OJ Mayo #4: Recruiting Wars Ain’t Nothin’ But a Modern-Day Slavery Thang

By: D.K. Wilson

As I pulled into the small media parking area looking for a space I saw something that made me feel uneasy. I was at this small east coast university to finish a story on the burgeoning rivalry between two small college basketball programs looking to separate themselves from the other schools in their conference and join the carousel of “big-time” college hoops programs in perception and notoriety.

The two universities found themselves fighting for the same recruits they felt were necessary to allow them to compete with bigger schools. This particular season’s recruiting battle centered around four players. The school for which I was a beat reporter signed one of those recruits while their rival signed the other three which automatically made them heavy favorites to win not only their conference and conference tournament but perhaps a game or two in the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament.

I got out of my car and walked toward the sight that perturbed me so when I pulled into the lot. There in a row were five late-model sports cars of different makes.

Each had a vanity license plate with the last name of the player and their uniform number. I knew that three of the players’ parents had the money to afford such a luxury. But I also knew the story that two of the recruits came from the same neighborhood in New York and were impoverished. There was no way they could afford those vehicles.

After entering the arena and finding my spot on press row I immediately went to a section of seats inhabited by boosters. They sat behind the home team’s bench a few rows up toward midcourt. Students had filled the arena and we were about 30 minutes from the teams coming out for warmups. Sitting among this group of men who donated money to the athletic department and the basketball program specifically was enlightening. They were amicable, knew the game well, and understood their part in the program’s present and future success.

We were winding up our talks when the players came out for their pregame warmup. The crowd was raucous, already cheering wildly for their team. The jewel of the recruiting class was a 6′6″ shooting guard and every time he touched the ball the crowd went crazy. The player was aware of the crowd and played to them, turning to the student section and waving for them to increase the noise level. Just before the team’s layup line broke he was passed the ball. He took a couple of quick dribbles and stepped wide of the three point line and swooped in toward the rim. Everyone was momentarily quiet. All eyes including mine and the boosters were turned to the guard. He rose, spun in the air - a 360-degree pirouette - and seemed to pause just for a split second. Then with a powerful suddenness he violently slammed the ball through the rim and released a primal scream in the process.

The arena exploded. Most everyone was on their feet cheering wildly. Even the opposing team stopped to watch the display. At that moment the booster to my right on the end of the line of money men tapped me on my shoulder and said:

“You see that! You see him. That one’s my boy!”

He was beaming and proud, chest puffed out as he jabbed his finger into his chest for emphasis.

I was suddenly sick with what I just heard, realized and what it portended.

The home team easily won that night and solidified their grip on the conference lead. When I finally left the arena after postgame interviews I walked by the cars and took down all the vanity plate names and numbers, and the make and model of each.

Sunday morning I did some digging and quickly found out the profession of each booster. On Monday I contacted some sources and found out that, indeed, the players whose parents had the money supplied their sons with their cars. And the cars were purchased in the players’ home towns.

The two players from the same impoverished neighborhood had their cars bought for them, too - by their mothers. I knew neither mother could afford such a purchase for their sons.

But then I found out that the autos were purchased from the same dealership in the town of the university. And the owner of the dealership was the booster who tapped me on my shoulder and said with all the pride of a man who had purchased a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred:

“That’s my boy.”

I never wrote the story as it should have been written. When I floated the idea by my editor of turning what would have extended the story about two teams and their rivalry into the dirty underbelly of recruiting sought-after basketball players, he flatly said no. He said it would have required too many man hours on my part and additionally he did not want to jeopardize the newspaper’s relationships with local college athletic programs.

He was right - but he wasn’t right. It wasn’t my place to fight for the story. I was too young to persuade him to change his mind. And we were a weekly newspaper, not a daily. And if I dedicated myself to this story full time there were four per week for who knows how many weeks that would be turned over to stringers, stretching the sports section’s budget.

However, not being able to pursue that story hurt me for some time. But the booster’s last words will always haunt me:

“That’s my boy.”

—————-

Young boys with a talent for basketball live in every corner of the United States. Most of those boys who will find their way to the nation’s best college basketball programs are black. They are spotted at an early age by men who live to spot “talent” at as early an age as possible. When they do see the next “One,” the next Big Thing, they begin to work their Svengali-like dark magick on these boys. And make no mistake, they are boys.

They are.

Children.

They sidle up to children as young as 12. Tell them how their handles remind them of a young Allen Iverson, how their jumper is smooth as Ray Allen’s; how they leap like a young Vince Carter.

You would think that compliments such as these would make a boy grin from ear to ear. And surely some do. Unfortunately, many of these children come from environments that do not allow for smiles. Smiles are a sign of weakness. That’s the, “I gotcha” face, that smile means you can be “got.” For children on the street a smile can mean you’re slippin’, you’re sleepin’ - while the one who made you smile is steadily creepin.

