An omen: Kwame Brown went down with a sprained ankle in the Wizards' season opener Oct. 30 against the Knicks in New York. "The question," says NBA Commissioner David Stern, "is whether he will suffer any permanent setbacks by being tossed in the oil too soon." (Post File Photo) __Kwame Brown: The First Year__ • Jan. 31: Other high school players who made the jump also struggled. • Nov. 24: The league taught Brown some tough lessons. • Oct. 31: Brown's first game was an adventure. • Oct. 11: With Michael Jordan's return, Brown thought he'd be spared scrutiny. • Aug. 9: Brown's struggles are hardly unique in today's NBA. • July 15: Brown signs a three-year deal with the Wizards. • Thomas Boswell: Brown sounds and appears to be a mature young man. • June 27: The Wizards select Brown with the No. 1 pick. _____A Good Pick?_____ Given what we know now, was taking Kwame Brown with the No. 1 overall pick a good move by the Wizards? No Yes Still too early   Note: This is an unscientific survey of washingtonpost.com readers. _____Gallery_____ • Look back at the highs and lows of Kwame Brown's rookie season. _____Live Online_____ • Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins will be online at 1 p.m. EDT Monday to field questions and comments. • Submit questions. _____Wizards Basics_____ • Wizards Section • Roster • Schedule • Statistics E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version Subscribe to The Post

By Sally Jenkins
Sunday, April 21, 2002; Page W20

Kwame Brown knows more than he should about some things, such as certain aspects of human nature, and less than he should about others, such as nutrition, how to treat a good suit, and when to throw the lob pass. What Brown knows and what he doesn't is a consequence of his age, newly 20, and where he's from, the saw grass lowlands of Georgia, where crook-armed silhouettes of shrimp boats move against the horizon and misshapen oaks draped with gothic-gray moss line the melting tar streets, so sticky-hot that the children, Brown until recently one of them, hitch up their pants and hop from patch of grass to patch of grass.

Brown's route to the National Basketball Association has been a similarly awkward hop, from an overcrowded home with a sagging porch in Brunswick, Ga., to the $11.9 million patch of grass offered him by the Washington Wizards last June, when Michael Jordan made him the NBA's No. 1 draft pick and gave him a three-year contract. The presumption behind this investment is that Brown will become another Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett, the next great young thing. The truth is that, in practice, the hop is too big: Turning a teenager from a sleepy shrimp port, not long out of puberty, into a multimillionaire NBA professional is a traumatic process. And not just for Brown, either. For the adults, too.

Brown has been lectured and scolded and instructed, advised. And, perhaps, warped. The voices have overwhelmed him. They run together, all of them telling him what is best for him. "Most people," he says, "are wrong." He is still young enough to have a faintly wounded set to his jaw, and a reflexive honesty as he considers a rookie season that, until the very end, was a public humiliation. "There's a part of me that questions, when your confidence drops like mine did, are you a good ballplayer and do you deserve to be here, or what?" he says. "You're just scared. Scared to do anything."

Brown is sitting in Clyde's restaurant in Chevy Chase, regarding with suspicion a chicken sandwich, which has been served to him on unfamiliar bread. Among the many revelations of his profoundly dislocating and confusing rookie season with the Wizards are the things that some people will eat.

On a road trip to Boston, the Wizards took him to an elegant French restaurant. Brown was not just shocked, but outraged, to discover that the restaurant did not serve French dressing. "Can you believe that?" he says. "No French dressing. In a French restaurant."

Then there was the matter of the salad itself. "It was tree roots," he says disgustedly. "Leaves. And branches."

For weeks afterward, Brown took a bottle of store-bought French dressing with him whenever he went out to dinner.

On this particular day Brown is having lunch at Clyde's with Duane Ferrell, a retired 13-year NBA veteran who has been hired by the Wizards to mentor him through his first season, and Maureen Nasser, their director of public relations.

A plate of strangely shaped fried seafood arrives at the table.

"Is that like fried shrimp?" he asks.

"That's calamari," Nasser says. "It's squid."

"You shouldn't have told him that," Ferrell says.

Brown looks stricken.

"Squid," he repeats.

"You should have just let him eat it," Ferrell says with a laugh.

What Brown knows, and what he does not, has been a source of continual surprise for the Wizards, and they have not always been amusing surprises, either. The fact is, when Jordan, in his role as the team's chief executive, and Coach Doug Collins decided to make a 19-year-old fresh from his senior prom at Glynn Academy the No. 1 draft pick, they had no idea what they were actually getting themselves into. Isiah Thomas, the head coach of the Indiana Pacers, tried to tell them. "You're going to be shocked," Thomas said. "He won't know a thing about basketball."

Basketball was the least of it. With Brown, the Wizards have found themselves in the business of child rearing, of caring for a 6-foot-11 baby-man who has required far more careful handling and feeding than they bargained for.

