The NBA Forgot How Good Penny Hardaway Was

The NBA Forgot How Good Penny Hardaway Was

In the mid-1990s, the NBA had found its next superstar. >> YES, SIR. IT IS PENNY TIME. >> NOT MICHAEL JORDAN, NOT KOBE BRYANT, Penny Hardaway. 6’7″, playing point guard, vision like  Magic Johnson, handles that made defenders look broken, the coolest athlete in basketball, and a future that looked completely, utterly unlimited.

  >> If Penny could have been a top three player of all time, cuz that’s where Kobe is. >> Yes. >> If Penny didn’t get injured, yes. >> Penny was Kobe, and then that’s what I always tell people. He was Kobe before Kobe. >> But here’s what nobody  ever tells you. Before Penny Hardaway became a superstar, he was shot.

 Before he reached the  NBA finals, his own body turned against him. And the partnership everyone thought would produce championships for a decade, it was destroyed from the inside by ego, by money, by a puppet getting knocked off a couch on national television. This is the full story of Anfernee Penny Hardaway.

And I promise you, by the end of this, you’ll never look at the Orlando Magic dynasty the same way again. >> Originally thought to be tendinitis  was more serious than that, and Penny Hardaway will miss the next eight to 10 weeks  of the NBA season. >> Before the injuries, before Shaq left Orlando, before the surgeries, the beef, the heartbreak, and the silence, Penny Hardaway wasn’t just a rising star.

 He was basketball’s future. At just 24 years old, he had already done things most players never do in a full career. Four-time All-Star, All-NBA  First Team, NBA Finals appearance, Olympic gold medal, a signature shoe line that sneakerheads still hunt today, a Nike campaign so massive it launched Chris Rock’s career, and a partnership with Shaquille O’Neal that should have produced a dynasty. Should have.

 And Michael Jordan, the greatest ever do it, had already told people that Penny Hardaway was the next one. >> Who have you been sizing up for the torch pass? Hardaway’s probably my pick right now. >> The next  one until everything fell apart long before the bright lights of the NBA.

 Penny Hardaway was just a kid from Memphis, Tennessee and life was not easy. His father was gone before Anfernee could form a single memory of him. His mother, Fay, had her own dreams to chase, a singing career that took her to California and away from her son. So, it was just the boy and his grandmother, Louise Hardaway, a woman who started her life as a sharecropper in Arkansas, who moved her family to Memphis the moment they had enough saved to do it.

 Who moved into a house in the Binghamton neighborhood in 1950 and never  left. She worked as a cook in Memphis elementary schools. She didn’t have much, but what she had, she gave entirely to that boy. >> I take everything that I know about being respectful, uh working hard, I learned it from my grandmother.

>> She used to call him pretty. >>  >> With her thick Southern drawl, it came out sounding like Penny. His friends heard it, latched onto it, and that was that. Penny, >>  >> forever. And years later, when he made the NBA, he chose to wear number one because a penny is worth 1 cent, because everything he ever had, he owed to that woman.

His first love was actually football, but Louise said no. She wasn’t raising this boy through poverty and sacrifice just to watch him get hurt on a football field. Basketball it was. >>  >> And once Penny Hardaway chose basketball, basketball had no choice but to choose him back. >> Hi everybody, I’m Mike Brain and the reason they’re here, or at least one of the reasons, is Anfernee Hardaway.

Another just perfect example of the great talent that’s come out of the city of Memphis. >> By his senior year at Treadwell High School, he was averaging 36 points, 10 rebounds,  and six assists per game. He scored over 3,000 points in his high school career. Parade magazine named him the National High School Player of the year.

>> When he left here and went to the University of Memphis, I knew >>  >> it was just a matter of time. >> Pretty long was Anfernee Hardaway. >> The entire NBA was watching, but before any of that could be cashed in, Penny Hardaway’s entire future almost disappeared in a single night. Penny arrives at Memphis State University as the most hyped recruit the city had ever produced, and the first thing that happens, he can’t play.

 His grades coming out of high school weren’t good enough. NCAA Proposition 48 forces him to sit out his entire freshman year. >> We basically had to just do our own thing and then just go to the game. So, that freshman year was cool because I kind of got settled. You know, I wasn’t in the streets anymore.

