In Memory

The smile on David Wesley’s face has never been bigger, his confidence never higher. After seven seasons of being told he wasn’t good enough to play in the NBA, the Hornets guard is having a career year.

It’s all happening at the right time for Wesley, who came into the season at a crossroads in his life, personally and professionally.

“I’ve thought several times that with everything he’s been through, it’s just amazing to me that he has found himself so quickly,” Charlotte coach Paul Silas said. “Not only that, but to have the year he is having, it’s wonderful.”

This was the season Wesley was supposed to lose his job in the starting lineup. Everyone who said he couldn’t be a shooting guard in the NBA would be proved right.

And this was the year everyone would find out if Wesley would recover from the guilt he was carrying over the death of best friend and teammate Bobby Phills.

Wesley never really did last season, when he played on after Phills was killed in a January car wreck following a morning shootaround.

Police said Wesley and Phills were racing their Porsches at up to 100 mph when Phills lost control and slid into oncoming traffic. He died instantly, and Wesley saw it happen in his rearview mirror.

“David is a unique kind of guy, a thinker, and he thinks very deeply,” Silas said. “He’s also an emotional guy. After the accident, he played the rest of the year with a very pensive look on his face and I didn’t know if that look would ever go away.”

Neither did Wesley’s mother, Ramona, who lives 130 miles away from Charlotte but makes the trip for every home game.

Since all three of her sons live in Charlotte, she spent a lot of time in the city over the summer organizing family functions. To her, it was therapy for Wesley.

“I’ve always said David has a million-dollar smile, one that you could see in his eyes,” she said. “I didn’t see it for a long time, his eyes were kind of dull. But as the summer went on, it slowly came back and I could see the smile in his eyes again. It was like he had come alive again.”

So did his play on the court.

“Bobby is always in my heart, I think about him every day and I relive the accident,” Wesley said. “But the summer was really therapeutic for me and the time really healed the wounds. When it was time to play basketball again, it felt like I could go in with a clean page and a fresh start.”

But when Wesley showed up for training camp in October, there was a chance he wouldn’t even get the opportunity to prove himself.

Silas made him a team captain, the honor Phills had carried, but also told him he would have to fight for his job.

Second-year player Baron Davis was a natural point guard and Wesley was not--even though he had started every game he’s played in Charlotte at that position.

Silas didn’t expect Wesley to win the job. Wesley thought otherwise.

“Everybody seemed to think I was the odd man out, and it might have looked that way, but Coach told me it was my job to lose,” Wesley said. “So I had no thought whatsoever that I was going to be the odd man out. I came in ready to do my job and whatever happened, happened.”

What happened was forward Derrick Coleman missed the entire preseason and Silas had Jamal Mashburn, his shooting guard, replace him. That allowed him to use Wesley as the shooter.

At 6-foot-1, Wesley had been told he was too small for the position and didn’t have a good enough shot.

Eventually he just stopped listening.

“You hear different things like, ‘He’s not a shooting guard. He’s not a point guard. He won’t make it in the league,”’ Wesley said.

“So I just continued to believe in myself and work hard and stopped paying attention.”

After he moved to shooting guard, Wesley had to prove he deserved to stay.

Coleman would eventually be back and Silas didn’t see how he could keep him out of the lineup. That would mean Wesley eventually would go to the bench as the third guard.

It hasn’t happened that way.

Coleman is out of shape and overweight and has been on the injured list since Nov. 18. And Wesley has been playing so well, Silas said there’s no way he can send him to the bench now.

He’s also proved to be a good team captain, filling the role in which Phills excelled, Silas said.

“I’m not sure if he approaches it as filling Bobby’s shoes, but it seems like his presence is in him,” Silas said. “I was in the family room after a game recently, and one of the wives came up to me and said, ‘It’s just like Bobby is working through him.’

“That’s not an easy role to take on, but he’s doing it, and I’ve never seen things better for him.”