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It’s easy to get caught up in assessing greatness. Like getting caught in Michael Phelps’s wake. Or getting twisted in a Simone Biles floor routine. And until Sunday, it was almost inevitable that you’d get caught in Usain Bolt’s dust. But Bolt’s loss in the 100m final at the IAAF World Championships reminds us that greatness is not a currency based on the gold standard, but a currency by fiat.
This latter greatness is as much about what we’ve felt as it is about what we’ve seen. And where we substitute the question “who is the greatest?” with a more tractable one—who do we want to be the greatest?—without even realizing we’ve changed the question.
When Kobe Bryant was asked in one of his many “exit interviews” during the final lame-duck season of his career, “who is the toughest person you’ve ever played?” the answer may have been a bit surprising to some. He listed off some tough competitors: Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury, Gilbert Arenas, Carmelo Anthony, and Kevin Durant. Strangely, King James was absent from the list.
At the top of the list, the toughest player Kobe had ever squared off against? Tracy McGrady.
Love him or hate him, Kobe Bryant is arguably one of the top ten greatest NBA players ever. He has five rings. Multiple MVPs. Tracy McGrady? He’s a footnote. Not a ring to his name. A hall of famer maybe, but he’d be lucky to sniff the top 50 greatest players of all time.
So how did McGrady make it to the top of Kobe’s list?
The easier, more dismissive part of the answer is that Kobe picked a player whose legacy poses no threat to his own. Do you think he left LeBron off his honorable mention list by accident?
But still, that is an incomplete explanation. I think even Kobe recognizes, if only from a safe distance now, that McGrady was special. That there was something in the way he played—something that no one could accurately count or rank or metricize.
A greatness not by rings and MVPs, but by collective decree.
To appreciate the mythology of McGrady, we must go back in time, before he became known as one of the greatest players to never actually win anything, before he finished out his career as a benchwarmer with San Antonio, and before he pulled a Kenny Powers and tried to work his way into the major leagues after he’d peaked as an athlete. Not all the way back to the 90s when Jordan was redefining basketball and competition and the athlete-consumer nexus. No, a little more recent than that, when Kobe was beginning to look like more than just the Robin to Shaq’s Batman. Jordan was there too, making his third debut in fact, but he was no longer the league’s greatest player. More elder statesman in a jersey.
These were the early aughts in the NBA, fresh off the reboot of the Lakers dynasty, of a Kings team that people actually paid attention to. Of a rising Paul Pierce. And of a young Richard Jefferson before he was cryogenically preserved only to be thawed ten years later, without any apparent signs of wear, to help LeBron win the 2016 NBA championship for Cleveland.
That was the NBA era I “grew up” on. I was late to the NBA, late to sports in general. So my player wasn’t Jordan. And it wasn’t Kobe, the heir apparent to Jordan’s throne.
My guy was Tracy Lamar McGrady Jr.
T-Mac. The Big Sleep. And for at least a few years, I wasn’t the only one who thought McGrady might transcend Kobe as the greatest player of the time. Might go on to be something else altogether, something like Jordan when he first arrived in the NBA, which is to say, as-yet-seen.
For a few years McGrady’s play forced you to choose a side. Forced you to acknowledge, as Bill Walton never tired of reminding us, that this was the rivalry of the modern NBA. And everyone watching, be they sportswriter, fan, coach or player had to answer the question: Are you for Team Kobe, or Team Mac?
He had the dream mix of body and skillset previously only found in “create your player” modes of video games. A 6-foot-8 shooting guard. Yes, a 6 foot, 8 inch shooting guard. Usually with that kind of height you sacrifice dribbling skills. But not McGrady. He had, in the words of a good friend of mine, handles for days.
His first step was absurdly quick. He could shoot from anywhere on the floor before Steph Curry redefined the colloquial meaning of “anywhere on the floor” to actually encompass the entire floor. And efficiency, hoo-boy was T-Mac efficient. If McGrady got the ball he was shooting (and likely making) it, or passing for one of his many assists.
In the 2002-2003 season McGrady put up the following stat line:
32.1 points (NBA-high), 6.5 rebounds, 5.5 assists, 1.4 steals and 0.6 blocks per game while shooting 45.7 percent from the field with a league-best 30.3 PER.
Those aren’t Kobe numbers. Those are LeBron numbers, with Durant’s efficiency.
And the highlights.
It’s cliché to say that McGrady was a human highlight reel—so I’ll refrain from writing it. Wink, wink.
There’s this one McGrady play that I can’t get out of my head. I remember the announcers being as did-that-just-happen?! as I was at the time, though I’ve yet to find it on YouTube.
