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For T-Mac fans, a good story recently (albeit maybe a year late) from ESPN the Magazine on James Felton, a blue-chip prep star who, at an ABCD camp in his hometown, unwittingly made the superstar legend that would become Tracy McGrady. Succumbed to alcohol-related problems last year after getting in tons of trouble. I looked him up for one of my sites for a "Where Are They Now?" piece and was surprised to hear of his passing last year.

THE WRONG SIDE OF GREAT:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3471118

That was kinda sad.

Bump. More people should read this.

dope story

the guy makes it seem like its tmacs fault. I thought he went for a dunk and tmac bruce bowened him up or something.

But yeah thats a sad story. I don't think he ever would have made it to the nba even if he blocked the hell out of tmac

Agreed, the part about his heart not being into basketball made that much clear. Still a really sad story.

Yea, what a sad story. Plenty of players are still in the NBA even though they don't like the game. They don't last very long either, especially after receiving their first big contract. I can't imagine the pressure of people telling you to play ball just cuz you're tall and athletic, and on top of that, make you feel worthless for not making it in the NBA.

Amazing what a dunk can do to a guy.

Wow..

Wow nice story. Does anyone have any footage of the dunk? I'm intrigued.

My bad in suggesting his death was last year, it was October '06. In January '07 for my Yahoo group I dug around high and low and couldn't find a clip/pic of the dunk, or the ABCD camp. In '96 SLAM mag wrote about it in its first paragraph heralding T-Mac's arrival ("Punks" section), after he left Florida for Mt. Zion Academy.

Pity T-Mac didn't remember Felton personally to know what happened to him. Tracy said to Dime magazine in May '06: "After I made that dunk, I had chills run through my body . It's like the moment I knew I had finally arrived."
http://web.archive.org/web/20060516012404/http://www.dimemag.com/feature.asp?id=1713

Manhattan (now Seton Hall) coach and famous uber-recruiter Bobby Gonzalez said of the dunk, "It was unbelievable. The whole camp stopped. It was like a moment in time when everything stood still."

Felton ran into some undisclosed issues with Pitino at Kentucky, and after The Dunk, the Wildcats quit recruiting Felton and began recruiting McGrady. At the time I wrote about the dunk's aftermath:

...and with that, James Felton helped create a Legend. Only it was not his own. YOU would come to know that legend simply by the moniker "T-Mac." But at that moment, the shockwaves were reaching every corner of the continent. You should appreciate that this was an age that preceded the capacity of cell phones, video recorders, e-mail and the Internet to get the word out instantly. You should also recognize that the summer of '96 was just the start of the NBA's decade-long obsession with high school players. Pro scouts having witnessed KG's raw potential in the League were convinced to take a chance with kids like a smug Kobe Bryant and a less-confident Jermaine O'Neal in that year's draft. But those players had been watched closely for many years. Like James Felton, the world never saw Tracy McGrady coming.

Hoop Scoop proclaimed the sleepy-eyed Florida prodigy the "sleeper of the decade," and a young man who entered the camp not touted among the top 500 prep prospects ended his summer at number two, right behind the much-hyped Odom. Hoops reporters scrambled to find this McGrady kid. Desiring to become a factory for blue-chip basketball recruits, Mount Zion Christian Academy in North Carolina made it easy to find him. Pitino began wooing him with a scholarship offer, instead of Felton. SLAM and SI wrote feature articles on McGrady and his new nationally-dominant team. USA Today names him the National High School Player of the Year. A 1997 McDonald's All-American, he wowed the crowds at both Mickie D's and Magic's Roundball Classic.

You know the rest of the story. If not for the electrifying dunk over James Felton, Tracy McGrady would not have been the ninth pick in the '97 draft. He might never have had the chance to discover that a teammate on the Raptors, Vince Carter, was actually his cousin. We might never have seen the spectacle they put on together at the 2000 Dunk Contest. The ABCD Camp sponsor, adidas, would never have the chance to offer a $12 million dollar shoe contract, unheard of for a high school kid (say thanks, LeBron), and ride the T-Mac hype train out from under the shadows of MJ's Nike and AI's Reebok. No free agent pay-day with the Orlando Magic. No unreal 13-points-in-33-second torching display with the Rockets against the Spurs. If you don't know the rest of the story, just ask Kornel David, Alonzo Mourning `n P.J. Brown, Yao Ming, Drew Gooden, and Shawn Bradizzle what T-Mac did to them.

You may know a whole lot less about James Felton. While it's easy to claim him a victim of McGrady's success, he was really a victim of diabetes plus undiagnosed mental imbalances that led to bouts with depression, alcoholism, multiple personalities, and kleptomania in a community where crime pays. If these flaws were ever diagnosed, they went largely untreated because people wouldn't look at a 6-9 specimen, who could "run like a deer" and put the ball in the hoop, and see a troubled young man.

~lw3

Can someone posts some cliffs?

I don't have time to read it all but am intrigued.

So this is why Tmac doesn't dunk anymore. He has unintentionally ended 2 players career. First James Felton then Shawn Bradly.

wow thats a sad story

Fantastic article. I recommend it to everyone.

Guy986 wrote:So this is why Tmac doesn't dunk anymore. He has unintentionally ended 2 players career. First James Felton then Shawn Bradly.

At least have some respect man, jeez. I, just like anyone else likes to laugh but there's a time for everything. Talk about an unnecessary "joke".

sad story, that's too bad.

No disrespect to the guy, but if a dunk is going to ruin his career he had no business playing basketball in the first place on any decent sort of level.

He's in a much better place now, maybe being free from the troubles of this world is what he needed. I hope his son reaches the NBA one day...

Nate505 wrote:No disrespect to the guy, but if a dunk is going to ruin his career he had no business playing basketball in the first place on any decent sort of level.

I don't know if it was the literal act of being dunked on so much as it was the pressure of being pigeonholed as an NBA player when it wasn't what he wanted to do.