The only Canadian to go first overall in the NBA draft, Anthony Bennett remains humble and grounded—just like his mom
In the kindest translation of Toronto-speak, Jane and Finch is shorthand for hardscrabble. The mention of the intersection connotes poverty compounded with violence. It’s a place to leave behind and never return to, and yet just days after he first found himself in the global spotlight, Anthony Bennett went back.
Bennett walked through the Community Housing project on Grandravine Drive, a warren of low-rise buildings sorely in need of repair. He walked by windows with aluminum foil for curtains and open doors that provided the only air-conditioning in the oppressive heat and humidity. He padded down an unpaved path and across grass uncut and not weeded. He didn’t need directions. Only nine years ago, he had trod this route daily. This time, though, he was tailed by dozens of young neighbourhood kids and a few interlopers with notepads.
Just days after the Cleveland Cavaliers selected him with the first overall pick in the NBA draft, Anthony Bennett was going back to the Jane and Finch Boys and Girls Club, a ramshackle sanctuary for young people looking to stay out of trouble, a building no bigger than a school portable. Bennett was going to give a speech to kids in T-shirts issued by the centre in various shades of Day-Glo. After the messages of inspiration, the you-can-do-its, he was going to open the floor to reporters for a brief question period. The media could be forgiven for thinking it a contrived PR moment that recalled LeBron James rolling out kids like so many human props when handing down “The Decision.” After all, Bennett could have held a press conference anywhere. He could have chosen a place befitting his bright future that will be lived, variously, downtown and uptown.
He picked this venue because it stood for a key part of his story. It didn’t foretell what was next but laid out plainly what had been. “I used to be here every day, after school or on weekends, chilling out, basically staying out of trouble,” he said, sitting in front of a wall of grade-school impressionism in crayon and waterpaint. “It’s the same set-up but new people, new faces. I’m happy that I had this growing up.”
Bennett dispelled any notion that he had come to Jane and Finch as an exercise in image manipulation not with anything he said, only with how he said it. Though he had spent two years living in the States and had travelled more widely than most 20-year-olds, he didn’t come across as worldly but rather impossibly soft-spoken and humble. It was easy to imagine what the baby-faced Bennett had looked like as a 10-year-old.
Edith Bennett sat far off to the side of her son, out of the frame of the television cameras and away from prying reporters. When he thanked her for all she had done, she smiled and nodded but did her best to allow this to be her son’s moment. Even when cornered away from the action, she spoke softly lest she attract any undue attention. “I’m proud of my little boy,” she said of her apparently fully grown six-foot-seven son. “He’s a quiet guy. He liked to stay at home. He stayed out of trouble and then played basketball, just for fun. When we moved from here to Brampton [when he was 10], a coach said, ‘He’s going to be a special boy, going to go a long way. He has a gift.’ And I believed it, but never thought he’d be the No. 1 pick some day.”
Bennett and his two older siblings watched Edith work two nursing jobs, one of them in a mental-health institution. He saw the sacrifices she made to find a better life for the family. He saw her resolute dignity, her constant bedside manner. “His mother is his role model or hero,” says Michael Peck, Bennett’s coach at Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nev., before he went to UNLV. “Most top players have a Type A personality, but Anthony is almost introverted and always respectful, aware of other people.”
Edith wasn’t inclined to take too much credit for her son’s accomplishments. “My boy turned out so well because of who he is,” she said. “He’s intense when he goes into something, but he’s also able to turn it off and shut it down and just be Anthony afterward.”
Just who Anthony Bennett will be going forward is anyone’s guess. Across the NBA’s history, 67 players have been the No. 1. Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson were first-ballot Hall of Famers. Many first-overalls were serviceable pros, e.g., Joe Smith and Kenyon Martin. A few couldn’t play a lick, most infamously LaRue Martin and Kwame Brown. Many see Bennett as a tweener in the mould of the other No. 1 to have come out of UNLV, Larry Johnson: too strong for small forwards to defend on the blocks, too quick for taller power forwards to keep up with in the open floor.
Where Bennett will fall on the sliding scale of first-overalls is to be determined, but he’ll be forever compared to a player who ran on the same Toronto courts: Andrew Wiggins, formerly of Vaughan, outside of Toronto, lately of Huntington Prep in Virginia.
So far the two are a study in contrasts. For more than two years, Wiggins, a six-foot-eight small forward, has been projected as the top player in the class of ’14. This year, however, few mock drafts slotted Bennett’s name in the top three. In fact, some analysts had his stock sinking if not tanking, falling out of the top five all the way to No. 10. After all, UNLV, a fifth seed, was upset in the first round of the NCAA tournament, depriving him of an opportunity to showcase his game. Then he wasn’t available for workouts for NBA teams because of shoulder surgery. And questions about his conditioning and athleticism dogged him because of his weight—240 lb. during the season, 260 by the time the draft rolled around.
We’ll never know where other teams ranked Bennett. Seemingly he was able to work his way to the top of the Cavaliers’ list through nothing more than his performance this season at UNLV (16 points and eight rebounds on average per game, shooting 38 percent from three-point range) and the interview process.
While many would presume a conversation with executives is a poor substitute for a workout, Bennett’s agent, Mike George, believes his client separated himself from the other elite players when he sat down with Cleveland’s brass. “The Cavaliers only had one interview with Anthony but he came back to me and said they were grilling him,” says George, who had previously coached Bennett with Nike CIA Bounce, the AAU program in Brampton. “He must have done a great job. They want to know who you are, and they interviewed everyone you could think of getting the workup on him. They wanted to know what type of character he had, if he was a winner. And that’s the NBA today, teams trying to avoid investing in guys with questionable character.”
Still, after selecting Bennett, a player outside the major conferences and largely off the media’s radar, Cleveland’s management was left in the unusual position of explaining exactly who their pick was. Said Cavaliers GM Chris Grant: “He was one of those guys when you walked out of the gym when you saw him play, you went ‘Wow!’ He does things that you don’t see other people do.”
The reaction among many in Cleveland was a variation on “Wow!” That is: “Wow! We already have a guy from Brampton who does a lot of the same things!” Tristan Thompson, the Cavs’ 2011 first-rounder, has a game like Bennett’s, so much so that they’re more likely to compete for minutes than play together.
There’s barely any overlap between Bennett and Wiggins however, on or off the court. The son of NBA veteran Mitchell Wiggins and former Canadian Olympic runner Marita Payne, Andrew Wiggins seemed to already be a professional at the press conference announcing Kansas as the whistle stop for his one-and-done year, even more so when compared to Bennett’s low-key event at the Boys and Girls Club.
Bennett enjoyed a comfort level speaking at his old stomping grounds and he gave well-considered answers to a few hard questions. Yes, he looks forward to playing for the Canadian national team that others eligible have frequently not found the time for. No, he wasn’t looking at the mixed reviews of his selection on Twitter that might spin the head of someone made of stuff less stern.
Still, whether fielding inquiries from reporters or even just requests to pose for pictures with young kids, Bennett evinced an expression that said clearly and loudly, “Me? Really?”
Edith Bennett smiled as she watched the scene, pleased and maybe amused. “I raised him to be determined to get everything he could out of his gifts,” she says, “but I didn’t want him to forget who is, the people who helped him on the way and where he came from.”
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.