By PAUL FLANNERY {Boston Phoenix} August 15, 2010
WILL POWER: At 26, Blalock is at the point in his career where he’s not so much auditioning for teams as reminding them what he can do. It’s been a long haul, but if he’s frustrated, it doesn’t show: “When the bell rings and it’s time to go,” he says, “you can’t think like that.”
LAS VEGAS — The Cox Arena is sold out. Everyone is here to see John Wall make his professional debut for the Washington Wizards. The top pick in the 2010 draft, Wall has a game that's undeniably electric, which is why Reebok gave him $25 million to wear their kicks before he even put on a uniform, and why everyone who has anything to do with the NBA is in the building. Everything about him says superstar. He's 19 years old and living the dream.
At the other end of the floor is reality.
Will Blalock, the pride of Mission Hill and a four-year veteran of the professional grind, takes his seat at the end of the Golden State Warriors bench. Barring some extremely good fortune, he won't come remotely close to making as much in his entire career as Wall will get from his rookie contract, let alone his sneaker deal. He's a point guard like Wall, but in every other way the two couldn't be further apart.
Blalock is 26 years old, going on 27, and his NBA career has consisted of exactly 14 games, with his last appearance coming in 2007. In between, he's bounced around from Israel to the Development League to Germany and back again. He doesn't know where he will be playing next year and his future is as shrouded in uncertainty as Wall's is secure.
If not for Wall's presence on the court, the arena would be much quieter during an NBA summer-league game. Typically, the action off the court is far more interesting than anything that happens on the floor. Only here can you bump into the head of the players' union getting a pretzel at the concession stand, or kill an hour trading gossip with a coach at the Hard Rock.
There are 23 teams in Las Vegas and about 270 players, but only a handful actually have NBA contracts. The vast majority, like Blalock, are essentially independent contractors, hustling for their next gig. Some will never make it, while others are locked in basketball limbo: good enough to be there, but not good enough for one of the few jobs available. Blalock falls into the latter category.
"All these guys on the bubble, they're not not NBA players," says David Thorpe, an analyst for espn.com and the executive director of the Pro Training Center in Clearwater, Florida. "They're NBA-[caliber] players. They just need a break."
Blalock's well-connected agent, Reggie Brown, is determined to get him that break. "I'm going to do everything I can to give him the opportunity, because it's his time," Brown says. "I'm not going to ask for a favor. I don't want any favors for him because he's good enough to be there and if he wasn't, I'd tell him."
But Blalock is more circumspect about his prospects. He'd love to be back in the NBA, but he's thinking about going overseas, where the money is better. "If this is a game of cards, my hand really ain't that great right now," he says. "[Europe] is an opportunity to make money for me and my family. I realize in the back of my mind there's not a lot of teams picking up 26-year-old point guards."
Mingled with the 4000 paying customers to watch Wall's debut are scouts, general managers, and coaches representing every level of professional basketball, both here and abroad — and quite possibly his next employer.
You might think this would make someone in Blalock's position nervous, but very little fazes him when it comes to basketball. He battled Chris Paul in his AAU days and was one of the top 100 college recruits in his high-school class. He made SportsCenter's top plays twice while at Iowa Stateand lives on in the school's record book alongside Cyclone heroes like Jeff Hornacek and Jamaal Tinsley. He was a second-round draft pick and spent a year with the Detroit Pistons when they were still championship contenders.
As the game begins, Blalock's face is stoic, unmoved, and he betrays exactly zero emotion. If he is frustrated by his circumstances, he learned long ago not to let it show. This is his credo: "When the bell rings and it's time to go — 'Will, get in there' — you can't think like that because it messes up your whole situation."
All things considered, his situation isn't that bad. He is, after all, making a living playing ball and everyone here whose opinion matters about basketball knows his name — he's not so much auditioning for teams as reminding them. Beyond all that, there is something else that makes him see this encounter as just another in a long line of possibilities. Two years ago in an airport terminal, Will Blalock came perilously close to losing everything.
