Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal were high-profile teenagers who shared the same agent and shoe brand in January 1998, when a mutual acquaintance suggested they meet for a meal. They went to Applebee’s restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
O’Neal was in his second season there with the Trail Blazers, who had selected him to leave high school with the 17th pick in the powerful 1996 NBA draft, four picks behind Kobe Bryant. McGrady, who had also been selected from high school, with the ninth overall pick in 1997, was a rookie with the Toronto Raptors.
“It was just a natural connection,” said McGrady. “We’re like brothers”.
“It was our first time sitting and talking,” O’Neal said. “For two young men to have that kind of communication and chemistry, that’s what I always remember every time I come in contact with Tracy.”
That contact is about to become more frequent. McGrady and O’Neal, who have 13 NBA All-Star appearances between them, said in a phone interview that they plan to open a player representation agency this fall. They will call it Seven1 Sports Group and Entertainment.
The name is a combination of his racing jersey numbers that propelled McGrady into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017 and allowed O’Neal to play for seven teams in 18 seasons and sign player contracts worth more than $ 150 million. If successful, they would become the most outstanding players in NBA history to enter the highly competitive and hard-to-force agent business.
McGrady and O’Neal, who are 41 and living in Texas, said they were financially secure, but felt an urge to forge a new path in their careers after playing after discussing the matter regularly for the past two years. Their conversations have escalated in the past four months, while they were mostly confined to their homes due to the coronavirus pandemic. McGrady (who lives in the Houston suburbs) and O’Neal (who lives in the Dallas suburbs) found, in O’Neal’s words, “time to process and think a lot together” about how they could help the players youth, especially black youth. players, most.
“We think it is necessary and we are passionate about it,” said McGrady. “We are close to children every day because we have youth programs. It just makes sense. We see the lack of information that these children receive, so we would be harming our people if we do not lend our experience of what we know and help guide them. This is a call we have. “
McGrady said he would serve as co-owner and player advisor and would likely walk away from the broadcast role he has had in the past four and a half seasons with ESPN. O’Neal intends to take the National Basketball Players Association exam in January to become a registered NBA agent and maintain partner status alongside McGrady.
“Make no mistake,” said O’Neal, “this is very personal.”
O’Neal’s relationships with several top-tier prospects at his Drive Nation sports complex in Irving, Texas provided another strong push. Three possible first-round picks in the October NBA draft: RJ Hampton, Tyrese Maxey and Jahmi’us Ramsey, went through the Drive Nation program, as did highly-qualified 2021 draft candidate Cade Cunningham. By answering numerous questions from those players and their families about various aspects of becoming professionals, O’Neal was convinced that he and McGrady had a lot to offer, despite the obvious questions they will face about their lack of experience in negotiation and marketing.
“There is no magic wand for this,” said O’Neal. “We are not trying to say that we are the magic wand. But we will be different. You can’t name another couple of people who have had the level of success and ups and downs we’ve had in our careers. “
In what turned into an emotional conference call as they discussed the startup, McGrady and O’Neal opened up about the various pressures they felt even at the peak of those careers. Both said the pressure from the superstars and the lack of parental guidance to help them get through it was greater than they ever stopped being active players.
“I didn’t know my father until I was 30 years old, and he died nine months after that,” O’Neal said. “I was truly blessed to have a core of people around me who helped me overcome my difficulties, but I guarantee that no team I played for knew that about me. No team knew I had a problem with that, not being able to pick up the phone and call my father and ask, ‘Can you help me?’ Or ‘Are you proud of me?’ Or to appreciate being recruited or my children being born. “
“You just brought something when you said that,” McGrady told O’Neal on the call. He said he had a relationship with his father, Tracy McGrady Sr., while playing, but was not strong.
“Throughout my career, I hated the fact that I was never able to bring my pops into my environment,” said McGrady. “Do you know how difficult it is to be an elite player in this league, to be considered a superstar, and then to have an injury that changes your career? To be on top and have a career-changing injury and you don’t even have a discussion with your father about going through those things, do you know how hard that is?
After winning seven All-Star picks and winning two NBA scoring titles, McGrady began having serious knee problems with the Houston Rockets during the 2007-08 season. Next season, as his 29th birthday approached, he needed microfracture surgery on his left knee. The Rockets traded him to the Knicks in February 2010, and in his last three and a half seasons in the NBA, McGrady played for four teams and never averaged more than 9.4 points per game. He last played at age 33.
“When I had microfracture surgery, I was depressed,” said McGrady. “And the only people around me were my wife and my mother. That was painful. “
What McGrady and O’Neal can offer potential customers right away, beyond name recognition, is the wisdom gained from dealing with such crises. The value of his experience can be further increased if the NBA, as he hopes, reinstates the rule that allows players to jump directly from high school to the NBA. McGrady, O’Neal, Bryant, and Kevin Garnett took that leap again. Prominence in the middle -1990 for the first time since the 1970s.
Of course, for all the life experiences they can pass on to prospective clients from the 34 combined seasons they played in the NBA, McGrady and O’Neal don’t have a history of deals compared to more established player representation firms. of the league. . They said they hoped to recruit players entering the NBA 2021 draft and players who were already in the league, but that would mean competing with players like Excel Sports (led by Jeff Schwartz, the former tennis agent-turned-NBA power broker. ), BDA Sports (led by Bill Duffy, one of the league’s most experienced agents) and Klutch Sports (whose CEO, Rich Paul, appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in June 2019).
O’Neal said he and McGrady were in the process of hiring “experienced partners,” including some “old school pit bulls,” to make up for what they lacked in representation skills.
“This business is not waiting for me to pass a test,” O’Neal said.
Only a handful of former players have moved into player representation, especially BJ Armstrong, who settled into the business well after playing alongside Michael Jordan on three of the Chicago Bulls’ six championship teams in the 1990s. Armstrong said in a phone interview that similar motivations persuaded him to become an agent after a stint as a Bulls executive, when he acknowledged that incoming NBA players were getting younger and lacked the means to receive guidance.
“It was something I never thought about when I was playing,” said Armstrong, who represents Derrick Rose of Detroit among his nearly 20 clients with sports agency Wasserman. “After working in a main office, I remember thinking: ‘Who is preparing them to understand the business they are going to?’ I saw an opportunity to make myself accessible to the questions I wish I had asked someone when I was playing. “
McGrady is not intimidated by the shortage of NBA players who have made this transition. He laughed out loud when it was pointed out that Arn Tellem, the former power broker representing both McGrady and O’Neal, left the field that they will now try to break through to become the Detroit Pistons vice president in 2015.
When asked about how to try to find his niche in such a ruthless industry, McGrady said of his new rivals, “At the end of the day, they can’t catch every player. Obviously, it will take some time to get our feet wet and really understand how this works. But no one intimidates us. We know there will be a lot of people trying to make holes in this. “
