Intelligent Warrior : Webber, 20, Shows Great Maturity While Fitting in for Golden State

When conversation in the Michigan locker room would hit a topic Chris Webber knew something about, he would remain close-mouthed. Even if he recognized in a rap verse a reference to literature he had studied at Detroit Country Day. Even if he understood a business term from hours spent studying the stock market. By the time he was a college freshman, Webber had become adept at living in two worlds, worlds as different as the affairs of the body are from those of the mind. Better to be silent and be thought a fool, he figured, than speak up and be considered full of himself.

“It wasn’t that I thought they would make fun of me,” says Webber, an emerging National Basketball Assn. star playing for the Golden State Warriors. “They knew I knew. But I never wanted it to seem like, oh, Chris knows so much. Like I was different than they were. I had never really fit in in any situation up to that point because I didn’t have a normal life. Normal 18-year-olds where I come from don’t read the stock pages and have an interest in all kinds of things. They just don’t.”

Sometimes eating only beans for dinner while he fixed his sights on a career as a lawyer or an English teacher, Webber happened upon the books of George Orwell. He would fold himself into an easy chair with “Animal Farm” and disappear. He rarely talked about reading with his street-smart friends. He already had developed a citywide reputation as a basketball player. He didn’t need something else to set him apart.

“He’s very strong-willed,” says Steve Fisher, the Michigan coach, “yet he very much wants to be one of the guys.” If those ideas seem to work in uneasy synthesis, well, that’s Webber’s life story. One of the most renowned prep basketball players in the history of his state and a pro prospect from the time he was a ninth-grader, he considered a college major of English literature before settling on child psychology. A product of a tough part of Detroit, he attended high school physics classes with the children of auto executives. He has always been the tall kid, the smart kid, the black kid, the kid without the proper clothes to wear. Now he’s the rich kid, with a $74.4 million, 15-year contract. So he’s deferential to everyone he meets, and he fills his idle hours playing video games with teammates, in no small measure because that’s what NBA players do.

Chris Mullin, Billy Owens, Latrell Sprewell, Warriors coaches and trainers--they know Webber as an earnest, good-natured, fun-loving companion, hardly removed from adolescence. They have never heard him disdain Columbus Day, which he does, because it “celebrates a man who murdered Indians and stole their land.” They don’t realize that he’s wise to the ways of modern advertising, or that he praises Mike Ilitch, a pizza magnate and owner of two professional sports teams, not for making those sophomoric Little Caeser’s commercials, but for helping rebuild the crumbling, gutted core of downtown Detroit.

“He’s the reason the Red Wings play at Joe Louis Arena downtown, and why they’ll build a new Tiger Stadium in the same neighborhood as the old one,” the basketball player says, his voice firm with conviction. And then Chris Webber talks about returning home one day and running for mayor.

He’s 20, looks even younger, sounds more mature when he wants to. Like the college junior he is supposed to be, he struggles to work out who he is. The process has long been a battle: after winning an academic scholarship to Country Day, Webber attempted to thwart his parents and flunk out. “We had to wear a suit to school every day,” he says, discomposed even by the memory. “I didn’t even have a suit.”

The consensus best player in high school basketball as a senior, he claims to have decided to attend Michigan because he believed classmate Juwan Howard would attract most of the clamor. Webber spent his two years there as a dominant figure on the sport’s most exciting team, but at least Jalen Rose, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson and Howard were nagged for autographs and interviews, too. “I’d get asked how the rest of the Fab Five were doing, like we were a unit,” Webber says. “That felt great.”

His precocious success--a 16.5 scoring average and more rebounds and blocks than any other Warriors player--has caused little friction in the clubhouse. Inside the team and out, nobody has a bad word to say about Chris Webber. With the instinct of a pure politician, he has made sure of that. “He’d make somebody a great public relations man,” Fisher says.

Webber speaks softly, and in two voices: a classroom-straightened locution for the media, and a hip-hop syntax of the streets for teammates and friends, the better for both groups to be comfortable. He dresses in a manner that belies his contract, in T-shirts and jeans like a college kid. He has filled his large house with friends from Detroit, in part to ensure that he doesn’t change.