'I wake up and everyone's gone'
In the spring of 2008, Blalock was sitting in Logan Airport with a first-class ticket to Seattle and an invitation to the Sonics mini-camp. (This was just before the franchise was relocated to Oklahoma City.) The invite carried no guarantees, but Blalock was feeling good about his chances.
He was only a year removed from the NBA, where he absorbed as much as he could from veterans like Chauncey Billups and Rasheed Wallace. From Chauncey, he learned how to run a team and think two or three steps ahead on the court, and from Sheed he learned to see beyond the hype when he was away from it.
He split his time shuttling between the Pistons and their D-League affiliate in South Dakota, an experience he found useful, if not humbling. The D is bus rides through the Badlands and airplane connections in Atlanta, always Atlanta, zigzagging across the country with a game somewhere in Texas one night and another in New Mexico the next. The NBA is tantalizingly close and yet another universe away.
Blalock spent one season with Detroit, playing in those 14 games, but when the Pistons didn't renew his contract he did a brief stint in Israel and spent the rest of the next year back in the D with Anaheim. It wasn't glamorous, but he was gaining experience. The young team in Seattle represented a great opportunity to get back in the league.
That's when everything went wrong.
"It was crazy, man," Blalock remembers. "It felt like I blacked out. I couldn't feel nothing. It was like something got numb."
He was on the phone in the terminal when he reached down to pick up a drink. "I couldn't feel my hand," Blalock says. "I hung up the phone and my arm was dangling."
A woman sitting next to him asked if he was okay. He said yes, and stood up to look for his ticket. When he got to his feet, he discovered that he was drenched in sweat and that the left side of his body wouldn't move. The woman ran to get help. He took a step back, and began to pray.
"The next thing I remember," says Blalock, "I wake up and everyone's gone." He had just suffered a stroke.
Blalock was rushed to the hospital, where doctors performed an MRI and a CAT scan. He knew about the small hole in his heart — he was born with it, although it had never been a problem — but a blood clot was found near his neck. Either could have caused the stroke. The doctors told him that if he had boarded the plane he could have died.
"I was scared," his friend Will Dickerson recalls. "I had tears in my eyes, because that's my little brother. Had he got on that plane, God knows what would have happened."
The Johnson Center
The two Wills may be unrelated, but they're as close as family. Dickerson is five years older and remembers first seeing Blalock as a 13-year-old kid throwing behind-the-back passes at the Thomas Johnson Center in Roxbury. He's been watching, critiquing, and supporting his friend ever since.
To the extent that Blalock has an entourage, Dickerson and a small group from home are basically it. Blalock still lives in Boston and Dickerson fondly recalls Blalock riding his bike over to the Johnson Center after his season with the Pistons to spend time with the kids who hung out there. "He's got a big heart," Dickerson says. "Will doesn't know how to say 'no.' "
Blalock grew up a few feet from the center and it was there that he watched local legends like Randall Jackson and Wayne Turner play — not to mention his sister, Marsha, who was the reigning hoop star in the family at the time. It was where he began to get serious about ball, and where he began to get his own rep.
His talent took him from East Boston High to Notre Dame Prep. In the summers, his toughness was forged by Leo Papile's Boston Amateur Basketball Club, whose players delighted in going to high-profile AAU tournaments and beating their more-hyped opponents.
Jeff Adrien, the powerful former Brookline High and UConn star, remembers watching Blalock in his BABC days and being in awe. "Nobody could guard him," says Adrien, a free agent who played with the Grizzlies in Vegas. "Still, no one can guard him."
Blalock signed with Iowa State, but on the day he Fed-Exed his letter of intent, ISU coach Larry Eustachy went on ESPN to announce that he was leaving the school because of a drinking problem, after photos of him partying with co-eds hit the Internet. It was a huge scandal, but Blalock is able to laugh about it now. He spoke up for assistant Wayne Morgan and kept his commitment once Morgan got the job.
