Fighting for Approval : Kemp Seems to Have It All, but He Makes It Hard to Get Close and Now He’s Suspended for Laker Game

Darryl Dawkins is a cartoon character in an old highlight film. Moses Malone turned pro so long ago, today’s generation isn’t sure if he was the first high school kid to make the jump or the guy who parted the Red Sea.

If they were pioneers, it was a lost trail. No one followed for years until 19-year-old Shawn Kemp, who had just sat out a transfer year at a Texas junior college, dealt himself in.

It was 1989. Kemp was largely unknown outside the world of college coaches and recruiting touts, but he was a celebrity in his native Indiana, where his test scores and preferences in higher education were matters of statewide interest.

In Elkhart, his hometown, they still tell of the night Kemp’s principal, Jim Barney, kicked Bobby Knight himself out of their gym after Knight had harangued Coach Jim Hahn for letting the greatest prodigy the state had produced in decades sign with Kentucky.

If you want to know how this star-search process affects the very young, Kemp’s life and career suggest the answers are mixed.

On one hand, Kemp, now 27 and in his eighth NBA season, is a recognized superstar with breathtaking acrobatic moves never before seen in someone 6 feet 10.

“Like me, when I was younger,” Michael Jordan said.

Kemp has a $36-million contract and a “signature shoe” from one of the big companies, which stars him in national TV commercials. He works hard and he’s only getting better.

On the other hand, he seems to wonder if anyone else knows it.

He’s as sensitive as someone would be who was signed at an early age, when fans at a high school game chanted “S-A-T!” and once even threw a banana on the floor. He’s as wary and closeted as someone who was disappointed to learn that the world regarded him as some sort of valuable commodity, rather than a person with feelings and doubts.

He struggles with any notion that he has already made it. He feels slights keenly, like his omission from the last Dream Team, which he deserved to make but didn’t after missing a team flight to Portland and an appointment with a USA Basketball official.

This is what can happen in a society that makes idols of children and capitalists of teenagers.

It may not be that hard for Kevin Garnett or Kobe Bryant, who may be better grounded, more poised or went through less strife but there’s one constant for them all:

Say goodbye to childhood, all ye who enter here.

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Kemp isn’t going for a one-on-one interview.

Seattle SuperSonic officials are apologetic but resigned. They run into this with him all the time. He wants recognition, but he’s notoriously hard to pin down to anything.

Last summer he was supposed to be in a movie but pulled out in a last-minute disagreement, on location in Scottsdale, Ariz. The producer said it was about his pay; Kemp’s lawyer said it was about the quality of the production. A TV crew caught Kemp sitting in his limo, dickering with the movie people through the car window.

Kemp sends word that he will be available to the reporter after the next night’s game. It turns out to be a loss to the Utah Jazz.

In a somber dressing room, he comes out late but takes questions from local writers on the SuperSonics’ perplexing start. Since the other Seattle star, Gary Payton, is customarily unavailable these days, Kemp still qualifies on a relative basis as a stand-up guy.

Gracious but perfunctory, he’s edging toward the door when the out-of-town reporter introduces himself. Immediately, Kemp’s demeanor softens.

He is no longer somber. The interview will last only 10 minutes or so, and he’ll deny just about everything anyone has ever written about him--See? Nobody really knows me!--but he’s animated, even friendly.

“I’ve been through a lot of hurting time?” he asks, looking surprised.

“I don’t know where you heard that from, but I haven’t been through a lot of hurt. I mean, I came from Trinity Valley [junior college in Texas] but other than that . . .

“That happens to a lot of kids, not just me. When stuff happens to you, it just makes you tougher, man. You never let what someone says bring you down. If you do that, you’d be a chump in this world.

“If I read an article and believed everything a guy said about me, I’d believe I was the best person in the world or the worst person in the world, so I can’t go off what some guy says about me. I only go off what happens to me.

“And no one who ever writes a story about Shawn, they never have it right in the first place, man. [He grins at a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.] ‘Cept for the PI, ‘cept for the people here that know me.”

The Post-Intelligencer reporter says later he doesn’t know much about Kemp at all, though he would like to.

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In fact, it didn’t look easy to the people who watched Kemp growing up in Elkhart.

Before he understood there was a downside to his dreams, he was at the vortex of their expectations. Townspeople eyed him as a civic treasure from the time he was in grade school. When he played as a Concord High freshman against cross-town rival Central, doing OK but not great, the Central coach told the local press that they had just seen a future NBA player.

Kemp was shy but determined, working at everything. His coach, Hahn, had him practice interviews with Vince Turner, the play-by-play announcer on the local radio station, WTRC. (Concord and Central shared a 7,700-seat gym, for years the largest high school facility in the country.)

