boutons
12-17-2004, 05:43 PM
Jamison Comes Clean
By Mike Wise
Poor Antawn Jamison. No rap sheet to explain, no court date to keep, no CD to promote. How can the bright young forward for the Washington Wizards expect to be an all-star when he is so lacking in today's behaviorally challenged NBA? Retro jerseys, yes. But a retro player?
"You got a lot of superstars in this league who don't get in any trouble and it seems like people don't want to hear that story," Jamison said. "If somebody does something negative, they're a bigger story than the positive guy."
Jamison performs, speaks and carries himself as if he walked out of an NBA marketing seminar, the one in which league officials implore their law-abiding, image-conscious veterans to sell their product during turbulent times. Along the way, he has helped the Wizards captivate the District's beleaguered basketball fans. He is averaging 21.8 points, 9 rebounds and almost 3 assists, scoring from every imaginable angle for one of the most promising young teams in the Eastern Conference.
Eddie Jordan, Jamison's seventh coach in seven seasons, says the numbers belie an even larger contribution: leadership in a once-rudderless locker room. In less than three months, Jamsion, 28, has become an extension of the team's coach. "People don't see what he does in practice, in the locker room, on the road," Jordan said.
Washington (12-8) last began a similar winning season 30 years ago, the year the Bullets won 60 games and advanced to the NBA Finals. Led by Jamison, Gilbert Arenas and Larry Hughes, this team is an amalgam of mostly young guns who like to run. Only the Phoenix Suns score more points a night in the league this season. Last week, the Wizards were tied for the best record in the East and have shown signs of ending the franchise's seven-year playoff drought.
Jamison's presence has become an instant balm, healing the wounds caused by years of malcontent players, fed-up fans and demoralizing losses. Washington's woefulness as a franchise has spanned three decades; the Wizards have not won a playoff series since 1982 and have not finished with a winning record since 1997.
Jamison is playing well enough to be named to the all-star team for the first time in his career. But he won't dwell on it, having been snubbed before. Midway through the 2001-2002 season, in which he was lighting up the Western Conference and failed to be selected, Jamison began to believe the league was more interested in promoting quick-tempered players who accrued technical fouls like free throws, who had more edge than he could deliver.
"After the brawl in Detroit, there's not a kid who thinks you don't have to be tough when you're out there on the basketball court to be successful. 'I ain't takin' no junk. You not goin' push me.' They look at it and see a lot of these successful guys and they say, 'Well, he did it.' It becomes acceptable," Jamison said. "We need more people to tell them it's not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with being talented and good and also a good guy."
When Jamison left North Carolina in 1998 after his junior season and entered the NBA draft, many teams were leaning toward more athletic players, such as Jamison's University of North Carolina teammate, Vince Carter. Jamison's agent, Arn Tellem, met with Garry St. Jean, then the general manager for the Golden State Warriors. "Don't measure Antawn by style," he told St. Jean. "Antawn is not the flashiest player in the draft but he has a lot more to him that would be valuable to a team. This is the kind of guy that could be a cornerstone of a franchise."
Working-Class Roots
Jamison was born in Shreveport, La., on June 12, 1976, within a mile of where Robert Parish, the Boston Celtics' Hall of Fame center, grew up. His first jump shots were more like heaves, thrown at a makeshift goal his father constructed on a telegraph pole in back of the family home. Jamison and his mother, Kathy, thought that basket was 12 feet tall, two feet higher than a regulation rim.
"That's probably why I developed such a high-arching shot," Jamison said. By the eighth or ninth grade, Jamison said he rose high enough to grab the rim. "I used to try to tear it down, but it wouldn't fall for nothing in the world."
That was because his father, Albert Sr., who worked construction among other jobs, built it. Nothing Albert Jamison built fell apart -- especially his family. The Jamisons moved from Shreveport to Charlotte when Antawn was about 13 and his father found another construction job. The Shreveport convenience store his mother worked at had recently been held up at gunpoint. The neighborhood they lived in was better than the area where his mother worked, but "the gangs were getting bad," she said. "They were aiming at kids that were Twan's age at that time. I didn't want him to be a target." Antawn said the move was one of the defining moments for his family.
