Aside from guys on the San Antonio Spurs and anyone with cornrows, my favorite NBA players as a kid were unsung heroes who overcame problems I dealt with as a kid. Theron Smith conquered a speech impediment, and Oliver Miller struggled with his weight. So did Robert “Tractor” Traylor. I identified with that battle! I gradually amassed a collection of forty-five of his basketball cards.
Not everyone is named after semi-truck, but at 6-foot-8 and 290 pounds, Robert Traylor certainly fit the bill. As a kid, he learned about basketball from his Aunt Lydia. She’d starred for the University of Detroit in the late 1970s. Traylor put those skills to good use as a high-schooler, playing as a McDonald’s All-American with future superstars and hall-of-famers Kevin Garnett, Vince Carter, and Paul Pierce.
Tractor declared for the University of Michigan out of high school, and he quickly shattered a backboard dunking against Ball State. Soon, he emerged as the leader of his team by averaging 16 points and 10 rebounds a game during his junior year. He was voted the MVP of the 1997 NIT Tournament, and Michigan won the inaugural Big Ten Tournament in 1998.
Unfortunately, Traylor’s college resume was not squeaky clean. As a freshman, he and several teammates were involved in a car crash as they returned to Ann Arbor from a party in Detroit. The accident’s winding investigation revealed a decades-long conspiracy centered around booster Ed Martin, who “loaned” several Michigan basketball stars, including Traylor, more than $600,000 to conceal the winnings from an illegal gambling operation Martin ran.
Robert Traylor was stripped of his collegiate awards since his amateur status had been compromised. The University of Michigan was punished harshly as well, and wound up vacating the records of every game Robert Traylor played in. Even his high school volunteered to retroactively forfeit his senior season!
Despite the controversy surrounding his amateur career, Tractor Traylor was selected by the Dallas Mavericks as the sixth pick in the 1998 NBA draft. On draft night, the Mavs quickly shipped him to the Milwaukee Bucks for rookies Pat Garrity and Dirk Nowitzki in what’s been called one of the more one-sided trades of all time. No one would have known it back then, but Dirk Nowitzki blossomed into a fourteen-time All-Star over twenty-one seasons with the Mavericks. He’s considered by many to be the greatest European-born basketball player ever.
As a rugged player with top-flight footwork for his size and a soft touch in the key, Traylor was expected to immediately impact Milwaukee’s milquetoast frontcourt. He responded by quickly became the Bucks’ starting center, shooting 53.7% from the field while averaging 5.3 points and 3.7 rebounds over sixteen minutes per contest.
As a rookie, Traylor’s best game was a late-season win against the Toronto Raptors. He scored fifteen points, grabbed eight rebounds, and recorded a steal and a block over thirty minutes of action. After the season ended, the Bucks made the playoffs for the first time in seven years! Unfortunately, they were swept by the Indiana Pacers in the first round.
Traylor was the only rookie to shoot better than 50% from the field in his debut year, and expectations were high for his sophomore campaign. Unfortunately, his numbers declined across the board as his starting center position was ceded to Ervin Johnson. Traylor started fifteen early games at power forward that year before veteran Scott Williams took his place in the lineup.
Traylor regressed off the bench, shooting 47.5% and averaging 3.6 points and 2.6 rebounds over ten minutes per game. His best performance during his second season came during its last game, when he hit half of his shots from the field on his way to eight points and four rebounds in a win against the Washington Wizards.
Although Traylor’s second season was underwhelming, the Bucks returned to the playoffs before losing to the Pacers in the first round again. I watched those Pacers-Bucks matchups religiously on TV and, despite playing sparingly during his second year, I’ll never forget seeing a guy like Tractor Traylor yam one over seven-foot-four Rik Smits! I’ll always love the Pacers, but powerful dunks like that were a big part of why I connected with Robert Traylor.
Of course, I wasn’t tall enough to throw down a windmill over a massive opponent. I’ve never been naturally athletic, but I practiced enough to be the sixth man on travel and school teams in middle school. I was fat when I first started playing organized basketball in elementary school, fat when I played organized ball, and I was fat when I scrimmaged and practiced with the high school team my senior year. Fat, fat, fat! Nevertheless, I decided if guys like Oliver Miller or Tractor Traylor didn’t let their size get in the way of their performance, I wouldn’t either! I used their examples to my advantage like Tractor Trailer did.
Sadly, it turned out that the Bucks weren’t as enamored with Robert Traylor as I was, and they shipped him off to the Cleveland Cavaliers at the end of the season. Despite playoff success in the 80s and 90s, the Cavaliers were perennial cellar-dwellers around the turn of the century. Nevertheless, Traylor had the best season of his young career.
