Evo jedan stari članak o Kwame Brownu, iz današnje perspektive tu ima više gluposti nego u našem saboru, jedna stvar mu se mora priznati čovjek se fakat dobro prodao, kao da mu je agent platio 3-tjednu školu gdje je naučio glumit (lagat)
pomoglo je i to što je uništio Chandlera 1-1, Tyson je imao slab dan možda i najgori dan.
Wiz Kid
In 19-year-old Kwame Brown, Wizards boss Michael Jordan may have drafted a player Whose competitive fire rivals his own
In his day, Michael Jordan lived for vengeance, whether the affront to
him was real or imagined. So, too, does 19-year-old Kwame Brown, who was
certain he was not the Washington Wizards' first choice—"a scrub" is
how he thought they viewed him—as they considered their options for the
No. 1 pick in the NBA draft. When Brown arrived in Washington 12 days
before the draft for his second meeting with team president Jordan and
his staff, no one was at the airport to meet him. The driver who finally
showed up wasn't sure where he was supposed to deliver Brown, and when
Brown reached his hotel, he was told there was no reservation for him.
It turned out that his last name had been misspelled. "How can you not
get that right?" Brown says.
The slipups, however, didn't bring out the worst in Brown; he's not the
type to be petulant. No, Brown used the Wizards' apparent indifference
to build some Jordanesque animosity toward his chief rival in the draft,
7-foot high school star Tyson Chandler. When Brown arrived at
Washington's practice facility, he ran into Chandler, who let him know
that he'd been meeting with Jordan's people for two days.
Kwame-come-lately was then told to wait on the sideline as the Wizards
put Chandler through an individual workout. "It was like they were
coaching him—'Come on, Tyson!'—like he was their player already," says
Brown. With a shrug he adds, "So then I went out and killed him. Killed
him."
If Jordan was looking for a competitor reminiscent of himself, he saw
glimpses of one that June day as the 6'11", 250-pound Brown repeatedly
lowered his thick shoulders and dismantled the 235-pound Chandler
one-on-one. When the Wizards said they had seen enough, Brown walked
over to Jordan, his hero, and vowed, "If you draft me first, I'll never
disappoint you." Before turning away, the teenager offered a prediction
for a one-on-one showdown in the not-so-distant future: "And I'll beat
you."
The Wizards, who on June 27 made Brown the first high school player to
be chosen No. 1, maintain that he was wrong to think they had their
hearts set on Chandler. Nonetheless, assistant general manager Rod
Higgins likes hearing that Brown reacted to the perceived slight as
Jordan would have. "If that's the competitive nature Kwame has," Higgins
says, "then he's off to a good start."
Growing up in the shrimping town of Brunswick, Ga. (pop. 16,433), Brown
would watch Jordan on TV whenever he could, learning from his example
and drawing strength from whatever similarities to His Airness he found.
His competitiveness and poise may change the perceptions of those
opposed to high school players leapfrogging college and going directly
to the NBA. Though Brown declared for the draft the night before his
senior prom at Glynn Academy, he appears to be as centered, mature and
reasonable as any draftee this side of Shane Battier.
Brown turns stereotypes on their heads, beginning with the one about
young men in households where the father is absent: His circumstances
actually improved significantly when his father left. Kwame was six or
seven years old when the police came to his Charleston, S.C., home and
arrested Willie James Brown on a criminal charge that Kwame cannot
recall. What he does remember is that it was the last time they saw each
other. Kwame's mother, Joyce Brown, who has said she was beaten by her
husband, soon moved with her eight children out of Charleston,
eventually ending up in her hometown of Brunswick. In 1990 Willie was
sentenced to life without parole for murdering his 22-year-old
girlfriend with an ax handle and burying her in a shallow grave along a
suburban Charleston road.
"He's pretty much dead to me," Kwame says of his 59-year-old father. He
has heard that Willie would like to renew their relationship, now that
his son is guaranteed more than $9.9 million over the next three years.
