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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > June > 27
Friday, June 27, 2008
BLOG: I’m not so sure O.J. Mayo will be a great pro
Will O.J. Mayo be a great NBA player?
I’m not so sure he will, but almost everybody else seems to think so. Especially the pundits and talk-show callers in the Twin Cities, today, who are lamenting the Minnesota Timberwolves’ late draft-night trade of Mayo — who the team had just made the No. 3 overall pick in the NBA draft — to Memphis for No. 5 pick Kevin Love in what ended up an eight-player deal.
And consequently, the folks in Memphis are giddy about landing the 20-year-old who Sports Illustrated — some 5 years ago — trumpeted as “The Next Big Thing.”
But I’m not sold that Memphis got the best part of this deal. And that’s not because I’m in love with Love. It’s because I have questions about Mayo.
Trouble and a lack of truthfulness seem to follow the guy wherever he goes. And though he’s one of the most talented young players I’ve ever see — and can be quite polite, accommodating, insightful and down-right charming — he’s got a “Me First” side of him that rears its head on and off the court and I think that could end up being his Achilles’ heel.
Already back when he was playing for North College Hill in Cincinnati — part of his six years playing high school ball in three different states — people were saying he was ready for the NBA.
Before Thursday night’s draft one league GM called Mayo “one of the four hardest workers” in the upcoming talent pool. And several people are saying he’s one of three or four draftees who will make an immediate impact in the league.
All that’s probably correct.
But when it comes to Mayo, all that seems true doesn’t always turn out that way. His blogosphere detractors call him everything from a “punk” to a “fraud.” I think that’s over-stated, but I have seen that side of him, too.
The first time I met him was soon after he transferred into North College Hill from Rose Hill Academy in Kentucky, where he’d played high school basketball while being a 14-year-old seventh grader and an eighth grader.
After an early-season game, he introduced me to his “grandfather” Dwaine Barnes. I then visited Barnes, who was working at Milt Kantor’s Victory Wholesale Grocers complex in Springboro.
Barnes claimed he was Mayo’s paternal grandfather and told stories of not knowing the boy was his grandson until O.J. was six or seven years old.
The only problem was that Barnes wasn’t his grandfather, but instead his AAU coach and had orchestrated the move to Ohio from their Huntington, W.Va., hometown.
They lived together — and at times Bill Walker, another NCH transfer who landed in the NBA Thursday night — in an apartment right next to North College Hill High. Barnes bragged of being given keys to the school and that O.J. would often come over late at night and shoot around in the deserted gym.
I wonder how many other NCH students — especially ones who had just moved into the district a couple of months earlier — were given the keys to the school?
Then again, NCH officials seem to have given away a lot more than that — let’s start with integrity — to keep Mayo, Ohio’s two-time Mr. Basketball, around for three years and two state titles before he jumped ship and finished his career at Huntington High, which he also led to the state crown.
It appears that already when he was at NCH — and almost certainly when he was at Huntington High — he was beginning to get thousands of dollars in gifts from Rodney Guillory, a runner for the big time sports agency, Bill Duffy Associates. At least that’s what Larry Johnson, a former sportswriter and another runner and Mayo insider — until he had a falling out — claimed in a big expose by ESPN’s Outside the Lines.
In all — in Mayo’s high school years and last season at Southern Cal — Johnson claimed Mayo accepted over $30,000 in gifts. That included regular ($2,500) shopping sprees, a 42-inch flat screen TV, airline tickets, payment of his cell phone bills ($170 a month) and other items.
His “Me First” style showed on the court, too. His last play in high school epitomizes that.
With his team leading by 40 points in the waning moments of the game, he threw himself an alley-oop pass off the bank board, dunked, then threw the ball into the stands.
He got a technical and was ejected from the game. He celebrated his exile, waving to the crowd, posing for cell-phone pictures, hugging and high-fiving teammates and, most sickeningly, getting a big embrace from his coach.
His apologists — and there are many in the stands and the media — say all that was no big deal. The crowd of 10,000 mostly had come to see him play and he gave them a treat at the end of the game.
They say his associations with Barnes and then Guillory were because he was desperately looking for a real father figure.
Mayo had told me his mother was 14 when she gave birth to him and that she had raised him and his seven siblings on her own. His dad, Kenny Ziegler, a Huntington High hoops star, was in and out of jail. In fact, this past January he was convicted again with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
That night at NCH, Mayo told me he wasn’t going to go down that path. He was going to play in the NBA. He said that’s all he ever wanted.
And now it’s come true.
He certainly has the game. I just hope it isn’t double-teamed by the trouble that always seems to find him and the “Me First” attitude that never quite seems to leave him.
