From left to right, the highly touted freshmen: Malcolm Lee, J'mison "Bobo" Morgan, Jerime Anderson, Drew Gordon and Jrue Holiday.
By Wendy Soderburg , Potraits by Patrik Giardino UCLA Magazine Jan 2009
Men's Basketball Head Coach Ben Howland has done it again. His 2008 crop of freshman players — named the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation by both ESPN.com and Scout.com — includes elite guards, an explosive power forward and a standout center. The good times figure to keep on rolling with these freshman phenoms, who bring personality to spare, along with talent, to Westwood (Keep reading "Hoop Dreams" at www.magazine.ucla.edu).
From NBA.com: "2008 Sprite Slam Dunk Champion Dwight Howard is back to defend his crown, and if being up against Rudy Gay and Nate Robinson wasn't tough enough for him, now YOU will pick his final challenger. For the first time ever YOU get to decide who will advance to compete as the 4th dunker in the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest at NBA All-Star 2009 in Phoenix!"
MUH says: "Forget the white guy, forget the Spanish guy, and vote for OUR guy, RUSSELL WESTBROOK! "Bringing value to the number 0""
Lakers guard Jordan Farmar underwent successful surgery today to repair a torn lateral meniscus in his left knee, it was announced by the team.
The surgery, which took approximately 30 minutes, was performed by Dr. Clarence Shields of the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Group. Farmar is expected to be out approximately eight weeks.
Farmar suffered the injury in the fourth quarter of the Lakers game at Miami on Friday night. He is averaging 7.9 points and 2.4 assists in 19.6 minutes this season.
I thought I'd post a great piece that Tommy Craggs wrote for the New York Times back in November on high-school hoops phenom Renardo Sidney (6-10/270 pf/c), and Sidney's meanderings through high school hoops, AAU tournaments and college hoops recruiting. This is an extremely well-written, well-researched and compelling article, and well worth the minutes to read. You'll find the original NY Times article here, along with some pictures. Enjoy.
The Next Big Thing By TOMMY CRAGGS New York Times November 2, 2008
The lightning arrives in great, thwapping bursts, and the night sky over New York City is a series of bright fissures. The world outside Renardo Sidney’s hotel looks gorgeously broken. Inside, Sidney is sitting in a gloomy nook, tapping distractedly on his Sidekick. He is one of the best young basketball players in the land, an 18-year-old with a molten game whose career, though he is not yet out of high school, has already become a morality play about the state of contemporary basketball. He is 6-foot-10 and about 270 pounds. In two years, maybe less, he will be a well-paid professional basketball player, and perhaps at that time, too, he will shrug his massive shoulders when he is asked why he still sucks his thumb.
“I’ve been sucking my thumb since I was a kid,” he says. “Sometimes, I do it just to do it. Like, when I’m mad.” He also travels with a lucky blanket. His father — Renardo the elder — is seated across the table. He chuckles. “It’s a sheet,” he clarifies.
Renardo Jr. is large in ways you don’t often see in people his age, less like a heavyset teenager rounding slowly into shape than a longtime athlete who has spent his off-season at the buffet. He has always been big, though, starting at birth. As his father recalls, even the doctor said damn. By middle school, he stood 6 feet 5 inches tall, but he had yet to outgrow his old compulsions. One of his coaches, Trent Hysten, used to kid him: “You look just like a big baby. Get your thumb outta your mouth.”
Sidney is frequently called a man-child, but maybe the most precocious thing about him is the already long arc of his career. Next spring, he will finish his senior year having attended three high schools in two states and having played for three summer travel teams since 2005. A nationally known quantity since before his eighth-grade year in Jackson, Miss., where his middle school charged $3 admission to his games, Sidney was considered the best player in America in his class by the time he reached high school. Some had penciled him in as the top pick in the 2010 N.B.A. draft. “They were talking about him being the next Magic Johnson,” says Tom Konchalski, an influential talent scout.
From the beginning, however, Sidney represented a different sort of high school star, in part because, strictly speaking, he wasn’t a high-school star. He didn’t even join a high-school team until his sophomore year, and caused a minor stir when he told The Washington Post that high-school ball is “not that important.” Of course, for Sidney, it wasn’t, but that’s not something a young player is supposed to say out loud.
Instead, to the dismay of many scowling traditionalists, Sidney was almost wholly a product of the summer. He made his name in the demimonde of summer basketball: what the sneakers companies call grass-roots basketball and what most everyone else calls, in slightly misleading shorthand, A.A.U. basketball. (Many, but not all, of the events fall under the purview of the Amateur Athletic Union, a nonprofit that promotes and oversees amateur sports.) What they’re talking about is the ecosystem of shoe-company-sponsored summer traveling teams, shoe-company-sponsored summer tournaments and shoe-company-sponsored summer camps.
It is a vast, roiling Dodge City of the hoops landscape, lying as it does outside the reach of high-school coaches and the regulatory arm of the N.C.A.A. — an unsavory world, in the popular imagination, of street agents and shoe boxes full of cash and chest-thumping 16-year-olds with Adidas stripes branded like bar codes on their foreheads. And largely for that reason, summer ball has become a catch-all symbol of basketball indulgence, blamed for everything from the death of the bounce pass to the corruption of America’s youth to the occasional failures of the grown men who represent USA Basketball on the international stage. It is something like basketball’s bad conscience.
And it was in this system that Sidney thrived. “He blew up in A.A.U. basketball,” says Renardo Sr., who, until his contract expired recently, earned about $20,000 a year as a Reebok “consultant,” a job that mostly entailed shepherding his son to Reebok-sponsored events. In 2007, Renardo Sr. started his own grass-roots outfit, the L.A. Dream Team, sponsored by Reebok and coached by Renardo Sr. himself. (He also mentors kids and works as a sort of personal trainer for other aspiring basketball players.)
