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 Inside College Basketball
Posted: Tuesday July 13, 1999 03:07 PM A Minimum Age in the NBA? Gerald Wallace has suddenly rocketed to the top of recruiting lists By Tim Crothers
Four months ago, national recruiting analyst Brick Oettinger had never heard of Gerald Wallace. Last week at the Adidas ABCD camp in Teaneck, N.J., Oettinger called Wallace one of the finest high school prospects ever. "He is the best combination of athletic ability, basketball skill and intangibles that I've ever seen in a wing forward," says Oettinger, who has been sizing up talent for 23 years. "I once wrote the same words about Michael Jordan as a wing guard. Wallace runs the floor, hits the three and plays every possession like it's his last. Nobody has put on a show like him in nearly two decades." So where has Gerald Wallace been hiding? In little Childersburg, Ala. (pop. 4,579), where he honed his game in late-night shootarounds at a park with his mother, Alice, his most passionate fan and most relentless critic. "I might score 40 points in a game," Gerald says with a smile, "and all my mom asks me about is the free throw I missed in the first quarter." While Wallace averaged nearly 30 points, 14 rebounds and four steals as a junior at Childersburg High last season, he didn't register a blip on the national radar until he participated in an AAU tournament in Memphis in April. There, playing his fourth game in a 10-hour span, he scored 24 points against blue-chip prospect Darius Rice of Jackson, Miss. Wallace then earned the MVP award at another AAU tournament, in North Carolina in May, after which Bob Gibbons, another recruiting maven, promoted Wallace to No. 1 on his prospects list, saying that he "may be as good a prospect as I've ever seen." Despite playing the ABCD camp with a painful pulled muscle in his back, the 6'7", 205-pound Wallace was still the most dynamic player on the court, dazzling onlookers with his leaping ability and drawing comparisons to his idol, Vince Carter. Says Wallace, "I've always thought that I was one of the best players in the nation, but I was just waiting to be found." Wallace's story recalls that of Tracy McGrady, who jumped from nowhere to the head of his class during a phenomenal summer in '96. McGrady skipped college, and Toronto made him a lottery pick, but Wallace insists he isn't ready for such a giant step. Until he began playing AAU ball last summer, he had never traveled farther from home than the 40 miles northwest to Birmingham. He doesn't like to read the glowing recruiting mail that has doubled over the last two months -- until the Memphis AAU tournament he was being recruited only by Alabama, Auburn and UAB, but now schools from all over the nation are interested -- and he is the kind of unassuming kid who begged his mom to let him take a job this summer with the local Water Works, Sewer and Gas Board, cutting grass for the minimum wage. It probably won't be too long before Wallace will be getting a considerable raise. "None of us would have believed that he would get so much attention so quickly," Alice says. "The boy may be a big deal up in New Jersey, but down here in Childersburg, he's still just Gerald to us."
Louisville Legacy Case: In stark contrast to Gerald Wallace, DaJuan Wagner has been a player to watch ever since he was an eighth-grader at Morgan Village Middle School in Camden, N.J., and was the subject of a feature story in the local Courier-Post. The recruiting letters began overflowing his mailbox a year later. "You have to grow up a little faster when you're Milt Wagner's kid," says Milt Wagner, who as a high-scoring guard led Louisville to an NCAA title in 1986 and played 13 pro seasons in the NBA and overseas. "My son has been in the spotlight since he can remember, but he's used that pressure to blossom ahead of his time." DaJuan was so precocious that at age five he played rec-league ball in a division for 10- to 12-year-olds. At Camden High he averaged 27.3 points and nine assists as a freshman on the varsity, prompting the Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook to rank him among the top five high school players in any class. As a sophomore last season Wagner scored 35.3 points a game and was so big an attraction that Allen Iverson drove over from nearby Philadelphia three times to see him play. After one game Iverson told Wagner, who is often compared to him, "Little brother, you got game." Known around his neighborhood as the Messiah (he has the nickname tattooed on his left biceps), Wagner was one of only a handful of soon-to-be juniors invited to last week's Nike camp in Indianapolis. There the 6'3", 180-pound guard scored 50 points in one game with his repertoire of powerful drives and rainbow treys. His eventual college destination may well be decided in a classic bluegrass blood feud. Camden High is a traditional pipeline to Louisville, having sent Milt Wagner, Billy Thompson, Kevin Walls and current Cardinals star Nate Johnson, but DaJuan was suspicious last season when Louisville announced plans to retire his father's jersey. "The timing didn't seem right to me," DaJuan says. "I asked my dad, 'Why do you think they want to retire your jersey now when you finished playing 13 years ago?'" Meanwhile, Kentucky is reportedly courting one of Wagner's Camden teammates, 6'6" senior forward Arthur Barclay, who has lived with DaJuan and DaJuan's mother, Lisa Moore (she and Milt never married), for the last four years. Barclay, who considers DaJuan a brother, is a cousin of Art and Valerie Still, who starred at Kentucky in football and basketball, respectively. The Wildcats may be angling to land Barclay -- a relatively marginal prospect who averaged 18 points and 14 rebounds at Camden last season -- in hopes of getting Wagner in a kind of package deal. Wagner says he will follow Barclay wherever his friend goes to school. "If DaJuan picks Kentucky, I may not be allowed back at Louisville," says Milt, who played in Europe and Israel for the last nine seasons but recently retired to follow his son's career. "DaJuan has Louisville in his heart, but he's his own man, and he'll go to school wherever he wants to go."
A Minimum Age in the NBA?: Are we headed toward a day when basketball players will be carded before they can enter the NBA? Last week the league's commissioner, David Stern, floated a proposal that would establish 20 as a minimum age for players. The idea was a hot topic among coaches at the major summer camps last week. "I believe the NBA has finally gotten its wake-up call," says Georgia Tech coach Bobby Cremins. "These days, the minute any high school kid has a good game, he starts thinking about declaring for the NBA. The league needs to give these kids a game plan so they can all just relax." Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun supports the idea but would like to see the NBA take it a step further, to age 21 or the completion of a player's junior season in college. "There are 3,000 kids playing college basketball each season, and maybe 50 of them will make the NBA," says Calhoun. "Most kids just aren't as good as they think they are." He thinks that the longer kids stay in school, the better the chance they'll face the reality that they're not going to the pros and will instead stay and get their degrees. Any new rule would require approval from the NBA players' association. At a union meeting last week in the Bahamas, a group of player reps said they would not support the minimum-age plan. But that stand may be subject to negotiation. While most of the high school stars at the camps were against a minimum age for NBA eligibility, and most coaches were for it, at least one coach sees Stern's proposal -- and the underlying notion that teenage hoopsters need to be protected by such rules -- in racial terms. "Why are people perpetuating these myths only about basketball players?" Temple's John Chaney says. "When black kids see these white high school dropouts in other sports like tennis or figure skating making millions of dollars before they turn 18, they'll ask themselves, Why is the NBA screwing us? David Stern's statement is stupid and asinine and perplexing, and the idea is the dumbest one I've heard in my life."
Issue date: July 19, 1999
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