This is street life and everybody’s looking for a way to use the next boy or man or girl or woman. Ain’t nothin’ nice on the block. Just like Prodigy of Mobb Deep said a long time ago in one of those songs mistaken for odes to incarceration and death; one of those alleged Black KKK songs that is really a sped-up in time Renaissance Harlem - now set in Queensbridge - tale of the reality of despairing lives where death after 21 is a good life lived:

“I might crack a smile, but ain’t a damn thing funny.”

So if the young boy smiles the magick man knows he’s got one who might just be beyond his years in awareness of “the game,” whatever game that might be. And in the magick man’s case, that game is called in no uncertain term, “Bodies for Money.”

That’s right, Bodies for Money.

Modern-day slavery.

Oh sure, at the end of the boat ride there might be millions awaiting the young boy turned older boy turned young man. But on the voyage to might is a long line of magick men with increasingly potent and devastating powers. And while you’re under their spells, receiving what amounts to trinkets - a wad of cash here, a suite for a weekend there, a party where every woman you’ve never seen before knows your name - every single one of them will have their pockets lined with money that’s supposed to be yours.

The child is ultimately told by the first magick man - “middleman” or “runner” - that the only way he is going to get where he wants is through this “system.” He will show the child a few of his professional contacts - players - and maybe hit one or two of them up for a text chat, allowing the child to see what power he has.

Once the child shows he understands the process and accepts the fact that this man holds the key to a safe middle passage, the child is his. From this moment to the natural end of the player’s journey, education almost always takes a back seat to what might happen, but is put to the players as what will happen. Beyond the child’s natural proclivity to dream, believing wholeheartedly that he is on the road to personal riches, he takes an open stance of disdain toward the education process.

This is the initial manifestation of the modern-day slavery warehousing of young athletes.

When it is time for high school choices the magick men of today do not steer children to schools but to AAU teams where other middlemen await; the fewer people in any traditional system like that of the school system, the less the chance for the slavery game to be exposed.

Like any slave owner the masters invest in many young bodies hoping to strike gold with at least one. The others are cast aside in to the scrap heap. And because tracks must be covered to hide these heinous acts, AAU teams that have no checks and balances, no oversight, no true hierarchy, are perfect first thinning areas where ties are cut to players who do not exhibit the potential to excel beyond this level of basketball.

But if you are an AAU star you will ultimately be steered to a “player-friendly” high school. There are hundreds of them, enough to accommodate every hoop dreamer who has the potential to play Division I basketball - and plenty of upper-echelon prep and public schools to house those big bucks with “NBA” written all over them.

At this point the magick men at the top of the food chain, college coaches and agents, take a heightened interest in tracking the progress pf their investments. The middlemen ensure the continued comfort of the big buck and make sure that the proper palms are greased with cash and other amenities.

What we see today with O.J. Mayo, Rodney Guillory, and the snitching on these two and more by fringe slave agent Louis Johnson is a prime example of a middleman gone awry. It was tasked by someone, whether that someone was Calvin Andrews who works for “Teflon” Bill Duffy of Bill Duffy and Associates (BDA) or another master magician agent to find the right person to befriend Mayo and manipulate his actions until he arrived in the NBA.

That person was apparently Guillory. Why Rodney Guillory was picked to sidle up to Mayo is unknown. This particular middlemen was a too known quantity by the Big Box slave warehouse, the NCAA, because of his being outed as former University of Southern California guard Jeff Trapagnier’s field master. It was Guillory who first showed up at USC head coach Tim Floyd’s office to tell him that Mayo would be soon in touch with the coach to inform him that he would be attending USC and playing for the Trojans. It was Guillory who laid the groundwork with Floyd for the manner in which Mayo would be treated while at the university.

This was clearly a planned obfuscation tactic.

However, no one knew that Guillory had violated the one rule of not only the modern-day slave trade but of all graft operations: for the machine to work without a hitch, all palms must be properly greased.

What Guillory also either failed to realize or forgot is that by the time Mayo contacted Floyd to commit to USC, the appearance that young O. J. Mayo was the puppet master pulling all the strings and these “poor men” Guillory and Floyd, were at this mercenary’s mercy was in place and set in stone. In fact, Mayo’s image as a bad kid was set up much earlier. He was long known as a malcontent, the young man who Michael Wilbon on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption called a “punk” before ever meeting or speaking with Mayo. He was known as a play for pay kid who would go to the lengths of playing basketball in Kentucky just to be seen by pro scouts instead of playing in his home state of West Virginia. Actually Mayo was only 12 years old and the state of West Virginia’s high school athletic governing body would not allow a 12-year-old to play on a varsity team, so Mayo went to Kentucky.

