It is said the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
For Scott Padgett, it most definitely is.He's played basketball. He's mowed lawns. And now he's back to playing basketball, having come to grips with the folly of his freshman ways. It's the side of the fence on which Padgett intends to stay. Understandably, too. Green-lined pockets, after all, sure beat grass-stained sneakers.
It's a lesson Padgett learned the hard way, way back when the now 6-foot-9 Jazz rookie forward was a naive freshman living out a dream-turned-nightmare-turned-dream at the University of Kentucky.
But before he could get back, first he had to get there.
The year was 1993, and Padgett was not long removed from a sophomore year in high school in which he had grown from 6-1 to 6-7. The kid from St. Xavier in Louisville wanted to go off to Lexington so bad and play in Rupp Arena, which is where the Jazz will just happen to play a preseason game against Boston on Saturday night. The Wildcats coach then was Rick Pitino, who just happens to coach the Celtics now.
Padgett wanted to play for his beloved blue so bad that he wasn't about to say he'd go anywhere else, not even to his own hometown school, the one his best buddy lives and dies for.
"I had a weird sort of recruiting process," Padgett. "Louisville was sort of hard after me, from the summer before my junior year up until the time I committed to Kentucky. But I wasn't going to commit to a school until I had given Kentucky a chance to recruit me.
"Going into my senior year, I went to Nike camp. I had a good camp, and two or three days after the camp, coach Pitino offered me a scholarship. So it was like I went from just getting the normal recruiting letters -- didn't really know how serious they were about recruiting me -- to just one day he offered me a scholarship."
It was July before his final season of high school basketball, and already Padgett knew where he was going to go. Just like it was scripted. Just like he had always wanted.
"It wasn't like I had this senior year where it went down to the wire between a couple of schools," he said. "Had it been like that, it probably would have been some pressure from both sides . . . But I sort of ended all the drama before it even started."
The plot twists, however, were just getting under way.
Padgett's first big break wasn't pleasant at all.
"I got hurt my senior year," he said. "Four games into the year, I broke my wrist, and I missed four, five weeks of the season."
Any shot at the coveted title of Kentucky Mr. Basketball fell like an errant Olden Polynice free throw. It didn't even hit the rim. But that's OK. Padgett was off to play for the Wildcats, off to live his dream. One toss and a couple of turns later, the nightmare had begun.
"I came into a situation where, at the two positions I played, I had five guys who eventually went on to play pro basketball, and they were all juniors and seniors, and I was a freshman," Padgett said, reeling off a list of names that includes current Celtics Walter McCarty and Antoine Walker and Mark Pope, who spent the past two NBA seasons with the Indiana Pacers, whom the Jazz play tonight at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis.
"The frustrating thing about it was, it was like, you know, you always hear, 'Whoever plays the best at practice gets the playing time.' As much as they say that, they usually go with the experience," added Padgett, who regrets not having taken Pitino's advice to redshirt as a freshman. "I had probably a two-week string there in the early part of the season where even Coach came out in the paper and said I was the best player in practice, and then game-time would come around, I wouldn't even get in, much less play a couple of minutes.
"No matter how good I played in practice, I wasn't going to get in. I think I let that get to me. And when that happened, I sort of let things slide in other ways."
This was no kiddie slide at the playground, either. It was a Wet Willie, twisting, turning, picking-up-speed-before-hitting-the-cold-water-that-waits-below kind of slip-and-slide.
Padgett partied hearty, basically blew off the books, and darn-near blew his chances at what is now a pro basketball career that has him signed by the Jazz to a guaranteed rookie contract worth more than $1.7 million over the next three years.
"My problem wasn't classes. It was what I was doing at night," he said. "I was staying out so late I didn't have the energy to get up and go to class. Somehow, in a little old town like Lexington, I found a way to find something to do every night, even though there's really nothing to do."
He wound up, sad but true, flunking out of school. Everyone in the commonwealth knew, and everyone close to him, including family and friends, had to deal with the indignity of it all. Which, looking back, maybe wasn't the worst thing in the world that could have happened.