"When we moved to North Carolina, it was a different world, really hard to adapt to," Jamison said. "It was just us five. No grandmothers, no uncles, no aunts, no cousins. We relied on each other. I think that's the main reason we're really tight now."
Jamison has a brother, Albert Jr., 18, and a sister, LaTosha, 24. Albert is a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta and LaTosha graduated from Western Carolina two years ago. She's now a social worker in Atlanta. Within two years of moving to Charlotte, basketball became his focus. Jamison began playing on Amateur Athletic Union teams and dunking on players much older and more experienced. He did not receive the acclaim of many of the top high school players until the end of his senior year. He chose North Carolina soon after then coach Dean Smith entered the family home.
"I can't promise you'll be in the NBA or you'll make all this money, but I promise you you'll get your college degree," said Smith, who had given similar successful pitches to Michael Jordan and James Worthy over the years. "And when you leave here you'll be a better man and person than when you came in."
"That really sunk in to me because here's a guy that's the best college coach of all time," Jamison said. "And his whole philosophy was . . . off the court. This life and this world is more than just basketball." Jamison left North Carolina as the consensus national player of the year. He returned two years later to finish a degree in African Studies.
Jamison was plucked No. 4 by the Toronto Raptors in 1998, one pick ahead of Carter, who was taken by Golden State. The teams had agreed to pick for each other before the draft and immediately swapped players.
Antawn gave his mother simple instructions on the night he was drafted. "He told me, 'Go get yourself a house. Go get something big to live in. It's time for you move on up,' " she said.
"We became the Beverly Hillbillies of Bugtussel," Albert Sr. said, laughing.
The family moved from a very modest $65,000 house to a 9,000-square-foot, $850,000 dream home in Charlotte's oldest and most exclusive neighborhood, the Providence Country Club area. "You can count the black families that live out here on one hand," said Albert Sr. "First, I was a little intimidated. You know, these folks got all this money. But come to find out half of them had to work two and three jobs to get what they had."
Jamison's father elected not to retire after his son signed his first contract. He worked four more years, driving a forklift for the Lance cracker-cookie company in Charlotte. "I wanted all the kids to know that just because he's got money now doesn't mean you stop working," Albert Sr. said. "You still have to work, that's the most important thing. Just because you got money, you're no better than anybody else. My feeling has always been, if you're going to be a pooper-scooper, be the best pooper-scooper you can be. I wanted my children to grow up with that mind-set."
With Antawn's help, Albert Sr. opened a barber shop last year. Antawn also bought LaTosha a home in Atlanta.
Between injuries and playing time, Jamison's first two seasons with the Warriors made him question his abilities. "I didn't even play that much that first year and Vince was just soaring," Jamison said. "For a while I thought, 'Is it going to work out?' A lot of people doubted me, saying, 'You're a tweener,' " meaning coaches thought Jamison was caught in a positional no man's land, somewhere between an undersized power forward and an oversized small forward. "They'd say, 'What is he going to do?' "
He eventually put up huge numbers at Golden State, but he also became a lightning rod for scrutiny after signing a six-year, $89 million deal in 2002. As the team continued to miss the playoffs, Jamison became a player defined by his exorbitant contract. "When I talk about all my critics, that's where it came from," he said. "It started then. 'I'm not a leader. Don't hit big shots down the stretch. Cannot lead a team into the playoffs.' All that stuff came right after I signed the contract. It was like, 'He's making 80-something million dollars and we can't win?' "
In the summer of 2003, Jamison -- against St. Jean's wishes -- was shipped to Dallas. He became a part of a playoff team for the first time in his career before he was traded to the Wizards. His five coaches in five years with the Warriors each had their conception of what kind of player they thought Jamison could be.
