Zero Tolerance

There may be no I in team, but there are two in insecurity, which is just the way Gilbert Arenas likes it.

No. 0 in your program, No. 1 in the hearts of people who saw him start his trip from obscurity at Grant High in Van Nuys, he just finished No. 4 in the NBA in scoring, trailing only Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Allen Iverson, ahead of Dwyane Wade.

Having just turned 24, Arenas is a five-year veteran and a two-time All-Star, halfway through a six-year, $65-million contract -- on his way to making some real money -- although little inclined to acknowledge that he has arrived.

“You know, I’m still that guy,” he said recently. “It’s just like a hard-working guy hit the lotto.

“I’m not going to turn into a millionaire. I just want to be that regular old guy. That’s how I feel. I’m still No. Zero, no matter how far my career goes.”

His recent All-Star appearance was not untypical. Left off the East squad, which was loaded at guard, Arenas made the usual announcement about using it as fuel for his fire. Then the league upset that plan by selecting him to replace injured Jermaine O’Neal.

At the East squad’s practice, Arenas gave fans $2,000 worth of his All-Star jerseys, which he’d bought personally. For the game, he taped over the Adidas logos on the sneakers he’s paid to endorse in what he called a “silent protest” over the company’s failure to renegotiate his deal.

Arenas and Adidas are friends again now but that’s just how it goes with Gilbert, once fondly called “baby Ron Artest” by Golden State teammate Jason Richardson.

Of course, if you came from as far out in left field as Arenas did, it might take you awhile to get used to stardom too.

At Grant, where Coach Howard Levine ran an exemplary program that had never had a player like Arenas, he was passed over by the local colleges and got to Arizona only after a late offer from Lute Olson. Wearing zero -- for the number of minutes people said he’d play, Arenas explained -- he shouldered aside the Wildcats’ incumbent shooting guard and took the job as a freshman.

Declaring for the NBA draft after his sophomore year, he bought a loaded SUV in anticipation of going in the first round and was crushed at being passed over again.

Taken in the second round by Golden State, he was moved to point guard, became the starter as a rookie, averaged 18 points in his second season, then signed with the Wizards.

In his second and third seasons at Washington, the Wizards made the playoffs in consecutive years for the first time since 1988. His 2,346 points this season were the most since the franchise moved from Chicago to Baltimore in 1963, more than ever were scored in a season by Earl Monroe, Elvin Hayes or Bernard King.

He may not want to think about it and he may have a few things left to work on but Arenas is a franchise player.

“He’s more of a point guard,” says Wizard Coach Eddie Jordan. “He’s more of a leader. He’s playing better defense. And I know why Lute Olson has white hair.”

The Original

Gilbert Arenas

He’s a very sweet kid, good natured, big heart, very giving when given a chance but he’s got some issues.... He challenges everybody to, “What are you going to do? Are you going to leave me?”

Howard Levine

Grant High coach

This story didn’t start when a basketball coach passed Arenas over. It started further back, just before he turned 3, when his father, who was then 22, drove to Miami from his Tampa home and picked up the youngster from his mother, from whom Gilbert has been estranged since.

“When I came and picked him up, he said, ‘Are you my daddy?’ ” says Gilbert Arenas Sr. “I said, ‘Yeah, how’d you know?’

“He said, ‘I don’t know.’

“He just started smiling. It was like the biggest load off his back that I had ever seen, he was so happy ...

“On our way back, I don’t think he fell asleep. I told him, I said, ‘Why don’t you go to sleep?’

“He must have thought at the time I was going to take off on him so he didn’t go to sleep.”

It’s one thing to be raised by a single parent but another thing when it’s your father. Gilbert Sr., who still lives in North Hollywood, was good enough in football to try to walk on at the University of Miami when Jim Kelly and O.J. Anderson were there. After moving here, Senior had gigs as an actor and model, besides working his day, or actually, his night, job at UPS. In an age in which basketball players are groomed from infancy and often held back a year, the Arenas family had enough to do to make ends meet. Gilbert, whose birthday was in January, hadn’t yet turned 14 when he started his freshman year at Birmingham High in the San Fernando Valley and played on the junior varsity.

He transferred to Grant the next summer, to be closer to his father’s job, and Levine remembers clearly the first time he saw Gilbert Jr. “I remember he was on the south basket, side hoop,” says Levine. “And after watching him up close for 10 minutes, I said, ‘You know, Gil, I’ve never said this to another player and I think I’ll probably never say it to another player, but I think you’ve got potential to be a pro basketball player.’

”... He would always work hard, especially his senior year, but we could kind of tell when he wasn’t in a good mood that particular day. It was these demons that come on him but, gladly, it’s less and less now....

“The thing I always liked about Gilbert, he was a great competitor. He felt like he had something to prove. He played with a chip on his shoulder and he still does.”

It wasn’t paranoia; Arenas did have something to prove. Hoping to interest UCLA, Gilbert Sr. called Steve Lavin’s assistant coach, Michael Holton, and invited him to check out his son in a pickup game.

