At age 3, Jason Frederick Kidd provided no hints he would earn $70 million before his 30th birthday or be a chosen savior of an NBA franchise.
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At that time in the mid-1970s, all Kidd wanted to be was a cowboy.
“John Wayne was his main man,” said Kidd’s mother, Anne. “He wanted to ride around and be tough just like him.”
Thanks in part to Suki, Kidd never rode into the sunset. In fact, he barely rode. During an Oakland, Calif., afternoon atop an Appaloosa named Suki, one of the family’s three horses, Kidd learned the hard way it’s difficult being tough.
“Yeah, they warned me, but I wanted to go fast like John Wayne did on TV,” Kidd said. “Just when I got going, a dog ran out and spooked Suki. He raised up and bucked me off, and that was it; my riding career was over. I knew it was time to use my own two feet.”
Eighteen years and a couple of more failed experiments later, Kidd is more successfully following in the path of his other childhood idol: Magic Johnson. With spectacularly subtle passes, legendary high school career, lucky rubber band and handful of recent uncharacteristic incidents tucked in his baggage, the Mavericks’ first-round draft choice hopes to help transform the NBA’s worst team into a winner and himself into a star.
“I’d like to be rookie of the year and play in the playoffs,” said Kidd.
“I know those are strong predictions, but I’m going to stand by them all season.”
Despite being only 21, Kidd smirks at the so-called pressure of being the NBA’s No.2 overall pick. He chuckles at criticism about his inconsistent jump shot and about the trappings of a fast-paced career in the limelight.
You see, life in the NBA isn’t unusually demanding for a Kidd whose formative years were spent in the limelight. Kidd grew up with a white mother and black father, held news conferences in the eighth grade and saw his academic grades make banner headlines. One of his best friends committed suicide, and Kidd was recently slapped with a paternity suit, a civil lawsuit alleging abuse and a court appearance for leaving the scene of an accident.
“The attention’s been there as long as I can remember,” Kidd said. “It’s like a part of me I think will always be there. Kind of like an old girlfriend’s phone number.”
Anne Kidd can’t remember a time when Jason wasn’t playing with some type of ball in their middle-class house in the hills surrounding Oakland.
“We were just keeping him occupied,” she said. “We knew he was coordinated from the time he was an infant even. But we never really thought, `Wow, he could be a star.’ “
That soon changed, about the time the records started falling.
In the fourth grade, Kidd set his first mark, scoring 21 of his team’s 30 points in a Catholic League game.
Though soccer was his first love, Kidd followed the lead of close friends Andre Cornwell, Kris Stone and Jay Hadnot to the cement basketball court with the 8-foot-high rims. In the sixth grade at Grass Valley Elementary School, the legend was born.
“About that time everybody started saying how great Jason was,” Steve Kidd said. “We were flattered but a little afraid to accept it. But by high school, there was no doubt he was going to be something special.”
With Cornwell and Hadnot helping develop his game, Kidd was being force-fed his life. Surprisingly, however, he said growing up the son of a Baptist airline worker from Missouri and an Irish Catholic banker from San Francisco was nothing but positive.
“It was different back then, and there were times when it got a little thick,” Kidd said. “But I got a lot of inspiration from those days, and I realized I have the greatest parents in the world.”
By the eighth grade, Kidd was receiving letters from colleges.
“But he never got the big head,” said sister Denise, 18. “I hung out with him and the guys. He picked on me but let me hang around. He never acted like a superstar.”
In the summer before his freshman year at St. Joseph’s of Notre Dame High School in Alameda, Calif., Kidd played in pickup games in packed gyms before spectators such as then-Cal coach Lou Campanelli.
“Even then, you could tell Jason was more than special,” longtime St. Joseph’s coach Frank LaPorte said. “Lou leaned over to me and asked about the new kid, thinking he was a junior or senior transfer. When I told him he was an eighth-grader, he about fell off the bleachers.”