He fooled them. The Wizards' youngest player only looked fully formed. The problem was Brown's deceptive physique; he seemed so ready-made. He was beautiful, they all agreed, your eye couldn't help but go to him, in everything he did, just picking up the ball. He was lightning quick for a big man, and he could handle the ball, which meant he could make a play the length of the floor. "Skills people dream about," Collins says. When he worked out against fellow high schooler Tyson Chandler, he had no conscience whatsoever, which was what they liked most; he was reckless and unschooled and he decimated Chandler in one on one, and oh, they'd seen things like this before, hadn't they, and what it was, well, it was the real thing.

And he seemed so level-headed, smart and self-assured. "If you draft me, I'll never disappoint you," he told Jordan.

"He's mature, articulate, he's 6-11, and got all this talent, and you think he's ready to help us immediately," Collins says. What they couldn't see was the inside of him. The lungs that were underdeveloped. The softness that came from never having been really pushed, from not having lived alone in a big city, from never having been away from his mother. "Inside, he's mush," says his youth pastor from Brunswick, the Rev. John Williams.

There was the time they discovered that he was eating Popeyes fried chicken for every meal, including breakfast, because he didn't really know how to grocery-shop. The sports management firm that represents Brown, SFX, assigned Richard J. Lopez, a 36-year-old business manager, to shepherd him. Lopez found that he essentially became a parent.

Lopez took Brown to a Giant supermarket and helped him fill a cart with food. Then Lopez drove Brown home to his rented apartment in Alexandria and hard-boiled a dozen eggs for him and put them in the refrigerator.

One morning before a Wizards game, Brown called Lopez, and said, "I have nothing to wear. Everything's dirty."

Lopez knew Brown had a closet full of new suits – he had helped hang them there. "Kwame," he explained, "you have to take those suits to the dry cleaners." That was fine, Brown said, but he didn't know how to do that, and he still didn't have anything to wear.

Lopez drove over to Brown's apartment, and found the suits in a heap by the bed. Each time Brown wore one, he would take it off, wad it up and throw it in a corner.

Lopez picked up a suit from the pile, got out the iron, and began ironing.

It was Lopez who helped Brown find his apartment, a four-bedroom condo in Alexandria. Lopez also got him a deal on a Mercedes S500, and a free cell phone, and helped him set up his cable service, and get an ATM card, and all the other things that go with being an adult. At first, Brown's mother, Joyce, was there to help, and there was a temporary roommate to keep him company, an acquaintance from Brunswick attending Howard Law School. But then his mother went home to care for her other children, and the roommate got a place closer to campus.

Finally, the condo was empty, except for Brown and Lopez. Brown looked at his manager. "Are you going to stay over?" he asked tentatively. Lopez, stunned, realized Brown had never spent the night alone before. Lopez took off his shoes.

A Man's Job

Brown's naivete poses the question once again: Is it wise for the NBA to make a foray into surrogate parenting of kids fresh from high school? What's to be done with a Kwame Brown? What is the nature of the league's responsibility to such a tender rookie? No one is quite sure. "There's a special kind of care and handling they need," says Commissioner David Stern. "The overriding issue for me is whether the pressure of life in the NBA might be too much . . . The question is whether he will suffer any permanent setbacks by being tossed in the oil too soon."

Is it worth the trouble? If nothing else, clubs will take a hard look at the issue from a market standpoint. Brown was just one of three high schoolers taken among the top five, along with Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry, now playing alongside each other in Chicago. But Duke graduate Shane Battier has been a far more mature and productive rookie for the Memphis Grizzlies, averaging about 14 points a game. Even the Wizards' own Brendan Haywood, out of North Carolina, has offered more immediate help.

Next to them, Brown's floundering has been painful to watch. He has been benched, placed on the injured list, and staggered by self-doubt. Only in the last month of the season did he begin to look like he might someday become the starting power forward the Wizards initially projected him as.

Not even the tutelage of Jordan has been able to ease Brown's entry into the league. Wasn't Jordan supposed to help guide this rough, raw, young, incompletely formed player into professionalism? Jordan firmly contends that Brown is right on schedule. "My expectations for him were never as high as his, or other people's," Jordan says. "He's never been taught."

But nobody pretends anymore that this is a fairy tale, unless it is a fairy tale with a cautionary moral. Stern, for one, is convinced that at least a couple of years of college produce happier young men and more fundamentally sound ballplayers. And he thinks that others in the NBA are watching the Kwame Brown saga unfold, and in doing so may find an antidote to irrational exuberance in the trading of player futures. "In a funny way, I think there might be a market adjustment," Stern says. "That will be ameliorative in its own right."

Stern wants to know exactly what Jordan and the Wizards expected when they drafted a 19-year-old straight out of high school. "What we're finding is that a 19-year-old would tend to respond like . . . a 19-year-old," says Stern. "Who should that surprise?"

At least one person, Collins, is ready to admit that he misjudged Brown's readiness to enter the league. "It's not just the education of Kwame Brown," says Collins wearily. "It was the education of Doug Collins."