 I wasn’t with that wrong crowd. I got in and got settled and kind of got to myself and was like, “Okay, it’s time to grow up. It’s time to mature. It’s time to get get ready for that next level and that blessing that God got for you. You know you can hoop. >> Mhm. >> You know, stay out of the way all this other stuff and just lock in.

” And I locked in, man, and that that freshman year was good for me. >> He’s on campus. He’s in practice. But on game nights, he’s in the stands watching while everyone else plays. >>  >> For a kid who had been the star his entire life, that silence was deafening. And then things got worse. One night, during that same redshirt year, while he’s already humbled, already grinding,  Penny is robbed at gunpoint outside his cousin’s house.

 A stray bullet hits him in the foot. >> They jumped out of the car, they had their heads down low, and they put the gun to my head. I didn’t even look at them, and then I just fell to the ground. So, they robbed us, robbed the truck, hopped in the car, and then drove down the street. Got about Mhm. about 100 ft away, and I guess they thought about that they should have killed us cuz they didn’t know if we saw their faces, so they started shooting back to where we were.

 And the first initial shots that rang out, I ducked behind the car, and then something told me to jump in into the car because the hatch was up and right before I jumped into the the hatch man I got hit in the foot. >> The kid who was supposed to be the future of Memphis basketball is sitting in a hospital a bullet in his foot his career not yet started wondering if it’s already over.

>> The word I get from the doctor where the bullet is lodged right under my foot in there it broke all it went through the small toe and then broke all of these bones and then lodged between the big toe and the second toe that I probably wouldn’t be able to play basketball again for the way that the bullet hit my foot.

>> Think about that for a second one of the most gifted players the NBA would ever see almost never made it to the league at all most people would have let that be the ending the poverty the bullet  the bad grades the silence on game nights most people would have gone home he rehabbed the foot went to class he made the Dean’s list Penny showed up every single day and when he was finally eligible to play his sophomore season he reminded everyone exactly who he was junior year 22 points eight rebounds six

assists per game two triple doubles all American finalist  for national player of the year the NBA’s head of scouting Marty Blake told the New York Times if I’m picking first I’d go for Hardaway he’s the best player in the draft in sheer talent and ability >>  >> the best player in the draft in sheer talent and ability so why on draft night did an entire arena boo him the moment his name was called because the city that was about to get him didn’t know it yet and what happened next is one of the

wildest draft night trades in NBA history 1993 NBA  draft the Golden State Warriors select Penny Hardaway third overall and then  almost immediately they trade him to Orlando for Chris Webber plus three future first round picks. >> Orlando has traded the draft rights to Chris Webber to Golden State in exchange for the draft rights >>  >> to Anfernee Hardaway and three future first-round draft picks.

>> Now, >>  >> here’s the part that gets overlooked. Orlando’s fans wanted Webber. They had a young Shaquille O’Neal already in the building, and they believed Webber was the perfect power forward to complete the picture. But, there was one person who wanted Penny instead,  Shaq himself.

 Shaq had just filmed the movie Blue Chips with Penny. He’d seen what the kid could do in pick-up games on set, and when Orlando’s front office was still debating, >>  >> Shaq told the GM directly, “Listen, I understand you want Webber, but this cat Penny Hardaway is the answer. If you put us together, we could be like Magic and Kareem.

” >> I picked up the phone, and I was I was terrified. I was like, “Listen, John, I’m playing with this guy Penny Hardaway. You heard of him?” “Yeah, I heard of him, but uh you know, we going to go with C-Webb.” I said, “I don’t think you should do that. I think you should go with him.” “Huh?” I said, “Listen, if you don’t pick this guy here, when my deal up, I’mma be looking somewhere else.” And I hung up the phone.

>> Shaq recruited Penny to Orlando. He  put his reputation on the line for this kid. Remember that, because it matters later. Orlando makes the trade,  and the fans, who didn’t ask for any of this, booed Penny on opening night in his own arena, before he played a single professional minute.

 But, what those fans saw over the next 3 years shut them up forever. >> [cheering] >> 6’7″ playing point guard, he could run the offense, throw passes nobody else saw coming, score at all three levels, guard anyone on the court,  and do all of it with a fluidity that made the whole thing look completely effortless.

 Shaq was power, Penny  was elegance. Together, they didn’t just look exciting, they looked inevitable. Rookie year, 16 points, six assists, five rebounds per game, 190 steals, sixth in the entire league, all-rookie first team. Started all 82 games, led Orlando to their first 50-win season, and their first  playoff appearance ever.

