Shawn Bradley, once the Sixers’ gentle giant, now faces a tragic challenge | Mike Sielski

The last time that Shawn Bradley and Joe Favorito saw each other was at an NBA All-Star Game four or five years ago, a pleasant reunion for a couple of guys who got their starts in professional basketball with the same team at the same time. In 1993, the Sixers selected Bradley with the second pick in the NBA draft and hired Favorito as their public-relations chief. Now the two were together again, Favorito getting that familiar ache in his neck as he craned it upward, trying to look a 7-foot-6 man in the eye.

“All he did was talk about how happy he was,” Favorito said by phone recently. “He repeated the same thing over and over again: ‘You have to be comfortable with yourself before you can be comfortable with anybody else.’”

A piece of heartbreaking news, revealed only last week, had started Favorito thinking about Bradley and remembering their time in Philadelphia: On Jan. 20, Bradley had been bicycling on North Country Lane in St. George, Utah, a block from his home, when a car struck him from behind, leaving him paralyzed. For two months, he has been hospitalized, rehabilitating the injury, and suddenly the boos and berating and pressure that he faced during his two-plus seasons with the Sixers are cake compared to the challenge before him now.

“He never treated anybody badly,” Favorito said, “ever, ever, ever.”

The crash was a tragic twist in Bradley’s story, the strangest chapter of which he spent here. He was 21 when the Sixers drafted him, having spent twice as much time as a Mormon missionary in Australia as he did a college basketball player. That single year at Brigham Young University, when he averaged 14.8 points and 7.7 rebounds a game and led the nation in blocked shots, was enough to convince Sixers owner Harold Katz and general manager Jim Lynam that Bradley could develop into a dominant post player. In an era when sports science wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as it is now, Katz, who had made his millions through the diet-food franchise NutriSystem, was optimistic that the Sixers and their training staff could add pounds and muscle to Bradley’s praying-mantis-style body, could justify the team’s decision to draft him after Chris Webber and before Penny Hardaway.

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The theory was flawed for any number of reasons, among them the Sixers’ methods, Bradley’s metabolism, and his makeup. The team signed Bradley to a $44 million contract, then splashed a photo of him on the cover of its media guide, raising expectations for him to a level that, in so demanding and tenacious a media market, he was never equipped to meet. Bradley and his wife ordered lawn furniture for their home and had it delivered to Favorito’s house so that no one would know where they lived. During training camp in Atlantic City, Bradley was walking along the pier with Favorito and another team employee when they saw an amusement-park ride in which a person bobbed up and down in the air from a giant bungee cord. I want to do that, Bradley said, so he did. “He was a giant kid,” Favorito said.

Within him swirled an odd mixture of innocence and entitlement. As part of a marketing promotion, the Sixers partnered with a local bakery, which presented Bradley with cheesecake samples. The goal was to bulk him up. He ate them one day after practice, then vomited. Bradley lost more than 6 pounds over the course of his rookie season, falling under 240, and sometimes complained about the rigors of Pat Croce’s conditioning program. Awkward and robotic on the court, he became the symbol of one of the sorriest periods in Sixers history, a five-year stretch when the team never won more than 26 games in a season.

“This is no disrespect to Shawn, but I think when you can get Penny Hardaway or Chris Webber and you pick him, I felt so bad for that dude,” former Sixers guard Dana Barros said in a 2019 interview. “He was put in the middle of the lions’ den, and he wasn’t prepared, coming off a sabbatical. He wasn’t physically ready. He wasn’t mentally ready. To watch the torture of that every day …”

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The Sixers had a succession of accomplished post players work with him to refine his game. They brought in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They signed Moses Malone, who appeared in 55 games for the team, in his next-to-last NBA season, and barely uttered a word to Bradley. They had Jeff Ruland as an assistant coach. None of the tutoring, such as it was, helped, and to read Bradley’s quotes from newspaper stories back then is to hear a kid who’s trying to sound like what he thinks a tough, edgy competitor sounds like. “I don’t play the game to lose,” he said after the ’93 draft, but the Sixers lost 97 of his 143 games for them before they traded him to the New Jersey Nets in November 1995.

“There was an obvious level of frustration that he couldn’t perform at the level he was expected to,” David Falk, Bradley’s longtime agent, said in a phone interview. “His whole background is so different from a typical NBA player, and I think that helped him deal with what I’d call ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ It gave him a better ability to withstand it.

“I tell my clients: The biggest challenge is managing the ups and downs you have to live with in professional sports. One day, you’re a hero, and the next day, you’re a bum. For most people, that’s a very difficult thing to deal with, particularly at a young age. Because he was different, he had a better ability to deal with it.”

Bradley lasted 12 years in the NBA before filling his time with his family and charity work, raising money for HIV/AIDS research, volunteering at leprosy colonies in India. In retrospect, maybe the greatest sin of his basketball career was getting drafted too high by a franchise that at the time was barely functional. “He wanted to be good, but I think he had to learn how to be good,” Favorito said. “He never really had the chance to fit in his own skin.”

The hope has to be that his perspective, his grounding, the maturity that he gained long after he left Philadelphia, will help him now. Reached by phone last week, Jim Lynam said that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about Bradley, that their relationship was too special, the sadness too fresh. And on his social-media accounts, Joe Favorito asked people to pray for Shawn Bradley, who turned 49 on Monday, who was happy and comfortable with himself and his life before he left his house on a winter afternoon and started on his bike along North Country Lane.