By August, however, the start of Sidney’s senior year, things had gone awry. Having relocated to Los Angeles in 2006, he was now attracting interest from a variety of college teams — among them Memphis, U.C.L.A., Texas and Arizona State, according to recruiting scuttlebutt — and perhaps even entertaining the notion, as some loose gossip had it, of playing in Europe next year. But he had put on weight. He talked wistfully about going fishing and “getting away from basketball,” which made him sound more like a 38-year-old power forward on a second tour with the Clippers. Sidney fell in everyone’s esteem. Rivals.com, a prominent recruiting site that offers a national ranking of prospects, nearly bounced him out of its top 10. A handful of scouts even figured him for a bust.
He is a “prima donna and has one of the worst attitudes that we’ve ever seen,” wrote Clark Francis, the editor of Hoop Scoop Online and a bigfoot on the recruiting scene, in a scathing evaluation of Sidney. By Francis’s lights, the kid with the thumb in his mouth had become the bogeyman of modern basketball. “As a matter of fact,” he wrote, “Sidney could be the poster boy for many of [the] things that are wrong with grass-roots basketball and is the perfect example of just how bad the sense of entitlement among many of the top players has become.”
He seemed to be saying, remarkably, that an 18-year-old’s basketball career had gone irretrievably to pot.
Some time ago, a series appeared in a newsletter under the title “Is Basket-Ball a Danger?” In it, several correspondents wrung their hands over the game’s miasmic influence on children, the unruly behavior it seemed to inspire. This is no doubt a familiar litany, especially to those who remember the moral panic that ensued in 2004 after Ron Artest and the Indiana Pacers decided to punch their way out of the Palace of Auburn Hills. The only surprise is the year the series ran: 1894.
It has been Renardo Sidney’s misfortune, more than a century later, to find himself cast as the villain in the oldest story in basketball.
The Sidneys are in New York City on this June weekend for a Nike-sponsored tournament called the Rumble in the Bronx, and the day has gone miserably for the L.A. Dream Team. The equipment manager apparently left the uniforms in Los Angeles, forcing the players to borrow jerseys from their New York rivals, the Juice All-Stars. Then the team van got lost, and the Dream Team arrived late to its second game of the day, against the New York Panthers. Renardo Sr. was further horrified to learn the game was being held in what he would later call “the dungeon,” a humid, windowless gym that effectively simulates what basketball might feel like if it were played in a blast shelter.
The Rumble in the Bronx is a relatively minor event in the summer hoops multiverse. There are a handful of college coaches milling about, mostly local. Where other summer events have the air of an industry convention, with backslapping reunions and furtive side-room deal-making, this one, at least off the court, feels meandering and almost casual; it is early June, the preamble to A.A.U. ball’s long summer.
The N.C.A.A. has worked assiduously to curb the influence of these tournaments. For years, this meant primarily a flurry of rules and recommendations, many designed to limit contact between college and summer coaches and to return the locus of the recruitment process to the high schools, where establishment coaches with better credentials could act as the key brokers between college and player. This spring, however, the N.C.A.A. and the N.B.A., with token participation from the A.A.U. and the shoe companies, upped the ante, announcing a five-year, $50 million effort to reform what the N.C.A.A.’s president, Myles Brand, called the “dysfunctional” world of youth basketball.
Fundamentally, the idea is to seize control of the mechanism by which players like Renardo Sidney launch their careers. What reform actually entails is unclear, but the deal calls for the N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. to each chip in $15 million, with another $20 million coming through joint-marketing ventures. The contributions will fund an as-yet-unnamed program that will offer an alternative structure for youth basketball. The N.C.A.A. News wrote, “The new structure is designed to negate the effects of third-party influences currently working the youth basketball environment,” by which it meant “people who may not have the player’s best interests at heart.”
That this comes from the same groups that in 2005 cheered the adoption of the N.B.A.’s minimum-age rule, effectively forcing high-school stars to spend one year playing college basketball pro bono rather than leap directly to the N.B.A., is more than a little rich. The partnership was announced at the Final Four this year, and it was noted in passing that both Brand and the N.B.A.’s commissioner, David Stern, would prefer that the age rule be raised from 19 to 20, meaning most players would have to remain in college for two years. Colleges benefit tremendously from keeping the best players in apprenticeship for two years; the N.B.A., in turn, gets marketable commodities who’ve spent more time in the college star-making machinery, as well as proven players who aren’t being drafted purely on their potential.
The traditional justification is that colleges produce better, more well-rounded citizens, though in fact one study has suggested that the opposite may be true. In 2005, Michael McCann, then an assistant professor at Mississippi College School of Law, looked at 84 recent N.B.A. player arrests. He found that 57 percent of the players arrested spent four years in college; only 4.8 percent had never gone to college, significantly less than the league-wide share of prep-to-pro players (8.3 percent). In fact, one might infer from the study that the less time a player spent in college, the less likely he was to get arrested.
“The N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. are entertainment vehicles. One pays you, one doesn’t,” says John (Sonny) Vaccaro, the 69-year-old godfather of summer basketball and the man who, in the employ of first Nike, then Adidas, then Reebok, rained shoe money on the basketball world and in so doing acquired so much clout that he is set to be portrayed by James Gandolfini — the guy who played Tony Soprano — in an HBO movie. Vaccaro walked away from Reebok in 2007 with two years left on his contract and now wanders the country as basketball’s angry prophet, barnstorming noisily against the N.C.A.A.’s tax-exempt status and the N.B.A.’s age rule. “One thing is constant,” he says. “One thing. The performers. The players. Without the players, neither of these entities can be multibillion-dollar businesses.”
Greg Shaheen, the N.C.A.A. senior vice president who oversees Division I basketball, says that “95 percent of our revenue stream goes to educating young people. I’d be curious to know if those criticizing us put 95 percent of their money toward the education of young people.”