"I've been in so many so-called pressure situations before. This is nothing," Jamison said of the expectations surrounding him in Washington. "I know a lot of people are looking at me to do a lot. That comes with the territory and I understand that. But this is a walk in the park for me. I've got help now."
Rising to the Occasion
Jamison galloped to a spot a few inches from the New York Knicks' bench last week. He caught a pass behind the three-point line and let fly an arcing rainbow from the left corner, a swish that gave the Wizards their first lead of the game and persuaded 16,000 fans at MCI Center to rise and roar.
The shot was important, helping Washington to an overtime victory over a Knicks team that advanced to the playoffs last spring. It also helped defy long-held perceptions about Jamison as a player.
"I heard them all: 'Couldn't make the big shot late in the game; can't lead a team to the playoffs; not hungry enough,' everything," Jamison said, shaking his head repeatedly. "I welcome pressure. I welcome being that guy. I love when people say it can't be done. When people ask me about trying to turn things around with the Wizards, I don't feel pressure at all. I actually feel like I've been let out of the cage."
Jamison sometimes lopes downcourt like a teen still harnessing his coordination. He is all limbs, his 6-foot-9, 225-pound frame gliding by in a rush of energy and muscle. He uses an economy of movement to score, elevating only slightly before he releases soft floaters and runners in the lane. His soft touch and timing result in many shot attempts bouncing once and twice before catching the lip of the rim and falling in.
Ernie Grunfeld, the Wizards' president of basketball operations, said Jamison is the rare NBA player who does not need the ball to be effective. He compares Jamison's unorthodox offensive game to that of Bernard King, Grunfeld's teammate at the University of Tennessee and with the Knicks.
Grunfeld traded Jerry Stackhouse, Christian Laettner and the rights to Devin Harris to Dallas on draft day last June in order to acquire Jamison. Jamison had won the league's sixth man of the year award with the Mavericks, and Grunfeld figured if a career 20-point scorer could sacrifice his game and minutes during his prime then he was worth any perceived gamble.
Jamison instantly became more than a presence on the court, as well, becoming a leader in the locker room and in the franchise's efforts to connect with local fans. He has been asked to stay for hours after practice to sign balls, and on occasion has signed more than 300 for team employees and suite-level fans.
Jamison is often more keen to teammates' moods than his own. Before Brendan Haywood, the Wizards' starting center, signed a contract extension last month, he confided to Jamison that he was worried about the team compensating him. Jamison told Haywood: "Don't worry about that. We win, all that takes care of itself. Don't even think about your contract."
In early November, when Kwame Brown took on his critics -- mentioning race as a motive -- Jamison took the disenchanted 22-year-old teammate aside and spoke to him bluntly.
"I said, 'Leave that alone. What are you doing?' " Jamison said. He thought Brown was too obsessed with the media, telling him, "Man, whenever you're around me, I do not want to see you reading the paper."
Brown has said Jamison's examples are even more impressive than his words. Jamison has not missed a game in four-plus seasons. He has the NBA's longest active streak of consecutive games played (347).
"I love the game and I love everything about it," Jamison said, "but when I'm all said and done, I want guys like Jarvis Hayes and Jared Jeffries to be like, 'You know I had Antawn Jamison as my vet and I learned a lot from him. He taught me a lot about the game.' "
Music to His Ears
After practice one day last month, Jamison climbed into his Bentley GT, an oval-shaped, gleaming silver luxury vehicle that resembles something NASA donated to the National Air and Space Museum. He gunned the engine as the MCI Center garage opened, later took a right on Constitution Avenue and a left on Ninth Street, where the view of the Washington Monument disappeared.
Jamison negotiated his way to one of his favorite hangouts, the Best Buy store at Potomac Yards in Pentagon City. He thumbed through music, pausing when he came across an offering from dethroned boxing champion Roy Jones Jr. "That's probably why he got knocked out," he said, shrugging. "He came out with a CD."