Blalock skipped his senior year to turn pro, a decision he would rethink if he had the chance. "It goes by so fast," he says of college. "Kids don't realize." He pauses a beat. "You really miss it."
And so, at just 24, when he should've been hitting his prime, Blalock found himself recovering from a stroke. He underwent heart surgery and was put on blood thinners and Coumadin. The doctors told him his career was on hold for the next seven or eight months. They may as well have told him that he was done. "I felt like that was the beginning of the end," Blalock says. "I didn't know which way was up. I was stressing out every day. It was a tough time."
Blalock began his comeback with the Artland Dragons in Germany in late 2008, and then it was back to the states for another D-League tour last season. Only now does he feel like he's getting his game back together, and the simple act of playing basketball has taken on a new meaning. "After that episode, I felt like a completely different person," Blalock says. "For the people that love me from Boston, just to see me out there, it's big for them."
Dancing with John Wall
After an opening quarter in which Wall basically confirms everyone's belief that he's the second coming, Blalock gets his chance. His job is to make Wall's life difficult, and that means getting up into him defensively and shedding picks set by a seven-foot behemoth named Hamady N'Diaye. Wall very quickly finds out that it won't be as easy to get to the rim against Blalock, who — despite standing only six feet tall — is deceptively strong.
It would be a nice end to this small snapshot of Will Blalock's life if he got into a duel with the phenom and had GMs rushing up to him afterward with contracts in hand. This very scenario will take place several days later when a rookie from Harvard named Jeremy Lin goes off against Wall and winds up with a guaranteed deal from the Warriors. Blalock's experience isn't nearly as dramatic.
Wall finishes the game with 24 points and eight assists and the Wizards win easily. He gets front-page treatment in the Las Vegas paper, while Blalock — after getting only one assist in 18 minutes — is relegated to the "Nonstars" notation in Scott Schroder's D-League blog, Ridiculous Upside.
It's a little unfair, since Blalock spends most of his minutes on offense camped out in the corner, which not only accentuates his biggest weakness (his outside shot), it also negates his best attribute — his ability to run the offense and break defenders down with his dribble.
When he does have a chance to operate, he's able to lay down a move that draws a few oohs and aahs from the crowd, but he isn't able to finish inside and he can't knock down the two open jumpers that come his way. Passes that should become assists are dropped and kickouts for jump shots are missed. "I've been in far worse situations," Blalock says. "If I have my opportunity, even if it's for 20 seconds, it's an opportunity."
A few nights later, Blalock is back in action against Miami at the 18,500-seat Thomas & Mack Center. It's the last game of the night and the buzz is completely gone. He's playing in front of a couple hundred half-interested folks, Dickerson and Brown among them, and there's a spooky, soul-crushing ambiance in the nearly deserted arena. Opportunity is opportunity.
All the Warriors have to do to finish it off is get the ball inbounds and make a couple of free throws. Blalock is the inbounder, but the Heat decide not to guard him and his defender is turned away from the play, a rookie mistake. Seeing this, he whips the ball off the unsuspecting player's back, picks it up himself and gets fouled.
Blalock's coach buries his head in his hands but emerges with a huge grin on his face. His teammates pat him on the head. Dickerson is up on his feet, relieved that his little brother's gamble has paid off. The only one unaffected by the chaos is Will, who steps to the line and calmly makes both free throws.
Ultimately, Blalock chose security over opportunity, signing a one-year contract with the Townsville Crocodiles in Australia. He thought about taking another run at the NBA, but after talking to the Crocs coach, Gleeson Taylor, he felt like he finally found the right situation. The team finished third in Australia's National Basketball League last year, and Taylor convinced Blalock that he was the missing piece.
"He was straightforward with me and said he was looking for what I do: lead guard and a vocal leader on the court," says Blalock.
He had to go halfway around the world, but maybe, just maybe, Will Blalock has finally found a basketball home.
Paul Flannery covers the Celtics for weei.com and teaches journalism at Boston University. He can be reached at pflannery@weei.com.
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