The attacks on summer basketball typically also come wrapped in a lot of moralizing about the style of play. In particular, the reformers have made a fetish of “the fundamentals” — the stuff that, to hear them talk, apparently went out of fashion around the time Whitey Skoog left the N.B.A. and that now lies dead by the hand of Sonny Vaccaro and the summer game. It’s for lack of fundamentals that the Americans can barely keep up with those “team-first, back-to-basics foreigners,” as USA Today put it, and after the 2004 Olympics, the critics hung Team USA’s bronze medal around the summer game’s neck like a millstone. This is a preposterous argument to make now, during the ascendancy of LeBron James and the coronation of Kevin Garnett, both of whom cut their teeth in summer basketball and bypassed college ball entirely and both of whom are as fundamentally sound as anyone who passed through John Wooden’s bounce-pass academy at U.C.L.A.
Nevertheless, this is maybe the most persistent charge lodged against grass-roots ball, and because the summer game is mostly coached by blacks and played almost entirely by black kids in a black idiom, it comes freighted with all sorts of odious insinuations. In 2006, George Raveling, the former coach at the University of Southern California, fired an oblique shot at summer basketball when he told USA Today, “N.B.A. teams are realizing it’s less risky to draft internationals because they’re more coachable, more socialized, have no posses and have not been Americanized.” The racial tinge of his comment was staggering, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Raveling was not only Nike’s grass-roots director but a black man, to whom Martin Luther King gave his original typewritten notes for his “I Have a Dream” speech.
I ask Vaccaro about the attacks on the style of summer play. “Are you crazy?” Vaccaro says. “The style of play? What was the style of play in U.S.A.-Spain [the 2008 Olympic gold-medal game]? Tell me, where was the defense in United States-Spain?
“I’m tired of that. I’m tired of the vilification of these kids,” he goes on. “It’s sinful. It’s ethnic cleansing. Street basketball to them has a connotation — they think street basketball is black. Well, they better hope it’s black, because the majority of players playing the game has been black since they allowed blacks to play.”
Brian McCormick, a coach and trainer who self-published a book on youth-player development, suggests the real problem with summer ball is that it “creates a system of overtraining,” with players bouncing from the high-school season to the summer season and back again with little break. Sidney estimates he plays close to 100 games a year. “Players are going, going, going,” McCormick says.
In many ways, Renardo Sidney’s game was built for grass-roots ball, which, because of its fast tempo and showcase nature, tends to reward versatility. Last year, The New York Times called him “the epitome of camp evolution.” But Sidney does not suffer from a lack of fundamentals. He has a clean flick-knife of a jumper, smooth from anywhere on the court. He has the ballhandling ability of someone a foot shorter and five years older, and there are a lot of tiny felicities to his play: touch passes and no-looks and footwork out of an Arthur Murray studio. His is a veteran’s game. In fact, it’s possible he appears too fundamentally sound, that he relies too much on the sort of deftness that won’t sustain him in college and the pros. At his size, at this level, elegance can look more like nonchalance.
At the New York tournament, Sidney is arguably the best prospect in the gym, and there are plenty of glimpses of the player he has been celebrated for being, not to mention the player he might become. But he also has a maddening tendency to drift, and in a game against the Panthers, he hardly leaves a mark. Triple-teamed on offense and mostly inert and grabby on defense, he manages only a handful of points before fouling out with several minutes remaining. The rest of the team looks equally skittish and tentative, and L.A. loses by a dozen, dropping the squad to the Rumble’s second-tier silver bracket. Renardo Sr. leaves the court hurling insults over his shoulders at a ref: “You can’t foul out the No. 1 player in the country with 10 minutes left!”
By the time I see the Sidneys back at their hotel later that evening, neither is in much of a mood to chat. Renardo Jr. rubs his knee warily and hovers over his phone, barely lifting his head to answer questions. Renardo Sr. is hoarse, still exercised over the tournament, the conditions, the cost. And then, of course, there are the refs. “You can’t just get these guys off the street or at a liquor store,” he says.
Renardo Sr. is in his pajamas, and his eyes look a little rheumy. He is not a big man, or at least he doesn’t look it, sitting here next to his son, but he certainly has an outsize presence. He favors shades indoors and enormous, billowing T-shirts that have tigers on the front and hang down to his knees, making him look short-armed and skinny-legged; on each hand he wears a fat, gleaming bowling ball of a ring, spoils of a 2007 California Division III state championship won by Renardo and Renardo’s older brother Tacus while at Artesia High School in Los Angeles.
In talking about his younger son’s career, Renardo Sr. occasionally slips into the first-person plural, in the way that agents often do. For instance, when talking about whether the family’s history with Reebok — the deal expired this summer — will influence his son’s shoe preference in the pros, he says: “We’re gonna be with anybody that got the most money. So if you see us with Ponys on” — Pony being a minor player in the shoe game — “you know Pony came over.” Later, when he mentions Renardo Jr.’s nickname, the Difference — a nickname no one else seems to use, by the way — you can almost see the shoe commercial dancing in his eyes.
There are, by my count, 182 Reebok logos inside the gym on the small campus of Philadelphia University, the site of July’s Reebok All-American Camp, where Sidney makes an appearance. They are everywhere: on backboards, scorer’s tables, doors, wall pads, folding chairs. They’re affixed to the railing on the track high above the floor, nearly 100 of them encircling the gym. I don’t even bother counting the Reebok shoes and the Reebok uniforms and the Reebok pencils and the Reebok lanyards and the Reebok signs that some poor soul had to hang on lampposts all around campus. Reebok-Reebok-Reebok-Reebok-Reebok. With every repetition, the word seems stranger to the eye, and it occurs to me later that I have no idea what it means. As it happens, “reebok” is the Afrikaans rendering of “rhebok,” an antelope that reminded European settlers of a type of deer called the roebuck, a word that many years later could be found adjoined to the word “Sears.” These are heady connotations: imperialism and commerce. One hell of a give-and-go.
I mention the logos to Christopher Rivers, Vaccaro’s successor as Reebok’s director of basketball. He seems flattered. “I’m gonna have someone else count ’em,” he says, adding that the placement is anything but haphazard. “Everything is done strategically,” he says. “There isn’t a place you can shoot a picture without getting a logo.”
