From Amazon
Toronto Star sports columnist Chris Young--like legions of ball-heads north of the 49th parallel--has been in awe of Toronto Raptors dunk-junkie Vince Carter since the team scored him in the 1998 NBA draft. Drive tries to balance the hype and reality. Getting to the Carter story first entails a rumination on the out-bound procession of players, staff, and ownership. Young succinctly dismisses the lot: "Those earlier names ... belong to a prehistory from which the Raptors have emerged with Carter as their saviour." Whether he digs it or not, Carter's the reigning golden boy of the NBA's perpetual marketing machine--and not solely because of his skills. Young enthuses about Carter as a "wholesome package," meaning: "No tattoos, no piercings, no gangsta posing, no entourage." Still, his on-court stealth and pyrotechnics are already legendary, even if the living man off-court remains aloof. "You never know who is listening, and how they're going to take it," the star says. "You can't say anything." And that's led to potshots from teammates, other players, pundits, and, as Young writes, an outright questioning of "his desire for the game." Meanwhile, his mom is regularly besieged for sound bites.
Drive is a comprehensive chronicle of the Raptors' lurid genesis, their bizarre growing pains, and the arc of their ascent. It yields glimpses of the man at the centre of this "foreign outpost" poised to bust down the door to the NBA's pantheon, and will make the cut with ballers and bandwagon fans alike. --Sigcino Moyo
Review
“A well-written and absorbing book that even a non-fan of basketball will enjoy.” -- Kitchener-Waterloo Record
From the Paperback edition.
From the Paperback edition.
Book Description
The first in-depth book on Vince Carter, Drive captures the magic of the young superstar and charts the latest transformation of the NBA. Without a doubt, Vince Carter is the best thing to come along since Michael Jordan took basketball to a new level in the 1990s. Here in Canada, Vince Carter is The Franchise.
Veteran sports writer Chris Young tracks Vince Carter over the entire 2000–2001 NBA season. By charting the trajectory of Carter’s career from his origins in a Florida high school league, he reveals how one star can transform not only a team, but the entire NBA.
The Raptors were in their fourth season and at the bottom of the league when Carter joined as a rookie — now, three years later, he’s thrilling fans with his trademark levitations, breath-taking body control, and the power of his slam-dunks. His unique skills have turned him into one of pro sports’ rarest of performers: the charismatic superstar.
After the bitter labour dispute that delayed the 1998–1999 season and Michael Jordan’s retirement in February 1999, the NBA fell into a slump — TV ratings began to slide and attendance flatlined. It was at this point in NBA history that Vince Carter first attracted notice. His transcendent talent soon led media commentators to name Carter the most exciting young superstar in the NBA. Carter led the U.S. team in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, and has been the leading vote-getter for the last two NBA All Star Games — a clear reflection of his intense popularity with the fans.
Veteran sports writer Chris Young tracks Vince Carter over the entire 2000–2001 NBA season. By charting the trajectory of Carter’s career from his origins in a Florida high school league, he reveals how one star can transform not only a team, but the entire NBA.
The Raptors were in their fourth season and at the bottom of the league when Carter joined as a rookie — now, three years later, he’s thrilling fans with his trademark levitations, breath-taking body control, and the power of his slam-dunks. His unique skills have turned him into one of pro sports’ rarest of performers: the charismatic superstar.
After the bitter labour dispute that delayed the 1998–1999 season and Michael Jordan’s retirement in February 1999, the NBA fell into a slump — TV ratings began to slide and attendance flatlined. It was at this point in NBA history that Vince Carter first attracted notice. His transcendent talent soon led media commentators to name Carter the most exciting young superstar in the NBA. Carter led the U.S. team in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, and has been the leading vote-getter for the last two NBA All Star Games — a clear reflection of his intense popularity with the fans.
From the Back Cover
“A well-written and absorbing book that even a non-fan of basketball will enjoy.” -- Kitchener-Waterloo Record
From the Paperback edition.
