Written by Ben Golliver at SI.com
O.J. Mayo broke down in tears when he heard the NBA was going to ban him for at least two years for a failed drug test, and he surely would have cried even harder if he had known the embarrassment, loneliness and aimlessness that would follow.
His first instinct was to call his mother, Alisha, a conversation that left him feeling ashamed of the inevitable questions she would face at work. Two weeks later, shortly before his dismissal and disqualification became public on July 1, 2016, Mayo sent out a group text message to his family and close friends. As the former highly-touted high school star and 2008 lottery pick typed out the words to his siblings, the youngest of whom was still a teenager, he was forced to contemplate his neglected responsibilities. “If you’d been a preacher, your brothers would have been preachers,” Alisha had told him, quoting American Gangster, the movie about drug kingpin Frank Lucas’s family-run operation. “If you’d been a solider, they’d be soldiers. … They look up to you. They always expect you to know what’s best.”
The NBA’s press release hit on the first day of free agency last summer, and Mayo fielded a brief round of sympathetic and surprised texts from his friends while media organizations reported the news and social media users speculated about his drug of choice.
And then: nothing.
“I didn’t get a phone call last summer from anyone besides my family for 40 days,” Mayo told The Crossover at a Southern California gym last week, in his first extended interview since his suspension. “People who called me every day didn’t call me for two or three months. I still haven’t talked to some people who I talked to every week. Everybody was off my a–. I was tripping. ‘Oh, I see how the world is now.’ That was rock bottom.”
To continue reading this article, click here.