The origins of the camp go back to 1984, when, under Vaccaro’s midwifery, the ABCD Camp was born. It stood for Academic Betterment and Career Development, though no one ever used the full name, and depending on its creator’s allegiance, ABCD has been a Nike camp, a Converse camp, an Adidas camp and a Reebok camp, though it was always, above all, a Sonny Vaccaro camp. It was Vaccaro, a promoter of high-school all-star games, who first paid college coaches to outfit their teams in Nikes, Vaccaro who signed Michael Jordan to his first shoe deal, Vaccaro who hugged Kobe Bryant just moments after he was drafted. And as he moved from company to company, taking his camp with him, a new event would sprout up in ABCD’s place, the various camps and tournaments running concurrently. The basic aim never changed, however: to give scores of the nation’s best high-school players exposure in front of the finest college coaches in the country (and vice versa), and to bury those kids in a hail of shoe logos.
“There’s never been anything in the history of amateur basketball as successful as the ABCD Camp,” Vaccaro says of his creation. “And for this [the players] are vilified. Summer basketball and summer camps, starting with the Nike camp, the ABCD Camp, have been the epitome of what basketball is.”
Every sport exploits its prodigies, but none seems to cause the vast and unceasing tut-tutting that summer basketball does. Two years ago, O. J. Mayo, the nation’s most coveted high-school player and maybe the purest product of the summer system to date, picked up the phone and called U.S.C.’s head coach, Tim Floyd, to whom he had never spoken and who thought so little of his chances to sign the superstar recruit that he hadn’t even sent Mayo a brochure. “Coach,” he said, according to one account, “this is O. J. Mayo. I’d like to come to your school.” When Floyd asked for Mayo’s phone number, he answered, “No. I’ll call you.” As Rodney Guillory, an associate of Mayo’s, had explained to Floyd, Mayo wanted to market himself for a year before the draft and decided Los Angeles was the best place to launch his brand. Mayo, in effect, was recruiting Floyd. When an ESPN investigation later alleged that Mayo had received cash and gifts from a “runner” for an N.B.A. agent, his saga became a handy symbol of the ultimate corruption of basketball. But what, in the end, was harmed besides some outdated notion of amateurism? Certainly not Mayo. He played a single season at U.S.C. and then, in June, was taken third in the N.B.A. draft.
This summer, Vaccaro was instrumental in the decision by the prized point-guard recruit Brandon Jennings to spurn Arizona — he had not yet qualified academically — and instead play professionally overseas, sidestepping the N.B.A. entirely and making Jennings a wealthy man. (He was reportedly inspired after he and his mother heard Vaccaro on the radio discussing Europe as a viable option for newly minted high-school grads.) Playing in Italy for Lottomatica Virtus Roma, Jennings will earn $1.2 million this season in salary and endorsements. If all goes well, he will be a top-10 pick in next year’s N.B.A. draft.
To see Mayo work the phones, or Jennings draw a paycheck in euros at an age when he’d normally be running suicides for Lute Olson, is to see the players gaining the leverage that probably should have been theirs in the first place. For Mayo and Jennings, the supposedly dysfunctional summer game was in fact perfectly functional.
The Philadelphia camp is a disorienting affair. It’s not immediately clear who the intended audience is. There are only a handful of fans and a smattering of talent-scout gurus, plus of course the coaches. The coaches are there to recruit, certainly, but because of rules that bar contact with the players — the coaches can’t even use the same bathroom — it seems more accurate to say the coaches are there to be seen recruiting. They are marketing themselves and their schools just as surely as Reebok is hawking sneakers. The players, for their part, seem to try very hard to pretend they’re not being watched, though you catch them feigning a limp now and then after a blown layup. They’ll also glance toward the stands from time to time, up to where Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino and Billy Donovan and other Division I coaches are sitting.
On the floor, some of the players look drum-tight, as you might expect — but not Sidney, who is the only one mugging in his camp photograph. He has a mixed week. Midway through, he submits to the indignity of a press conference devoted almost entirely to his weight. In games, he turns himself into the camp’s tallest guard, firing away from the perimeter though he is easily the biggest guy in the gym. He also finds himself fencing with the refs again. In one game, he picks up three fouls in a minute, and from where Renardo Sr. is sitting, there comes a hoarse, concussive sound. “Boooo!” And then another: “Booo!”
“He’s gonna be up there as one of the all-time players [who make you] just shake your head and wish he’d wake up and figure it out,” Hoop Scoop’s Clark Francis says later. “Four years ago he could play any position, do things on the perimeter. He wasn’t heavy. And now he’s basically an underachiever. It’s a tragedy.” (Francis, it should be noted, thinks Shaquille O’Neal is an underachiever.)
If his performance is indeed a disappointment, perhaps it’s only because Sidney is being measured against the absurdly high standard he set for himself. “He’s the victim of the cancer of early success,” says Tom Konchalski, the talent scout. “They may have adult ability, but they’re kids. It’s unrealistic to expect a maturity level you find in an adult.” The Sidneys themselves are sanguine about Renardo’s prospects. As of September, Francis had dropped Sidney to 39th in his rankings (he had once held the top spot) and had named him the biggest disappointment for the second summer in a row, but as both father and son are fond of saying, “the only ranking we care about is David Stern’s.”
During one game in Philly, I find myself sitting behind Rick Pitino. I mention the common criticism of Sidney, that he can often look like he’s saving himself. Pitino snorts: “Saving himself for the Lakers.”
The story goes that when his son was a seventh-grader in Jackson, Miss., Renardo Sr., then a security guard, approached a local A.A.U. coach named James Wright. “He saw me and said, ‘Coach, I got a son in the seventh grade, about 6-foot-5.’ Oh, really? Sure,” recalls Wright, now an assistant coach at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. “He said, ‘Coach, he wants to play on your team.’ I said just bring him by. He brought him by; I worked him out. . . . This guy’s a pro. It took me five minutes. I told his dad, ‘You sure you want me to coach him?’ And his dad was just shocked. He didn’t think he was that good. It was ridiculous. . . . He had no clue what that kid was.