Kemp still calls Turner sometimes when he’s back in Elkhart. It would be nice if he felt as comfortable with the whole town but he doesn’t.

“The beginning of his demise in Indiana was when he said no to Knight,” Turner says. “All the lemmings who wear red sweaters in this state got down on him. His sins became crucifiable sins. . . .

“Shawn is honest to a fault. Sometimes you wish he wouldn’t say some things, but it’s just how he feels. He doesn’t talk to the local sportswriter here because of some of the stuff that was in the paper when he went to Kentucky. Shawn still holds that grudge.

“When he went into the draft, they talked to Donnie Walsh [the Indiana Pacers’ president], who said he was crazy to go, he wouldn’t be a first-round pick.

“The last time I talked to him, I told him, ‘Do a Don Henley, get over it.’ ”

Perhaps more than anything else, the necklace incident during Kemp’s brief stay at Kentucky--he never played a game there--complicated his career. On the record, there is only a report filed by Lexington police, alleging that on Oct. 20, 1988, Kemp tried to pawn two gold chains, worth $700, that had been stolen from Coach Eddie Sutton’s son, Sean, a Wildcat player. No charges were ever filed.

People close to Kemp say he doesn’t talk about it but has suggested there’s more to the story, not that he sees any point in ever telling it.

Friends have no problem believing him or writing it off as a youthful indiscretion.

“I’ve got three teenagers and they make their mistakes,” Turner says. ‘The only difference is, my teenagers aren’t on the front page of the Elkhart Truth.”

The larger world has forgotten it, but as an introduction to America, the incident wasn’t what Kemp had had in mind.

Crazy or not, he declared for the draft and, in a surprise, went in the first round, to the SuperSonics, who chose 17th.

“Great,” friends in Elkhart thought.

“The best thing that happened to him was Trinity Valley,” says Turner. ‘It was far enough away from here, he could just be Shawn.

“We had been talking about him since he was a fifth- or sixth-grader. [Junior college] was the first time in his life he wasn’t playing before crowds, that he didn’t have those great expectations.

“My prayer for him when he entered the draft was, ‘God, don’t let him be taken by anyone around here--Indiana, Chicago . . .”

If everyone knew what they know now--superstar talent will out, however painfully--Kemp would have gone in the lottery. His subsequent development dwarfed that of the top picks, Pervis Ellison and Danny Ferry. But this was 1989, a simpler time. College players stayed in college for three or four years. High school players went to college. Dennis Rodman didn’t have one tattoo.

If the game changed dramatically, Kemp was one reason.

He averaged 14 minutes and 6.5 points as a rookie. In his second season, he more than doubled it to 30 and 15. By his third, he was a double-figures rebounder, by his this one, with his average going up each year, a 21-point scorer.

In the glare of last spring’s finals, while the Bulls’ defense tightened around teammates, Kemp averaged 23 points and shot 55%, numbers that seemed to herald his arrival as a star of stars.

Of course, after that came the summer movie embarrassment. In the fall there was a 22-day holdout, a futile exercise because he had recently signed an extension, preventing Seattle from even discussing it for another season.

This winter, there have been three missed practices, a continuing pattern much speculated upon in Seattle, a recent Post-Intelligencer story alleging that he drank until 2 a.m. the night before an early-afternoon game against the Bulls, and now, a one-game suspension that will keep him out of today’s game against the Lakers.

His friends cringe when this stuff happens. There he is again, on the cusp of a dream so dazzling that even he will have to acknowledge it, and something silly always happens.

Maybe he’s too sensitive, too emotional, too young, gets bad advice, can’t say no to friends. Who knows? One way or another, Kemp’s career is still trending upward, but it isn’t always fun and it isn’t ever easy.

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Shawn Kemp Profile

BACKGROUND: Born Nov. 26, 1968 . . . 6 feet 10, 256 pounds . . . Selected after freshman year at Trinity Valley Community College (Texas) by SuperSonics in first round (17th overall). Never played a game in college . . . NBA all-star 1993-1997 seasons . . . All-NBA second team 1994-96 seasons . . . Led NBA with 13 disqualifications in 1992 and 11 in 1994 . . . Led NBA with 312 personal fouls in 1994.

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YEAR FG% FT% RPG PPG 1989-90 .479 .736 4.3 6.5 1990-91 .508 .661 8.4 15.0 1991-92 .504 .748 10.4 15.5 1992-93 .492 .712 10.7 17.8 1993-94 .538 .741 10.8 18.1 1994-95 .547 .749 10.9 18.7 1995-96 .561 .742 11.4 19.6 1996-97 .524 .766 10.8 21.0

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