A JaVale McGee feature in the Washignton Post

Here's a full-length article on JaVale McGee in the Washington Post:

The Son's Time to Shine
Once a Star Herself, P. McGee Gives Wizards Rookie His Space
Ivan Carter
Washington Post
July 28, 2008

Around 5:30 one morning when JaVale McGee was a sophomore in high school, his mother, Pamela McGee, woke him from a sound sleep and trudged him out into Michigan's bitterly cold winter darkness to run a mile in a pair of heavy boots.

At the time, McGee was on the junior varsity basketball team at Detroit Country Day School, an exclusive high school with high academic standards, a reputation for athletic excellence and a high tuition. Pamela, an all-American at Southern California who also played in the WNBA, was an assistant coach for the boys' varsity team.

When Pamela had poked her head into the junior varsity practice the day before, she was not pleased to see JaVale merely going through the motions. The next morning, he was jogging through the snow.

"It's expensive to go to Country Day," Pamela McGee said recently. "My mom was a teenage mother and worked in a factory so her children could go to college and get an education. So, when JaVale had the opportunity to go to Country Day and I went to that practice and saw that he wasn't working hard, that he was just loafing around practice wasting time, I was like: 'No. This is not going to happen.' That was unacceptable. I told him: 'If you aren't going to work hard, we're going to do this every morning.' He got the message and I've never had to do that since."

Today, JaVale is a 7-foot, 237-pound center preparing for his rookie season with the Washington Wizards, who selected him with the 18th pick in the June 26 draft. He is the first son of a WNBA player to be drafted by an NBA team.

The combat boots McGee wore that frigid morning were replaced long ago with a fresh pair of basketball shoes, and he'll put in most of his hard work on the plush practice court at Verizon Center. But the lessons McGee picked up from his mother have stuck with him....

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