Pistons' Will Bynum made himself into NBA player

BY JO-ANN BARNAS
FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER

He braces for the pain by gripping the sides of a barrel-sized cooler. Will Bynum knows the drill: His sore ankles and feet wrapped in tape, Bynum must climb into the icy tub for treatment to begin.

“Freeeziiing!” Bynum says, wincing and smiling at the same time.

Bynum, a backup point guard, is back in the Pistons’ lineup after missing three games because of the right ankle he rolled in Philadelphia on Dec. 9.

That the injury came three weeks after he tweaked his left ankle during a West Coast trip wasn’t surprising: Bynum knowingly put his right ankle at risk by overcompensating for the injured one. That also speaks of his driven personality:

“Everybody’s been playing hurt,” Bynum says with a shrug. “So it means doing extra on my part.”

There’s much we are just learning about Bynum, the former Georgia Tech star from Chicago’s South Side whose career finally has taken flight four years after working out for every NBA team — including the Knicks twice, he said — before being bypassed by each one in the 2005 NBA draft.

Now in his second year with the Pistons, Bynum, who turns 27 on Jan. 4, said he embraces each day by trying to live up to the words of Joe Dumars, who gave him his first big break by offering a two-year deal after the 2008 summer league.

“I think it’s your time,” the Pistons’ president told him. “You can show the world who you really are.”
Pistons' Bynum has overcome challenges in life and basketball

Any old phone book would do, as long as it was thick, and the binding was strong. And then the toe raises would commence -- up, down, up, down -- until Will Bynum reached 1,000.

For much of his childhood, Bynum was shorter than most kids his age. Although he knew he could nothing about his heredity, Bynum, even as a young teen, was determined to be in control of his basketball fate..

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Will Power