TORONTO — Sometimes, it’s hard to remember what it was BKG — Before KG, Before Kevin Garnett, before the Nets’ forward declared for the NBA Draft right out of Chicago’s Farragut High School in 1995 and altered the landscape of the league forever.
Part of that is because it’s almost impossible to think of Garnett being a kid anymore. His look is too grizzled, his voice landscaped by two decades of nightly battles, his outlook formed by so many splendid playoff chases. When he talks, it’s like those old E.F. Hutton commercials: people listen. They hang on every syllable, like the runners behind Forrest Gump, craning for words of wisdom.
Sample: “One of the hardest things to do — other than being consistent — is winning on the road. So with the belief that you can do it, you stand together, and understand what we’re here to do, and you hope to come out fortunate.”
A basketball Dalai Lama.
So it’s difficult to conjure the images and the assumptions that Garnett inspired back in 1995. A high schooler going directly to The League? That was the kind of fantasy-driven narrative that inspired basketball drama, like “The White Shadow” (which actually did have that as an episode in the early ‘80s).
For years, in fact, the list of high school players who skipped college and went directly to the pros was as exclusive a club as there is in basketball, a three-man crew whose names and games were always intertwined because everything they did as basketball players was defined though the prism of that Leap — because it was so unusual.
There was Moses, of course, Moses Malone, the gold standard for all of this, who overcame some early anonymity with teams like the Utah Stars and the Spirits of St. Louis and the Buffalo Braves before exploding onto the national basketball consciousness as a Rocket in 1981, and who reached the pinnacle of his career (and the sport) by delivering a title to Philadelphia in 1983.
There was Darryl Dawkins (Chocolate Thunder) prime minister of the planet Lovetron, destroyer of backboards (twice!) and owner of a game that drove a string of coaches to the brink of their wits because he would alternate games where he looked like the greatest player on the planet with others when he looked like he’d just been introduced to the game before tipoff. Maybe he never reached his full potential, but Dawkins brought a lot of fun to the NBA in the ’70s and ’80s.
And there was Bill “Poodle” Willoughby, the pride of Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, NJ, who was neither as physically imposing as the others (he was 6-foot-6, 205 pounds) nor as successful (playing eight seasons, for six teams), though he had his moments, notably the time, early in his career with the Rockets, when he utilized his 47-inch vertical leap to block a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook, one of the few to ever accomplish that.
For years, that was it: Moses, Thunder, and Poodle. With Dawkins, you’d sometimes hear a muttering of regret that if he’d only gone to college, he might have been one of the best ever. With Willoughby — who ultimately did graduate from Fairleigh Dickinson and now works for the league — it was clear: college would have done him well. With Moses … well, the only regrets came from Lefty Driesell, who thought he had recruited him to Maryland.
They were a trinity.
Then Shawn Kemp sort of joined their ranks, though it was unintentional, a product of some off-court problems essentially chasing him away from college.
Then came Garnett. And when he announced his intentions, it was Armageddon: this wasn’t just dangerous for Garnett, it was irresponsible, sending the wrong message to kids everywhere. The next year, Kobe Bryant and Jermaine O’Neal made the leap. And then Tracy McGrady. And by the time Kwame Brown became the first high-schooler picked No. 1 overall, it was virtually a non-story. Just six short years after Garnett.
Now, of course, the NBA locks high-schoolers out, and there’s talk there might be a two-year requirement, and that’s gristle for another column, but one thing is sure: Garnett survived his decision. And the NBA thrived as a result of it. Nineteen years later, the kid who was going to destroy everything is an elder statesman, dispensing insight and sagacity. How about that.