“He was so versatile,” Wright continues. “A freak of nature with length, ballhandling skills, and the kid’s 6-foot-5 at 12 years old? That’s a pro.”
Soon enough, Wright was calling Christopher Rivers at Reebok and then Vaccaro himself, suggesting they invite the boy to Reebok’s Camp Next. About watching him for the first time, Vaccaro says, “A blind man could see. There was no question he was gonna be a great player. From that minute on, the family and I started a rapport.” Sidney debuted at ABCD the summer before ninth grade and was named co-M.V.P. of the underclassmen’s all-star game, and from there his stardom was assured.
And that’s when high-school basketball got in his way. In his freshman year, Sidney hoped to play for a former University of Mississippi assistant, Wayne Brent, at the private Piney Woods School. The Mississippi High School Activities Association, however, ruled him ineligible. In Mississippi, private schools can only draw in-state students from within a 20-mile radius of the school, according to the association’s executive director, Ennis Proctor; the Sidneys lived 28.6 miles from Piney Woods, according to Brent. Had Sidney attended a public school, he would have gone to Forest Hill High School, where, some local observers pointed out, Proctor had once served as principal. Sidney practiced with Piney Woods and watched from the bench during games, and that summer seemed to indicate he might skip high-school basketball entirely, which raised eyebrows among the message-board set.
“My thing is, what makes high-school basketball the alpha and omega?” says Reebok’s Christopher Rivers, who is black. “White people, traditionally. Indiana. Playing for your school’s great, but he’s not playing as a hobby, so he can go out on a Friday night, score 17 points and go to the pizza parlor. He’s playing because it’s his career.”
So the Sidneys, including Renardo Jr.’s mother, Patricia, and two of his three siblings (Tacus and a sister, Tiarra), decamped for California. “To be honest,” Renardo Sr. says, “L.A. was the last resort. It was between Atlanta, Texas and L.A., and it took us a little bit of time to make that decision. We went to L.A. a couple times. We’re good friends with Master P,” the rapper, who also runs an A.A.U. team out of L.A. “You have to do what’s best for your family.”
It was a good fit. Sidney’s new school, Artesia High, ran a highlight video at the team banquet at the end of the season, with a U.C.L.A. assistant coach in attendance. “I was watching his mouth drop,” says Loren Grover, Artesia’s then head coach. That year, there were plenty of highlights to choose from. “There was one fast break in a playoff game against Simi Valley. The point guard, Lorenzo McCloud, just threw it to the rim. It was, like, ‘What are you doing?’ And Renardo comes out of nowhere, catches it in midair, throws it down right behind him and dunked it. He never even saw the rim. Just . . . wow.”
Is basketball a danger? Is Renardo Sidney a danger?
We’re sitting in a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, not far from Fairfax High School, where Sidney has just started his senior year and where his team will likely once again contend for the city and maybe the state title. This morning he was run ragged in the school’s gym, under the whistle of John Williams, a freelance trainer and former N.B.A. big man whom everyone called “Hot Plate” to distinguish him from the lankier John (Hot Rod) Williams, the springy former N.B.A big man.
Sidney transferred to Fairfax for his junior year, just months after winning a state championship at Artesia. There were a number of factors, according to his father, including Patricia’s new job in the Hollywood area. And though he doesn’t mention it, the fact that Coach Grover had left Artesia for Pomona’s Diamond Ranch High School — for reasons Grover won’t discuss, other than to say he had been placed in “a difficult situation” — no doubt figured in the decision as well.
At the moment, however, Sidney and I are chewing over the matter of the mohawk, a hair style that Sidney wore, briefly and regrettably, earlier this year. He thinks it had a good deal to do with his problems at a tournament in Arizona in May, when he recalls earning at least one technical foul every game and getting tossed twice. “The mohawk made me kinda crazy,” Sidney is saying.
Basketball makes its own monsters. They are the outward manifestations of the game’s bipolarity — its abiding pathology, the one true fundamental, going all the way back to James Naismith and his famously unruly Y.M.C.A. charges. Naismith saw the game as a pedagogical pursuit, something to occupy the men during the cold winters in Springfield, Mass., and not incidentally to spread the robust gospel of muscular Christianity. But at the same time, he designed the game expressly in the hope that the masses could learn it on their own, no coach necessary, taking the sermon out of the preacher’s hands.
“Is Basket-Ball a Danger?,” the Y.M.C.A. newsletter asked in 1894. “The gymnasium is not a playhouse,” a director for the organization wrote, sounding many of the same notes the N.B.A. would hit a century later in demonizing its own employees as overpaid greedheads during labor strife, “and when a man gets to be a basketball fiend it is very hard to do anything with him.”
And here is Renardo Sidney, the sum of basketball’s newest fears.
“Renardo Sidney,” Reebok’s Christopher Rivers says. “Fantastic basketball player. Good kid, never been arrested, not on drugs, never kicked out of school, not failing classes. He’s a normal kid. Probably comes home late and spends too much time on his computer. But because he’s 6-foot-10 and he’s special and has the ability to make a lot of money if he continues his craft, and he’s treated like there’s something wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?”
Sidney claims that he doesn’t read his notices, and that he only hears what people are saying about him through his parents. “Ain’t nothing on the Internet but negative stuff,” he says. Still, he seems fully apprised of the charges leveled against him and his father. “That he can’t control me,” he says. “That they see where I get my attitude from. I don’t like that.” He is keenly aware that people now call him fat. “It’s true,” he says. “I was fat. I put that in my brain when I get on the floor. All I can think of, he’s fat, he’s slow, he’s lazy. So I just work harder, you know?”
He’s at 270 pounds now, down from nearly 300 and still dropping, the fruits of a steady month of workouts, sometimes two a day. He starts plyometrics training in a few days, and his father hopes to hire a personal chef soon, someone who will keep the fridge stocked with three healthy precooked meals a day. “More have been slain by supper than the sword,” as the talent scout Tom Konchalski notes. Sidney is one of the best youth athletes in the land, and now this is what basketball has become: an 18-year-old responding to fat jokes.