From the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Chris Young, a sports columnist at The Toronto Star, has followed Vince Carter’s career closely since Carter joined the Raptors in 1999. Chris Young lives in Toronto.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Vince Carter was ready to howl at the world. Back at Chapel Hill for two final summer school courses toward his degree in African American studies, Carter closed the book on his university education only to find another kind of learning curve ahead. His cousin Tracy McGrady had left Toronto for good, the coup de grâce coming in an ESPN magazine article in August in which McGrady had called their relationship overrated. Carter could understand McGrady's departure. He could even understand McGrady feeling confident, freshened and emboldened by his new-found independence and a $93-million contract. But these shots at him in the media came from nowhere. He was hurt and confused.
The business side — which he tried to keep at arm's length; his mother, Michelle, in charge down in Florida — was going no better. In July, Carter had been hit with a $13.5-million judgment for breach of contract with Puma, the shoe company he had signed with before his rookie season. And just a few months before that, the Tank Black situation had reached its depressing conclusion, Carter being the last pro athlete to abandon his agent's rapidly sinking ship. Finally, he had watched from afar as another man he trusted, his first pro coach, Butch Carter, was fired.
Then there were the Raptors, swinging and missing in their free-agent search, including his buddy Cuttino Mobley. With the Olympics on the horizon, Carter's closest friend on the Raptors, Muggsy Bogues, was telling him he didn't think he'd get a deal to be back in Toronto for the coming season. Just thinking about that, and the nightmare finish to the previous season, made Carter gulp. Bogues's talks with the Raptors had bogged down by early August, and there was concern that the team wouldn't have enough money left in the budget to accommodate him. In town for his annual fantasy camp, Carter pitched a unique offer at Glen Grunwald: he would pay Bogues's salary, or at least $1 million a year of it, if it would help get the five-foot-three guard back into a Raptors uniform. Carter was feeling a little desperate, and Grunwald, normally an unflappable sort, was feeling a little stunned.
On the home front, there was more bad news. Just before Vince set off for the Sydney 2000 Olympics, his mother told him that she and her husband, Carter's stepfather Harry Robinson, were filing for divorce after 16 years of marriage. And while he was away, his brother Chris was charged with possession of cocaine for the second time.
"It got to be so bad, I would wonder — did I step in something bad here? Did I do something wrong?" he said. "It was like there was a string of things going on, one after the other, right in a row. After I'd try to get over one thing, there was something else, then something else, it was just ongoing and never-ending.
"I was trying to leave it hanging, so to speak. But I don't care how far you go, it's always going to be there, right behind you, closing in on you."
In the unofficial Vince Carter Olympic scrapbook, two pictures catch the eye. One is astounding; the other merely confounds. Study them closely and it's hard to believe that the fellow in both photos is the Vince Carter we've come to know here in North America, the one who is equal parts style and smile. Study them closely and you begin to understand exactly what Carter is talking about.
Picture no. 1 in that scrapbook is Carter's dunk over French centre Frederic Weis, which looks like a triumph of man over matter, or at least a suspension of physics. The photo that was carried in more than 200 newspapers and magazines around the world catches him frozen at the apex of his ascent.
Weis is seven foot three inches tall, and there's Carter — a mere six foot six — dunking over him as if he were some giant Gallic vaulting horse, a mere prop for the act. On the American bench, coach Rudy Tomjanovich thought Carter had left the ground too early. "And he just kept going and going and going higher," Tomjanovich marvelled. For Carter, whose toughest audience is at times himself, even this one was nothing special.
"It was just reaction," he insisted. "I was just playing the game." And then he continued, almost apologizing. "I don't do them for my enjoyment, believe me, I don't. I just do them because that's what happens."
"Le facial," drawled one French reporter.
"That was probably the greatest play in basketball I've ever seen," said Jason Kidd, Carter's teammate who dubbed him "the Next Coming" during the Americans' brief training camp.