He shopped with a hand-held basket, picking several CDs and a couple of romantic comedy DVDs, "The Wedding Planner" and "Under the Tuscan Sun," for his wife, Ione, whom he married in July 2003. "She likes those girlie movies," Jamison said, smiling, as he tucked two DVDs for himself into the basket, including DMX in . . . "Never Die Alone."
Jamison was clad in all black, from his baseball cap to his baggy jeans and an oversized Malcolm X T-shirt. He wore a diamond-encrusted watch and platinum-coated dog tags.
Last summer, Ione's sister married Carter, who plays for Toronto, making the onetime North Carolina teammates brothers-in-law.
"While I was in college, she used to come visit her sister all of the time when she was still in high school," Jamison said of Ione. "I was like, 'Maybe when she gets older, we'll see what happens.' Once I got into the league a couple of years, she was going to school at Spelman College. We ended up going out and, to make a long story short, we ended up getting serious about one another."
The couple dated almost three years before marrying. Ione received her master's in education from Spelman. She received her welcome to the itinerant NBA two weeks after their honeymoon when Jamison was traded to Dallas.
She is three months' pregnant with the couple's first child. Jamison has a daughter, Alexis, 4, from a previous relationship. Alexis lives with her mother in Memphis and Jamison spends as much time as possible with her during the season. "I get her every other Christmas and Thanksgiving," Jamison said. He said the relationship with the mother did not work out, adding, "We were more made to be friends."
When he finished shopping, Jamison got back in his Bentley and drove off. The sun receded in the background as the new player in town explored the possibilities of a new job.
Jamison and the Wizards received good news this week. For the first time since April 2003 -- the final month of Michael Jordan's playing career -- national television wants them. TNT is scheduled to televise the Jan. 6 game between the Seattle SuperSonics and the Wizards, a once-losing franchise now in possession of a bright, young star and perhaps playoff promise.
"There's a little buzz right now," he said. "That's good for us. These fans have been itching for something to cheer about in this organization. We get some confidence and some swagger, who knows."
Antawn Jamison smiled and looked out the window.
"I think D.C. is growing on me real quick."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Mike Wise
Poor Antawn Jamison. No rap sheet to explain, no court date to keep, no CD to promote. How can the bright young forward for the Washington Wizards expect to be an all-star when he is so lacking in today's behaviorally challenged NBA? Retro jerseys, yes. But a retro player?
"You got a lot of superstars in this league who don't get in any trouble and it seems like people don't want to hear that story," Jamison said. "If somebody does something negative, they're a bigger story than the positive guy."
Jamison performs, speaks and carries himself as if he walked out of an NBA marketing seminar, the one in which league officials implore their law-abiding, image-conscious veterans to sell their product during turbulent times. Along the way, he has helped the Wizards captivate the District's beleaguered basketball fans. He is averaging 21.8 points, 9 rebounds and almost 3 assists, scoring from every imaginable angle for one of the most promising young teams in the Eastern Conference.
Eddie Jordan, Jamison's seventh coach in seven seasons, says the numbers belie an even larger contribution: leadership in a once-rudderless locker room. In less than three months, Jamsion, 28, has become an extension of the team's coach. "People don't see what he does in practice, in the locker room, on the road," Jordan said.
Washington (12-8) last began a similar winning season 30 years ago, the year the Bullets won 60 games and advanced to the NBA Finals. Led by Jamison, Gilbert Arenas and Larry Hughes, this team is an amalgam of mostly young guns who like to run. Only the Phoenix Suns score more points a night in the league this season. Last week, the Wizards were tied for the best record in the East and have shown signs of ending the franchise's seven-year playoff drought.
Jamison's presence has become an instant balm, healing the wounds caused by years of malcontent players, fed-up fans and demoralizing losses. Washington's woefulness as a franchise has spanned three decades; the Wizards have not won a playoff series since 1982 and have not finished with a winning record since 1997.
