[Dime] Guess Who's Back? - Cover article on T-Mac

http://www.dimemag.com/feature.asp?id=2618

GUESS WHO'S BACK?

After a year away from the spotlight, Tracy McGrady is ready to reclaim his place as one of the game’s best.

By: Austin Burton


There’s a framed photo in Tracy McGrady’s home. Taken during a not-so-distant All-Star Weekend, it shows McGrady, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal posing together while donning their All-Star uniforms. It is one of a handful of pictures hanging on the wall of McGrady’s personal weight room, the one that overlooks the private gym at his sprawling mansion in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, Texas.

At the time the photo was taken, the three men in it were at the height of their powers. Shaq and Kobe had won championships together. Shaq had regular season and Finals MVPs under his belt and status as the most physically dominant player of his generation. Kobe was the “next Jordan” du jour and a media darling. T-Mac owned a scoring crown and the sickest highlight reel in the League. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing one of them in television or print ads, without hearing their names spoken in basketball circles as the best in the game.

Throughout this most recent season, two of those men remained in the spotlight: Kobe for his individual exploits, Shaq for his team success. T-Mac, meanwhile, was playing hurt (when he was playing) on a last-place team. His brief absence from the spotlight allowed others – LeBron, D-Wade, ’Melo, Dirk and Nash, among them – to vault McGrady in the eyes of many. Previously anointed a demigod within the game, McGrady was almost a forgotten man.

“You know, that’s how it is. That’s part of the game,” McGrady says in the middle of his Dime cover shoot, taking place in his gym. “One minute you’re on top, then an injury sets you back, and then everyone wants to write you off. But the minute I step back on the basketball court and do what I do, there I go again. I know how it works.” Irony has it that while McGrady talks, H-town’s own Mike Jones flows from the overhead speakers and fills the room. Back then, hoes didn’t want me. Now I’m hot, hoes all on me.

As the Rockets finished ’05-06 last in the Southwest Division, their franchise player played in only 47 games due to recurring back spasms. And in some of those games, Tracy was without his second-in-command, Yao Ming. When T-Mac wasn’t rendered helpless by the pain in his back, his squad was seven games over .500, which would have been good enough to make the playoffs at that rate. (The Western Conference’s eight-seed, Sacramento, finished six games over.)

“You get injured in this game, so there’s nothing I could have done. But it was real frustrating, you know, because before the season I worked extremely hard to come back and have a great season, and to go down with an injury was really frustrating,” McGrady says. “You hate sitting out. This is something that I love to do; it’s my love. So to not be out there playing, to be at home and just wishing I was out there, I was beating myself up because I couldn’t play.

“I went out after the first game of the season and I was out for a while. I tried to come back, it wasn’t right, and I went out again. I wasn’t healthy at all last year. I mean, I came back and I played, and when I played I did alright, but that was the most frustrating part about it: to not be healthy and play like I want.

“But, you know, it happens. It’s all about how you bounce back,” he continues. “I’ve been in the gym every day working to get back on the court. I feel good, my body feels good, my energy is good.”

In limited action last season, T-Mac still averaged 24.4 points, 6.5 boards and 4.8 assists per game. He still dropped 30-plus points on 14 separate occasions, including 43 on the Pistons one night in January and 41 on the Bucks the following evening. He was still voted an All-Star starter, and put up a game-high 36 points in a Western Conference loss. But that didn’t stop a number of players from supplanting T-Mac when it came to the public’s idea of who comprised the list of the League’s elite players. It’s an old saying: out of sight, out of mind.

“You hear ’em talking about Kobe’s the best player, you hear ’em talking about LeBron’s the best player … you know, it really doesn’t matter. What do you get for being the best player in the League? Nothing,” McGrady says. “It all boils down to what D-Wade got this year, what Shaq got this year. So I don’t give a damn about who they say is the best player in the League. You don’t get no reward for that, you know?

“Steve Nash, to me, was the best player in the League. That’s why he won MVP. And you don’t hear them talking about Steve Nash being the best player in the League. So all that stuff, it’s all bull****. What it boils down to is who wins that championship. I don’t worry about all that crazy talk, everybody talking about LeBron’s the best player or Kobe’s the best. Who cares?”

If imitation is the barometer of one’s greatness – it being the sincerest form of flattery and all – then T-Mac has not fallen behind the competition in that regard. In speaking to high school and college stars across the country, T-Mac is the one player mentioned most often when big guards/small forwards are asked whose game they want to emulate. More than Kobe. More than Wade. More than Mike, even. That’s respect.

“That’s a great feeling. I love to entertain. I feel like I was put here to entertain. I believe that’s my purpose here, you know? To entertain and be an inspiration to the younger generation that’s coming up,” McGrady says. “That’s a huge honor that kids look up to me and wanna pattern their game after me. I remember when I was younger, I patterned my game after Penny Hardaway and Magic Johnson, so it’s good that kids wanna do the same with me.”

Tracy McGrady has these moments on the court. Anyone who has watched him play regularly over the past nine seasons knows them well. While their visible identifiers vary – the fist pump, the primal scream, the shadowboxing, the defiant sneer – there is no question as to when T-Mac has entered those moments. His eyes liven, his swagger multiplies by 10, and he has the entire building in the palm of his hand. It is at that moment when T-Mac embodies confidence, using it as all men should: to deflect the doubts and insecurities that hold us back from touching the sky.