While the Reverend John Williams, Kwame's pastor, predicts that Kwame
will someday visit Evans Correctional Institution in Bennettsville,
S.C., and confront his father, it is not high on his list of priorities.
"He used to beat all of us," says Kwame, the second youngest of the
eight children. "He would tell us, 'I gave my life to the devil.' We
couldn't say anything about God, about church—nothing. He would pick up
whatever he could find and beat you or spank you. The next day he would
come home from work with a gift for you. I don't know why. I guess that
was how he would try to buy your friendship."
The relief the family felt when Willie was arrested was tempered by the
realities of life without the regular paycheck he earned as a truck
driver. Joyce did the best she could by finding work as a maid at the
Brunswick Days Inn. While raising her children, she suffered from high
blood pressure, lost a kidney to disease and eventually went on
disability with a bad back. After living hand-to-mouth for so many
years, Kwame has a hard time imagining himself wasting money, no matter
how much he is paid. "Invest it right and don't spend money on all those
stupid little chains everybody wears, and you'll be all right," he
says.
Yet as recently as three years ago, admits the apparently levelheaded
Brown, he was following the path of his father. "I could be in prison
right now," he says. "I grew up around a bunch of violent people, and if
anybody did something wrong to me, I would hit the person. The payback
for anything was physical abuse."
One symptom of Brown's lack of direction was his poor performance in
school, which led him to Williams during his sophomore year. The
associate director of The Gathering Place, a ministry for teenagers in
Brunswick, Williams filled the role of the father Brown never had. "He
was just a lazy guy," says the 37-year-old Williams, who impressed on
Brown the need to hit the books. Brown made honor roll in his last four
semesters and qualified to play for Florida, whose scholarship offer he
accepted last summer before deciding to enter the draft. Brown also
joined the church, sang in the choir and two years ago was baptized by
Williams. Mr. John, as Brown refers to him, even cuts his hair.
In the last of his four years as a starter at Glynn, Brown averaged 20.1
points, 13-3 rebounds and 5.8 blocked shots. Beyond his physical
skills, he impressed NBA scouts by demonstrating a good rapport with his
less gifted teammates. Brown says he never realized he might be the
best high school player in the country until last summer, when he began
to meet the bigger national names. Against fellow lottery selections
Chandler (the No. 2 pick), Eddy Curry (No. 4) and DeSagana Diop (No. 8),
he more than held his own.
Unlike most other high school draft choices of recent years, Brown has
the muscle to play inside as a rookie, and his strength will increase as
he begins lifting weights regularly for the first time. He didn't fill
out until this year—"I wasn't 200 pounds until I was a junior," he
says—by which point he was already a deft ball handler with a reliable
midrange jumper. "Everybody in the NBA has to have a great jump shot,"
he says. "If I develop mine more, I could even play some small forward."
Again, he uses Jordan as his model, noting that he perfected the
turnaround shot that made him unstoppable. "What Mike did, he found out
what his weaknesses were, and he kept working on them until he didn't
have any," Brown says. "That's what I need to do."
Jordan has already invited his new protege to his estate in suburban
Chicago for 10 days of well-heeled boot camp in August. "The guy took
probably the biggest risk of his life, picking a high school player
Number 1," Brown says. "I'm conscious that if I screw up, I'm messing
with Michael's reputation. I know he's going to work me to death."
When they sat together during a press conference in Washington after the
draft, Brown playfully repeated his vow to beat his boss. "That is a
dream," responded Jordan. This is a relationship unlike any Jordan has
experienced in basketball. After spending a career making sure he was
the preeminent player in the game, Jordan now finds it in his own best
interests to make Kwame Brown the league's best. Little did young Kwame
imagine, as he was watching his idol on TV all those years ago, that he
would be the one chosen by Jordan to extend his legacy.
Says Williams, who knows a bit about the big picture, "I really don't think it's an accident it's turned out this way."