Which is why, when the waiter materializes, there is a particularly fraught moment as Sidney deliberates over the menu. “Do you all have that brown rice?” Sidney asks. (He eats here frequently.)
The waiter nods.
“Does it taste just like the fried rice I’ve been eating?”
The waiter seems doubtful. “If you use brown rice, it’ll be soggy.”
“But I’m saying, will it taste like what we’ve been eating?”
Sidney turns to ask his dad something, then whips back around and starts tapping his menu on the table thoughtfully.
The waiter’s pen is poised.
“Just give me the brown rice, like how you make the other rice. It has that little sweet taste to it?”
“Everything’s the same,” the waiter says. “It’s just the texture.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sidney says at last. A pause. “But no vegetables.”
The waiter scurries off, and Sidney alights once again on the subject of his mohawk. It was nothing dramatic, nothing like you might have found on Mr. T. Still, in Arizona, he found himself mouthing off constantly, especially to the refs. What would he say? “You suck,” he says. “But it’d be, like, with cuss words.” He’d cuss at his dad, he says. “I’d cuss out anybody. It [the mohawk] just made me go crazy.” People noticed, too. The University of Arizona student paper described him as “not the character Arizona wants.” So Sidney shaved the thing off and swore never to have one again. “And when I cut the mohawk off,” he says, “I was just a normal person.”
Tommy Craggs is a regular contributor to Play. He lives in New York.
MUH update: As of Dec 30, 2008, Renardo Sidney (pf/6-10/260/Fairfax HS, LA, CA) has not committed to any college. He recently visited Virginia but, most probably, he is leaning towards USC or Europe.
Anthony Stover (c/6-10/210/La Canada, CA) Tyler Honeycutt (sf/6-7/190/Sylmar CA) Brendan Lane (pf/6-9/200/Rocklin CA) Mike Moser (sg/6-7/185/Portland, OR) Reeves Nelson (pf/6-7/215/Modesto CA)
Upperclassmen in 2009-10 (assuming everyone returns) Jerime Anderson 6-3/165 pg Anaheim CA So Drew Gordon 6-9/235 pf San Jose CA So Jrue Holiday 6-4/180 sg No Hollywood CA So Malcolm Lee 6-5/170 Riverside CA So J'Mison Morgan 6-10/265 c Dallas TX So Nikola Dragovic 6-8/215 f Belgrade Serbia Jr Mustafa Abdul-Hamid 6-2/195 St Louis MO g Sr James Keefe 6-8/231 Rancho Sta Margarita CA Sr Michael Roll 6-5/200 sg Aliso Viejo CA Sr
UCLA still in the hunt ??? Renardo Sidney (pf/6-10/260/LA, CA) … visited Virginia but probably leaning towards USC or Europe
Lance Stephenson (sf/6-5/202/Brooklyn, NY) … leaning towards St. John’s or Europe
Dashonte Riley (c/6-10/?/Detroit, MI)… de-committed to Georgetown, on his list: Ohio State, Xavier, Michigan, Michigan State, Florida, Minnesota, UCLA and USC.
DeAndre Kane (sg/6-3/170/Pittsburgh, PA) … de-committed to Duquesne, on his list: Pitt, UConn, UCLA, West Virginia
Players “pursued/linked to UCLA one way or another” but lost Avery Bradley (sg/6-2/165/ Tacoma, WA) … to Texas Abdul Gaddy (pg/6-3/170/Tacoma, WA) … to Arizona, then Washington Xavier Henry (sg-sf/6-6/210/Oklahoma City, OK) … to Memphis Elijah Johnson (pg/6-2/?/Las Vegas, NV)… to Kansas Noel Johnson (sg/6-6/?/Fayetteville, GA) … to USC Durand Scott (sg/6-5/?/New York, NY) … Miami Michael Snaer (sg/6-4/170/Moreno Valley CA)… to Florida State Stephan Van Treese (pf/6-8/220/Indianapolis, IN) … to Louisville
AUSTIN, Texas -- UCLA was down three, with less than a minute left in the game Thursday, and Texas extended its defense out on the Bruins' perimeter.
UCLA tried multiple times to get into the lane, to create a shot attempt, to create space, to create something to either convert a 3-pointer or get to the basket for a bucket and a foul.
What the Bruins couldn't do was throw the ball inside to create offensive balance. They were, at this point in the game, predictable.
Alfred Aboya will be asked to shoulder much of the responsibility down low for UCLA this season. That might not change too much this season.
"It's definitely a concern of ours," UCLA senior wing Josh Shipp said. "It's no secret that we're guard-oriented. We try to establish a post presence early in the game to set up for the guards, and if we do that, it will make it a lot easier."
The good news for the Bruins is they went down by 10 on the road to the Longhorns and managed to claw back and take the lead with a 12-0 run. They were right there on the final possession to tie the game and send it into overtime. They just couldn't convert, and Texas won 68-64.
But the larger issue for the Bruins is: How do they fix the offense? The defense was solid enough to win the game.
Darren Collison scored 22 points, and there were plenty of possessions on which he answered a Texas offensive spurt. Shipp had his moments, too, scoring 15. But heralded freshman guard Jrue Holiday exerted so much energy trying to guard A.J. Abrams that his offense suffered. Holiday finished with three points on 1-for-6 shooting, including 0-for-3 on 3s.
"Darren is doing the best he can, and Josh did the same, but they need me to step up," Holiday said. "[Thursday] I didn't. I'm still learning, and we're a young team."
Collison said he's not worried about the squad. He's convinced the younger players like Holiday will get on the same page and ensure that the Bruins are an elite team throughout the season. But coach Ben Howland isn't giving the other freshmen (Drew Gordon, Malcolm Lee and Jerime Anderson) double-digit minutes consistently.
"We'll be where we want to be in March," Collison said. "We just have to be more patient, look inside. We don't want to be too predictable."
