An NBA Welcome Parks Will Remember : Basketball: A well-placed knee from Matt Geiger told the Dallas rookie he wasn’t playing for Marina High anymore. But then, the money makes up for a lot.

Cherokee Parks’ painful welcome to the NBA was courtesy of opponent Matt Geiger, a 7-foot, 245-pound designated hitter who doubles as a center.

The greeting: A tactically placed knee right in the . . . well, let’s just say it hurt.

A lot.

“He was driving to the hoop and I didn’t get set in time,” said Parks, a rookie with the Dallas Mavericks. “He came up with a knee . . . and I thought, ‘Thanks a million for that one.’ ”

Parks, 6-11 and 240 pounds, got a painful reminder of one of his first exhibition season games a couple weeks ago--coaches replayed film of Geiger’s well-placed knee as his Miami Heat teammates hooted and hollered. (Geiger has since been traded to the Charlotte Hornets.)

Welcome to the show, rookie.

This isn’t the Sunset League, where Parks led Huntington Beach’s Marina High to a co-championship as a berth in the Southern Section I-A title game as a senior.

And it isn’t Duke, where he played on an NCAA championship team as a freshman and reached the finals as a junior.

This is the NBA, where everyone is bigger and things happen faster--on and off the court.

That 6-8 guy he used to cover is now 7 feet and outweighs him.

No more 30-game college schedules. The NBA plays 82, plus exhibitions and the playoffs.

And no more calling home for lunch money. The NBA meal allowance is $80 a day.

Parks chronicled his first few weeks in the NBA in his weekly rookie diary in the Dallas Morning News, co-authored with college buddy Tristan Simon:

“I’m not exactly sure when I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Maybe it was the first time I posted up on Dale Davis for a 10-foot jumper, only to discover myself 15 feet from the basket when I actually released the ball.”

Parks, a fast-food connoisseur since his high school days, wondered how far he could stretch the league’s $80 meal allowance. He wrote about his favorite Southern California burger chain when the Mavericks visited Los Angeles for two exhibition games:

“Mindful of an athletes need for protein [I read recently that Michael Jordan eats steak and french fries before every game], I ordered the usual--double-double ‘animal style’ and a large drink. The damage? $3, tax included.”

He figured that if he spent the remaining $77 on burgers, he could have bought 40 double-doubles. That calculates to 30 pounds of meat, 80 slices of cheese, three loaves of bread and 3,500 grams of fat.

“I also could have ordered 136 tacos,” he wrote.

While his diet hasn’t changed much, Parks has adjusted his lifestyle to the NBA’s fast pace. He contrasted his first week of the exhibition season with his freshman year in college.

“At Duke, I got a class schedule, a dorm room, a list of places to eat and, best of all, a thousand other people my age in the same situation,” he said.

Not so in the NBA.

The league’s lockout left Parks and other rookies wondering when, and if, and for how much they would sign for. The league and the NBA players union reached an agreement late in the summer, and players scrambled to get ready for the start of training camp.

Parks’ contract was negotiated and settled in about a week, then it was off to practice. He crashed at Simon’s apartment in Irving, Tex., before leasing a house in North Dallas. He has two pieces of furniture: “A sofa and a TV.”

That will change when his wife, Anne-Marie, whom he married June 4, returns from graduate school at New York University. In the meantime, Parks is living the bachelor life.

He’s not complaining. A million bucks a year for playing hoops? He’ll take it.

“Life of an NBA rookie is far from bad and upstages that of a college freshman in a number of important respects,” he wrote in his diary.

“The perks are better. You don’t have to call home when you need something. And while a schedule imparts a measure of stability to one’s life, there’s something to be said for not having to attend class.”