 The fans who booed him on opening night selling out the arena every single game. But, Penny wasn’t just becoming a superstar on the court. For one brief, electric moment in the ’90s, he became the coolest athlete in all of basketball, and that’s exactly where the trouble started. >> Nick Anderson, another three. >> This is the part younger fans don’t fully understand.

 Penny Hardaway  had aura. Everything about him felt cool. The shoes, the style, the smoothness, the way he floated across a basketball court like  the game was slightly beneath him, but he was kind enough to play it anyway. Nike knew exactly what they had. See, Penny was quiet, reserved, the kind of cool that doesn’t need to announce itself.

 So, Nike gave him an alter ego, a puppet, loud, outrageous,  shameless, everything Penny wasn’t. They called it Lil Penny, voiced by a then unknown comedian named Chris Rock, who wasn’t even the first choice. Eddie Murphy passed, Damon Wayans passed, Martin Lawrence passed, then Chris Rock walked in, saw the puppet, and just started. No script, pure chaos.

 Nike loved it. The campaign exploded. Lil Penny appeared on Oprah before Chris Rock himself did. >>  >> He starred in Super Bowl commercials alongside Tyra Banks. He published a book. He became genuinely more famous than some actual NBA players. Penny  once joked that his puppet was more popular than he was.

 He wasn’t entirely wrong. The Air Penny shoe line became a cultural landmark. Designer Eric Avar studied how Penny moved, the lateral cuts, the crossovers, >>  >> the way he was simultaneously point guard and small forward, and built a shoe around it. A line sneakerheads still hunt 30 years later. Nike was positioning Penny as their next Michael Jordan, the face of the brand, the face of the league.

 And remember,  this is happening while Penny is still Shaq’s teammate. Shaq, who is on Reebok. Shaq, who is the most dominant player on their team. Shaq, who personally recruited Penny to Orlando in the first place. And now Penny’s puppet is everywhere, on TV, on billboards, in every sneaker store in America, while Shaq watches from the same locker room.

 And then came the 1995 playoffs. Michael Jordan had returned from baseball. The Bulls  were back, and Penny Hardaway, when only his second professional season, stared down the greatest player alive and eliminated him. The Magic beat Jordan’s Bulls in six games, then swept past Indiana, and reached the NBA finals.

 In the finals against Houston, Penny averaged 25 points and eight assists on 50% shooting in a sweep loss that stung, but told the whole world, “This isn’t the  end. This is only the beginning.” >> Under 20 to go in the fourth. Hardaway backing Armstrong. Beautiful move by Anthony Hardaway. >> Then the summer of 1996 Atlanta Olympics gold medal game against Yugoslavia.

Penny scores 17 points. United States wins  gold. He’s 24 years old with a finals appearance, four All-Stars, an Olympic  gold, and a puppet voiced by Chris Rock. By nearly every measure, the second best player on the planet. But behind the scenes, between the commercials, the sneaker deals, and the highlight reels, something  had been quietly breaking for a long time, and it was about to blow wide open.

  Here’s the thing nobody talks about when they tell the Shaq and Penny story. On the court, they were Magic and Kareem,  unstoppable, perfect, often. They were two of the most marketed athletes in America, on competing brands, in the same city, in the same building, sitting two lockers apart. And that tension,  it had been simmering for a while.

 But then, on January 31st, 1996, it boiled over on national television. >> There’s only one thing in my head. The championship. The championship. Cuz I got 10 fingers and no rings. And I love jewelry. >>  >> That’s what’s on my mind. This is my planet. >> You got room for a brother on your planet? >> Fight. >> A Reebok commercial featuring Shaq aired nationwide.

 In it, Shaq is sitting in a chair talking about his obsession with championships and jewelry. And  then, a familiar face appears on screen, Lil’ Penny, his teammate’s Nike alter ego, >>  >> the puppet that had been stealing every commercial break in America for the past year. And in the Reebok ad, Shaq knocks Lil’ Penny off the chair.

 Shaquille O’Neal, Penny’s own teammate, made a commercial where he literally knocked Penny’s alter ego off a couch on national television during the American Music Awards. And Penny found out about it when the rest of America did. He didn’t speak to Shaq for 2 weeks, but the Reebok ad was just the spark. The real fire had been building in contract negotiations.