But the mainstream press failed to report these facts and helped greatly to impugn the character of yet another black athlete.

Only this time it was a 12-year-old boy.

That Guillory failed in his job as field master to a prized slave is nothing new. The manner in which he failed, though, is unique. And because of that Louis Johnson provided us with a glimpse into the modern-day slave machine at hand. These people got to a 14-year-old; they get to 12-year-olds.

The slickest of magick men slave masters get to children young to keep from having to enter into almost-open block auction bidding on these tender black bodies. These men send their field masters out to view fresh young meat in sickness-infested pens called ———- ghettos. There, the field masters, just like those before them for the past 400 years pluck the heartiest of the young, the ones projected to be prized big bucks.

Like any good businessmen, they buy low and sell very high. And it does not matter to them one whit that they are peddling in flesh. They do this and use an ever-compliant, ever-racist media, whether mainstream or today’s Internet alternative, sell hope to the rest of the chattel in the ghetto pens and at the same time keep the prized big bucks in check.

This way the chattel is kept in a constant state of hopelessness, a constant state of fear. They are hopeless because they know the chances of escaping the pen without a slave master pen to a check is next to nil. They also know that escaping at all is like playing the lottery. They live in fear because a pen might go decades without one of its own escaping into the rest of the world and succeeding. They live in fear because they know that no one ever truly escapes a slave state; even a slave with money can be brought to his knees in the time it takes to read a 20-inch article, or the time it takes a policeman to run the plates on a Mercedes-Benz.

Modern-day slavery is the state of U.S. basketball today. And all the jingoistic flag-waving and black men draped in those flags that we will see later this summer cannot obviate this fact. The reasons for the continuation of the Western world’s oldest moneymaker, the buying and selling of human flesh, are many and they run as deep as Western culture will permit.

All that can be done now is to continue to shake the tree and watch the slave masters fall and shed light on the nature of their business.

And hope that those who are on the periphery but aid in perpetuating the system begin come to understand how no good can come from these acts. Unless, of course, the self-centeredness of the entertainment value of the games overrides your sense of humanity.

You see, right now, March Madness and the NBA Finals are winning.

And all the tender but jaded, young black bodies in the pens nicely called ghettos are losing ——– badly.

Previous O.J. Mayo Reports

O. J. Mayo: A First Report on the Money Trailing Behind the Collegiate Star

O. J. Mayo Report 2: Investigation, the ESPN Way

O. J. Mayo #3: U.S. Culture and the One-and-Done Rule

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D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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4 Comments

  1. Is socioeconomics just as much of a factor as race? I think colleges would go after — even take advantage of — whomever they could, regardless of race —- if they can play.

    But I think you make some good points because you don’t see too many poor white kids from the streets playing ball.

    The booster’s comments are pretty disturbing.

    Do you know anything about that kid who already signed with Kentucky? I got the feeling he was pretty well-to-do… Lutheran school in Thousand Oaks. Still something wrong with going after grade schoolers.

    Comment by Den Cotton on May 29, 2008

  2. Den-

    Is socioeco… as much as race?…
    To answer that question, first, you must define socioeconomics relative to recruiting. Are you saying that if a kid’s parents are rich, this doesn’t happen?

    There are huge difference in recruiting in basketball and football. There are also many more poor white parents whose boys are trying earn football scholarships; look at the vast differences in team sizes….

    I don’t pretend to understand this early verbal commitment crap. It almost seems like parents are impressing upon their kids how important it is to get wired into a scholarship as far as possible now, instead of waiting until anyone sees if they actually have the talent to play D1 ball by the time they are a junior in H.S…. That appears to be more of a “beat the Joneses” type of phenomenon and not low-level “magick men” working their charms on a kid…..

    If you go back to my experience in the beginning of the piece, the guys whose parents could afford the cars? They are white. Those players wanted to appear “down” with their teammates and show they were on the same level as the “pro futures” poor black players.

    Comment by D.K. Wilson on May 30, 2008

  3. Generally speaking, I think recruiting is a feeding frenzy regardless of socioeconomics, race, etc. I’m really surprised there aren’t more violations just simply because coaches have a pressure to win like never before. I may be wrong in that thinking, but that’s how it appears. I think it can only get worse, but hope I’m wrong.

    Comment by Den Cotton on May 30, 2008

  4. There are plenty of violations and they happen every single day. Fri instance, the one I wrote of never was touched by the NCAA….

    For recruiting: It is a feeding frenzy only for those select athletes who are “make or break” players. For the rest, it’s filling out rosters; finding recruits willing to sit for a year or two and recruits for practice. With that in mind, economics do not come into play much and since most of the top-tier athletes are black, most of the violations will occur with black athletes, especially in basketball.

    Comment by D.K. Wilson on May 30, 2008

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