Kevin Love and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute's departures to the NBA left a void down low for the Bruins that would be a tall task for any team to fill. Big men James Keefe and Nikola Dragovic would prefer to pop 3-pointers, so that means senior Alfred Aboya has the responsibility of anchoring the post until Gordon or J'Mison Morgan is ready to contribute more often. That might not happen this season. So the onus will be on the guards to create more offense for each other.
"We're just as good as the other teams, but the difference is we have a lot of new guys," Collison said. "We have a lot of talent, we just have to get it all on the same page."
The problem for the Bruins is they have only one more high-profile nonconference game against a likely NCAA team, Notre Dame on Feb. 7 at Pauley Pavilion. They missed out on a chance to play Duke in New York in the finals of the 2K Sports Classic benefiting Coaches vs. Cancer. Instead, they lost to Michigan and beat Southern Illinois, a team that might not make it to March's main event. The Pac-10 is rebuilding and might not have more than one other top-25 team outside of the Bruins. That team might just be Arizona State.
What does this mean? That the Bruins, even if they win the Pac-10, could find themselves a lower seed than they have been in the past and without the normal advantages of being the top team in the West. If Gonzaga continues to roll after beating Tennessee in the Old Spice Classic in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., last weekend, the Zags could be the top-seeded team in the West, with the advantage come March. Gonzaga still has games at Tennessee, against Connecticut in Seattle and against Memphis at home.
"March is a long way from now, and we've still got the Pac-10 play and this team isn't where it needs to be," Collison said. "The good thing is that we fought back in a hostile environment. We can build on that positive and leave the negatives behind."
UCLA point guard Darren Collison passes after drawing a double team from Justin Mason, left, and Gary Johnson of Texas during the first half Thursday night. Longhorns guard scores 31 points to lead the way as UCLA shows glimpses of what it might become but can't close the deal. Darren Collison leads the Bruins with 22 points. Photo credit, Harry Cabluck, Associated Press
Reporting from Austin, Texas -- A few more points. Two or three fewer breakdowns on defense.
UCLA almost pulled off a big win Thursday night, going into a hostile arena and taking eighth-ranked Texas down to the wire.
But when the Bruins' players talked about coming so close, they weren't talking about a few critical possessions or even the final score in a 68-64 loss at the Frank Erwin Center.
They were describing a team that is still searching for its identity, trying to blend veterans with a handful of talented freshmen.
"We know we have a tough team, a good team," forward Josh Shipp said. "If we can learn from this loss, it will help us later on."
In the simplest terms, Texas won this game in the last three minutes with the score tied at 62-62. The Longhorns won because senior guard A.J. Abrams, who led all scorers with 31 points, took control.
First, he made a three-point basket. Then he drove the lane and was fouled, making both shots to give his team a 67-64 lead.
That put the No. 12 Bruins, inconsistent on offense and playing in the din of a raucous crowd of 16,755, under too much pressure. They reverted to a familiar scenario, dribbling the ball on the perimeter, unable to create a good shot.
When these teams met at Pauley Pavilion last season, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute missed the front end of a one-and-one, giving Texas a chance to prevail in the last seconds.
This time it was Shipp who came up short from the foul line. His first shot bounced off the rim and Abrams ended up with the ball. Fouled immediately, he made one of his free throws to put the game out of reach.
"That's a very tough loss," UCLA Coach Ben Howland said.
Howland wasn't happy with the fact that his team had let the Longhorns shoot almost 44% from the field. Nor did he like the defensive miscues that had left Texas players open for key baskets throughout the game.
"We made a lot of mistakes tonight," he said. "A lot of things we'll go back and watch on film."
He also said his team should have played differently against Abrams, trying to deny him the ball. Darren Collison mused: "You give him a little space and he's going to make the shot."
But it wasn't only Texas' offense -- forward Damion James had 13 points -- that hurt the Bruins.
All week long, they had talked about how much the Longhorns had changed from last season. Deep and quick, with more experience, they had shifted to a pressure, man-to-man defense that sometimes extended beyond half-court.
"It has made them tough to score on because they're so athletic," Howland said.
Late in the first half, with the score close, their aggressiveness took its toll.
The Texas defense hounded UCLA's freshman center J'mison Morgan into taking a desperate shot. Nikola Dragovic traveled, then missed from three-point range.
That quickly, the Longhorns jumped to a nine-point lead that they carried into halftime. But that's where the Bruins showed a glimpse of what they might become.
In the early minutes of the second half, they turned up some defensive heat of their own as Shipp made a pair of dunks and center Alfred Aboya came alive inside.
When Collison, who led the team with 22 points, made a jump shot with 12:58 left, UCLA had a 47-46 lead.
The game turned into a back-and-forth affair for the next 10 minutes or so. Shipp ended up with 15 points. Aboya had 11 rebounds.
"For a young team, being on the road, they've got some guys who can play," Texas Coach Rick Barnes said. "They showed a lot of character."
Even Howland was able to take some solace in the way his team performed in the second half, saying: "To be able to come into a tough place like this and have a chance to win with three minutes to go is a good sign."
But those final minutes showed that the Bruins still have a ways to go.
A few UCLA players talked about needing another scorer. And more of an inside presence.
They talked about the freshmen gaining experience. Guard Jrue Holiday, in particular, shot one-for-six in large part because he spent all night chasing Abrams on defense and dealing with his first noisy college crowd.
Shipp figured that he and his teammates might start winning games like this when they stop making defensive errors.
Asked what it will take to make this team better, Collison offered a hopeful answer.
