It was one of those hinge points in Steve Francis’s life. He would be transitioning from college to the pros, from unpaid to paid. Just as Francis’s unlikely backstory—a rough childhood, a junior college transfer, a transcendent season at Maryland—was rocketing around the basketball cosmos, so, too, was speculation he was going to be the first pick in the 1999 NBA draft, the new backcourt star of the Bulls as they rebuilt from the Michael Jordan era.
For all the players who worry about whether they’ll be drafted, the great suspense for Francis was learning where and for whom he would be working. Better still, the draft was being held at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., a few miles from where Francis had been raised by his grandmother, in Takoma Park, Md. At the event, his agents were flanked by his Reebok representatives, who were flanked by publicists. A huge mural of him— “Godzilla-size,” as the Washingtonian characterized it—covered a wall adjacent to the arena.
But an evening that should have marked one of the great highlights in Francis’s life broke unhappily. With the No. 1 pick, the Bulls selected Elton Brand. When Francis was then chosen second, he wore the look not of a soon-to-be NBA millionaire, but of a man conscripted to serve in a foreign land.
