Photo. DePaul University

From Dime #35 (on newsstands now)…

There was a time when Paul McPherson was one of the most awe-inspiring athletes in all of basketball. P-Mac went 6-2. Was stacked like Ray Lewis. Owned a crossover that left cats broken all across the playgrounds of his hometown Chicago. And the hops? His one year at DePaul gave the basketball world a steady stream highlight material – oops, putback jams and fastbreak windmills. Rumor was that his vert was in the neighborhood of 50 inches. Paul McPherson seemed destined for NBA greatness.

Then he all but disappeared.

It’s been six years since Paul McPherson put on an NBA uniform. For the past three, he’s been hooping professionally in Italy. By the looks of his crib – a brand new, two-level condo in downtown Chicago – the money is good. As nice as his spot is, though, Paul looks at his DePaul brethren and knows he could have had it a lot better.

“Looking at Quentin Richardson and Bobby Simmons get all that money, that s*** will kill you!” says McPherson, now 29 years old. “Them boys got like 40, 50, 60 million. I’m like, I know I can get 10, 20 million or something!”

While he is partially joking, there is some truth to his jest. Those who have balled with P-Mac know he’s got the game to make that kind of money.

“With Paul, you have kind of like a freak of nature, because he has a football body,” says basketball writer Scoop Jackson, who is from the same South Chicago neighborhood as McPherson. “And for him to be 6-2 and a half, have like a 47-inch vertical, and left handed. He was bigger than anybody, you know, could post up anybody. And his imagination for dunks was crazy. Paul was unbelievable … he was unbelievable.”

“Ah, he’s a freak,” echoes friend and ex-Suns teammate Shawn Marion. “Very strong, athletic, has a hell of a crossover. Very physical. He’s a highlight reel waiting to happen.”

Self-admitted attitude problems and an undefined position contributed to Paul’s vanishing off the NBA map. And while the majority of the mainstream basketball world may have forgotten about him, McPherson says NBA players have not. “Every time I see them, they’re like, ‘What’s up with you? I want to see some tapes, I want to see some DVDs, I know you’re dunking on somebody’,” Paul says. “And these are NBA dudes. Shawn Marion will be like, ‘I need a tape, I haven’t got a tape of you for two years, my tape is old!’”

***

McPherson honed his game on the courts right outside of James Madison grammar school on the corner of 74th Street and Dorchester on the Chi’s South Side and grew into a star at South Shore High School.

After two years of junior college in Illinois and Florida, Paul signed with DePaul – a program already loaded with in-state talent like Quentin Richardson, Bobby Simmons, Steven Hunter and Lance Williams. McPherson was the second-leading scorer (11.2 ppg) on a Blue Demon team that lost to Kansas in the first round of the 2000 NCAA tournament. While the world expected the All-American Richardson to turn pro, many where shocked when McPherson declared for the Draft, too. But unlike Q, who was snagged in the first round by the Clippers, McPherson’s name wasn’t among the 58 called on draft night.

Paul caught on with Phoenix’s summer league team and in an early game in the Rocky Mountain Revue Summer League in Utah, McPherson took full advantage of the opportunity. “Coach subbed him in, and we just gave him the ball and let him go,” recalls Marion, who was on that same squad. “And he put the whoopin’ on everyone in there.”

For the duration of the league, McPherson dazzled the Utah crowd with his unique combination of strength and athleticism, finishing as the second-leading scorer in the summer league with 18.7 points per game, and shot a league-best 62 percent from the field. “I just knew I had talent. I knew if given the opportunity in an NBA setting, that I could prove I could play,” says McPherson, who has the NBA logo tattooed on his left bicep. The Suns rewarded McPherson with a guaranteed two-year contract. His stellar play continued into the regular season and was an immediate hit with the fans. He found himself in the rotation and scored 20 points in one game against the Raptors. “It was nutty. I was playing with one of the best point guards in Jason Kidd, and Shawn Marion,” says McPherson. “It was like a dream. Everyone grows up dreaming to be in the NBA, and I actually made it.”

But in January 2001, the Suns blindsided Paul and shipped him off to Golden State. “I couldn’t understand it,” he says. “I was so f***ing mad. They traded me and Corie Blount for Vinny Del Negro. I was like, ‘Get the f*** out of here…Vinny Del Negro!?’”

At first, Golden State seemed to be a decent situation for Paul, as his play improved near the end of the ’00-01 season, and was highlighted by games where he put 22 on Portland and 26 on Seattle. All was looking up for Paul until he was involved in a brawl in an Oakland night club just a week before the season ended. That led to a four-game suspension and the beginning of the end of his NBA dream.

“I would have walked away now, just thinking about that fight. That’s when everything seemed to start going wrong with me,” says McPherson.

A few days after the incident, Paul found himself in even more trouble when he was caught with an unregistered gun and a small amount of weed in Oakland. The Warriors drafted Gilbert Arenas and Jason Richardson a few months later, and it was clear McPherson was no longer in the team’s plans. “After Golden State wouldn’t re-sign me, I couldn’t get a tryout with nobody,” says McPherson.

He found himself bouncing around the minor leagues for the next few years in a period that Paul calls the “darkest” of his career. “I was going backwards,” Paul says. “Like I was going from NBA, to the D-League, to CBA, to the newest league, to can’t make the newest league … that killed me.”

***

Paul’s lack of a true position on the NBA level killed him. “Paul had enough areas of concern for the next level,” says Pat Kennedy, McPherson’s coach at DePaul. “Could he ever play the point? As a two-guard, did he have the range on his jump shot? He wasn’t big enough to play the forward.”

On top of the ‘tweener curse, McPherson’s attitude hasn’t helped his cause. In the fall of 2001, Paul joined the North Charleston Lowgators in the NBDL after being released from the Denver Nuggets’ training camp. McPherson immediately clashed with Lowgators coach and former NBA star Alex English. Fed up with McPherson’s poor attitude, English released him a short time after.

“Looking back at it, I don’t like how that panned out,” says McPherson, who contemplated quitting basketball after his release. “I was always taught to respect your elders, and regardless if you don’t like the situation, I should have respected his authority.”

“Paul is a very, very prideful kid,” says Kennedy. “But I would never put him in that [uncoachable] category, per se.”

Spend five minutes with Paul though, and it’s hard to imagine him having a poor attitude. It is apparent people like him. When Shawn Marion returned my phone call about being interviewed for this article, the first thing he said was, “So I hear you are goin’ to do a story on my main man P-Mac?”

While McPherson was with the Suns, his apartment was robbed while the team was on a road trip. His teammates didn’t hesitate to help Paul; he says they replaced all of the $15,000 worth of valuables stolen from him.

***

With no basketball job, McPherson swallowed his pride and took his game overseas to Italy in the fall of 2004. He spent his first year with Reggio Emilia and the last two with Livorno, earning himself a nice six-figure salary.

This offseason is busy for Paul. He helps run a daycare center that he and his long-time girlfriend have opened up in North Chicago. Like every offseason, Paul’s been working out at the Lake Shore Athletic Club and at Hoops the Gym with all the local pros and college stars. He also plans to compete in the Chicago Pro-Am.

He says he no longer dwells much on the woulda/shoulda/coulda’s of his career. “I’m happy with how my career turned out. It probably didn’t pan out to what it could have been,” says McPherson. “But I was looking at the first-team all-state team when I was a senior in high school. They had the 10 best players in the state of Illinois, and only me and one other person are still playing basketball. And that other person was Corey Maggette.”