GAMEDAY CENTRAL DATE: Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008 SITE: Frank Erwin Center (16,755) TIP-OFF: 6:05 p.m. PT TELEVISION: ESPN2 and ESPN360.com TALENT: Dave O'Brien (play-by-play) and Jay Bilas (analyst) RADIO: AM 570 TALENT: Chris Roberts (play-by-play) and Tracy Murray (analyst) SERIES: UCLA leads the series 2-1
SERIES vs. TEXAS This is just the fourth meeting between UCLA and Texas with the Bruins leading the series 2-1. All three prior meetings have been in Pauley Pavilion with the Bruins losing last year's meeting 63-61 in the Pac-10/Big 12 Hardwood Series on Dec. 2, 2007. D.J. Augustin threw up a prayer from the baseline with seven seconds left and the score tied at 61. His prayer was answered by Damion James, who grabbed the airball and slammed it home for the win, ending his night with a double-double of 19 points and 10 rebounds. Augustin, who also finished with 19 points and added four assists, was the only other Longhorn to reach double figures in scoring. The Bruins had four players reach double-digits in scoring, led by Luc Richard Mbah a Moute's 14 points. Darren Collison chipped in 12 points while Kevin Love and Josh Shipp each added 11 points. UCLA trailed 37-25 at halftime and by as many as 16 points in the first half (30-14 at 4:58).
POLLING UCLA UCLA sports a national ranking of No. 9 in the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll and No. 12 in the Associated Press poll, released on Dec. 1, 2008. UCLA has been ranked in the top 25 in the Associated Press poll for 60 straight weeks (since the 2005-06 preseason rankings). Texas is ranked No. 8 in both polls.
BRUIN INJURY REPORT Freshman guard Malcolm Lee sprained his right ankle (grade one) while junior forward Nikola Dragoviæ suffered a left knee contusion in practice on Nov. 24. Senior center Alfred Aboya sprained his left wrist in the Michigan game (Nov. 20) and later aggravated the injury against Southern Illinois (Nov. 21). All three played in the Bruins' last game, a 89-54 win over FIU (Nov. 29).
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This one puts it in perspective of possible repurcusions in March as well as the warning to stay off of chicken nuggets & curly fries...
It seems like eons until the NCAA men's basketball selection committee locks itself in a conference room in Indianapolis and begins formulating the bracket for March Madness.
Yet, if the Pacific-10 and Big 12 conferences hold to form, that committee could look at Thursday, when No. 12 UCLA plays at No. 8 Texas, to determine the seeds for two of the nation's top teams.
"I think when it's all said and done, they're going to look at this game because Texas is going to be one of the top teams that is going to have a chance to have a good season, and so are we," UCLA senior point guard Darren Collison said. "If we do what we're supposed to do, then they're going to end up looking at this game as one of the biggest matchups."
It could have added importance because UCLA (4-1) is picked to win what is expected to be a weak Pac-10. UCLA, which lost to unranked Michigan, and No. 19 Arizona State, which lost to Baylor, are the only conference teams ranked.
A quality non-conference road victory would help the Bruins immensely.
"They're a team that would not surprise me at all if they were playing in Detroit (in the Final Four) in April," Bruins coach Ben Howland said. "They'll win the Big 12, in my opinion."
Texas (5-1) has an experienced starting lineup with three juniors, led by 6-foot-7 wing Damion James (14.5ppg, 8 rpg), and two seniors, including 5-11 guard A.J. Abrams (15.8 ppg). The Longhorns also do not have a freshman playing a significant role, while UCLA has five freshmen in its rotation.
"This would be a big win for us," Bruins wing Josh Shipp said. "They're a top 10 team. They're highly touted. If we can win this game, it's going to do something for us." Different look When the Longhorns beat UCLA 63-61 last year at Pauley Pavilion, Howland said Texas played plenty of zone defense. In scouting Texas this season, Howland said they have not played zone.
"They're a much more defensive team in terms of getting pressure (on the ball), switching everything, doubling ball screens, doubling the post," Howland said. "Their defense is way different than it has been in the past. I think it's made them really difficult to try and score on because they're so athletic, so long."
Texas' opponents are shooting 34 percent from the field and averaging 55.5 points per game.
Fashion statement Shipp was wearing a neoprene sleeve on his shooting elbow, but he continually deflected any questions as to what was ailing him, or if it was affecting his shooting.
"Style points," he said when asked why he was wearing the sleeve.
Also ...
Howland said backup freshman guard Jerime Anderson missed Monday's practice because of illness after eating chicken nuggets and curly fries. UCLA's freshmen have not been available to the media during the usual Tuesday press meetings. A UCLA official said it is because they are all in classes during the fall quarter.
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And finally, Coach B wants to talk to you (yes, you) about Texas in HD video...c/o the LA Times blog for Dec 3 2008.
UCLA BASKETBALL FYI from the LA Times By David Wharton December 3, 2008
Coach Ben Howland is giving Bruins' senior swingman the assignment of guarding the opponent's top offensive threat, at least for now.
The last few seasons, UCLA assigned the likes of Russell Westbrook, Arron Afflalo and Cedric Bozeman to guard the other team's top scorer.
On Thursday night, when the No. 12 Bruins face No. 8 Texas in Austin, the task will go to senior swingman Josh Shipp.
Coach Ben Howland said his team would begin the game at Frank Erwin Center with Shipp guarding Damion James, a 6-foot-7, 222-pound junior who is averaging 14.5 points and eight rebounds.
"We can't simulate Damion" in practice, Howland said. "This guy's like a pogo stick. He stops and goes up on a dime."
Shipp, who is 6-5, 220 pounds, did not seem overly concerned, saying that it's all about sticking to principles. Not like compassion and honesty. The basketball kind.
"Stay in front of your man," he said. "Box out. Contest shots."
James isn't the Longhorns' only scorer. Speedy guard A.J. Abrams is averaging 15.8 points and guard Justin Mason adds almost 10.
"It's going to be a real matchup for our defense," forward James Keefe said. "It'll show how well we can come out and play against a ranked team." Healthy concern
Shipp wore a neoprene sleeve on his right elbow Tuesday but said he was healthy. . . . Reserve guard Mustafa Abdul-Hamid was scheduled to have an MRI exam on a wrist injury that has been bothering him for some time. . . .
Freshman guard Jerime Anderson missed practice earlier this week because of food poisoning, mentioning "something about some chicken nuggets and some curly fries," Howland said. "I said, 'Yeah, maybe that could make you sick.' "