Later that summer, Kidd was chosen the most valuable player of a pro-am league that included NBA starting guards Gary Payton of Seattle and Brian Shaw, then of Boston.
“He’s been destined for the NBA since he could walk,” said close friend Payton.
There is no hiding Kidd’s boyish enthusiasm when he talks about Cornwell and LaPorte, or his somber contemplation when Hadnot’s name comes up. Each, he says, helped build his game.
Back on the court at Grass Valley, Kidd was a self-described “scrub,” four years younger than Hadnot and most of the players. Usually picked last for games, Kidd learned quickly that the more he passed the more readily he was picked.
“It was intimidating to play with them, but Jay made me,” Kidd said. “I was just out there for exercise at first, but he taught me how to pass and who to pass to. He helped me develop my joy for passing.”
Unknown to Kidd, Hadnot was also developing a drug addiction. After leaving a drug rehabilitation center in 1990, Hadnot killed himself at 21.
“Jay taught me a lot of lessons,” Kidd said softly. “Showing me what can happen if you decide to use drugs was one of them.”
While Hadnot was the friend Kidd lost, Cornwell became “the brother I never had.” It was the 5-foot-8 Cornwell who teamed with Kidd on the late-night court to perfect what they claimed was an original, unstoppable play.
“We saw Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) and Magic run this sweet give-and-go, so we decided that would be our play, too,” Kidd said. “We called it the `GG’ and acted like we invented it. Andre even wanted me to get goggles like Kareem.”
But it was LaPorte who saw the most in Kidd.
LaPorte, now in his 14th season at tiny St. Joseph’s, helped market Kidd into a Northern California cult hero, one a newspaper called “the best Bay Area basketball talent ever, including Bill Russell.” It was LaPorte’s idea to move St. Joseph’s games from their 800-seat gym to the Oakland Coliseum, where they drew crowds up to 11,000.
With Kidd at the controls, St. Joseph’s won consecutive Division I state championships and went 122-14.
“Jason put our school on the map,” LaPorte said like a proud papa. “Once we had 5,000 fans at a game. When I took Jason out with four minutes left, 4,999 got up and walked out.”
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LaPorte had Kidd raise money for team road trips by selling doughnuts in the gym at 7 a.m., autographing 250 rubber basketballs to be auctioned at a pancake breakfast and putting his likeness on T-shirts, caps and posters that still blanket the coaching office walls.
“He’s my godfather,” Kidd said. “He’s 99 percent of the reason I’m the player and person I am today.”
Said LaPorte: “I love him like a son.”
As a senior, Kidd promised LaPorte a new car if he became the nation’s No. 1 recruit. Goal achieved, Kidd then autographed a picture for LaPorte with the drawing of a car and “That’s Next” scribbled in the corner. LaPorte, who drives a mid-1980s Thunderbird, dreams of a “Cadillac El Dorado with a maroon interior.” Kidd says he plans to deliver on his promise when he can secretly videotape the scene himself.
“Just planning it in my mind, I know it’s a moment I’ll never forget,” Kidd said. For the time being, Kidd surprised LaPorte with two tickets to the NBA draft in June.
“He’d do anything for anybody,” LaPorte said. “In fact, I’ve only seen him turn down one fan request.”
On a St. Joseph’s trip to Arkansas, a woman propped her teen-ager up in front of Kidd and said, “This is my daughter. I hope you marry her someday.”
“I can’t describe what it was like,” LaPorte said. “Watching him play, or even practice, was like a spiritual event. People wanted to see the kid make something so impossible look effortless.”
Kidd says he was “numb” to all the attention even before his first day at the University of California, which he chose because he could stay close to home and help build a program. But late in the summer of 1992, Kidd received a sobering dose of reality.
The front-page headline in the Oakland Tribune read, “Kidd Fails SAT Again.”
“That’s when we realized how out of whack things had become,” said Anne. “It was an eye-opener.”
Kidd made the required 700 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test on his fourth attempt, opening the door to a record-setting, albeit short career in Berkeley.
