Great story in next month’s Esquire about Gilbert Arenas, point guard for the Washington Wizards.

I’ve never been particularly committed to an NBA team. My rooting interests were typically based on which team had the most North Carolina grads on its roster. But beyond the hometown Mavericks, the Wizards may be my second favorite team. That’s partly because of two Carolina grads on its roster (the childlike bull Brendan Haywood and the quick-release genius Antawn Jamison). But it’s also because of Gilbert Arenas, the most gloriously crazy player in the NBA.

On second thought, Gilbert is rich, so I guess the word is “eccentric,” not “crazy.” But charmingly eccentric.

Nobody expected Gilbert to be much of a player; he chose the jersey number 0 because that’s how many minutes he was expected to play for his college team. He wasn’t even drafted in the first round. Yet he’s the fourth-leading scorer in the NBA, dropping 29 points a night, largely because he works really hard on the court.

Among the Gilbert facts mentioned in the article:

- He never leaves his hotel room on the road. Never. The better to watch infomercials. “The last thing I bought was this colon cleanser. I just got talked into it. I’m like, Man, he makes it sound so good.”

- He plans to build a basketball court made entirely out of glass.

- He spent the last three years sleeping on his own couch every night.

- He wrestles his teammates before games to get out his energy. “No punching in the face. No chest and no ribs.”

Among the weird Gilbert facts the article doesn’t go into:

- He has modified his house to artificially reduce the amount of oxygen so that he can emulate playing at high altitude.

- He has been known to take a shower at halftime while wearing his full uniform.

- Before games, he hides a random teammate’s jersey in the locker room and makes him hunt it down.

- He once tried to shoot a free throw in a game by bouncing it off the floor.

By far the best Gilbert talk comes from FreeDarko. (Which is also the best NBA blog, treating the league as a sort of dense semiotic text.) FreeDarko loves Gilbert as all humans should and has attempted on numerous occasions to analyze his psyche:

- “I think you’re right about Arenas’s psyche; it is utterly unknowable. Like looking into the face of God or gazing at the abyss, it is a question with no answers.”

- On the Wizards’ playoff loss this spring to the LeBron James-led Cavaliers: “But look back on what I said barely one hour ago: ‘I can’t stand to see Arenas suffer.’ Uh, isn’t that part of his appeal? That he bounces back against impossible odds more often than not, and that even his blunders leave you wondering exactly what they meant? I guess I’m only showing here that I do have such a strong affinity for the perennially under-respected Arenas that I don’t want to see him razed by Team LeBron. The point of Gilbert, though, is that he’ll go down dying before he lets the inevitable happen. If LeBron is a walking foregone conclusion whose shown he can indeed falter, Arenas is, and always will be, the unlikeliest of all the elite, even over the course of a single game. Having something invested in him is an uneasy, hair-raising pact tinged with a certain anxiety; being Gilbert, though, is probably the complete and total opposite of this.”

- “We’ve rhapsodized about LeBron as some sort of first principle of basketball, but I’ll take the wilderness of Gilbert’s soul any day over LeBron’s techtonic empircism.”

13 October 2006

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