Right now, sitting on the second level of his gym’s bleacher seats, Tracy is in one of those moments.

Do you have anything to prove?

“Not at all. Not at all. Not at all … I’ve done that, I’ve been so-called in the argument for being the best player in the game. I want what D-Wade has. I want what Kobe has. That’s what I’m shooting for,” McGrady says.

He means it. His weight room is adorned with framed jerseys of Shaq and Jordan. That’s 10 rings. It serves as Tracy’s inspiration for one more rep, one more set, one more plate on the barbell.

So if the awards and tangible individual markers don’t do it, how do you validate yourself as a dominant player?

“That’s all confidence. You gotta be confident in what you know you can do on the basketball court, and I know what I can do because I’ve proven I can do it,” McGrady says. “What makes a guy the best player in the League? It’s all opinion-based. This guy’s gonna say LeBron, this guy’s gonna say T-Mac, this guy’s gonna say A.I. … Like I say, that really doesn’t mean anything.”

What means everything to Tracy is what his basketball success can afford him. Not necessarily the material things, but rather the ability to provide for his family: his wife, Clerenda, their three-year-old daughter Layla, and infant son Laymen. If you know nothing else about Tracy McGrady the man, know that family is of utmost importance to him. They are permanently etched into his skin – Layla’s portrait on his chest, Laymen on his right forearm. To get an accurate picture of Tracy’s devotion, remember this story: when Clerenda went into labor with Laymen on Dec. 27 of last year, Tracy abruptly left the Toyota Center at halftime to be with her, in the middle of a game in which he’d already scored 21 points on Andrei Kirilenko. But potentially dropping 40 on one of the best defenders in the world was instantly deemed meaningless when family called.

“To have my boy, it’s … you know … I don’t know, it’s just a great feeling,” Tracy says. “I think every guy in America wants to have their little man. Especially when you’re in the League, to have your son grow up and try to do the things you’ve done or do it better. Or if you had a rough life coming up, you wanna teach your son that … you know, you wanna raise him better than how you were raised.”

The gym in McGrady’s home is that of a man enjoying family life. A couple of steps from one baseline, next to the mini-kitchen and two coolers stocked with bottled water, a bright-red Radio Flyer wagon sits next to a pink-and-blue Mongoose tricycle. A few feet from where Tracy sits on the bleachers for this interview, his adidas signature sneakers rest next to a pair of tiny shoes belonging to Layla. There’s also the superhero-looking cartoon of T-Mac at halfcourt, and colorful basketball-themed paintings adorning the walls, paintings created by Dikembe Mutombo’s brother. The gym is child-friendly, yet still a place where one can come to perfect his craft. Surrounding the gym are additional markers of a man who has reached his goals: the six-car garage, the personal chef, the pool where a father watches his daughter’s swimming lessons. From Auburndale, Fla., to the ‘burbs, Tracy McGrady has won.

But as fulfilling as his personal life has been, Tracy is still biding his time for when he can regain his former place among his sport’s elite. After the back injury kept him mostly bed-ridden from March until June, T-Mac attacked summer workouts with a passion. Just from looking at him now, the man described as “wiry” and “lanky” for so many years has filled out. He’s visibly more muscular. Sturdier. He credits a summer’s worth of intense core training that keeps his back in good condition.

He says he’s making a run at that elusive ring. But before that, T-Mac must advance past Round One of the playoffs, something he still has yet to do in his career. But at least in Houston, he doesn’t feel like a one-man show anymore.

“In Orlando, it was definitely all me. There was a lot riding on my shoulders,” McGrady says, remembering a time when Grant Hill’s injuries left him as the solitary 1 in what was supposed to be the NBA’s deadliest 1-2 combo. “I got an inside presence now. In Orlando I didn’t have that. I got an inside presence now with Yao, and a better defensive team – we’re always tops in the league defensively. So now, I really don’t think so much relies on me to go out and do it every night. I think I have enough help where I can count on guys to kind of relieve some of that pressure off me. So it’s definitely night and day with Orlando.”

Anyone who knows Tracy McGrady knows he’s a huge Jay-Z fan. Tracy is aware that people compare the two: both supremely talented and accomplished professionals who make the amazing look easy. That they ply their trade in forums that have an exponential impact on urban culture explains why both resonate with the public so well.

“I’ve heard that. People say if they had to compare me to an artist that does their job, and really they put a lot into it, but you couldn’t tell, they compare me to Jay-Z,” Tracy says. “I come in here, I work, I do what I do, and when I get on the basketball court, it’s easy.”

It looks easy, I ask him, or it feels easy?

“Both.”

He’s not done with Jay. “He needs to come back, man. I’m tired of listening to him on other people’s stuff and he’s killing these tracks, so I don’t think it’s over.”

Nor is it over for T-Mac. A season away from the limelight doesn’t seem like much, but in this quick-turnover culture of making and breaking stars, T-Mac seems to have been away for a long time. On his end, he sees this as a comeback.

“I’m getting back to the old T-Mac. All of last year I was playing hurt. The year before that, everyone was praising me. Everything was good when we took Dallas to seven games (in the ’05 playoffs). I had a great year, I had a great playoff, and I was one of the ‘Best in the Game,’” Tracy says. “But then I get hurt and everybody wants to write me off. So …”

His voice trails off.

“I’m gonna be a force,” he says. “It’s gonna be an interesting season, brotha.”