LOS ANGELES — It’s a warm July night in Los Angeles, USC’s campus has settled into its summer lull and the traffic along Figueroa has noticeably thinned.
I walk through the Galen Center doors, up the steps of the vacant arena and into the auxiliary gym, where South Central Los Angeles’ version of the long-standing tradition of off-season open gym is taking place.
Word has it that O.J. Mayo, the biggest recruit in USC basketball history, has finally landed in town.
In the gym, some familiar faces stand out — USC center Taj Gibson is perhaps the most recognizable — and the presence of North Carolina’s Alex Stepheson, Nebraska’s Sek Henry and Wyoming’s Joseph Taylor proves this won’t be your typical “open gym.”
Also present to begin their preparations for college ball are USC freshmen Marcus Simmons, Davon Jefferson and, straight from the highlight reels, Mayo.
Watching these players warm up, you’d almost need assurance that the guy wearing black and silver, logo-less shorts, zebra-striped shoes and a USC shirt was, in fact, Mayo.
You have to wonder how much longer he will be allowed to wear mismatched brands.
The first game to 21 commences with Mayo, Jefferson, Simmons, Gibson and Henry playing against a team composed of Stepheson, Taylor and three other collegiate players.
After roughly 15 minutes of alley-oop jams, NBA 3-pointers and snaking finger rolls, the score is knotted at 18, and I am wondering how I got in for free.
The ball is hurried down to the other end, and after running through the lane on defense, Mayo yells out that the game needs to stop for a moment.
The 10 players gather in the middle of the lane, spit on the court, squeak their sneakers to dry things up and resume play.
Mayo says the court was getting slippery with dust. Never mind that the game was in its most crucial stage, and never mind that Mayo was probably the youngest player there. He’s always been a court general, and so it goes.
Mayo’s team gets a stop and he nails a 23-foot 3-pointer on the other end. A steal, a weaving layup that makes Mayo look like Gumby, and the game is over.
It doesn’t take long to realize Mayo is the phenom he’s been advertised to be.
The real question for those who have followed Mayo’s story, however, is the quality of his character. After all, it’s difficult to refute the skills we’ve all seen on TV and YouTube — 50-point performances and solo alley-oop dunks by a kid barely old enough to drive.
And so, after watching Mayo effortlessly nail a three from the parking lot to win the third game, I reminded myself why I was really there: to watch Mayo when he’s not picking apart defenses.
Walking away from my third open gym a week later, it was the off-camera Mayo I truly wanted to write about.
It’s funny how comfortable our society has become with making assumptions about people based on what they see on TV or read in publications.
For everyone who watched Mayo throw an alley-oop to himself in his final game as a senior at Huntington (W.Va.) High School and then chuck the ball into the stands, or everyone who has seen the YouTube clip of Mayo “bumping” referee Mike Lazo, causing Lazo to fall over, I beg you to keep reading.
In the first night’s competition, Mayo’s side won five of the seven games played. The players walked over to their duffle bags, threw on jean shorts, changed shoes, sat down and joked about their summers.
Everyone, that is, except Mayo.
Mayo never left the court. While everyone else was lounging, Mayo was practicing step-back 3-pointers. He would gather the ball, take one slashing dribble forward, hop backward so he was just behind the 3-point line and then shoot.
He missed his first two shots, cussed under his breath, then made 13 shots in a row. Most people would start getting excited at five or six consecutive threes. Mayo made 13, then cussed again after he missed an attempt at 14.
Pretty soon, the crowd at the other end of the gym was hitting the buzzer on the scoreboard controller during every shot Mayo took.
They all laughed, half providing commentary as if Mayo was in an actual game situation and half wondering if this kid was for real.
For someone with as much natural talent as Mayo, his work ethic is astounding.
When I finally got the chance to talk with him, I asked about the time he commits to practicing on a daily basis.
“Two and a half to three hours a day by myself,” Mayo said, not including the time he spent playing pickup at UCLA in the mornings and at USC in the evenings.
“It is kind of a combination of a lot of things — shooting, ballhandling, conditioning.”
If you look around to find a coach, or at least someone putting the bug in his ear to practice more, you won’t find one.
Mayo doesn’t smile on the court, he only speaks when there is an on-court matter that needs to be resolved, and he practices with a meticulous perfectionism difficult to comprehend.
You ask him about his long days in the gym, however, and he’ll shrug off their significance.
The biggest benefit, he said, “is probably just getting in shape. Getting up and down the floor — it’s better than nothing.”
If Mayo’s practice routine is better than nothing, nothing must be a pretty remarkable state of being.
His words show that he’s already been trained to deal with the media.
Spotlighted in Sports Illustrated and USA Today as a 14-year-old seventh-grader, Mayo played nearly all his high school games in sold-out arenas. His high schools — he played at three of them — won recognition, TV stations won advertising dollars, and Mayo won championships.
Now at USC, expectations have not diminished.
“From start to finish, our goal is to make sure we improve and win a national championship,” Mayo said.
That jump in logic — improvement to winning a title — may seem irrational to most, but it’s just an example of how Mayo’s mind works.
His drive and the pressure he places on himself force him to continually refine his game, already years beyond his freshman counterparts, while the rest of us get to sit back and take it all in.
Turning on the media switch, Mayo was quick to remind me that his game is nothing without the four guys around him.
“I don’t think [winning] is really about my individual performance,” he said. “It takes a team to win a national championship, not just one player. As long as we improve as a team as the season goes along, then we should be good.”
Yet Mayo also knows a championship can’t be delivered to the Trojans without him. Judging by the small glimpse I got of the thousands of hours he spent playing basketball this summer, he’s ensuring he won’t be the weak link.
After my third night watching Mayo tear up the court adjacent to the one he hopes will be his personal playground come November, I biked back down Figueroa wondering how many athletes have been unfairly labeled as having an attitude problem.
It was 11 p.m. and I had finally spoken with Mayo after watching him play for three nights. I figured the chance to talk with him would have come an hour earlier, when the lights were turned out in the auxiliary gym. You couldn’t see your own hand.
Instead, I shuffled out, sat in a chair in the hallway and listened for 40 minutes to the constant rhythm of a lone basketball bouncing on the court, interrupted by a “swoosh” every 10 seconds.
The lights never came back on, but Mayo didn’t care. He didn’t need light to know where the basket was.
And I no longer need convincing to wish him the success he is destined to achieve.