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March 2010

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Jul

11

Maggette to Come Out and Play with Warriors

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When you’re a 14-year-old kid unhappily attending an all-boys high school on the northwest side of Chicago, the opportunities to meet or even be in the presence of girls are slimmer than the chances of Shawn Kemp’s figure returning to its pre-McDonald’s-gorging days.

So as I entered Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois with my St. Patrick freshman basketball teammates for an early evening game on a cold Monday in December 1996, let’s just say that I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the school’s coed student base loitering in the hallways.

Even though my team wouldn’t even play that night due to a scheduling conflict, the opportunity to see Fenwick’s young blonde and brown-haired women in their Catholic school girl’s outfits – collared shirts with loosened ties, short skirts with knee-high socks – was certainly worth the price of admission (my perceived value to my high school coaches was so low that it wouldn’t have surprised me if they made me pay the $2.00 to be allowed in the gym).

Anyways, while my team sat in the gym bleachers waiting to be driven back to school, the whispers started to trickle amongst my teammates as the Fenwick freshman game started to pick up.

“Oh my god, that’s him,” my teammates muttered below their breaths as they turned around and looked in my direction.

Oblivious to what they were talking about, I spun around and saw Fenwick’s junior All-American Corey Maggette sitting directly behind me, wearing a black skull cap with a flaming basketball on its front and watching the game with a glazed interest.

While Maggette didn’t seem to notice the eyes gawking at him – he likely had grown accustomed to the buzz that came with the territory of being not only the best prep player in the state of Illinois but also one of the most-heavily recruited high school players in the entire country – I tried to play it cool on the outside; however, on the inside, my nerves were all over the place.

You’ll have to know that during this time of my life, the Chicago Bulls were in the middle of their repeat three-peat and I lived and died with the team’s every game. Naturally, Michael Jordan was a God to me; however, with such a cult status in my mind, a player of Jordan’s abilities never seemed tangible to me beyond the television screen. To this day, if I ever meet Jordan, I’ll probably pass out.

Thus, being a few feet from Maggette for a couple of minutes – a hoops phenom who was of course being compared to a young Jordan by the Chicago media – was a truly surreal experience and probably the first time that I was in the immediate presence of a first-class athlete, albeit a high school kid who was only two years older than me, now looking back with some perspective of the situation.

During the two years that overlapped between Maggette and me being in high school at the same time, I would watch my older St. Pat’s classmates match up with Fenwick on three separate occasions – twice during our annual Shamrock Thanksgiving Tournament title game and once during the 1997 IHSA playoffs after my school upset up a heavily-favored St. Joe’s team (of Hoop Dreams fame and the alma mater of Isiah Thomas).

Maggette and Fenwick would win all three of those games, which were tight through three quarters before the Friars pulled away.

The most memorable moment from those games?

During the 1996 Turkey Title game, Maggette caught the ball on the wing during a fast break, lifted off and began to ascent into a windmill dunk in the third quarter with Fenwick clinging to a tight lead.

Don Sweeney, a scrappy point guard for St. Pat’s, got it in his head to try and take a charge and ultimately undercut Maggette, who bricked the basketball off the back iron, seemingly catapulting it 100 feet into the air as the packed gym erupted looking for an offensive foul.

To this day, it was one of the coolest missed dunks that I’ve ever seen.

Amazingly, Maggette’s teams at Fenwick would never win the state title.

After beating St. Pat’s in 1997, Fenwick fell one game short of state when Thornton Fractional High School – behind current Washington Redskins receiver Antwaan Randle El and New Orleans Hornets backup power forward Melvin Ely – got an early lead and then went into an effective stalling game of four-corners that would have made Dean Smith proud.

During his senior season, Fenwick would make it downstate to Peoria, where Maggette and teammates would be frustrated in a loss to a Maine West team featuring the pesky Lucas Johnson (who would go on to Illinois) and forgotten Kevin Frey (who would go to Xavier).

Maggette would of course go to Duke, serving as a standout freshman sixth man on an amazing 1998-1999 team that would make it to the title game with only one loss behind studs Elton Brand, Trajan Langdon, Shane Battier and William Avery.

UCONN would shock Duke in the title game, and Maggette, along with Brand and Avery, would declare for the 1999 NBA Draft, becoming the first underclassmen in Mike Krzyzewski’s tenure with the Blue Devils to leave school early, prompting much dismay in Cameron Crazy land.

Maggette would get drafted in 1999 by the Seattle (make that Oklahoma City) Sonics and be traded on draft night to the Orlando Magic, where he played for one season before being traded to the Clippers, his home for nine seasons prior to officially signing with Golden State today for a hefty sum of $50 million over 5 years.

Only 28 years old and entering his 10^th year in the NBA, Maggette will never come close to that elusive championship with Golden State.

However, he should be a perfect fit for Don Nelson’s run and gun style, which will present him with many opportunities to run the wing, slam it home and atone for that incredible miss nearly 12 years earlier at St. Pat’s cramped gymnasium.

chris@hoops4thesoul.com