Selected 9th overall in the 1995 NBA Draft by the New Jersey Nets, UCLA’s Ed O’Bannon will share his insight over the next week into this year’s draft on Thursday. In Part 2 of 4 of his draft diary, O’Bannon recalls the week-long extravaganza leading up to the big night.
Our draft was in Toronto. My parents, my brother, my wife – who was my girlfriend at the time – and my agent went.
It was kind of like a scheduled vacation. The draft picks and their families all ate together, and we got a chance to know each other on a different level. Everything that you had worked for had been done. So the only thing left to do was taste the fruits of all your work. There was no basketball being played. It was all about enjoying each other’s company. These are guys you see and read about all the time, and now they’re in front of you.
The families were involved, too. The only time you broke away from your family was if you had a photo shoot or you had interviews.
We did a lot of touring during that trip. I remember seeing the city while taking a little boat cruise. We went to arcades, malls and laser tag, too. It was almost like we were all a family vacationing together.
I spent some time with Shawn Respert. I got to know Kevin Garnett. He was real cool. Rasheed Wallace was really cool. A lot of these guys knew my brother (Editor’s Note: Charles O’Bannon also played on the 1995 NCAA title team) a lot more than they knew me because they were a little bit younger than me. My brother had played on teams with and against a lot of these players. Again, to just be able to see them in person and be a part of that life-changing experience together, I thought was pretty cool.
Rasheed was really a nice guy. It was fun to be around him. I think what people see on TV is that sometimes you lose your head when you get a bad call. But there were no calls made that weekend, so he seemed like a pretty cool cat.
I don’t know what it was about Shawn and me. He has always been one of my favorites. Shawn and I also played together in the World University Games in Toronto, ironically. And we played against each other in Poland some years later. He and I had always hit it off. He’s a really cool guy, works extremely hard and was fun to get to know.
Kevin didn’t act young. He was very mature for his age, at least that was his demeanor. You knew that he was going to do well. And he was so big. I had seen him before in All-Star games and things like that. But just seeing him interact with everybody and how he went about his business was impressive. You knew he was going to be something special.