  When Penny was negotiating his extension, Shaq had his back. Publicly, he told the organization that Penny deserved to be paid.  He vouched for his teammate. Penny got his deal, 6 years, $70  million, and then it was Shaq’s turn. Orlando lowballed him, offered $80 million, well below what the most dominant center in basketball commanded.

And while all of this is happening, >>  >> while Shaq is fighting the organization for what he’s worth, his teammate, the man he recruited to Orlando, the man he vouched for publicly, said nothing. But it got worse. Word got back to Shaq that during those negotiations, Penny had told the organization something.

Something that to Shaq  was beyond unforgivable. He heard that Penny said Orlando was his team. >> They said it wasn’t my team no more. It hurt a little bit. So, since they said it wasn’t my team, it’s his team now. Let’s see what the other teams would offer me. So, the other teams offered me more than what my team was willing to offer, and I took advantage of it.

 But again, if I didn’t have that attitude, how many could we have won? >> Shaq didn’t hold back on what he thought of that. Their teammate, Horace Grant, a four-time champion who had seen friction between superstars  before, watched all of this unfold up close. And when he summed it up, he didn’t sugarcoat a word. Egos, egos, egos.

 It’s just a darn shame that all the talent that Shaq and Penny had, they couldn’t just be one and win championships. That’s what it should have been all about. Not who gets the perfect parking space, or who gets the commercial. Two superstars, two  brands, two egos. And the fans and media were making it worse.

 Orlando’s own fan base was publicly questioning whether Shaq deserved his max contract because he couldn’t make free throws. The Los Angeles Lakers saw everything that was happening in Orlando. The disrespect, the lowball offer, the teammate who wouldn’t go to bat for him, and they made their move. $120 million. >>  >> ESPN has learned the Lakers can now offer Shaq over $120 million bucks.

>> Shaq signed with LA, and just like that, the partnership that Shaq himself had engineered, the  dynasty that was supposed to define the decade, was over. Not because of a rival team, not because of an injury, because two young men who should have been unstoppable together, let pride  get in the way.

 And here’s the part that makes this whole story hurt even more. Years later,  sitting by a pool together for ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary, >>  >> they finally said what everyone already knew. >> A lot of what ifs when it comes to you and me. >> Yeah, what if you had stayed? >> What if you wouldn’t have gotten injured? A lot of what ifs.

>> Two men, >>  >> poolside, older, wiser, and 30 years too late. Shaq left for Los Angeles, and everything Penny Hardaway had built, the dynasty, the partnership, the future, was now entirely on his shoulders. With one knee already starting to give out, game one, >>  >> 1996 playoffs, Orlando versus Detroit.

Before Shaq even left, Joe Dumars goes for a rebound. Penny extends to play the ball, Dumars’ knee catches the back of Penny’s left knee. It’s not malicious, it’s not even a foul, it’s just contact, but something is different this time. >> And I remember the second one was Joe Dumars, he slammed into the back of my knee.

 I was going up for a rebound, and right when I was about to extend, he came to kind of try to seal me in on a rebound and knee me right in the back of my knee, man, and I that that was never the same. That those two really just kind of started off the the avalanche of what happened moving forward with the with the knee injuries. >> He played through it, the entire playoff run, the entire Olympics,  smiling for cameras, holding the gold medal, pretending he was fine.

 But when training camp started that fall, the pain had become something that could no longer be ignored. Surgery, a torn meniscus, and from the moment he woke up,  Penny could feel it. Something had been taken from him. His first step, his explosiveness, the thing that made him Penny. Shaq is gone. >>  >> The knee is broken.

 And now Penny is the sole face of an Orlando franchise trying to hold itself together with tape and hope. He still made the All-Star team in 1997  and 1998. Remarkable given what his body was enduring. But by 1999, Orlando traded him to Phoenix. And in Phoenix, any last hope of a comeback  started fading into something much darker.

 Two microfracture surgeries on the same left knee, both  in the year 2000. A procedure so new that Penny would later say, >> Uh, when I had the microfracture I knew it was instantly the the worst decision I had made in my life because I could just tell I was different. To have microfracture surgery sold it, that just destroyed me.

 It wasn’t even a And And it felt like my legs got my left leg got weaker. >> From the best guard in the world to a player who couldn’t straighten his leg without wincing. >> It was just to go from the best player in the league >> Mhm. >> the first team All-NBA point guard >> [clears throat] >> to the best guard in the world when you face him first team All-NBA to not even being mentioned, not going to All-Star game.

