A shameless shout-out to my starting fantasy point guard: Gilbert Arenas.
I found an article called "Captain Quirk" by Sean Deveney. Enjoy.
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On a chilly afternoon in Washington, D.C., last week, Jean Brown's living room was overrun with Washington Wizards, players bearing gifts and stooping over a bit to protect their heads from the low ceilings. The elderly matriarch -- whose family was chosen to be part of the Wizards' generous family-to-family holiday gift program -- declared that she watches every Wizards game and smiled wide as Etan Thomas, Caron Butler, Jarvis Hayes, Antawn Jamison and members of the Wizards organization brought presents and took pictures. Suddenly, though, she looked concerned. "Where's Gilbert?" she creaked -- more of a demand than a question. "Where's Gilbert?"
From behind Thomas and Jamison popped Gilbert Arenas. Brown wrapped her hand around the back of Arenas' neck and planted a kiss on his cheek. Arenas chuckled and kissed Brown on the cheek. "You be good," she told him.
As the players left the house to board a bus, Arenas stopped to talk with some teens who had gathered nearby. They asked about his injury -- he had just missed a game with a bruised back -- and he assured them he was fine. As he left, a girl in the bunch attempted to give Arenas her phone number. ("Can you believe that?" Arenas said back on the bus. "Shouldn't she be in school or something?")
And so it went. Stopped at an address on K Street, there were distant calls -- "Gilbert! Gilbert!" -- from a high-rise apartment building. Arenas squinted to determine the source of the calls and wondered, "How the heck can they tell it's me from way up there?" Simple, says Wizards director of basketball administration Tommy Sheppard: "Gilbert is the man in this town."
He has become the man by developing into one of the NBA's best guards, an All-Star last season and, at 23, one of the league's best young talents. He's a relentless scorer who ranks fourth in the league in scoring (27.8 points per game) and is improving his point guard skills. Arenas, with Jamison and Larry Hughes (now in Cleveland), helped the Wizards crack their image as one of the league's saddest sacks last season and led the team to a 45-37 record and an appearance in the second round of the playoffs for the first time in 23 years -- back when the team was known as the Bullets. The team has struggled in the early part of this season, but expectations remain high.
For Arenas, though, it's not points and wins that make girls swoon, aged ladies pucker up and folks shout from high-rise balconies. There is a mischievous playfulness about Arenas, bad acts performed with a winning smile. During one gift-giving stop, Arenas showed some chivalry by taking a load of presents out of the arms of a female Wizards employee -- but then turned, handed the boxes to Butler (who already was burdened with a pile of gifts) and said, "Here, Caron, carry these." When a young girl asked Thomas, who is a poet, about his upcoming book, Arenas chimed in. "You want poetry? I got it," he said. "Roses are red, violets are blue, and ... I can't remember the rest."
Arenas is known for off-beat behavior. He once showered during a halftime of a game -- in full uniform -- and he does not let Wizards trainer Eric Waters touch him on game days. ("Bad luck," he says. "It's been proven.") After one game this month, Arenas said he was tired because he had been up all night playing video games.
But Arenas resists the quirky label he has been tagged with. Much of that quirkiness is rooted in a man-of-the-people mentality. He tosses his jersey into the crowd after every game so "at least one kid won't have to pay $200 for a jersey," he says. He added a behind-the-back twist before each free throw last season because he saw a player in a youth game imitating Pistons guard Rip Hamilton's shooting routine and Arenas decided he wanted to give kids something of his to imitate. After Hurricane Katrina, Arenas went to a store, spent $18,000 on soap, razors, detergent and other necessities and took them to the local armory, where hundreds of evacuees had been moved.
"I am quirky for an NBA player, maybe -- but not for a regular person," says Arenas, who has matured to the point he was named one of the team's three captains before the season. "I do stuff NBA players won't dare to do, but I don't think that makes me crazy. Most NBA players push themselves away from fans, but after a game, I'll go running into the crowd. I am not better than anybody else. So, when people see me, it's just, "What's up? How are you doing?' That makes me quirky? I don't know why."
The way Arenas sees things, he's normal. It's the behavior we've come to expect from big-time athletes that is weird. He is young and gifted, in the third year of a six-year, $60 million contract, but, as Wizards president of basketball operations Ernie Grunfeld says, "They forgot to tell Gilbert how an All-Star is supposed to act. Everyone loves him for it."
