Posted by SupremeCommander:
I hate to throw fuel on the hype fire, but this article was posted on another board and I really enjoyed it: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/the_bonus/05/24/jared.jordan/
It does, however, point out that Chad Ford had great things to say about Jordan, which immediately dampened my optimism.
The legend of Jared JordanFrom the time he saw a tiny kid whipping passes to men, the author knew he was watching a basketball prodigy. Now he is convinced Marist star Jared Jordan may be the next Steve NashBy Rand Richards Cooper, Special to SI.com
One summer day 11 years ago, I'd just moved to Hartford, Conn., and on my third afternoon I found my way up the block to the park and a pickup hoop game. It was your typical city playground tableau, a bunch of African-American guys in their teens and 20s, plus me, thirtysomething white guy. And this little 11-year-old white kid. The kid was tiny. Why are they letting this munchkin play? I wondered.
Then the game started. Munchkin brings the ball up, and I'm drifting through the lane, when wham! -- something smacks off my hands. A perfect pass from near half-court, threaded through several players. Oops.
"You better be ready," a guy laughed. "That's Jared."
An hour later I was headed home, shaking my head. I just saw this tiny kid do some amazing things on the court, I told my wife. I'm gonna watch him and see what happens. If you followed college basketball this season, you know what happened. The munchkin who surprised me on the court that day grew up to be Jared Jordan of Marist College, a point guard with a brainy, aggressive style and a considerable gift for passing the ball. Jordan splashed into the national conversation in last November's Old Spice Classic, in which he led mid-major Marist to a win over Minnesota and a close loss to Arkansas, snagging the tournament MVP award and prompting ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla to breathlessly gush, "Is Jared Jordan another John Stockton?" Jordan led the nation in assists this year and last, the most prolific Division I passer since Avery Johnson; all winter the buzz about the "best point guard you've never heard of" had NBA scouts downloading Mapquest directions to Poughkeepsie to check out his game. Some of that buzz will carry over to next week's pre-draft camp in Orlando, to which Jordan has been invited.
There are questions about Jordan's game -- no ups, not strong enough or quick enough laterally for defense, an inconsistent three-point shot. But one Eastern Conference scout with whom I spoke has another take. "We're bereft of really good point guards in the league," he said. "We have plenty of guys who can shoot, but consider passing secondary. Jordan's the ideal leader. He has complete control of the game, and his team is so much better when he's out there. He looks like the real thing to me."
Me, I've been watching Jordan ever since that summer day in the park. As it turned out, his parents, Sarah and Mike -- that's right, Michael Jordan -- lived two streets over from us, and their kids went to the private school, Kingswood-Oxford, where my wife taught. K-O was not exactly a basketball Mecca, but Jared took its low-flying basketball program on a magic carpet ride. He won the starting point guard job as an 8th grader; by his junior year his dominating presence had the team's coach, Garth Adams, shuffling his schedule to take on prep-school basketball mills and state-champ public high schools.
The games in Kingswood's tiny gym had a carnival-like atmosphere. The PA announcer dubbed Jared "The Magician," and we in the stands oohed and aahed at the show. Jared diving for a loose ball and dribbling while on his knees, Marques Haynes-style, as two opponents swiped at it in vain. A halfcourt shot tossed up at the halftime buzzer -- and getting nothing but net. No-look passes that left your mouth hanging open.
Jared himself was a modest kid off the court, and once told me he disliked the "Magician" nickname. But it captured his game perfectly: the sleight-of-hand and misdirection, the ease with which he tricked opponents. One time I saw him make a three-point shot, then steal a pass at midcourt for an uncontested layup, then steal the subsequent inbounds pass and lay that in. Seven points in 10 seconds. "What just happened?" a guy sitting next to me said. Abracadabra.
A friend chided me for "falling in love" with a teenage athlete. There's some truth to that. I've spent most of my career involved in literature, and it strikes me that you fall in love with a brilliant basketball player the way you do, if books are your thing, with a brilliant writer. It's like reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury for the first time, or James Joyce's The Dead -- the amazement you feel at a vision that seems a little more than mortal. And especially with a point guard, who authors his team's offense. You fall for the startling insights and unexpected connections, the gift of seeing things in their totality. Garth Adams told me he'd often watch Jared make a pass and wonder where the hell he was throwing the ball. "Then all of a sudden it lands in a teammate's hands and he lays it in the basket, and you go, Oh, that's where he was throwing it."
