``He loved basketball. And he already knew
he was going to the NBA.''Janie Willoughby Scouts from out-of-state showed
up at the Mauldin High School games. Little kids ran up to Kevin Garnett,
wanting his autograph. Nike invited him to basketball camps in Indiana,
Oregon and Illinois. Kevin received a lot of mail at the high school. He
asked Janie Willoughby, who taught him U.S. history, if she would help
him figure out what mail he should pay attention to. She set aside a large
drawer in the credenza behind her desk as Kevin's mailbox. He often was
tired in her class, which was just before lunch. If he finished his work,
he would grab an afghan from one of a collection of blankets Willoughby
has in a milk crate, and he would stretch out there next to the credenza.
Willoughby kept a stash of candy there for him, too. He was always hungry.
Kevin wrote and scratched his initials in and around her classroom. ``K.G.''
on a typewriter cover. ``K.G.'' on the outside of a door jamb. The initials
are still there. ``He can shuck and jive and street talk when he wants
to,'' says Willoughby, 56 and a teacher for 30 years. ``But when it came
time to do a paper, he would say to me, `Now, I have to use proper English,
don't I?' '' He was one of the most well-mannered young men she has taught
and an auditory learner, she says. ``If you told him something, he never
forgot it.'' She recalls the time he did a paper on the Boston Tea Party
and was required to give an oral report. She held the report in her hand,
and he stood before the class without any notes. He easily reeled off everything
he had written. But every so often, he would stop and ask: ``Is that enough
yet for a `B?' '' ``No, no, no,'' she said, ``just to keep him going.''
Once, Willoughby remembers, another student was shy about giving her report
on John Kennedy. Kevin encouraged the girl to go ahead, telling her he
would sit near her. Whenever she stopped, he asked her a question. And
when she finished, Kevin said, ``OK, folks. Let's give her a big hand.''
Kevin was a good student in Willoughby's class. But he struggled in other
classes that required lots of reading. He didn't apply himself as much
as he could have and did not accept offers of tutoring help. It seemed
he had already decided his future was basketball. Kevin averaged 27 points,
17 rebounds and seven blocks per game his junior season. When he played
in the upper-state championship in March 1994, no one realized it would
be his last game with the Mavericks. But it was. In May, a white student
was injured during a fight at Mauldin. Kevin was one of five black students
charged with second-degree lynching, a charge that in South Carolina includes
simple assault. His arrest made headlines in the Greenville papers. Some
said Kevin was an innocent bystander and that the white student was a known
troublemaker who taunted black students, sometimes calling them ``niggers.''
Kevin did not confide what happened even to longtime friends. ``He never
talked about it,'' Baron ``Bear'' Franks says. ``But I do know he felt
really betrayed.'' Says Murray Long, a white student who was a year ahead
of Kevin and played with him on the Mauldin team: ``Just knowing Kevin
like I do, I don't think he ever would do anything to hurt anyone, and
I never understood why the whole thing was made such a big deal. ``When
someone told me Kevin was arrested -- for lynching -- I kind of laughed.
I just didn't believe it.'' Kevin, who had never been in trouble before,
qualified for pretrial intervention. Meanwhile, his mother decided she
did not want her son to attend Mauldin High School for his senior year.
She made plans to transfer Kevin to Farragut Academy, a public high school
on Chicago's West Side. Kevin already knew William Nelson, one of Farragut's
coaches, from a Nike basketball summer camp. ``I had to save him,'' says
Kevin's mother.
Garnett leaves his mark