An admittedly unenthusiastic student, Kidd struggled with classroom books while rewriting the record books on the court. Despite being accused of instigating a mutiny of academics-oriented coach Campanelli-“I was the furthest person from it,” said Kidd-he set school career records for steals and the Pacific-10 Conference career record for assists in only two seasons while earning All-America and conference player of the year honors as a sophomore.
“All eyes were on him,” said Campanelli’s successor, Todd Bozeman. “And he produced spectacular results night in and night out.”
While at Cal, Kidd also established the Jason Kidd Foundation, to which contributions were made from his “Kidd Klub” official fan club and $19.99 highlight video.
“People literally chased him night and day,” Bozeman said. “Fans would sneak inside the locker room or just run onto the court. We finally had to move him off the campus.”
After a first-round upset loss to Wisconsin-Green Bay in last spring’s NCAA Tournament, Kidd moved himself permanently off campus and into the NBA draft. Even at the ultimate level, the accolades piled up like his assist totals.
Washington Bullets General Manager John Nash called Kidd “the best passer on the planet,” Denver Nuggets GM Bernie Bickerstaff said he was “in his own world,” and Mavericks coach Dick Motta labeled him a player that comes around “once a decade.” Because of his size (6-foot-4, 205 pounds) and respect for the fundamentals of the game, scouts said Kidd was the best defensive point guard to come out of college since Walt Frazier in 1967 and the best pure point since Isiah Thomas in 1981.
But less than a month before the draft, for the first time since the eighth grade, the Kidd bandwagon wobbled and almost crashed.
Kidd, the consummate floor general, began making terrible off-court choices that had the Mavericks wondering if he was a problem child instead of a wonder kid. Kidd’s paradise became his paradox.
“He made a couple of really bad decisions at terrible times,” Anne said.
First, Kidd was hit with a paternity suit in mid-May by 21-year-old Alexandria Brown, who said she needed financial support for her son, Jason Jr., fathered by Kidd. A court ordered Kidd to pay Brown’s legal fees of $15,000, $4,000 a month in child support and provide health insurance. Kidd since signed a nine-year, $54 million contract with the Mavericks and an eight-year, $15 million deal with Nike, and another court hearing is pending.
“I never denied he is my son, and legally I’ve done everything to take care of him financially,” Kidd said. “The day he was born is a day I’ll always remember. Those kinds of things happen every day, but mine got blown out of proportion because I’m an athlete.”
Later in May, Kidd flipped a Toyota Landcruiser he bought for his father and, in a panic, left the scene and two unharmed passengers via a car driven by Brown. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to two years probation, 100 hours of community service and $1,000 fine for leaving the scene of an accident.
“I should have stayed, no doubt about it,” Kidd said. “That taught me a lesson. I’m only 21, but I’ve got to do things by the book, too.”
In June, Tameka Tate sued Kidd for $250,000, claiming he hit her at his 21st birthday party last March. The Oakland District Attorney’s office ruled there was not enough evidence for a criminal case.
“That showed that one minute you can graze somebody and the next be defending yourself,” Kidd said. “From now on I’ll make sure I bump into my best friend and then say, `Excuse me, I’m sorry.’
“Those incidents aren’t based on my character. They are all isolated events, and it’s not fair I’m tagged as somebody who’s going to be crazy or bad. I know I’m a very good person.”
Anne wouldn’t say her son has been treated unfairly by the media, but she does wonder aloud why so much attention is given to his scrapes with the law and so little to his $46,100 donation to a West Dallas church so it could buy a new gym floor.
“If you read what’s written lately, you’d think Jason was some kind of monster,” Anne said. “And a dumb one at that.”
Kidd may not be a magna cum laude, but he did learn from the incidents.
“Nobody or nothing can pierce my family’s circle of me, my mom, dad and my two sisters (Denise and Kim, 10),” Kidd said. “And I learned life is a lot like golf. Not every shot is intended to go into the hole, but every one counts.”