In the play, McGrady vaults towards the basket to catch a lob, only to realize that he’s in the middle of an alley oop gone terribly wrong. The ball has gone by him and is sailing behind the backboard towards the stands. But McGrady doesn’t admit defeat. Instead he reaches out with his go-go-gadget arms – reaches behind the fucking backboard – pulls the ball back in towards him, switches the ball to his left hand, and proceeds to lay the ball in the hoop.
I cannot describe to you how much that single play impacted my view of Tracy McGrady, or moreover, of basketball itself. It was without a doubt the most Matrix-y thing I’ve ever seen. Keep in mind, this was also the era of Shawn Marion—THE ACTUAL MATRIX.
Sport is not poetry. It is nonfiction. But some players evoke something more than stat lines and commentaries on work ethic. They even evoke more than a bar-room debate over the greatest of all time. They inspire, for example, writers to do the strange work of converting an athlete’s kinetic energy into prose, as if unlocking some hereto-unknown latent word energy.
My appreciation of McGrady is probably predicated as much on reading about his greatness in those years as it is on witnessing it for myself. Ralph Wiley, a columnist for Sports Illustrated and ESPN, wrote about McGrady with the sort of literary panache that David Foster Wallace used in his pieces on Federer and tennis.
If I can’t convince you of McGrady’s greatness, or Kobe, perhaps you will listen to Wiley. Here’s how he describes facing off against McGrady on the court:
If the opponent doesn’t double, T-Mac stands out high, ball on hip, but held slightly behind his body, not like a rook showing ball so it can be picked … he only seems to be nonchalant … he regards the set-up with those wide-spaced, otherwordly, sleepy, soulful eyes, and you feel like he’s already on either side of you. Both sides at once. And then he does whatever he wants to do. Basically. From deep, or on the drive, or on the pull-up, on the up-and-under, off the backboard to his ownself … tell me, how do you want it?
Do not overlook Wiley’s point about McGrady’s eyes.
Just try looking at him, staring into his eyes and not feeling like he’s somehow lulling you into submission, into sleep.
Here is Wiley writing in that same piece about a prominent vein in McGrady’s arm, as he searches for McGrady’s source of power.
I do know there’s the Vein. The Vein looks like a garden hose as it shoots down from his shoulder through his right, or shooting, arm. Maybe that’s what gives him the Power.
Maybe it’s just good circulation.
Flashing back to modern Olympic heroes, Phelps apparently has a body built like a fish, so commenting on his peculiar physical traits in trying to explain his greatness seems fitting. Same for Bolt, though there his extreme height provides not an explanation for his speed, but a paradox to be explained since excessive height is usually seen as a hindrance to sprinters.
But when is the last time you read something about Phelps’ eyes? As if that somehow unlocked the key to something deeper about his success? Or Bolts’ veins?
Here is Wiley describing McGrady on the burgeoning Kobe/McGrady rivalry circa 2003:
Kobe is like the Jordan of a New Age and World, and is quite intentionally built by Kobe almost entirely in Jordan’s image. He even walks like Jordan, like a superstar, a gunslinger, like it’s his world and you’re just a squirrel, trying to get a nut…
But T-Mac is even more of an original. He is inexplicable, actually, coming from no pedigree, as if someone grafted Penny Hardaway with a fire-breathing dragon, then gave him the cunning of a wolf and the remorselessness of a cobra and put it in the country, in a football-mad state like Florida, coming from, to, then through and beyond Vinsanity, with crazy hops, Shuttle-booster thighs, pencil calves, a monster first step, and the sleeve drop of a seven-footer.
While Kobe was Jordan 2.0, McGrady was something altogether different.
Penny Hardaway grafted with a fire-breathing dragon. Kobe’s greatness is one measured in the traditional metrics and awards, like defensive player of the year and the six championships he chased. But Wiley, and folks like me, looked at McGrady, with his lack of rings and stats that were better, but not unequivocally better across the board than Kobe’s at the time, and felt compelled to explain a greatness that we wanted McGrady to have.
Do I get teased by friends for wanting to bring T-Mac into discussions of the greatest NBA players of our generation? Certainly. Am I relying too much on Bill Walton, my recollections of one fantastical play that has yet to materialize on YouTube, and my admiration of Wiley’s prose? Probably.
T-Mac’s greatness is not the same sort that we see on display on the world stage. It’s more fragile, complex and open to interpretation. And yet once the ceremonies are closed, the medals and awards are given, that more illusive sort of greatness it is the only kind of greatness we have left. We find McGrady as we drift back towards the sports, and the athletes, with which we have a more regular, and visceral, connection. Into a domain where our intimacy and season long exposure allows us to feel greatness in a way that we never could by just camping out at the trophy ceremony.
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