So it isn't the kid, really, but rather the gift in the kid: You fall for that gift, and then you stake a large hope on it. Probably too large. There's something extravagant in what a community demands of its high school sports hero-symbolically defending us against marauding outsiders, and also, in a sense, justifying us to ourselves, by convincing us we have glimpsed genius. Watching Jared singlehandedly keep his overmatched team in the game against a powerhouse opponent was almost freakish, like those videos of someone pulling a giant semi truck with his teeth. We had the feeling he could do anything.
***************
Come college recruiting time, however, a 6-foot white kid from a suburban private school made nary a blip on the big-program radar. In the end, just three offers came in, the best of them from Marist, a mid-major backwater known solely as the answer to the basketball trivia question, Where did Rik Smits play in college?
We Jordan watchers felt dissed and wounded. The big world was trash-talking us. The greatest star in your cosmos, it taunted us, is barely a pinprick in ours. You don't want to believe that taunt -- but part of you does believe it, and you are humbled. There's something Homeric to this humbling, going back to the days of wandering bards who awed villagers with songs of the distant dangerous world and its monsters. What did we really know, after all, about the realms of elite college basketball?
Jared worked hard to show the big schools they'd been wrong. Early in his freshman year, he cracked Marist's starting lineup; by midseason he was leading it in minutes. I'd run into a Kingswood friend at the gym. Is he showing these bastards, we'd say to each other, or what? In Connecticut this means one thing -- making Jim Calhoun sorry he never looked at you. How about our boy going head-to-head against Chris Thomas of Notre Dame and playing him evenly? Or scoring 32 against Iona as a sophomore? Or dishing out 11 assists to beat St. John's in Madison Square Garden?
Even Calhoun may have noticed when Jared conquered the Hartford Pro-Am summer league. The Pro-Am is our Rucker League, packed with NBA prospects, its up-tempo games played before rowdy urban crowds; the list of players over the years includes Marcus Camby, Ray Allen, Michael Finley, Ben Gordon and Luol Deng. Last summer, as point guard for Jive Records, Jared's squad lost in the semis of the tourney (against a team headed by Ryan Gomes of the Celtics) but still won the league MVP award.
And then came Thanksgiving and the Old Spice Classic in Orlando. Three Marist games in four days, all on ESPN. For Jordan fanatics around Hartford's West End it was feast and feast again. When Jared followed Orlando with a two-game spree of 56 points and 18 assists against Old Dominion and Richmond, the accolades came pouring in. Dick Vitale named him his Player of the Week. Internet NBA draft sites began including him on their lists of darkhorse first-rounders. Around Christmas I ran into Mike Jordan, out walking the family's German shepherd. Life had gotten crazy, he said. Agents were calling daily. Nine scouts were headed to Jared's next game. "He's the same player he was six months ago, but now everyone's paying attention."
In January I drove over to see a few Marist games, the first time I'd watched Jared in four years. It was instantly clear he had become his team's indispensable player -- for most of the season he led it in scoring, assists, and rebounds, often playing the entire 40 minutes -- and whenever Marist got in trouble, coach Matt Brady resorted to an offensive set I'd heard him describe as follows: "Keep the ball in Jared's hands, leave the floor open, and let Jared go nuts."
Against arch-rival Siena, the team frittered away a lead and let the game go into overtime. Time for Jared-Goes-Nuts. Wham! A scoop layup in the lane. Bam! A drive and baseline fadeaway. Pow! A long-bomb pass, Tom Brady-style, to a teammate racing down the court. When the dust settled, Jared had 24 points and a triple-double, and Marist won by nine. Three days later he did it again against Niagara, exploding for 17 points in five minutes as Marist won its second OT game in a row.
"When it was time to be great, he was great," commented Niagara coach Joe Mihalich after the game. "He mesmerizes everybody in the building."
***************
It's a funny thing, the sweet vindication you feel when the big world finally starts paying attention to the kid on your block, the one you've been raving about for years. Suddenly, people who mattered were marveling at the same things we had marveled at in Jared all along: the supreme basketball smarts, the uncanny court vision. "Great point guards see all other nine players on the court," Fraschilla told me, amplifying the comparison with Stockton. "Jordan sees the game in slow motion. It's a rare ability. And he plays basketball like it's chess -- always two or three moves ahead. You can't coach that IQ."
One winter day I stopped by at the Jordans' big brick house on North Beacon Street and found Jared home on a visit. I asked him what he made of all the media speculation about his future, the comparisons with Stockton and Nash. He grinned. "Ever since I was little, I knew basketball was something I wanted to keep doing," he said. "And now, having the opportunity to get paid to play? It's crazy, everything that's happening."
