The Rookie: Michael Carter-Williams

NONE OF WHAT’S unfolded in the very brief career of Michael Carter-Williams was a given when the Sixers selected him 11th overall in last June’s draft. Questions lingered about his shooting percentage, his slim frame and his consistency. “I thought he’d be good eventually, but I didn’t think it would be this fast,” says Chris McManus, a host on ESPN Radio in Syracuse.

Everything that happened in college, and what’s unfolding here, began not with the point guard, but with his parents. His mother, Mandy Carter-Zegarowski, played basketball through college and coached a high- school team near the family’s hometown of Hamilton, Massachusetts, to seven titles in a decade. She split from her son’s father (who’s still a strong presence in Carter-Williams’s life) when Michael was a few months old. So it was his stepdad, Zach Zegarowski, who helped Mandy mold him into a pro-prospect athlete. Zegarowski played for UMass-Lowell and coached high-school ball in Boston for 11 years. Between both parents, Carter-Williams grew up at practices and watched state title banners raised to the rafters. “There’s a lot of humility in our household,” says his mother, who also has a 16-year-old daughter and twin 15-year-old sons—all athletes—with Zegarowski. “There’s a lot of talk about ‘we’ and ‘team,’ and that really makes a difference.”

In high school, Carter-Williams left other sports behind to concentrate on basketball, to which his talent—and later his height—was best suited. (You won’t find any six-foot-six catchers in the major leagues.) Through summers on the AAU circuit, camps, and a transfer to prep school in Rhode Island, Carter-Williams was usually the best player on the court; at the McDonald’s All-American game in 2011—for high-school students, which he was not quite three years ago—he won the skills competition. His lone setback was a camp coach who wrote him a harsh evaluation, suggesting that with a lot of hard work, he might earn a roster spot with a Division III college. Carter-Williams took a page from the Tom Brady School of Self-Motivation, posted the report on his wall, and set out on a mission. “It crushed me at first,” he says. “I thought I was pretty good. I always dreamed of playing in the NBA. When I got that, it made me take a step back and realize how hard I do have to work just to prove people wrong.”

So it was a shock when Carter-Williams spent his entire freshman year at Syracuse on the bench. That team went on a historic tear, going 20 games without a loss and without his help. His stepfather puts it bluntly: “Freshman year was the toughest basketball year of his life. There were a lot of days he was in tears: Am I good enough? Should I be here?” Zegarowski is a Boston sports junkie who can recite the starting roster for the 1978 Red Sox and rattle off the Sixers of the Dr. J-era, in deference to their classic battles with the Celtics. He had an appropriately lunch-pail suggestion for his stepson: “I said, ‘Get to the gym early and stay late. How about that? Don’t complain.’”

Carter-Williams listened, and would dribble so much before practice that he once Super Glued his fingertips to stop them from bleeding. “It humbled him,” Zegarowski says of that freshman season. “It made him appreciate work ethic and produced what came the next year. Without freshman year, he wouldn’t be where he is.”

BEING THE STARTING point guard at Syracuse University is like being the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles: You’re the centerpiece of the biggest game in town; all eyes are on you, and the blood pressure of a sports-crazy fan base rises and falls with your every triumph and misstep. “A lot of opinions, a lot of criticizing,” his mother recalls of the atmosphere around the Orange during her son’s sophomore year. “When you’re playing well, they love you. When you’re not, they let you know.” (Sound like somewhere you know?) The team struggled late and lost five out of eight to close the season. In a title-or-bust town, playing in March isn’t enough. (Again, familiar?) The Chicken Littles clucked loudly, and Carter-Williams took much of the heat. “He was the star and asked to do everything on a team that’s offensively challenged,” says McManus of ESPN Radio. “He was the lightning rod.”

By all accounts, Carter-Williams was then, and still is, a good kid. Sixers insiders gush over what a pleasure he is to be around on a daily basis. When his sister Masey—a Division I basketball prospect—tore her ACL, Carter-Williams calmed her with stories of his own disappointments, and had teammate Nerlens Noel, who’s sidelined with the same injury, call her to commiserate. In March, when a three-alarm fire swallowed up the family home in Massachusetts, Carter-Williams was the calming voice. “Michael said it’s going to be okay,” says his mother. “He’s an old soul.”

But kids make mistakes, even the straight arrows, and in December 2012, Carter-Williams made a little one that grew into something big. On a shopping trip to the local mall near campus, he and some friends were goofing around. A pair of gloves and a bathrobe ended up in his backpack at Lord & Taylor, and when he left the store, a plainclothes security officer handcuffed him for shoplifting. Someone snapped a photo as he was led away on an escalator, with the backpack and burly guard in tow. (Carter-Williams paid a $500 fine and was banned from the store for two years; no criminal charges were filed.) Suddenly, head coach Jim Boeheim was fielding questions about the incident, which he and Carter-Williams would call “a misunderstanding.” Basketball blogs, local media and opposing Big East fans had a field day. At a game against Georgetown, one Hoyas supporter was photographed in a bathrobe with a sign reading “Please don’t steal my bathrobe MCW.” (Through a Sixers spokesperson, Carter-Williams says the incident is one he “apologized for at the time, learned from and has moved on.”)

His parents reacted in the time-honored way that all children dread: with the “d” word. “We were disappointed that he made a poor decision,” his mother says. “He was more upset about how it affected his family than himself.” Ever the parent-coach, she also used the experience as a teaching tool, to show how an act of kindness could reach just as many people someday as his boneheaded stunt did. “The stage is set,” she told her son, “for you to make a difference in other people’s lives.”