"You can be president and rule the world if only 51% of the people like you, so I'm cool with not everybody bein' down with me."

The college coaches had all come to see somebody. They'd come to see Lamar Odom, the lefthanded point guard/center. And none of the kids wanted to guard Odom. None of them wanted to be abused in public. But No.175 wanted him, and in the first game of the camp, he got him. "What, are you nuts?" someone said. He weighed 100-nothing, and a few months before, he'd struggled to bench-press 135. His mother had always thought he looked like J.J. from the old show Good Times. But he was 6'8", his hands were huge, his arms went on for days, his vertical was 40" and he had his grandmother's fire. His grandmother, Roberta, drove a pickup truck, worked as a janitor at his grammar school and fished for dinner every morning in the local pond. She had raised him herself, because his mother had had him straight out of school, and Roberta always used to tell him, "You're the best athlete I ever done seen, and don't ever forget that."

And so he asked to guard Odom that day, and the college coaches yawned, and then this nobody took this somebody to school. He took him for some 30 points. He'd back Odom in, or he'd lure him outside, and what he did was put his No.175 on the map. All the college coaches went running to the camp's director, Sonny Vaccaro, and Vaccaro told them that the kid was a mystery. That he wasn't even a top-500 prospect. That no one had scouted him down at the swamp. That a friend had begged to get him into the camp. And the coaches wanted the kid's name, and they wanted it now.

"It's McGrady," Vaccaro said. "Tracy McGrady."

To read the rest of the story, get the August 21 issue of ESPN The Magazine.