Jamison is playing well enough to be named to the all-star team for the first time in his career. But he won't dwell on it, having been snubbed before. Midway through the 2001-2002 season, in which he was lighting up the Western Conference and failed to be selected, Jamison began to believe the league was more interested in promoting quick-tempered players who accrued technical fouls like free throws, who had more edge than he could deliver.
"After the brawl in Detroit, there's not a kid who thinks you don't have to be tough when you're out there on the basketball court to be successful. 'I ain't takin' no junk. You not goin' push me.' They look at it and see a lot of these successful guys and they say, 'Well, he did it.' It becomes acceptable," Jamison said. "We need more people to tell them it's not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with being talented and good and also a good guy."
When Jamison left North Carolina in 1998 after his junior season and entered the NBA draft, many teams were leaning toward more athletic players, such as Jamison's University of North Carolina teammate, Vince Carter. Jamison's agent, Arn Tellem, met with Garry St. Jean, then the general manager for the Golden State Warriors. "Don't measure Antawn by style," he told St. Jean. "Antawn is not the flashiest player in the draft but he has a lot more to him that would be valuable to a team. This is the kind of guy that could be a cornerstone of a franchise."
Working-Class Roots
Jamison was born in Shreveport, La., on June 12, 1976, within a mile of where Robert Parish, the Boston Celtics' Hall of Fame center, grew up. His first jump shots were more like heaves, thrown at a makeshift goal his father constructed on a telegraph pole in back of the family home. Jamison and his mother, Kathy, thought that basket was 12 feet tall, two feet higher than a regulation rim.
"That's probably why I developed such a high-arching shot," Jamison said. By the eighth or ninth grade, Jamison said he rose high enough to grab the rim. "I used to try to tear it down, but it wouldn't fall for nothing in the world."
That was because his father, Albert Sr., who worked construction among other jobs, built it. Nothing Albert Jamison built fell apart -- especially his family. The Jamisons moved from Shreveport to Charlotte when Antawn was about 13 and his father found another construction job. The Shreveport convenience store his mother worked at had recently been held up at gunpoint. The neighborhood they lived in was better than the area where his mother worked, but "the gangs were getting bad," she said. "They were aiming at kids that were Twan's age at that time. I didn't want him to be a target." Antawn said the move was one of the defining moments for his family.
"When we moved to North Carolina, it was a different world, really hard to adapt to," Jamison said. "It was just us five. No grandmothers, no uncles, no aunts, no cousins. We relied on each other. I think that's the main reason we're really tight now."
Jamison has a brother, Albert Jr., 18, and a sister, LaTosha, 24. Albert is a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta and LaTosha graduated from Western Carolina two years ago. She's now a social worker in Atlanta. Within two years of moving to Charlotte, basketball became his focus. Jamison began playing on Amateur Athletic Union teams and dunking on players much older and more experienced. He did not receive the acclaim of many of the top high school players until the end of his senior year. He chose North Carolina soon after then coach Dean Smith entered the family home.
"I can't promise you'll be in the NBA or you'll make all this money, but I promise you you'll get your college degree," said Smith, who had given similar successful pitches to Michael Jordan and James Worthy over the years. "And when you leave here you'll be a better man and person than when you came in."
"That really sunk in to me because here's a guy that's the best college coach of all time," Jamison said. "And his whole philosophy was . . . off the court. This life and this world is more than just basketball." Jamison left North Carolina as the consensus national player of the year. He returned two years later to finish a degree in African Studies.
Jamison was plucked No. 4 by the Toronto Raptors in 1998, one pick ahead of Carter, who was taken by Golden State. The teams had agreed to pick for each other before the draft and immediately swapped players.
Antawn gave his mother simple instructions on the night he was drafted. "He told me, 'Go get yourself a house. Go get something big to live in. It's time for you move on up,' " she said.
"We became the Beverly Hillbillies of Bugtussel," Albert Sr. said, laughing.
The family moved from a very modest $65,000 house to a 9,000-square-foot, $850,000 dream home in Charlotte's oldest and most exclusive neighborhood, the Providence Country Club area. "You can count the black families that live out here on one hand," said Albert Sr. "First, I was a little intimidated. You know, these folks got all this money. But come to find out half of them had to work two and three jobs to get what they had."