And he doesn’t care if his reputation changes. If America knows him best as the scowling, strutting focus of the undisciplined Fab Five, that’s fine with him; the better shield to hide behind. If the defining moment of his career is to be the phantom timeout he called in last year’s NCAA championship game against North Carolina, that’s a price he will pay. In many ways, he believes, it’s better than the irony of the truth: that one of college basketball’s smarter players should be remembered for something quite so stupid. It’s an easier part to play.

“People automatically assume that the way I am on the court, grimacing and talking trash and all that, is the way I am off the court,” he says. “But is there anything wrong with that? Is there any reason I should change? If you can move yourself away from an extreme into the middle, so you’re just another one of the guys, it’s better. There’s less jealousy and less resentment.”

“Give him credit,” says Warriors Coach Don Nelson, who has been playing or coaching in the NBA for longer than Webber has been alive. “For some smart-ass rookie to come in and act like he knows everything, that’s the wrong way. This is the right way, what he’s doing. This is a close team and he has managed to fit right in.”

More than a quarter-century ago, a student-athlete with impeccable academic credentials and a national reputation came to professional basketball equally determined to exist as just another player. He was less concerned about his teammates than about reporters, whom he believed had violated his privacy in college. A book-length profile in “The New Yorker” magazine can do that.

His solution was to behave as much as possible like everyone else, offering only the blandest of observations for public consumption, leaving honest introspection for the pages of his diary. There were no video games then, and he didn’t much like playing cards, so Bill Bradley stared out of a lot of airplane windows.

In Life on the Run, a memoir about the world of the professional athlete, Bradley wrote:

Wariness of the press comes from my years as a college player when much of what I said and did received exaggerated attention. . . . The solution I have settled on is to help the reporter when I can but otherwise to utter a few standard comments so often that they lose interest in me. . . . Among the press, players get reputations as being ‘good copy’ or ‘bad copy’ depending on their quips or cooperation. I’m bad copy.”

“I’ll admit to that,” Webber says after hearing Bradley’s sentiments for the first time. “Yeah, I’d say that about sums it up exactly. It’s not necessary to be the center of attention in every situation. In fact, I’d rather not be. When that happens, you get trouble.”

Webber’s father is an auto worker making Cadillacs on the assembly line. His mother tutored retarded children in the Detroit school system. oldest of five children of a teacher and an auto worker. His mother, who is back in school studying for her doctorate in education, instilled in him a love of learning. But as a basketball player, Webber is already financially successful beyond his family’s grandest dreams. “We came from a terribly bad neighborhood,” he says of his lower-middle class area. “I got the chance to go to a private school on scholarship and saw kids get new cars on their 16th birthday. Then I would go home and eat beans for a week. I vividly recall that. I was 16 years old, going to school with a kid whose father was the president of General Motors, and all we had to eat for a week was beans.”

Webber’s father, Mayce, says, “It was a very poor environment. There were a lot of things Chris didn’t have that some of the other children had. . . . But it was very important to us that he have the chance to attend private school. We kept repeating the same things to him--warning him about drugs, being with the wrong people, being out too long. We tried to give him a good environment.”

Webber envisioned working his way into the NBA slowly, perhaps not even starting at first. But when Sarunas Marciulionis and Tim Hardaway, two of the Warriors’ best players, were lost with knee injuries before the season had even opened, his importance grew. Then Mullin hurt a hand and missed a month. Webber, still recovering from an appendectomy, suddenly became essential.

So he carried the load. The Warriors sent a media-relations representative with him to handle interview requests--and during the interviews Webber did verbal gymnastics to praise his coach and teammates. When Mullin returned, Webber’s role shifted to complementing the five-time All-Star on the court and deferring to him off it, and he was perceptive enough to realize as much. Nelson, who still considers Webber terribly raw, wonders how much further along he would be if he’d had the luxury of worrying only about his own progress. Here’s one answer: The San Antonio Spurs’ Dennis Rodman, probably the best defensive forward in basketball, says Webber lacks only a jump shot to be a complete player. “Already,” Rodman says, “he is a dominant force.”