Well, not everyone. Jamison, for one, rolled his eyes on the bus listening to Arenas bust on his handbag. "It's a purse," Arenas said. "The thing you have has, like, fur and rhinestones on it. The thing you have would look good on Jennifer Lopez. It does not look good on Antawn Jamison."
Jamison has been Arenas' teammate in four of Arenas' five years in the league and figures he is one of the few people who understands him -- Arenas can be both good-natured and hotheaded, lovable and aggravating. Arenas was drafted by the Warriors in the second round in 2001 and was ticked at every team that broke promises to take him in the first round. He carried a hefty chip on his shoulder and had difficulty controlling his emotions. It was at the end of his second season that he tried to prove a point to Jamison, who had complained about not getting the ball enough. Arenas refused to shoot for three quarters, then started shooting midway through the fourth quarter and quickly racked up 14 points.
"Gilbert is going to talk a lot," Jamison says. "But he did not understand at first how to keep things from getting negative. So, problems developed. He has matured a lot since then."
Arenas went to Washington as a free agent in 2003. Year 1 was a disaster. He injured an abdominal muscle and missed 27 games. With three ball-needy guards -- Arenas, Hughes and Jerry Stackhouse -- the Washington offense operated like a tug-of-war. Making matters worse: Arenas seemed to hit more potholes than jump shots. "I had 32 flat tires my first year," he says. "I hit every pothole in Washington. That kind of summed up that season."
The concerns about Arenas followed him. He was outgoing and funny, but sometimes he went too far. He was competitive, but sometimes that competitiveness yielded to unhealthy anger with his teammates. Former teammate Kwame Brown told reporters he nearly slapped Arenas last season.
"He is going to get on guys, but he knows better now that sometimes it's obnoxious -- it's not funny," says Wizards coach Eddie Jordan. "Being a point guard, being the leader, means you have to know when you need some fire and brimstone and when you need hugs and pats on the back. That's the final thing Gilbert needs. He needs to compete with composure."
Maintaining composure has been a theme in Arenas' basketball life. When he was a sophomore at Grant High in Van Nuys, Calif., his coach, Howard Levine, watched Arenas for 10 minutes and declared Arenas would be his first NBA player. As a junior, Arenas broke school records for points (46) and assists (14) in the same game.
But, Levine says, "There were many faces of Gilbert, and we knew them all here. The biggest thing for him was managing the anger. The thing I learned about Gilbert is that you have to be tough on him. If you are tough on him, he will ultimately make the right choices."
"That's how I would coach me," Arenas says. "Be tough." That need comes from his upbringing. Arenas was raised by his father, Gilbert Arenas Sr., who won custody when his son was just 3. A few years later, the pair moved from Miami to Burbank, Calif., so Arenas Sr. could pursue an acting career. While trying to land gigs on commercials by day, Arenas Sr. worked the midnight shift at UPS. There were no aunts and uncles. Once his father left for the late shift, Arenas would hop out of bed and shoot baskets at the park.
"Most kids don't grow up with their fathers," Arenas says. "I was the other way around. My father worked long hours at night, then came home and worked more. The best way for me to stay out of trouble was to go play basketball, even late at night."
Little wonder Arenas sleeps just three hours per night or that he is known for showing up as late as 3 a.m. at the MCI Center practice court to take jumpers. Little wonder, too, that as an adult -- and despite his gift for gab -- Arenas has a solitary existence. He has no posse. He has no girlfriend. He lives alone. "It's just natural to me," Arenas says. "But other guys on the team say, "If I lived by myself, I'd go crazy.' Well, that's just the NBA. That's not everybody else. Plenty of people in the world live alone."
Arenas may be alone, but he's hardly lonely -- he's backed by a city that loves him, a relationship that will flourish as he matures. The negatives that once weighed down Arenas' reputation are nearly erased. He has taken to offering coaching advice to Hayes, and Arenas consoled rookie big man Andray Blatche when he was sent to the developmental league last week.
Jamison says Arenas "is just about at the point where he gets it, where he understands how to be a leader." Jordan stays on Arenas about becoming a better pure point guard and about maintaining his defensive intensity, but one Eastern Conference scout says, "He is already twice as good at doing those little things as he was when he came into the league. He is going to get better."
And when he does? "Not a single thing will change," Arenas says. "If someone else thinks that's weird or quirky, then let them call me weird or quirky."
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P.S. Joe, I'll never let you live down the fact you thought Gilbert would turn out bust, Mister I-know-a-good-point-guard-when-I-see-one. B)
P.S.S. westkoast, aren't you glad I was smart enough to not post the link, but the article itself. :up:
