Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

Different — he was always different. Normalcy for Jonathan Bender withered away with every inch he shot up as a teenager, from a springy 6-3 to a stringbean 6-11, and was gone altogether by the time he graduated from high school.

He was no longer just another talented teenager. He was the next preps-to-pros prodigy, the rarest of prospects: a basketball player blessed with a center's height and a guard's game. He was the kid who broke Michael Jordan's McDonald's All American Game scoring record; the kid with the 39-inch vertical leap; the kid, they said, who could become the next Magic Johnson.

"Think Kevin Durant before there was a Kevin Durant," said Indiana Pacers executive Donnie Walsh, who was so enchanted by Bender's upside, he traded enforcer Antonio Davis for Bender after Toronto made him the fifth pick in the 1999 NBA draft on behalf of the Pacers.

"I've never drafted a player with more potential," Walsh said 15 years later. "I can tell you that without even thinking about it."

Curious — Bender, too, was always curious. He came from nothing, in tiny Picayune, Miss., grew to nearly 7 feet and became a millionaire at 17. Still, he sought more. Amidst a sprint, he dreamed of winning a marathon.

Even as a precocious young star with the Pacers, Bender's road-trip reading consisted of books on business tycoons Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. Occasionally, he'd find himself parked in his Mercedes outside the mansion of Pacers co-owner Mel Simon, the ambitious NBA newbie captivated by his billionaire boss's success.

He admired the shopping-mall magnate from afar but never summoned the gusto to speak with him. For Bender, this is where different and curious collided. Like Simon, he wanted to create. To build. To provide. Success in sports had come too soon, too easily. Bender was as much a rarity off the court as on it: He was the star athlete who looked long term.

What happens, he wondered, when basketball stops?

"At a time in the league when everybody was idolizing Michael Jordan, Jonathan was idolizing Mel Simon," Walsh remembers.

Then the game was taken from him. Basketball, for Jonathan Bender, first stopped when he was 25.

"It can be a very short shelf life," Bender says now. "As a professional athlete, you're just a product. In my mind, I wanted to create something that could live forever. Something that wouldn't fade out. Something that people would need."

His career as a Pacer ground to a halt in 2006. Chronic knee pain — the result, Bender believes to this day, of that abnormal growth spurt during his teenage years — winnowed down his seasons: from 46 games in the 2002-03 season to 21 the next year, to seven, to two. By his sixth season, Bender could barely walk down a flight of stairs.

So he retired, leaving all that potential unrealized.

What if?

Fair or unfair, it became the question that will trail Jonathan Bender the rest of his life.

A new career

Bender is 33 now, and he won't play that game. Too painful. Too futile. Plus, these days, he doesn't have the time. He's too busy pushing forward.

Now, the can't-miss prospect who washed out of the NBA at 25 is resurrecting his life as a blossoming businessman. This is Jonathan Bender 2.0: building the brand of a joint-strengthening device he invented, refined, markets and sells.

So effective, it's one that, had it come around a decade prior, it could have saved his basketball career.

For Bender, "What if?" has become "What's next?"

"You need failure," Bender said. "Without it, you'll never know how to succeed."

Bender knows failure on the court and off. After seven seasons in Indiana, he packed up, sold his Carmel home and moved to Houston, where the warmth would offer solace to his brittle knees. The cartilage was so worn down, the doctors told him, he'd never play again.

He had tried, however. He had spent months at a time in Boston, working with renowned trainer Dan Dyrek, the same man who helped sustain Larry Bird's career in the late '80s after his back betrayed him. But for Bender, the pain always kept coming back.

"I'd feel good for five minutes, then 10 minutes into practice, it'd feel like people were stabbing my knees over and over," he said. "It became mentally exhausting because I felt like I was failing over and over."

Then it was done; the Pacers waived him in June 2006. Bender was labeled one of the biggest busts in NBA history.

Life after basketball began with a string of poor investments that severely sliced into the $30 million he'd accrued during his career: concert promotions, real estate, a record label. Nothing stuck. Bender was, in just his late 20s, on the brink of becoming the latest pro athlete to squander his fortune.

So he changed course. He stopped thinking quick fix and started thinking long term. As a kid, he'd create, design and build his own bicycles and parachutes. To succeed, he finally surmised, he'd have to start from scratch.

Slumped on a park bench in Houston one afternoon shortly after leaving Indiana, Bender watched runners and walkers stroll by, and a light bulb went off in his head.

