Watching them makes one wonder why NBA commissioner David Stern has insisted on boosting the league’s minimum age to 19, essentially forcing the best high school ballers to spend at least one season playing college basketball. While Stern believes that the kids profit from that year in both personal and hoops maturity—and there may be, in many cases, some truth to that—the minimum age rule is fundamentally a marketing ploy. It aims to bolster the profile of the college game with an infusion of the top high school talent, which, as a result, will enter the NBA with far more hype and, thus, marketability. And to that end it has worked beautifully. The youngsters—Ohio State’s Greg Oden and U. Texas’s Kevin Durant last year, Kansas State’s Michael Beasley and Memphis’s Derrick Rose this year—take a turn in the Big Dance and move on to the NBA with starry reputations. This season’s ad campaign heralding the arrival of Durant (who went on to win NBA Rookie of the Year honors this season) wouldn’t have been possible without all the exposure he received playing college ball last year.
But the one-and-outers aren’t true college students, at least when it comes to the ostensible purpose of higher education. And sometimes they may even turn out to be worse than just impostors. That may prove to be the case with O. J. Mayo; according to a report on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” the 20-year-old received money and gifts totaling at least a quarter of a million dollars from an agent while he was still in high school and as a freshman at the University of Southern California. Mayo, who has already opted to turn pro, has denied taking any money or other illegal gifts.
Regardless of what an NCAA investigation reveals, Mayo had become something of an embarrassment for USC even before he stepped on campus. And the most amazing thing is that USC’s basketball coach never seemed to realize that. The tale of his recruitment (actually his self-recruitment), as first reported in the New York Times, began when a middle-aged man showed up without an appointment at coach Tim Floyd’s office. He informed Floyd that Mayo, regarded by many as the best high school prospect in the nation and one USC hadn’t bothered trying to recruit, had decided to attend school there. Moreover, he told Floyd that Mayo would dispense any remaining basketball scholarships to friends who were top players. When Floyd asked for Mayo’s phone number so that they could share the joyous moment, he was told that the kid didn’t give out his number. In other words: don’t call him, he’ll call you.
Floyd, thrilled that he would finally land the kind of talent that usually went to crosstown rival UCLA, seemed delighted to recount this bizarre episode to Times reporter Lee Jenkins. After all, Mayo could propel USC into the nation’s college basketball elite. Floyd didn’t seem the least concerned with the role of this middleman—not a family member and probably, even the coach realized, not a social worker—who brokered the deal for Mayo’s basketball services. Remarkably, Floyd didn’t even seem put off by the kid’s unwillingness to entrust his phone number to his prospective college coach or his insistence on usurping that coach’s recruiting responsibilities. Now Floyd might be the only one surprised that a former Mayo intimate has told ESPN that the man meeting with the coach has for years funneled cash and gifts to Mayo from a California-based sports agent.
Mayo, a ballyhooed prospect since he was in seventh grade, has a history of skating on the edge. While scouts were drooling over the youngster, he moved four times—to three different states—in six years. He was suspended during high school for a physical confrontation with a referee but managed to play in a big tournament courtesy of a judge’s restraining order. He was arrested after police found marijuana in a car in which he was a passenger, but the charges were dropped after another passenger claimed responsibility. The NCAA even investigated his extremely high score on the college entry ACT exam, but found no irregularities. And now the scandal at USC. According to the Times, when Coach Floyd finally met Mayo the youngster told him that he had chosen a school without a great basketball tradition because “I want to be different. I want to leave a mark.” Still, this probably isn’t the kind of mark Floyd envisioned.
None of these “character” issues are David Stern’s fault. But without his decision to raise the NBA’s entry age (he now wants to raise it by another year), Mayo would have been playing pro ball already and not posing as a college student and damaging USC’s basketball program as well the school’s reputation. It remains to be seen if this incident costs him anything—if, in a league that purports to be increasingly character-conscious, Mayo will slip in next month’s draft, losing millions. (Don’t bet on it; ESPN’s own mock draft has Mayo going as a top-six pick.)
Stern likes to suggest that having these young players in college for even one year is—for the player, the college and the league—a win-win-win situation. Nobody can pretend that’s the case with Mayo. Indeed, it looms as a likely lose-lose-lose proposition—and one that is ultimately of Stern’s own making.