This had certainly been something of a welcome party for Carter. He was not even among the originals selected for the Dream Team, as the assemblage of U.S. talent had always been called. In truth, it was a group that represented an abrupt shift for the Americans, with not one NBA championship ring adorning the 12 pairs of hands on the roster.
Instead of elders, youth defined them, and none was younger than the 23-year-old Carter. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that instead of a grizzled benevolence, their most marked characteristic was a grim sense of their own importance.
They arrived in Melbourne a week before the Games began, nothing on their schedule other than a final exhibition game with the host country, some practice, a little acclimatization and lots of quiet time before the flame was lit and the real work began.
Instead, their downtown Crown Casino hotel was the venue for the World Economic Forum in the coming days. As such, it had become the focus for ten thousand protestors. The hotel was barricaded from the outside world, security at each checkpoint, and inside the lobby a "bizarre and at times frightening scene," according to U.S. player Allan Houston.
"We were prisoners in our own hotel," said Carter. "It was like clearing customs every time you wanted to get on a bus to get out of there. They were talking about putting us on boats, with big sheets on the side to hide us so we could just get out of there and go to practice."
But first there was a game to be played, a game that carried its own sense of foreboding. The United States was playing Australia, which was feeling very good about itself as a medal hopeful after winning a tournament in Hong Kong. The Melbourne Park arena sold out in 55 minutes for the game, 15,114 watching and cheering Carter and Kevin Garnett's thunderous warm-up dunks.
Such matches are called "friendlies" overseas, but that didn't fit the U.S. team's mood. Out of public view, in the tunnel between the locker room and the floor, they met up for the usual pregame huddle. "Let's bury these mother-------!" one of them cried. This zeal for what was actually a rather meaningless game came from the most unlikely of sources. When they had arrived at Sydney airport in transit to Melbourne, a copy of The Australian newspaper had been passed around, its cover story about this U.S. team carrying the headline "Dream On: Basketball's New Generation of Nobodies."
Thirty-six seconds into a game that had begun with passion and intensity and plenty of X-rated yakking, Australia's Andrew Gaze put up a three-point shot that missed, and suddenly Carter was headed the other way to receive a breakaway pass. Gaze hooked him down by the arm. They rolled on top of each other, Gaze grabbing with his hands, Carter headlocking Gaze.
Picture No.2: Vince Carter standing over Andrew Gaze, snarling down at the ancient Aussie like a young Ali. And just like that, Carter had gone from lightning to lightning rod, the very face of the Ugly American cliché.
"You can be physical and intense without having a blue with someone," Gaze told Australian reporters later. "There's a certain Olympic spirit you have that doesn't include going out and hitting someone."
Carter was incensed. "It was a dirty play," he said. "What bugged me the most was the way he was saying one thing to one person after and another to someone else. If I had let him pull me all the way down, I was going face first into the floor. It would've broken my nose. There were no punches thrown. I'd forgotten about it pretty quickly."
Carter was clearly rattled. He missed two free throws badly and was held without a point in the first half. Worse, the audience got on his case early in the second half, unveiling a "Carter is a wanker" chant reserved for the opponents Australians truly regard as poor sports or overblown posers.
"Vince never had any crowd on him like that before," said assistant coach Larry Brown. "He'd never been considered a bad guy. The immediate effect really bothered him. He was really shook up."
This was new for Carter. For the rest of the time in Australia, he didn't really care about what the crowd was doing. He ignored the media critics that were castigating him, and there were many. "As far as I was concerned, I thought I handled it pretty well," he said later. "When things like that happened, like the Gaze situation, for all that was built up inside me, I could have very easily thrown a punch. I had this great chance to let all that frustration go. But I didn't. I stayed under control."