An Internet junkie, he was obsessively reading basketball blogs, and his NBA hopes were revved pretty high, he admitted. He felt confident he could make it. "I'd have to be put in the right situation. It would have to be a West Coast team, that style of play -- fluid, up and down, and not the East Coast style, which is more banging." He wondered about the NBA lifestyle, he said, whether it would be lonely, how he would fit in. He sighed.
"Sometimes I just wish I knew where I'll be one year from now," he said.
He also knew that some basketball people were skeptical about his NBA prospects. ("Enjoy your collegiate career," one columnist for Sportingnews.com had written sarcastically.) He shrugged it off. "It's always been like that," he told me. "Everywhere I've gone, I've had to prove people wrong. I take a lot of pride in it."
There's a story to how he learned to prove himself. When Jared was in fourth grade his parents, tired of life in the suburbs -- Mike's a lawyer at GE Capital, Sarah runs a funeral home -- moved the family into Hartford. Jared switched from an all-white suburban school to a city grade school, where he says he was so nervous, he didn't speak a word for the first month. As for basketball, his suburban game quickly got retooled on the city hardcourts. His grade school coach, Gerry Toney, began taking him to pickup games in the city's toughest neighborhoods. Mike Jordan still shakes his head, remembering.
"Some of those courts, we'd go in on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and they'd have to clean up the broken glass from whatever went on there the night before."
It was an odd pair, the middle-aged black coach and his pint-sized white protégé, traipsing all over Hartford. "What's this little white kid doing here?" people would ask. On court, Jared's shyness evaporated. Toney constantly had him playing up, against older, stronger players; he got him in to practice with the varsity at Hartford High . "I was 10 years old," Jared recalls, "and he had me running the conditioning drills."
I happened to meet Gerry Toney recently, and he told me that of the hundreds and hundreds of Hartford kids he coached over the decades, Jared showed the most promise, and worked the hardest. "I did one thing with Jared that I never did with any other kid," he said. "I took his mother aside one day and told her, 'I believe your kid can play in the NBA one day.' I felt that way then, and I still feel that way today. I'd bet all my money on it."
***************
For Marist, the season ended in disappointment. An unexpected loss in the MAAC tournament semifinal killed their March Madness dreams and knocked them back to the NIT. Jared engineered a thrilling first-round road upset of Oklahoma State, a Big 12 team with wins over Texas and Texas A&M and a 138-2 home record against non-conference opponents. But in Round Two, playing N.C. State before a hostile ACC crowd, Marist dug itself an 18-point hole it couldn't get out of, and lost by six.
As for Jordan's personal hoop dreams, in April he signed with BDA Sports Management, and since then he's been working out under the supervision of agent Kevin Bradbury, getting ready for the predraft camp in Orlando and for workouts with individual teams. Bradbury anticipates nine or 10 of them. Rumors are that Phoenix, San Antonio, the Clippers, Detroit and Washington are in the mix.
BDA handles Steve Nash, Carmelo Anthony, and a bunch of other marquee NBA stars. It also handles Taylor Coppenrath, Toby Bailey, and other one-time NBA hopefuls currently enjoying life in Europe. How good is Jared Jordan, really? In late February Chad Ford, the NBA draft analyst for ESPN, called Jared "an early second-round steal" who might even go late in the first round. "The dude," he wrote on his blog, "knows how to play."
"Jared Jordan will get a long hard look from the NBA," Fraschilla predicts. With his ability to run an offense, Fraschilla says, Jared could in fact turn out to be the next John Stockton. "Or he could be a great college point guard playing in Italy."
The coming weeks will likely determine where the kid who impressed me all those years ago in the park ends up. I for one am not betting on Italy. I'm betting some GM out there has fallen in love with his game, the same way I did. A playmaking alchemy that turns teammates into gold; a pass-first mentality that finds countless ways to help a teammate score: what point-hungry NBA superstar doesn't love that?
I see Jared dishing one soft-serve assist after another to some grateful, voracious Western Conference scorer. No, he won't always make the highlight reel. He'll just make the highlight reel possible. I'd bet all my money, Gerry Toney said. It's a curious gamble a fan makes, investing his emotions in the talent of a young person. Maybe we're just dreaming. Fandom is, by definition, a state of dreaminess. And yet against all odds, The Magician has always found a way. Those of us who have been watching Jordan for a decade now await the greatest trick of all, watching him pull an NBA career out of his hat, right before our eyes.
9/30/2007 6:06 PM