“Gil had a great workout with Magic Johnson, Rafer Alston, couple UCLA kids, JaRon Rush and Baron Davis,” says Gilbert Sr. “We went to see Steve Lavin. He said, ‘We know about Gilbert. He’s a great player but we’re looking at Carlos Boozer, Kareem Rush.’

“I’m thinking in my mind, ‘Gilbert’s right in your backyard.’ ”

His son was set to visit DePaul when, out of the blue, they got a call from Olson, who had lost a recruit. Olson apologized for never having seen Gilbert Jr., and asked him to visit.

Somehow, it didn’t sound that exciting. Nevertheless, Arenas flew to Tucson and found himself in a pickup game with a bunch of Olson’s veterans, including future Laker Luke Walton, who had just completed his sophomore season.

“Gil was crazy,” says Walton. “From the year before, we had Ruben Douglas as a freshman starter and Gilbert came in talking trash, saying that he used to score 50 on Ruben in high school, this and that.

“So we were laughing, like, ‘Whatever, that’s why you got recruited by -- it was like Cal State Northridge....’

“So we were giving him a hard time and then we start playing pickup ball and he was, like, killing everybody. So we go, like, ‘All right, we might have to get this kid here.’ ”

Douglas wound up leading the nation in scoring ... at New Mexico, where he transferred after Arenas took his starting job. In Arenas’ sophomore year, he led the team in scoring as Arizona advanced to the Final Four before losing to Duke.

Nevertheless, at Arenas’ in-between height, it was still early to go pro. As former Wildcat star Steve Kerr diplomatically phrased it later, “I think he was more confident in his pro chances than anybody else.”

Not that that was anything new. Nor was the fact that everybody had a surprise coming.

Take a Number

... on Round 2

Picking up where he had left off when it was time to leave Grant for the wider world, Arenas started his NBA career in lottery-pick style, splurging to buy an SUV before the draft, complete with four TV sets. His father threw a draft party.

Unfortunately, his son missed the first round by two picks, going to Golden State at No. 31.

“That’s probably the first day I cried since I was 5,” Gilbert Jr. told the Washington Times. “I was heartbroken.”

Actually, it required foresight on the Warriors’ part to take him that high. At 6 feet 2 1/4 , which is what he measured at the Chicago pre-draft camp, he would have to move to point guard. Arenas had played a lot of point guard at Grant. Beyond that, he was Gilbert Arenas Jr.

As a rookie, he replaced Larry Hughes as the starter and averaged 10.9 points. He whooshed to 18.3 in his second season, beating Detroit’s Chauncey Billups in voting for the NBA’s most improved player.

Suddenly a prize free agent, Arenas signed with the Wizards, turning down a late pitch by the Clippers spearheaded by new Coach Mike Dunleavy, whose son, Mike Jr., had played alongside him with Golden State.

Of course, there was all the other stuff. Arenas was known for his emotion (at Grant, he cried after some losses), outlandish pranks and, most of all, his temper.

“He had all this energy he had to kill because he doesn’t have another life,” says Jordan. “He’s in the gym at 3 o’clock [in the afternoon] to shoot, in the gym at 5 o’clock in the morning to shoot, comes in at 11 o’clock at night to shoot, so he’s always in the gym.

“There’s nothing else in his life except to get better as a basketball player.”

No one saw this coming but with his drive, it wasn’t an accident that Arenas’ scoring average kept going up, to 19.6 in his first Wizard season, 25.5 in his second and this season’s 29.3.

“No one knew what his ceiling was,” says Jordan. “We knew that he was the most improved player of the year. We knew he was athletically talented, he had speed, he had quickness and that he had a nose to score.

“But did he turn the ball over a lot? Yes. Was he a point guard? No. Was he a different sort of prankster off the floor that irritated people? Yes. Could he mature in time to save my job?

“We didn’t know but as they say, it takes a village to raise a child.”

The organization is now devoted to raising Gilbert but it’s an ongoing process. Arenas just revealed that he won a 2001 Chevrolet Monte Carlo off one of his childhood friends in a game of Halo 2 on Xbox, after putting up his own Cadillac Escalade in the wager.

On the floor, with his Kobe-of-the-East shot selection, Arenas is still the scoring kind of point guard but his assists are up from his first two Wizard seasons.

He’s a local darling and a media favorite, a stand-up guy who’ll say anything. Team officials marvel at his charitable efforts, many unattended and unreported. He equips the Grant program, once dropping by to get everybody’s measurements in person.

Of course, being Gilbert Arenas Jr. means never running out of dragons that need slaying.

“Me and Dwyane Wade are cool,” says Arenas. “Me and LeBron are cool. You know, they’re the faces of the NBA. They’re in big cities. Dwyane Wade went to the playoffs that year before and then the next year he comes in with Shaq [O’Neal] so the media is going to follow Shaq....

“Shaq is one of those guys who helps his players.... ‘He’s the greatest player in the NBA, he’s the greatest in the world, he’s better than Kobe.’ It’s like Muhammad Ali.”

If only O’Neal had been traded to Washington instead of Miami, Arenas might already be the face of the NBA, but it’s OK. It works fine this way.