O.J. Mayo was not on an NBA roster last year after he was dismissed from the league and placed on a two-year ban for a violation of the NBA’s drug policy. After an eight-year NBA career, which followed one of the most scrutinized prep hoops careers of the past two decades — he was once called the “next LeBron” out of high school — Mayo would have to be out of basketball for two years.
Mayo’s absence from the NBA was accompanied by a general absence from the public eye, with very few exceptions. So, for the past year Bleacher Report’s Ryan Jones poked around, asking NBA players, executives, coaches, and agents about the curious silence of Mayo and found that very few — even those that would be considered friends of Mayo — had heard from him since his NBA departure.
It was a thought-provoking read about Mayo’s rise and fall from someone who has followed his career since the high school days, but the headline of the piece grabbed everyone’s attention — including Mayo’s.
On Thursday, Mayo decided to respond to Bleacher Report on Instagram and let them know that he was right where he’s been for most of his life, in Los Angeles working out in a gym.
There was also a recent post from Taj Gibson of the new Timberwolves acquisition in the gym with his fellow USC Trojan, working out.
Mayo seems like the kind of guy that handles his fame in a different way than many others, and went out on his own to rediscover something after he was dismissed from the league. He isn’t an attention seeker and, as Jones noted in his piece, is a curious intellectual, which makes it hard not to see connections between his quiet departure from professional sports and what we saw from someone like Ricky Williams when he left the NFL. Mayo insists he’s on the orderly path back and isn’t missing at all. For those he wants to find him, they know where to reach him, but everyone else will have to live a bit in the dark.