Hard Time

Brunswick, population 15,600, is a place of seedy beauty, that contradictory grace possessed by the Old South, with its decadent residue and peeling antebellum wretchedness alongside old wealth, all of it bathed in sublime breezes. Brown's childhood home is a clapboard A-frame with torn screens and a collapsing sofa on a sagging porch, as if it all had given way from the weight of holding the eight Brown children and their single mother, Joyce.

Where Brown is from, ordinary career options range from wielding a sponge at a carwash to a spatula at a fast-food restaurant. These are some of the jobs held by his brothers. And then there are the murkier and more tawdry employments that have landed four of them in jail. One of the earliest elements of Brown's education was simply: Don't do what they did.

"They made every bad decision that you could possibly make, and I saw the ending result," he says. "So it was almost like a test that I already had the answer for. All I had to do was fill in the blanks. I just did the total opposite."

Brown's oldest brother, Willie James Brown Jr., 29, is serving a 121/2-year sentence in federal prison in Jesup, Ga., for conspiracy to sell narcotics, more specifically, for distributing crack. Tolbert Lee Brown, 25, was convicted of shooting a man and is serving a 15-year sentence in the Wilcox (Ga.) State Prison for aggravated assault. Two other brothers, Alton and Tarik, have had lesser difficulties with the law.

Where Brown is from, religion can be a fairly desperate matter, a begging for some explanation and improbable rescue from the unpayable bills and empty refrigerators and the illnesses that come from living in stagnation and deprivation – in the case of Joyce Brown, the gnarling arthritis, or the kidney disease that left her with just one, or the degenerative disk in her back from cleaning under all those beds at the local Holiday Inn. It was at the urging of Reverend Ike, the television preacher, that Joyce Brown finally left her physically abusive husband, Willie James Brown, once and for all after 17 years.

Joyce Brown met and married Willie, a truck driver from Charleston, S.C., when she was barely 20. She was born and reared in Brunswick; her father was a fisherman and her mother worked in a cannery. Willie offered her a ticket out of town, and to be a father to her first child, Carla Yvette, who is now 32 and lives in Smithfield, Va. Seven more children came in close succession, Willie James Jr., Tolbert, Alton, Tabari, Tarik, Kwame and Akeem.

No one in the family could anticipate when Willie would turn ugly and administer a beating. Joyce Brown is 6-2 and not easily bullied. She tried to leave, she says, "almost every year. I'd get away, and he'd get me right back." She would flee to Brunswick, and he would come after her, and tell her, "These are my children. They belong to me. You might leave, but you aren't taking them." That was his way, she says, of telling her, "You're not going nowhere."

She suspected he was using speed when she found a handful of multicolored pills in his pocket, which would have explained his violent mood swings. "There were some good days and some bad days," she says. "There were some ups and downs. I had to keep my head. The stuff I went through, it was pretty bad. Somebody needs psychological help to get through it. And then, you rely on God. I was raised in the church, so I had to grab my faith, and I started digging deep for the spirit. Because I was in a deep need, and I could have just given up."

At one point, when Kwame was 5, certain that her husband was coming after her once again, she was desperate enough to write to the Reverend Ike, explaining her situation and asking for help. "What should I do?" she asked.

Some time later, she received a reply. As she remembers it, the TV preacher wrote, "He's going to kill somebody. But it's not going to be you. When your mother gave birth to you, she gave birth to an Amazon."

This time, when Willie appeared in Brunswick, she jabbed her finger at him and quoted the Reverend Ike. "You're going to kill somebody. But it's not going to be me."

In 1990, Willie James Brown was convicted of murdering his 22-year-old girlfriend with an ax handle. He is serving a life sentence in the Evans Correctional Institution near Bennettsville, S.C. Kwame has not seen him since he was 6 or 7, and says he has no desire to.

His father's absence was a relief for everyone. But it left Joyce alone with a houseful of kids – big, tall ones with large appetites – and no paycheck. Joyce got jobs cleaning rooms at the local hotels. The work told on her back. Every day she would have to shove the huge bureaus away from the wall and vacuum behind them. She would flip the heavy mattresses back and sweep under the beds.

"My mom struggled day in and day out," says Tabari Brown, 22, a junior and a basketball player at Jacksonville University. "My brothers hated to see her like that." When Joyce would get her paycheck, she would buy food and pack the refrigerator with it. The boys would pillage it. "When it was gone, it was gone," Tabari says, "and it was gone for a while. And that's when my brothers used to have to do that stuff. They'd go out in the streets."

One evening, early this season, Brown drove to a Wizards game with Lopez in his Mercedes S500. In the midst of a chat about his halting pro career, he suddenly started talking about his childhood. Lopez asked him what his dreams had been.

"Did you ever imagine?" Lopez asked.

"Yeah," Brown said, "I used to imagine I was full."

Joyce pleaded with her sons to stay out of trouble, and badgered them to go with her on Sundays to the Church of Greater Works. "It was hurting her, what they had to do to help her," Tabari says. "She wasn't too happy with any of that, the whole situation. She'd tell them don't do that. They'd come back at her like, how you think you going to do without it? She'd cry."

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