Jamison's father elected not to retire after his son signed his first contract. He worked four more years, driving a forklift for the Lance cracker-cookie company in Charlotte. "I wanted all the kids to know that just because he's got money now doesn't mean you stop working," Albert Sr. said. "You still have to work, that's the most important thing. Just because you got money, you're no better than anybody else. My feeling has always been, if you're going to be a pooper-scooper, be the best pooper-scooper you can be. I wanted my children to grow up with that mind-set."
With Antawn's help, Albert Sr. opened a barber shop last year. Antawn also bought LaTosha a home in Atlanta.
Between injuries and playing time, Jamison's first two seasons with the Warriors made him question his abilities. "I didn't even play that much that first year and Vince was just soaring," Jamison said. "For a while I thought, 'Is it going to work out?' A lot of people doubted me, saying, 'You're a tweener,' " meaning coaches thought Jamison was caught in a positional no man's land, somewhere between an undersized power forward and an oversized small forward. "They'd say, 'What is he going to do?' "
He eventually put up huge numbers at Golden State, but he also became a lightning rod for scrutiny after signing a six-year, $89 million deal in 2002. As the team continued to miss the playoffs, Jamison became a player defined by his exorbitant contract. "When I talk about all my critics, that's where it came from," he said. "It started then. 'I'm not a leader. Don't hit big shots down the stretch. Cannot lead a team into the playoffs.' All that stuff came right after I signed the contract. It was like, 'He's making 80-something million dollars and we can't win?' "
In the summer of 2003, Jamison -- against St. Jean's wishes -- was shipped to Dallas. He became a part of a playoff team for the first time in his career before he was traded to the Wizards. His five coaches in five years with the Warriors each had their conception of what kind of player they thought Jamison could be.
"I've been in so many so-called pressure situations before. This is nothing," Jamison said of the expectations surrounding him in Washington. "I know a lot of people are looking at me to do a lot. That comes with the territory and I understand that. But this is a walk in the park for me. I've got help now."
Rising to the Occasion
Jamison galloped to a spot a few inches from the New York Knicks' bench last week. He caught a pass behind the three-point line and let fly an arcing rainbow from the left corner, a swish that gave the Wizards their first lead of the game and persuaded 16,000 fans at MCI Center to rise and roar.
The shot was important, helping Washington to an overtime victory over a Knicks team that advanced to the playoffs last spring. It also helped defy long-held perceptions about Jamison as a player.
"I heard them all: 'Couldn't make the big shot late in the game; can't lead a team to the playoffs; not hungry enough,' everything," Jamison said, shaking his head repeatedly. "I welcome pressure. I welcome being that guy. I love when people say it can't be done. When people ask me about trying to turn things around with the Wizards, I don't feel pressure at all. I actually feel like I've been let out of the cage."
Jamison sometimes lopes downcourt like a teen still harnessing his coordination. He is all limbs, his 6-foot-9, 225-pound frame gliding by in a rush of energy and muscle. He uses an economy of movement to score, elevating only slightly before he releases soft floaters and runners in the lane. His soft touch and timing result in many shot attempts bouncing once and twice before catching the lip of the rim and falling in.
Ernie Grunfeld, the Wizards' president of basketball operations, said Jamison is the rare NBA player who does not need the ball to be effective. He compares Jamison's unorthodox offensive game to that of Bernard King, Grunfeld's teammate at the University of Tennessee and with the Knicks.
Grunfeld traded Jerry Stackhouse, Christian Laettner and the rights to Devin Harris to Dallas on draft day last June in order to acquire Jamison. Jamison had won the league's sixth man of the year award with the Mavericks, and Grunfeld figured if a career 20-point scorer could sacrifice his game and minutes during his prime then he was worth any perceived gamble.