"The toughest part was missing basketball," said Padgett, who also wound up paying the hefty price of missing out on an opportunity to play on Kentucky's 1996 NCAA championship team. "I mean, for me, during my time at Kentucky, my best friends, and still my friends, are guys I played with. But, basically, for six months, I didn't get to live with the team at all . . . For a year, it was like I was shunned by the team. And it was like you were shunned from friends.
"I think it was a major growing up process for me," he added. "I think it's a situation now, looking back (at the Jazz's preseason opener) I played like 12 minutes. Maybe coming into I might have wanted to play more, but from that situation I had before, I knew how to react to it. I could deal with it.
"Plus, you know, you get a pretty decent paycheck. There's a lot worse things I could be doing for less money."
Padgett laughed. But he wasn't kidding. He knows, the hard way.
Off the team and unable to even get back into school the ensuing semester at Kentucky, Padgett was at a crossroads. His freshman scoring line read 14 games played, none started, just 7-of-27 from the field, four assists, three steals, a whopping 2.0 scoring average and, oh yeah, one blocked shot.
His checking account wasn't looking much better, so Padgett went to work.
Real work.
For about a month, Padgett delivered used sporting goods like bikes and treadmills. Then there was the yard work: Mowing, trimming, planting shrubs. Seeding, laying mulch, uprooting dead trees. He even cleaned gutters.
"My cousin owned a lawn-care company at the time," Padgett said, "and I worked for him from 7 in the morning to about 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon, then I would go home, take a shower, and be back at my other job at 5, (which was) . . . cold calls, basically, where you just call people, and I was selling lawn-care services. Chemicals, pesticides, stuff like that. And , you know, let me tell how these people really want that stuff."
With time, and a few too many hang-ups, Padgett realized this was not how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
"The first game of the year (Kentucky) played Maryland, and I'm thinking to myself, 'I should be out there, and I'm sitting at a restaurant watching it with my friends,' " he said. "It hadn't really hit me until then, even though it was three months into the school year.
"As far as doing the work, I didn't enjoy what I was doing. But it didn't hit home that hard until I said, 'I really miss this. This is where I should be. This is what I want to be doing.' And then that's when I decided to go back and turn things around."
Padgett used the money he had made to pay his way back into school. He couldn't play games but was able to practice with that team that wound up winning it all.
"The deal I had with coach Pitino was I had to have a 3.0 or better, or he wasn't going to let me back on the team," Padgett said. "I didn't want to take any chances, so I got like a 3.66."
No cake schedule, either. Twenty-one hours, including courses in biology, chemistry and sociology. OK, so maybe popular blowoff Pharmacy 222 was tossed in there to pad the numbers, but Padgett worked his way back to doing what he knew he should be doing all along.
On the court, he returned for the second half of the 1996-97 season and went on to lead the 'Cats to a national title he could call his own. Off it, he wound up with a bachelor's degree in social work, and academic all-Southeastern Conference honors to boot.
And now he's back where he started, playing hoops, getting his minutes here and there, a good-shooter forward who is a bit of a 'tweener, not quite yet the banger he needs to be to play the No. 4 spot, not quite yet the quick, skilled ballhandler he needs to be able to unseat incumbents at the No. 3. He's just a kid who has a coach, Jerry Sloan, who talks about him as a player who "has pretty good awareness of what's going on," but someone who has to "work harder, longer."
If there is anyone who knows about hard work, it should be Padgett. After all, he's learned his lesson once. He doesn't want to have to learn it again.
"I realize you can't take things for granted," said Padgett, who scored a game-high 17 points and earned MVP honors in Kentucky's 1998 NCAA championship victory over Utah. "And you also have to keep setting more and more goals. Going into high school, my goal was to play for Kentucky. And I think once I reached that my freshman year, it was like, 'I'm where I want to be.'
"When I came back, I had a whole new philosophy. I wanted to start; fourth game into the year, I got to start. So then it was, 'Well, now I want to be all-conference.' I didn't do that that first year, so it took me a year. Made all-conference, and it was 'Let's keep going and going.' And finally it was, 'I want to play in the NBA.' And now, it's 'I want to try to earn 10, 15 minutes a game here.' And if I ever get to that, it will be another level."
One where the grass is greener. And it doesn't have to get cut.