Can a four-year NBA career, spent with five teams, for which you averaged just 4.9 points, be considered a rousing success? It can when you’re Shawn Respert. After averaging almost 26 points a game his senior season at Michigan State, Respert was selected No. 8 overall in the 1995 NBA draft. But he never developed into an NBA star, not because of a lack of talent but rather because of a battle with stomach cancer. It was a fight Respert kept secret from almost everyone, even his family. With the cancer in remission, Respert, the director of basketball operations at Rice University, is about to come full circle. He is joining the NBA to work with players in its developmental league. Recently the 34-year-old chatted about his remarkable journey.
Anthony Cotton: Let me start by asking what a director of basketball operations does.
Shawn Respert: Man, what don’t we do? It obviously depends on the program, but at Rice, it’s working with the travel, whether the bus or a plane, hotel accommodations; basically, it’s everything behind the scenes that enables us to play a basketball game. So the coaches don’t have to worry about where to eat, where to go, who’s the contact here, everything.
AC: So how does that help with getting back into the NBA?
SR: It’s ironic (in that) I just accepted an offer from the NBA.
AC: What is it?
SR: Until I get the formal letter, I can’t get into too much detail, but it’s in NBA headquarters; basically I’ll be a regional manager in the NBDL. I’ll be working with the player development departments, helping the teams understand the transition the players are making, and for the players, helping them understand the opportunities they’re getting. We’re all old-school fans who grew up watching Jordan and Magic and Bird, and there’s a different approach to the game today. Players need to take a better approach. It helps that the better players now, LeBron, Wade and Carmelo, have transformed their personalities a bit since they’ve come into the league and become more professional. It sets a standard; we want young players, even at the NBDL level, to do the same thing,
AC: I can’t imagine how rewarding this must be for you.
SR: It’s tremendous, it’s amazing. I can remember talking with some people about how amazing the lifestyle can be, but how stressful, and how delicate the line is between being successful and being a failure. It doesn’t take a whole lot either way. In the end, I feel wherever I came up short as a player, I now have a chance to fulfill my destiny in management, to work with people who can make a big difference in the way the whole league is run.
AC: Let’s go back a little bit to your playing career; at the end of your rookie season, you knew something wasn’t right physically?
SR: I thought I was like any other player; you’re constantly having aches and pains. I just assumed I had pulled a muscle or strained something. I felt pain in my abdomen; my trainer and I observed it for about three weeks, but it never went away. I was taking anti-inflammatories and painkillers, but it went from being sore to the touch to seeing a visible lump. It was about two months from the start of the pain to when the tests came back.
AC: And your reaction was…
SR: I’m 22, 23 years old and playing in an era with Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, guys who were very private with their personal lives. So in my mind, that was the template.
AC: Well, maybe not Barkley.
SR: Well, he’d talk about anything basketball, but as far as personal stuff, he didn’t talk about his marriage, or his children and family. So I looked at that and said maybe this is something I need to model myself after. It’s my personal stuff, maybe I shouldn’t talk about it. They had their issues and their problems, but they still put the game first. It was doing their job first and then taking care of whatever they had to take care of afterwards.
AC: But you weren’t telling your family!
SR: It’s crazy; but I was 23, I just didn’t know. Could I do that again? Heck no! I wouldn’t have had the inner strength, but it’s amazing what the mind and the human spirit can do when you’re focused. For me, it was having an NBA career. Anybody who picks up a ball dreams of doing something on TV against the pros. I was as close as I could get to that and I didn’t want to do anything that, in my mind, would hamper that opportunity.
AC: So you got through that first season and had a great summer league, but your coach with Milwaukee (Chris Ford) didn’t play you in the first couple of games in the regular season.
SR: That was difficult, but it really gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I had been through; and it was the first time I’d been in a situation where a team didn’t want me. But it wasn’t personal, it was just business. I guess it’s something all of us have to go through at some point in our career; mentally, it can be disconcerting, it can be disappointing. You’re with someone for four years in high school and college, but now, here’s someone saying, “We don’t have any use for you.”
AC: And you still weren’t talking with anyone?
SR: What I’m doing now is something that will maybe help guys understand where their places are. I’m not a psychic, I don’t know where their careers will end up, but if someone had sat me down and said, “Listen, I don’t know what you’re dealing with, but here’s someone to talk to.” If there could have been that someone to tell me what was happening, maybe I would have taken a different route. Can you imagine the influence I would have had talking with cancer patients, getting the word out on behalf of the NBA? But things like that didn’t exist back then. I feel like I missed some opportunities, but the ship re-docked and picked me up this time, and I’m definitely going to take advantage of it.
AC: When did you finally decide to tell your family?
SR: My mom, who’s a registered nurse, came to visit me about four months after everything. She was being nosy, like a mom, going through stuff in my bathroom, and she picked up one of my medicine bottles. She understood what it was for, so she approached me about it and I wasn’t gonna lie to Mom. But at that point, the worst was over. I’d already gone through chemo and radiation therapy, and the cancer had started to subside. So I felt, at that point, that it was OK to talk about.
AC: Which was good, because there were people who thought your career ended because of drugs and that you were living on the streets.
SR: When I was playing in Europe (after his NBA career), people would be saying things in chat rooms and online; it was disturbing to hear that. Then, when I decided to finally talk about what had really happened, it was, “Oh, he’s just crying out because he doesn’t have any money.”
AC: You can’t win.
SR: I learned early on in my career, you can’t please everybody.
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