Jamison instantly became more than a presence on the court, as well, becoming a leader in the locker room and in the franchise's efforts to connect with local fans. He has been asked to stay for hours after practice to sign balls, and on occasion has signed more than 300 for team employees and suite-level fans.
Jamison is often more keen to teammates' moods than his own. Before Brendan Haywood, the Wizards' starting center, signed a contract extension last month, he confided to Jamison that he was worried about the team compensating him. Jamison told Haywood: "Don't worry about that. We win, all that takes care of itself. Don't even think about your contract."
In early November, when Kwame Brown took on his critics -- mentioning race as a motive -- Jamison took the disenchanted 22-year-old teammate aside and spoke to him bluntly.
"I said, 'Leave that alone. What are you doing?' " Jamison said. He thought Brown was too obsessed with the media, telling him, "Man, whenever you're around me, I do not want to see you reading the paper."
Brown has said Jamison's examples are even more impressive than his words. Jamison has not missed a game in four-plus seasons. He has the NBA's longest active streak of consecutive games played (347).
"I love the game and I love everything about it," Jamison said, "but when I'm all said and done, I want guys like Jarvis Hayes and Jared Jeffries to be like, 'You know I had Antawn Jamison as my vet and I learned a lot from him. He taught me a lot about the game.' "
Music to His Ears
After practice one day last month, Jamison climbed into his Bentley GT, an oval-shaped, gleaming silver luxury vehicle that resembles something NASA donated to the National Air and Space Museum. He gunned the engine as the MCI Center garage opened, later took a right on Constitution Avenue and a left on Ninth Street, where the view of the Washington Monument disappeared.
Jamison negotiated his way to one of his favorite hangouts, the Best Buy store at Potomac Yards in Pentagon City. He thumbed through music, pausing when he came across an offering from dethroned boxing champion Roy Jones Jr. "That's probably why he got knocked out," he said, shrugging. "He came out with a CD."
He shopped with a hand-held basket, picking several CDs and a couple of romantic comedy DVDs, "The Wedding Planner" and "Under the Tuscan Sun," for his wife, Ione, whom he married in July 2003. "She likes those girlie movies," Jamison said, smiling, as he tucked two DVDs for himself into the basket, including DMX in . . . "Never Die Alone."
Jamison was clad in all black, from his baseball cap to his baggy jeans and an oversized Malcolm X T-shirt. He wore a diamond-encrusted watch and platinum-coated dog tags.
Last summer, Ione's sister married Carter, who plays for Toronto, making the onetime North Carolina teammates brothers-in-law.
"While I was in college, she used to come visit her sister all of the time when she was still in high school," Jamison said of Ione. "I was like, 'Maybe when she gets older, we'll see what happens.' Once I got into the league a couple of years, she was going to school at Spelman College. We ended up going out and, to make a long story short, we ended up getting serious about one another."
The couple dated almost three years before marrying. Ione received her master's in education from Spelman. She received her welcome to the itinerant NBA two weeks after their honeymoon when Jamison was traded to Dallas.
She is three months' pregnant with the couple's first child. Jamison has a daughter, Alexis, 4, from a previous relationship. Alexis lives with her mother in Memphis and Jamison spends as much time as possible with her during the season. "I get her every other Christmas and Thanksgiving," Jamison said. He said the relationship with the mother did not work out, adding, "We were more made to be friends."
When he finished shopping, Jamison got back in his Bentley and drove off. The sun receded in the background as the new player in town explored the possibilities of a new job.
Jamison and the Wizards received good news this week. For the first time since April 2003 -- the final month of Michael Jordan's playing career -- national television wants them. TNT is scheduled to televise the Jan. 6 game between the Seattle SuperSonics and the Wizards, a once-losing franchise now in possession of a bright, young star and perhaps playoff promise.
"There's a little buzz right now," he said. "That's good for us. These fans have been itching for something to cheer about in this organization. We get some confidence and some swagger, who knows."
Antawn Jamison smiled and looked out the window.
"I think D.C. is growing on me real quick."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company