A Good Name: Hard to Make, Hard to Keep

Dear Juwan,

The tough thing about endearing yourself to a community and showing you can handle so much responsibility at a young age is that you are held to a higher standard of behavior. Is it fair?

Yes.

Nobody would bat an eye at, say, J.R. Rider driving while intoxicated and failing a sobriety test because nobody with a brain in his head would invest an ounce of trust in J.R. Rider. But overwhelmingly, from the day your precious grandmother, Jannie Mae, died when you were a senior in high school, pretty much leaving you on your own in the world, your behavior encouraged trust and you welcomed it with open arms. The accomplishments have been so honorable and the slip-ups so rare that the reputation for being special was earned.

But a good name built over years can be besmirched in the blink of an eye. It all depends on you. It must be hard to mind your P’s and Q’s all the time, day and night, even in your private life, especially at 23 years old. But it’s harder, much harder, to deal with the consequences if you don’t.

And when you’ve just signed a $100 million contract, the stakes are even higher. Everything you do is open to judgment, up for public debate, wholesale scrutiny. Just as $100 million was the price of doing business for the Washington Bullets, it’s the price (or way past the price) of having to rethink every action and reaction.

There’s a whole list of stuff you can’t do anymore and you may as well get used to it. Drinking and driving is way, way, way up on the list. It can’t be kissed off as a mistake, it’s plain foolish, selfish and dangerous. Somebody could have been killed.

A good place to start was with your apology. I wouldn’t question your sincerity one bit. I’d bet every penny I own that at some point you’ve already shed a pool of tears over this because I know, absolutely, how much your image matters to you. That you called the matter of early last Monday morning “truly a big embarrassment for me personally and for my family and also for this Bullets organization” was the right thing to say.

That you are kicking yourself as hard as I know you are means the rest of us should be less inclined to do so. And even less so given the depth and the passion of your involvement in countless community endeavors. Everywhere you go in the metropolitan area somebody’s got a Juwan Howard story. A good story: “Juwan helped me dig my car out of a snowbank during the blizzard.” Or “Juwan handwrote a letter to my kid and told him why he needs to study more and think less about sports.” Or “Juwan talked to my grandmother when she was dying of cancer and it meant so much to her.” Or “Juwan brought coats to our school so the kids who couldn’t afford them would have something to wear last winter.” There are so many stories it’s like there are three or four of you at times, a regular urban Santa Claus.

You know why there wasn’t a drop of resentment around here when you left for Miami, then came back for more than $100 million? Because people like what they see. They--make that we--are sick and tired of arrogant, sleazy, low-life, criminals dominating the headlines on our sports pages, Juwan. There’s a reason Grant Hill was voted to the all-star team with more votes than anybody, as a rookie. There’s a reason one magazine said he was sent from above to save sports.

On one side of the street there’s Hill and David Robinson and Karl Malone and Boomer Esiason and Cal Ripken. And on the other side there’s, well, you know who’s there.

You and Grant, Juwan, that’s who we’re banking on in professional basketball. Fair? Who knows. It just is. It’s not fair that a teacher makes $400 a week and a ballplayer $4 million a year, but it is. We wouldn’t ask this much of lesser men, Juwan, but we know you’re up to it and then some because a young man who would work as tirelessly as you did to earn a college degree when you surely didn’t have to is worthy of that kind of trust.

And I must say this is personal to me. We grew up in roughly the same neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, 10 blocks apart. We both know the hopelessness, we both know the people whose lack of discipline and character betrayed their talent. You know what a source of pride we feel when somebody from the neighborhood succeeds, and how we worry when they take a misstep. When some people--even some in the Bullets organization--didn’t think you were going to amount to very much--off or on the court---was one of the people who said you would prove them all to be fools. And you have.

But it only gets harder from here. A higher profile brings leeches out of the woodwork, brings temptations of all kinds right to your doorstep. John Thompson talks about how it’s not the two hours a day on the basketball court that worries him about young men with millions of dollars, it’s the other 22 hours. To suggest you try to turn into an angel would be stupid. You don’t have to be an angel but you do have to be careful, and circumspect. I don’t know that most of us were either at 23 years old, but you’ve already demonstrated commitment and discipline at a level many of us will never see.

What the recent fight between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt was what a man can do when he says no to the worst of life’s seductions and stays on that straighter path. It’s not up to the NBA, or the Bullets, or your friends, or the media. It’s up to you. And tough as it can sometimes be in the fishbowl, there’s already ample evidence that you will reduce this to a regrettable exception.