You're right Blackman.
I'm taking the Sixers (pk) tonight
January 8, 2003
By Eric Adelson
ESPN The Magazine
Crazy. Ron Artest is crazy. Sometimes it is said with a chuckle: He crazy! Sometimes it is said in admiration: Mmm, mmm, dude is cray-zy. And sometimes it is said in a grave whisper: I think he might be crazy.
His high school coach: "A wild man."
His college coach: "Kind of scary at times."
An NBA teammate: "The court is 94 feet of therapy -- for whatever's bothering him."
If Artest can control himself, he can control his fate.
Look at the man. Watch him play. Watch him rip a phone out of press row, bust a blackboard, charge into a locker room after a loss and scream at his teammates, "Ain't nobody eating! Nobody deserves to eat!" Watch him hurl a TV monitor to the floor after a loss in New York and then smash a $100,000 camera to bits.
Listen to the man. Listen to him call himself unstoppable -- and mean it; then call himself a loser -- and mean it. Listen to him wonder aloud how he shut down Kobe and T-Mac and then wonder aloud why NBA players are so far beneath his expectations. Listen to him insist that if he were commissioner, he'd enforce a mandatory ejection for cussing "because kids are watching" but remove any punishment for punting a ball into the stands "because it's fun." Listen to him say this: "They better not put me in the All-Star Game. I won't shoot, but I'll dominate that easy game. I'll be playing hard defense. I'll be foulin'. I'll be flagrant fouling. Everyone will be like, 'What are you doing?' "
What is he doing? The whole league wants to know. Artest's own team has removed any "throwable" objects from the scorer's table -- and that was before he was fined and suspended for three games for chucking all that A/V equipment at Madison Square Garden. Teammates practice hard because they know if they don't, they're gonna get hurt out there. And opponents are just plain scared by Artest's arched-eyebrow scowl, his Joe Weider arms and his bump-and-run defense. "If there is any fear in your heart," says former teammate and longtime friend Marcus Fizer, "you will be afraid of that guy."
What will Artest do next? Here's a guy whose unmatched defense and drive ratchet up as his first-place team improves. Here's a guy whose own father says, "I always thought Ron's temper would be his downfall in life." Here's a guy who threatened his ex-girlfriend over the summer and was ordered to undergo anger-management therapy, then called his boss in Indianapolis to tell him the news and said, "I could sure use that!"
He wasn't joking. Artest had anger-management therapy once before. And out of those doctor's visits came a prescription that has stayed with him and buoyed him and transported him to an almost impossible happiness. Unspool all that crazy and you'll find a single thread that weaves from each outburst to the one before, and all the way back to the turbulent time that Artest first entered a therapist's office, at 8 years of age.
This nice delivery man in the cap and jacket can explain. Here he is now, in a Manhattan McDonald's on a Friday afternoon, after dropping off his last cases of bottled water. He devours six sugar cookies and two milks. "You wouldn't think I had a temper by lookin' at me," says Ron Artest Sr. And no, you wouldn't. A goofy, endearing smile stands out more than that 6'2", 250-pound brawn. But the man is sensitive, and he takes everything personally. Once, a co-worker challenged him, poked him in the chest, and Big Ron coldcocked him right there on the job. Ron Sr. is a Navy vet and a former boxer -- a one-time Golden Gloves heavyweight from Philly -- who put the gloves on his oldest as soon as Ron-Ron could keep them aloft. Ron Sr. says he prayed that sports might keep the boy from inheriting that Artest temper. It didn't. Not in the grimy-bricked Queensbridge projects of New York that Ron Sr. and his wife, Sarah, called home. Not when there were eight kids -- six siblings, two nephews -- in two bedrooms. Not when money was so tight that Ron Sr. borrowed from seven different loan sharks. Ron-Ron ate and ate -- he started eating solids at 3 months -- so Daddy took food from the hospital where he worked and bought $300 worth of groceries at a time on store credit. And not when Ron-Ron saw Daddy get angry and start yelling. Saw Daddy's jaw set and his eyes go from warm to hot. Saw Daddy hit Mommy. Ron-Ron offered to lie to the cops, but Daddy said no, that's not right. Never lie. Never hit a woman. Don't be like your father.
But it was too late. Ron-Ron's own temper began to smolder as his parents' marriage fell apart. And he knew only one way to cope -- by lashing out, like Mom and Dad did. So when a boy cut him in line at the school cafeteria, Ron put his enormous hands around the kid's throat. When an older cousin taunted him on the playground, Ron knocked him out. Only 7 years old, Ron was trapped by the madness he feared and the only method of coping he knew. "A lot of Ron's anger," says Ron Sr., "came from the breakup of the family."
Ron Sr. and Sarah did not stay in love, but they did stay involved. Dad moved only a few doors down from Mom, visited Ron every day and took care of the spankings when his oldest got into trouble at school. But it wasn't enough. After several calls from worried teachers, the Artests sent their 8-year-old son to anger-management therapy. The counselor talked and listened and found out what would distract Ron from all the trouble at home. After a few weeks, he offered a suggestion: basketball.
So Ron played against his humongous daddy, who shoved him and held him and sometimes tackled him to make him strong inside and out. The boy played in wind and snow and after midnight and by himself, and played on that day when the director of the community center asked him, "Why are you always so upset?" The boy played in the Rucker Summer League and snarled on cue when all the older men called him "Ultimate Warrior." He played when Mom and Dad finally separated in '92, when his baby sister died of SIDS in '95 and on the day after the funeral -- where he watched Mommy put one of his basketball plaques in 10-week-old Quanisha's casket. The boy played on into high school, leaving his blood on the floor and elbowing bigger players and stepping on their feet just to scare them a little. He played in an AAU tournament in Phoenix, when some kid on his own team started yapping too much and Ron-Ron shoved him backward over a chair. That very day, the coach from St. John's, there scouting the tournament, smiled at the muscular teen and thought: That's him. That's the one I want.
Hoops made Artest feel better, made him excited and then made him special. His new coach, Fran Fraschilla, told Ron he would be the linchpin, the perfect player for rugged St. John's. The coach tweaked and taunted him, demoting him to the second team just to rile him up and stir up practice. "It felt like Frankenstein in the laboratory," Fraschilla says. "You could tell he was ready to blow his stack. Everyone kind of feared him."
Artest outright unnerved opponents -- the bumping, the elbowing, the unshakable glare. Even when someone got by him, big No.15 would follow his man to the hoop and put all his power into a swooping roundhouse right timed to his victim's release. Whether the swing hit ball, hand or head, the message got sent. The Red Storm became the Artest tempest, and New York ate it up. Sure, there were technicals and the occasional fights with teammates, but St. John's had given Ron-Ron a safe place to seethe.
And Ron gave back. Fraschilla got canned because of his own temperament, but Artest's will and talent made the Johnnies a force. Mike Jarvis -- the guarded anti-Fran -- sat Artest down in his first week on the job just to exchange pleasantries. Right away, Artest leaned forward in his chair and said, "Do you think we have what it takes to get to the Final Four?" Jarvis tried to process it -- a player challenging him? -- and said, uh, yes. So Ron took it to another level. More bump-and-run defense, more fights, more dismissals from practice, more winning. Artest dragged his team to the Elite Eight as a sophomore, then invited about a thousand of his neighbors to the Queensbridge community center to announce he was going pro at 19. Come on, everybody, let's get out of the projects once and for all.