When it came to the basketball tournament, perhaps it was no surprise that the Americans developed a tiresome us-against-them mentality, much like Carter already had. They were winning, which was expected. But the margins were closer than they'd ever been before. The world was catching up and almost beating them, but all they could do was grouse about the international game (different than the NBA, therefore not as good as the NBA), their opponents (different, therefore not as good), the rules and referees (different, therefore not as good), and so on.
"The best games to play in were the ones we had in practice," said Carter. "Those games we played against those national teams, they'd look at us like we're NBA superstars and it was like we had a target...
The business side — which he tried to keep at arm's length; his mother, Michelle, in charge down in Florida — was going no better. In July, Carter had been hit with a $13.5-million judgment for breach of contract with Puma, the shoe company he had signed with before his rookie season. And just a few months before that, the Tank Black situation had reached its depressing conclusion, Carter being the last pro athlete to abandon his agent's rapidly sinking ship. Finally, he had watched from afar as another man he trusted, his first pro coach, Butch Carter, was fired.
Then there were the Raptors, swinging and missing in their free-agent search, including his buddy Cuttino Mobley. With the Olympics on the horizon, Carter's closest friend on the Raptors, Muggsy Bogues, was telling him he didn't think he'd get a deal to be back in Toronto for the coming season. Just thinking about that, and the nightmare finish to the previous season, made Carter gulp. Bogues's talks with the Raptors had bogged down by early August, and there was concern that the team wouldn't have enough money left in the budget to accommodate him. In town for his annual fantasy camp, Carter pitched a unique offer at Glen Grunwald: he would pay Bogues's salary, or at least $1 million a year of it, if it would help get the five-foot-three guard back into a Raptors uniform. Carter was feeling a little desperate, and Grunwald, normally an unflappable sort, was feeling a little stunned.
On the home front, there was more bad news. Just before Vince set off for the Sydney 2000 Olympics, his mother told him that she and her husband, Carter's stepfather Harry Robinson, were filing for divorce after 16 years of marriage. And while he was away, his brother Chris was charged with possession of cocaine for the second time.
"It got to be so bad, I would wonder — did I step in something bad here? Did I do something wrong?" he said. "It was like there was a string of things going on, one after the other, right in a row. After I'd try to get over one thing, there was something else, then something else, it was just ongoing and never-ending.
"I was trying to leave it hanging, so to speak. But I don't care how far you go, it's always going to be there, right behind you, closing in on you."
In the unofficial Vince Carter Olympic scrapbook, two pictures catch the eye. One is astounding; the other merely confounds. Study them closely and it's hard to believe that the fellow in both photos is the Vince Carter we've come to know here in North America, the one who is equal parts style and smile. Study them closely and you begin to understand exactly what Carter is talking about.
Picture no. 1 in that scrapbook is Carter's dunk over French centre Frederic Weis, which looks like a triumph of man over matter, or at least a suspension of physics. The photo that was carried in more than 200 newspapers and magazines around the world catches him frozen at the apex of his ascent.
Weis is seven foot three inches tall, and there's Carter — a mere six foot six — dunking over him as if he were some giant Gallic vaulting horse, a mere prop for the act. On the American bench, coach Rudy Tomjanovich thought Carter had left the ground too early. "And he just kept going and going and going higher," Tomjanovich marvelled. For Carter, whose toughest audience is at times himself, even this one was nothing special.
"It was just reaction," he insisted. "I was just playing the game." And then he continued, almost apologizing. "I don't do them for my enjoyment, believe me, I don't. I just do them because that's what happens."
"Le facial," drawled one French reporter.
"That was probably the greatest play in basketball I've ever seen," said Jason Kidd, Carter's teammate who dubbed him "the Next Coming" during the Americans' brief training camp.
This had certainly been something of a welcome party for Carter. He was not even among the originals selected for the Dream Team, as the assemblage of U.S. talent had always been called. In truth, it was a group that represented an abrupt shift for the Americans, with not one NBA championship ring adorning the 12 pairs of hands on the roster.