 That was just weird for me. The first All-Star game I missed, >> Meanwhile, the league kept moving. Kobe Bryant rose. Allen Iverson exploded. Vince Carter took over every highlight reel. And Shaq, the man who left Orlando, >>  >> won four championships. Four. Penny Hardaway became yesterday’s superstar before he even turned 30.

 This is the part of Penny’s story that hurts the most because the NBA never watched him fail. The NBA watched his body fail  him. There’s a difference, and it matters. But even after the injuries, even after basketball moved on without him, even after Shaq won rings in Los Angeles while Penny was hobbling through Phoenix, Penny Hardaway still wasn’t finished.

  Memphis never stopped being Penny City. Even after the NBA, even after all of it. He came  back, coached AAU ball, coached at Memphis East High School, invested in the community, a barber shop,  a beauty salon, programs for young players, a summer league he rebuilt from the ground up so kids in Memphis would have somewhere to grow.

 And in 2008, he wrote a check for $1 million to the University of Memphis. Not for a statue, not for his  name on a wall. To build a Hall of Fame that honored the program that gave him everything. Memphis didn’t forget Penny, and  Penny didn’t forget Memphis. Then in March 2018, Memphis fired their head coach, and before the announcement was even made, every person in that city already knew who was getting the call.

 Within weeks of being hired, Penny had landed the number one recruiting class in the entire country, headlined by 7’1 James Wiseman, considered a near  certain number one overall NBA draft pick. Penny said it himself, “This is Memphis. We don’t bluff.  We want all the smoke. We want everything.

” But the NCAA came knocking. They ruled Wiseman ineligible just three games into his college career. The allegation  that Penny, years earlier, while coaching Wiseman in high school, had helped pay moving expenses for his family. $11,000. Not a bribe,  a community figure helping a kid’s family.

 But the NCAA doesn’t care about context.  It cares about rules. Wiseman left, went second in the 2020 NBA draft to the Golden State Warriors.  Memphis faced years of investigations. Another gut punch, another thing taken from Penny Hardaway. But Penny had been gut punched before. He’d been shot. He’d  had his knee destroyed one surgery at a time.

 He’d watched his friend and running mate leave over ego and money. He’d watched his career dissolve while he was still young enough to stop it. He knew how to absorb a hit, so he kept building. 2021 NIT Championship,  2023 AAC Tournament title, 2025 a 29 and five record, AAC regular season and tournament championship, three consecutive March Madness births.

 In seven seasons as head coach, Penny Hardaway has gone 162 and 68. Memphis basketball isn’t just relevant again, it’s dangerous and he built it in the same city, the same streets, the same neighborhood where a young kid used to referee youth games at the YMCA and dream about something bigger. The boy from Binghamton came home >>  >> and it turns out home was the destination all along.

 We started this video asking a question, what if Penny Hardaway almost wasn’t? Almost wasn’t alive after a bullet found his foot on a Memphis street corner. Almost wasn’t a player after a knee gave out on a playoff court in Orlando. Almost wasn’t a dynasty after two superstars let pride cost them  everything. But Anfernee Hardaway always found a way through because the same woman who gave him his name, who turned the word pretty into Penny with nothing but a southern accent and 30 years of love, also gave him something no injury could take, no

beef could destroy, no bad decision could erase. She gave him the understanding that  you don’t need a championship to have a legacy. You don’t need to escape a neighborhood to prove it produced something extraordinary  and you don’t need the last word to win. He wears number one, one cent, the currency of a grandmother who cooked lunches at an elementary school and raised a Hall of Fame caliber talent on love, discipline,  and the quiet belief that her boy was going to be something special.

She was right about him. Some players are remembered for what they won. Some players are remembered for the partnerships they built. Some players are remembered for the shoes they wore  or the commercials they made. Penny Hardaway is remembered for all of it and for what he chose to become when every single one of those things was taken away.

 If Penny’s story hit different, if you’re sitting there right now thinking about what could have been, or maybe you’re learning  all of this for the very first time, then you are exactly who Crossover Fadeaway was built for. We don’t just cover what happened, we cover what it meant. The stories behind the stats, the people behind the legends, the beef, the brotherhood, and the moments that got lost in the highlight reels.

 If that’s your kind of content, subscribe right now. It costs you  nothing, and it means everything to us. And drop a comment. I want to know, do you blame Penny for Shaq leaving, or was the dynasty always doomed? Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time.