“See, I’ve been wanting to be in the NBA since I was a little kid,” Kenny Hayes said with a laugh. “That goes back to when I was 7 or 8.”
“And the Chicago Bulls were his team,” said his mom, Sheila Johnson.
Hayes nodded: “Every year at Christmas I had to get something with my Michael Jordan or the Bulls on it. Finally — about the time I was heading to Northmont (High School) — I just decided I wanted my head shaved bald, just like Jordan.”
Sheila said Smoke — worried about maternal fire — told Kenny: ” ‘I gotta call your momma first.’ And when he did, I was like, ‘No. Absolutely not! He’s just 14. When he gets older he can do his own thing but not now.’”
Well, Hayes is older now — he’s 26 — and he still wants to be in the NBA.
But now, instead of heading to the barber shop, he’s trekked off to pro teams in Israel and Venezuela, had two stints with the Maine Red Claws of the NBA Developmental League, been to several NBA minicamps including one of the Bulls, played in various NBA summer leagues and two seasons ago nearly made the Cleveland Cavaliers.
He now lives in Chicago in the offseason and this summer is training with an assortment of pro and top college players while his agent is lining up more NBA minicamp invitations and overseas offers.
“The ultimate goal is the NBA,” the 6-foot-2 guard said as he visited his mom at their Clayton home the other day. “But truthfully, it’s a grind if you don’t get drafted out of college.”
From the other room Aaron Pogue — the Dunbar High and Cleveland State standout who last year played professionally in Romania and now appears headed to Brazil — chimed in: “They say you got a better chance of hitting the lottery than making the NBA.”
Hayes, who had just worked out with Pogue at Sinclair Community College, managed a faint laugh: “You’ve got to be mentally tough, but it drains you and you gotta decide: ‘Do I quit or keep fighting, keep chasing the dream?’
“I want to make the NBA, but I’m not doing it for the money. If that was the case I never would have played two years in the D-League. The NBA has the best players in the world and I want to say I’m one of the best.
“After what happened with the Cavs, I know I can play in the NBA. Now it’s finding a team that needs what I do. I can’t control what each of them does, but I can control what I do. I can keep putting in the work. Keep grabbing the best opportunity in front of me. It’s all about timing. You just never know when it’s gonna be your time.”
Lot of doubters
Hayes has been beating the odds since he was caught by a one-two punch to the basketball jaw as an eighth-grader. First, he was cut from his Trotwood-Madison middle school team and the next day he was cut from his Dayton Metro team.
Before the following school year, his mom and late stepdad — Henry “Hank” Johnson — moved to Clayton, which put him in the Northmont district. He made the JV as the smallest player on the team and by the end of the season he was playing varsity.
Although he had a good career at Northmont, he said few beyond Coach Jim Brown believed he would play Division I college basketball. He had to work on his academics and still was quite small and skinny.
He spent a season at Saint Catharine, a small, NAIA school in Springfield, Ky., and then went to Cincinnati State for a year and was a junior college All-American.
He still was short on believers until Miami University coach Charlie Coles offered him a chance. Hayes averaged 12.1 points a game his junior season, was sidelined early the following year by injury and came back for his 2009-10 senior season and averaged 14.9 points, 3.1 assists and 2.9 rebounds.
In the process he became one of Coles’ all-time favorite players, so much so that today Hayes will serve as one of the pallbearers for the RedHawks’ coach, who died last Friday at age 71.
Although he had proved the D-1 detractors wrong with his Miami success, he admits, “When I came out of there, people would have thought I was crazy if I’d said I wanted to play in the NBA. So I set out to prove ‘em wrong again.”
He stated his case most emphatically with the Red Claws, the Portland, Maine-based D-League team that’s a feeder for the Boston Celtics. He played two seasons there — as has the University of Dayton’s Chris Wright, who is his first cousin — and at the end of the 2011-12 season he was named the D-League’s “Most improved Player.”
He averaged 17.1 points per game that year and put on a one-man show on March 4, 2012 when he scored 52 points, one shy of the D-League all-time record, against the Springfield Armor.
One of the congratulatory messages he got afterward came from Cleveland coach Byron Scott, who had nearly made that NBA dream come true at the start of the season.
Hayes had been one of six non-roster invitees to the Cavs’ preseason camp. Four of those prospects were soon jettisoned, but Hayes and 6-foot-7 Mychel Thomson, who had played at Pepperdine and is the son of NBA veteran Mychal Thompson, did well and made it to the final preseason practice.
“I made it to the laaaast day,” Hayes said quietly. “That’s when Coach Scott came to see me and he kept it real. He said, ‘I like you a lot. You challenge Kyrie (No 1 overall pick in the draft and later NBA Rookie of Year and All Star, Kyrie Irving) every day in practice, but (ownership) decided to go with Mych.”
The Cavs tried to get Hayes traded to their D-League team, but Austin Ainge — Danny Ainge’s son who had coached Kenny in Maine the first year and was now the director of player personnel for the Celtics — would have no part of it. He wanted to keep Hayes in the Boston system, which he did.
“I was hurt when the Cavs cut me — I honestly felt I was going to make the team — but when they said I could hang around a couple days afterward and work out, I said no,” Hayes said. “I wanted to get up out of there. I didn’t want no pity. I headed straight for the airport and a flight to Maine.”
Cole shows way
As Hayes and Pogue talked about their pro basketball odyssey, their conversation soon moved to Norris Cole, who is living everyone’s dream.
One of Pogue’s teammate at Dunbar and CSU, Cole is a second-year Miami Heat guard who is in the NBA Finals trying to earn his second straight championship ring.
The pair spoke of him with pride and when it was suggested Cole had been “really lucky,” the 6-foot-9 Pogue deflected that thought like it was an opponent’s soft lay-up attempt.
“It wasn’t luck at all,” he said.
Hayes agreed: “Coming out of high school, no D-l schools wanted him at first either. Norris wasn’t lucky — that dude put in the time.”
Pogue nodded: “He was one of the first guys in the gym in the morning for our workouts. Then he’d come back at night on his own and do the whole workout again. He didn’t go out, wouldn’t party. He just chased that dream until it came true.”
The pursuit is made even more real to guys from here because Daequan Cook, another Dunbar product, is a Chicago Bull who has been in the NBA for six seasons now.
Yet, the guy with local ties that Hayes can connect to most is former University of Dayton player Brian Roberts, who bounced around Europe for a few years — even playing for the same Hapoel Gilboa Galil team in Israel that he did — before he made it to the NBA last season with New Orleans.
“That’s why I got to just keep pushing,” Hayes said. “I feel like I’m so close and I’m going to do everything I can to make it happen.”
And so when he was cut by the Cavs and called his mom with the news, he said he refused her offer to come back to Dayton that night: “I didn’t want to come home and mope and get down. I didn’t want to lose focus.”
Sheila remembered the conversation: “I could tell in his voice that he was hurting and, of course, as a mom you want him to be here so you can comfort him. But I also understood where he was coming from.
“And like I always tell Kenny, ‘Don’t give up. You write your own story. From the beginning, right from birth, all the way ‘til you die, you’re the one who writes your own story. You are the one who can decide just how you want it to be.’ ”
Well, unless you’re 14 and want it to be bald.
Then Mom swats that shot and says: “Absolutely not!”
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