastian,
“You’re not in Montana or South Dakota. You’re in New York City. There are
more eyes here than anywhere in the world.’”
Pitino hoped Telfair had learned from his friend, LeBron, and his
cousin, Stephon, who faced NCAA scrutiny at Lincoln after he was given use
of a car by Lou d’Almeida, head of the famed Bronx Gauchos summer program (Marbury
was cleared when investigators found that his family’s relationship with
d’Almeida predated his rise as a basketball phenom).
Pitino pleaded with Sebastian to reject the advances of agents, and
hoped the point guard would see him not as a recruiter with a self-serving
agenda, but as a partner with the kid’s best interests at heart. “Being from
New York,” Pitino said, “(Sebastian) needed someone he could believe in. All
point guards who are 5-11 or six feet and trying to go to the NBA need
someone they can trust.”
Pitino told Sebastian about his business partnerships with former
Kentucky players such as Jamal Mashburn, Walter McCarty, Ray Mercer and
Derek Anderson. “We have Lexus and Toyota car dealerships, Outback
steakhouses, a glass company, you name it,” the coach said.
Before Pitino finally left the Telfair apartment, he needed Sebastian
to believe that he wouldn’t deceive him. The Louisville coach told the point
guard he’d advise him to turn pro when he was ready. Pitino told Telfair to
listen to the right people, namely his would-be college coach. “There’s so
many voices in New York,” Pitino said, “and Lenny Cooke and Omar Cook
listened to the wrong ones.”
***
At 4:39 p.m., Oct. 16, 2003, Sebastian Telfair slapped down his cards
face up. “Now I came to tell you,” he said, “that I will be attending the
school of the
University
of Louisville, Rick Pitino.”
On those words, the Lincoln boys and girls players sitting behind
Telfair and wearing those NBA OR COLLEGE? T-shirts rose to face the
assembled media and did a jump spin in place. TELFAIR SAYS LOUISVILLE, read
the announcement on their backs. The words FOR NOW weren’t visible to the
naked eye.
Family members, teachers and school and PSAL officials cheered this
seminal moment in a prodigy’s life.
“When you’re a kid,” Telfair said, “you dream of playing in the NBA.
You want to go to somebody who can help you live your dreams....Coach Pitino
is the person who can do that for me.”
Heslin and Ebeid hugged and kissed their boy king. Bobby Hartstein
beamed about Marbury’s more telegenic cousin. “Sebastian’s a media machine,”
Hartstein shrieked. “A public relations dream.”
The next day, the ESPN crawler kept delivering this bulletin: “High
school PG Sebastian Telfair announces he will attend Louisville instead of
entering NBA Draft.” Only Telfair never quite said that. In fact, not a
single one of the high school megastars who preceded him had declared for
the draft before his senior season; even LeBron James waited until his St.
Vincent-St. Mary career was complete.
“As of right now,” Telfair said, “I’m definitely going to be playing
college basketball.”
Pitino fully understood the implication of those first four words. But
weeks later, after Telfair sent in a signed letter-of-intent that did not
prohibit him from declaring for the draft, Pitino held a press conference to
bask in the reflected glory of his coup.
“(Telfair) is everything the marquee says about him,” he said.
A half hour after Telfair’s big Brooklyn announcement, and three hours
before the Yankees and Red Sox began an epic Game 7 that would drive that
announcement deep into New York’s sports sections, I asked Telfair if Pitino
really had him locked up.
“Nah, I just needed to get people off my back,” he said through his
million-dollar smile.
“If I’m in the top 15 of the draft, I’m gone.”
Ian O’Connor is one of
the nation’s premier sportswriters. A columnist for both USA Today and The
Journal News (Westchester, NY), he has been honored as the best sports
columnist in New York in three of the last four years by the New York AP.
Highly-respected for both his prose and for his integrity, O’Connor recently
completed his first book, “The Jump: Sebastian Telfair and the High Stakes
Business of High School Ball” (Rodale Press,
available on Amazon.com).
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