Back at center mostly off the bench, he averaged 5.7 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 1.1 blocks over seventeen minutes a game on efficient shooting splits. He even set a new career high of seventeen points in an early-season loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, a feat he matched five months later in a win over the Washington Wizards. More importantly, he grew an afro and braided it into cornrows. I craved those braids so much as a kid that, during summertime, my mom shaved an approximation of them onto my head! I wanted to look like Allen Iverson, Latrell Sprewell, Ben Wallace, Darius Miles, and, yes, Tractor Traylor.
Although I felt like a baller with my cool hair and took that attitude to my intramural leagues at Yorktown Elementary School, Robert Traylor didn’t pick up on the vibes I was sending his way. Despite flashes of promise, the Cavaliers traded him and two other players to Philadelphia before the 2001-02 season. Traylor never played a game for the Sixers since they quickly sent him to the Charlotte Hornets as part of a three-team deal, but he played sixty-one games off the bench as a power forward in the Queen City, averaging 3.7 points and 2.0 rebounds over eleven minutes per game.
The Hornets relocated to New Orleans the following year. Over a hundred and forty games across two seasons, Traylor turned in averages of 4.5 points and 3.7 rebounds in twelve minutes per game. His production was right in line with what he recorded during his first years in Milwaukee, but on November 3, 2003, Tractor Traylor had one of the best games of his career: he scored twenty points, snagged ten rebounds, and blocked three shots in a ten-point loss to the Atlanta Hawks.
Despite his big showing, the Hornets declined to re-sign Traylor for the 2004-05 season. He returned to Cleveland as a free agent, playing eighteen minutes a game and averaging 5.5 points and 3.7 rebounds. With a tendency to peak toward the end of the season, Tractor recorded a new career high of 20 points in a win against the Orlando Magic on April 11, 2005. Eight days later, he eclipsed his record by scoring 22 points, snaring ten rebounds, and blocking two shots.
Unfortunately, that marked Robert Traylor’s last season in the NBA. Although he was listed at 284 lbs. for most of his career, his real playing weight often topped 300. In the offseason, Traylor underwent surgery to fix an issue with his aorta. Although the New Jersey Nets signed him to play in 2005-06, he failed his physical and never appeared in an NBA game again.
Could Robert Traylor have climbed to greater heights than he achieved during his years in the NBA? It’s possible, but his career was remarkable nonetheless. Although no one would mistake his career for Dirk Nowitzki’s, Traylor played pro ball for seven years during an era when the average NBA career lasted four and a half years1. He made $12 million over those seasons, and got to count LeBron James and Ray Allen -two of the seventy-five greatest NBA players of all time2– as teammates!
That sounds like an excellent career to me, and advanced metrics such as win shares and value over replacement player label Traylor as slightly above average at his position. The numbers don’t tell the entire story, though, since the man threw down chaos dunks with no regard for human life!
Robert Traylor loved basketball too much to quit. After he left the NBA, he played professionally in Turkey, Italy, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. In 2010, he was even named the Baloncesto Superior Nacional’s Defensive Player of the Year! Unfortunately, his weight caught up with him and his playing regressed. In his last game for Puerto Rico’s Bayamon Cowboys on April 26, 2011, Traylor recorded two fouls but didn’t score during five minutes on the court.
Two weeks later, Robert Traylor was talking to his wife on the phone when the connection ended suddenly. Raye Traylor alerted authorities, who found him at his Isla Verde apartment, dead of a massive heart attack. He was only thirty-four.
By 2011, my interests shifted from basketball to music production, so I missed the news of Traylor’s death. “He was a leader of the team,” the manager of the Cowboys remembered. “He was very, very friendly and he got along very well with everyone. The fans loved him, idolized him3”
The Milwaukee Bucks echoed the sentiment. “Off the court he was a gentle giant, displaying his smile and care,” the team said in a release, “especially toward young people through his involvement in school visits and his work with the Special Olympics clinic4.”
There are bioliogical advantages to being built for the NBA, but it seems that obtaining a nickname based on a big rig is likely to cause some future problems. I idolized Tractor Traylor in elementary and middle school, but it’s clear that his weight issues prevented him from reaching his full potential. My own issues mirror Traylor’s, and maybe those struggles have impeded me as well. I’ll turn thirty-four in November, 2024. If my recent surgery was any indication, maybe I have one more lesson to learn from Robert “Tractor” Traylor, Michigan’s legendary frontcourt force.
All statistics and salary figures courtesy Sports Reference.
Sources Cited
1 Life after NBA comes sooner than many players think (2010, June 10). The National Basketball Association. NBA.com. Web. Retrieved July 27, 2023.
2 NBA 75th Anniversary Team Announced (2021, October 21). The National Basketball Association. NBA.com. Web. Retrieved July 27, 2023.
3 Thomas, M. (2020, July 19). The Tragic Death of Robert Traylor, Basketball’s Gentle Giant. Sportscasting. Web. Retrieved July 27, 2023.
4 (See footnote 1).
