``Everyone has a father in their lives,
and he's hurt by that. It bothers his mind. He's asked me, `Mom, what do
you think it would have been like?'''
Shirley Irby Garnett
Not many people outside of Nickeltown, an
old and hilly black neighborhood in Greenville, know Kevin Garnett's father
is O'Lewis McCullough.
McCullough, 48, is remembered there as ``Bye-Bye
45.'' He was No. 45, captain of the Beck High School basketball team and
on a fast break he would be . . . gone. ``Bye-Bye 45.''
Although just 6-4, he was one of the most
dominating centers in the Greenville area. A team player but aggressive,
he was known for his shot-blocking ability, timing and scoring. After high
school, he played for local leagues and in the Army.
``Back then, if you didn't make it to college,
you didn't get looked at,'' McCullough says.
Most of the good players he knew all wound
up like him, ``getting a job, raising a family.''
He met Kevin's mother a year or two before
Kevin was born May 19, 1976.
``It was something that happened when we
were young,'' he says. ``Things that happened between his mother and I
-- that's between us.''
McCullough married his wife, Frances, almost
20 years ago. He works for the Robert Bosch Corp. making diesel pumps and
lives outside Charleston. He and his wife have two sons, Christopher, 11,
and O'Lewis Jr., a 6-3 high school sophomore who plays basketball at Garrett
Academy of Technology.
McCullough has two other sons -- Isaac and
Kenneth -- who are older than Kevin. Kevin has met all of his half brothers,
except Kenneth, according to McCullough.
McCullough says he sent weekly support payments
to Kevin's mother ``from day one.'' Kevin also visited him in Charleston
several summers, when they played basketball together, he says.
Kevin's grandparents, Odell and Mary McCullough,
still live in the small house in Nickeltown where they raised their six
children. Before moving to Mauldin as a middle-school student, Kevin lived
nearby and attended elementary schools in the neighborhood. He did not
seem to know he had relatives in the area until he made friends with his
older cousin Shammond Williams, now a guard on the University of North
Carolina basketball team.
After that, his mother occasionally brought
him to visit his grandparents, Mary McCullough says.
She recalls one day when she pointed out
to Kevin all the houses in the area where he had relatives living.
``You got people here, you got people here,''
she told him.
She says Kevin, who was then about 11, exclaimed,
``Granny, I'm rich! I got a whole lot of kin.''
Kevin last visited ``Granny'' and ``Papa''
McCullough this past summer. ``Papa,'' who worked as a stucco plasterer
for 47 years, says he asked Kevin, ``How many pairs of shoes you got?''
Kevin responded by taking off the white,
$70, size 15 Nike Jumpmans he had on and handing them to his grandfather.
He later left the house in his socks.
The last time O'Lewis McCullough saw Kevin
was during the summer between Kevin's junior and senior year of high school.
``I remember he said something to me then
about how come I never came to see him play at Mauldin, and I told him
to send me a schedule so I could try to take some time off to come,'' he
says.
That never happened, though. Kevin went
to Chicago for his senior year of high school, a move that took McCullough
by surprise. He says he called Kevin in Chicago and left a message on an
answering machine but never got any response.
He has followed his son's career by saving
news articles and watching him on TV.
``I think he could be more aggressive in
his playing,'' he says. ``Two things I'd like to see him do and haven't
are develop a first step to the bucket, where he can drive past a man,
and learn to be more of a power forward, playing with his back to the rim.
I've never seen him develop that type of shot.''
At Bosch, a few of McCullough's co-workers
know he is Kevin Garnett's father. Some of them asked how he felt after
Kevin signed his $125 million contract. Did he have any regrets?
``I can't worry about that,'' he says. ``I'm
going to continue to do what I do each and every day: Get up, go to work
and make sure everybody in this house is happy and satisfied. I've got
two kids here, a family I have to keep going.''
McCullough says he cannot telephone Kevin
because he does not have a home number for him.
``He knows where I am,'' McCullough says.
``If he called, I'm here for him -- like I've always been. The love is
out for him.''
Garnett's biological father
Garnett's kin