Instead of elders, youth defined them, and none was younger than the 23-year-old Carter. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that instead of a grizzled benevolence, their most marked characteristic was a grim sense of their own importance.
They arrived in Melbourne a week before the Games began, nothing on their schedule other than a final exhibition game with the host country, some practice, a little acclimatization and lots of quiet time before the flame was lit and the real work began.
Instead, their downtown Crown Casino hotel was the venue for the World Economic Forum in the coming days. As such, it had become the focus for ten thousand protestors. The hotel was barricaded from the outside world, security at each checkpoint, and inside the lobby a "bizarre and at times frightening scene," according to U.S. player Allan Houston.
"We were prisoners in our own hotel," said Carter. "It was like clearing customs every time you wanted to get on a bus to get out of there. They were talking about putting us on boats, with big sheets on the side to hide us so we could just get out of there and go to practice."
But first there was a game to be played, a game that carried its own sense of foreboding. The United States was playing Australia, which was feeling very good about itself as a medal hopeful after winning a tournament in Hong Kong. The Melbourne Park arena sold out in 55 minutes for the game, 15,114 watching and cheering Carter and Kevin Garnett's thunderous warm-up dunks.
Such matches are called "friendlies" overseas, but that didn't fit the U.S. team's mood. Out of public view, in the tunnel between the locker room and the floor, they met up for the usual pregame huddle. "Let's bury these mother-------!" one of them cried. This zeal for what was actually a rather meaningless game came from the most unlikely of sources. When they had arrived at Sydney airport in transit to Melbourne, a copy of The Australian newspaper had been passed around, its cover story about this U.S. team carrying the headline "Dream On: Basketball's New Generation of Nobodies."
Thirty-six seconds into a game that had begun with passion and intensity and plenty of X-rated yakking, Australia's Andrew Gaze put up a three-point shot that missed, and suddenly Carter was headed the other way to receive a breakaway pass. Gaze hooked him down by the arm. They rolled on top of each other, Gaze grabbing with his hands, Carter headlocking Gaze.
Picture No.2: Vince Carter standing over Andrew Gaze, snarling down at the ancient Aussie like a young Ali. And just like that, Carter had gone from lightning to lightning rod, the very face of the Ugly American cliché.
"You can be physical and intense without having a blue with someone," Gaze told Australian reporters later. "There's a certain Olympic spirit you have that doesn't include going out and hitting someone."
Carter was incensed. "It was a dirty play," he said. "What bugged me the most was the way he was saying one thing to one person after and another to someone else. If I had let him pull me all the way down, I was going face first into the floor. It would've broken my nose. There were no punches thrown. I'd forgotten about it pretty quickly."
Carter was clearly rattled. He missed two free throws badly and was held without a point in the first half. Worse, the audience got on his case early in the second half, unveiling a "Carter is a wanker" chant reserved for the opponents Australians truly regard as poor sports or overblown posers.
"Vince never had any crowd on him like that before," said assistant coach Larry Brown. "He'd never been considered a bad guy. The immediate effect really bothered him. He was really shook up."
This was new for Carter. For the rest of the time in Australia, he didn't really care about what the crowd was doing. He ignored the media critics that were castigating him, and there were many. "As far as I was concerned, I thought I handled it pretty well," he said later. "When things like that happened, like the Gaze situation, for all that was built up inside me, I could have very easily thrown a punch. I had this great chance to let all that frustration go. But I didn't. I stayed under control."
When it came to the basketball tournament, perhaps it was no surprise that the Americans developed a tiresome us-against-them mentality, much like Carter already had. They were winning, which was expected. But the margins were closer than they'd ever been before. The world was catching up and almost beating them, but all they could do was grouse about the international game (different than the NBA, therefore not as good as the NBA), their opponents (different, therefore not as good), the rules and referees (different, therefore not as good), and so on.
"The best games to play in were the ones we had in practice," said Carter. "Those games we played against those national teams, they'd look at us like we're NBA superstars and it was like we had a target...