He raced to Walgreens, then to Home Depot, then to Sports Authority. ("Picture a 6-11 guy walking up and down every aisle for like an hour," he said.) He bought electrical tape, rubber bands, zip ties, ankle braces, metal rods and wire cutters. He went home, slapped together what he'd sketched out in his head, and asked his girlfriend, Bernice, to come into the room.

"Try this on," he told her.

She looked at it and laughed.

"It looked like garbage," Bender admits.

But it worked. The initial prototype of what would become the JBIT MedPro — picture a weight belt attached to ankle braces with elastic bands — accomplished exactly what Bender wanted: It relieved stress off the lower joints by making the quadriceps, hamstrings and calf muscles labor more intensely than usual. Simply put: It took the stress off his knees.

Bender tested it, refined it, tested it and refined it. Seeking a second opinion, he took it to the engineering wing at Purdue University. Here was an NBA has-been, a kid from rural Mississippi who never attended college, pitching ideas and brainstorming with biomedical researchers who analyze up to 30 potential inventions a year.

It was pure Bender: always different, always curious.

"Jonathan tends to break down a lot of stereotypes," said Eric Nauman, the Purdue professor who examined Bender's device. "He comes in, and with his background, I'm sort of like, 'I don't know if this thing is going to fly.' But as soon as you talk to him, you can tell he gets it. He knew exactly what he envisioned, this sort of external hamstring, and was very good at getting his ideas across."

Nauman and a group of graduate assistants all agreed: Bender's contraption did shift pressure away from the knees. All that remained before it could hit the stores: Bender had to demonstrate the results. And he knew there'd be no greater guinea pig than himself.

If he could rehabilitate the very knees that cut short his NBA career, he determined, it would prove his device was "undeniable."

Comeback dreams

Bender spent a year in the gym, working out every day with his invention. In 2009, his knees feeling stronger than ever, he reached out to Walsh, who was by then general manager of the New York Knicks.

Walsh gave him a tryout and signed him midway through the 2009-10 season. For a few months, Bender was reborn, averaging 4.7 points in a little over 11 minutes a game. Yet the maintenance was a struggle: Bender had to do leg squats on the bench to keep his knees loose, and after each game, he'd run through a strength workout with his MedPro in his hotel room.

But, for Bender, it was a redemption of sorts. He'd proven he could play again. He'd proven his invention could yield results. Most telling, perhaps, was what the Knicks training staff told him after running him through a series of workouts: that he had the strongest lower body of anyone on the team.

Walsh offered him a contract for a second season, but by then, Bender knew he was being pulled in a different direction. For the first time in his life, business trumped basketball.

"At that point," he said, "I knew I had to finish what I started."

Traveling salesman

All that was left was finding a market. Bender packed up his prototypes, hit the stores and pitched his product.

"When I played, I could play anywhere on the court," he said. "This was sort of the same thing. I didn't want to just invent it, I wanted to prove I could sell it, too. I wanted to be able to do everything."

An inventor's mind with a salesman's drive, Bender walked into a Relax the Back store in Sugarland, Texas, one day and met the manager, who told him he suffered from the lower-back condition sciatica.

"Try this out," Bender told him, confidently handing him his MedPro.

It didn't take long. The manager, so startled by its effectiveness, bought one on the spot.

"He told me it eased his pain between 60 and 70 percent," Bender says.

Similar stories soon followed. One involved an elderly man who, after a nasty motorcycle accident, hadn't been able to walk up stairs in 20 years. That was until he tried Bender's product.

"The best part of all of this is seeing his passion," said Bernice, now Bender's wife. "He's not wishing he was still playing basketball. More than anything, he loves helping people, like that old man who had some of the same pain he did."

Bender has partnered with Relax the Back and is now selling his MedPro (retail: $199) off his own website. The byproduct of Bender's imaginative mind that day in a Houston park has spawned a company — JB3 Innovations — and a product that has propelled revenue growth of 40 percent month-over-month since December.

He aims for more. While the current MedPro model has found a home among baby boomers (Bender himself sold 300 units his first two months), he hopes to soon polish off a model designed for serious athletes.

He imagines it thwarting the nagging knee pain that often accompanies a sudden growth spurt. And maybe for the man who invented it, it would further prove Jonathan Bender — always different, always curious — was destined to find success all along.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.