Canadian Beacon

In Greek mythology, Daedalus fashioned wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son, Icarus, so they could escape imprisonment in a labyrinth. However, they flew too close to the sun, Icarus’ wings melted and he fell from the sky to his death.

In NBA mythology, no one had to fashion wings for Vince Carter, who could already fly. Instead, they hyped him to the max, until he too plummeted.

In real life, Carter is still alive, if you call this living.

*

It’s the All-Star media session, that hour of each season when the foreign basketball press is turned loose amid its heroes, the pantheon in which Carter, the leading vote-getter in the two games since You Know Who left, shines brightest.

This season, the Europeans are all over their heimjunge--homeboy--Dirk Nowitzki, frustrating the American press, because most of the questions and answers are in German.

A year before, when Carter made his debut at the event, an Argentine guy kept offering Vince, who’d played in his high school marching band, a toy saxophone to toot. Carter demurred twice before a U.S. writer told the Argentine to put that !@#$%&! thing away, already.

Internationalism takes some getting used to. This year, it’s a French TV guy, who keeps trying to get Carter’s attention.

“For French people,” the Frenchman says, “just a question: What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?”

“What?” Carter asks, incredulously.

“What do you do when you wake up?” the Frenchman repeats.

“Oh my God,” Carter says.

“Do you see French TV?” the Frenchman asks.

“No,” Carter answers.

“Do you know ‘The Morning Light?’ It’s a French show,” the Frenchman explains.

“No,” Carter says.

“On the TV,” the Frenchman adds helpfully.

“No,” Carter says. “I don’t watch TV that much, man.”

Actually, Carter never watches French TV. However, if he’s hardly as colorful off the court as on it, he’s a patient young icon who seems to recognize this as some kind of weird, cultural-warp thing and is letting this Visitor To Our Country down as easily as he can.

“Can you make just a special dedicate to ‘The Morning Light?’ ” the Frenchman persists. What the heck, he’s come all the way from France, he may as well go for it.

“I can’t do that now, not right now,” Carter says. “I’ve got to do interviews, man.”

This stuff keeps happening. The more famous Carter becomes, someone suggests, the more bizarre everything gets.

“You’re right,” Carter says. “And I’m just starting to understand that.”

Actually, he’s doing quite well, given all the turmoil around him.

Kobe Bryant may be a better all-around player, as Michael Jordan, himself, noted last spring when the hype began to fall in on Carter, but nobody’s as spectacular as Carter.

No one can match his navel-at-the-rim jams. In 2000, he put on the last great All-Star dunk show. In 2001, without him, the contest turned into a rookie-packed farce, but the next day in the actual game, Carter did a 360-degree throw-down and the MCI Center all but rose as one to demand he get the award that had gone to Seattle’s Desmond Mason.

So many things seem to depend on Carter, starting with the future of the Toronto Raptor franchise, the last international outpost of NBA Commissioner David Stern.

It would make Carter crazy if he thought about it . . . so he doesn’t (he insists). He pulls in his head like a turtle and lets everything zoom past, like debris in the wind.

“Long days,” he says of his life. “Stressful hours--and a little fun in between.

“But it’s worth it. You know the success that every player wants, that’s what comes with it--the attention, the demands, no privacy. Should I go on?”

He’s smiling. Whatever it is, it looks as if he can handle it, at least to his own satisfaction.

Anyone who doesn’t think that’s enough, that’s his problem.

Two Faces Has He

Vince goes all out to avoid confrontation. Sometimes we would say, “Vince, you’ve got to stand your ground,” but he’d just say, “Oh, whatever.”

Vince rolls with the punches, and he hopes things will smooth out on their own.

--Carter’s mother, Michelle,

to Sports Illustrated’s S.L. Price

But then, Carter is used to turmoil.

Born and raised in Daytona Beach, Fla., he was 7 when his parents split up. He stayed on good terms with his father, which wasn’t easy, because his father was on bad terms with his mother.

Carter was very close to his mother, a public school teacher who ruled with an iron hand.

When his grades fell at North Carolina, she took away his car. When he turned pro, she picked his agent. When he became a star, she decided what interviews he did and for how long. For a cover piece for ESPN the Magazine, the writer got 30 minutes, with a Raptor PR guy instructed to sit in.

“Everything that goes on the schedule, I have to approve it or not approve it,” Michelle once said. “Even with regard to the Special Olympics celebrity dinner. What should he wear, how should he look? It’s down to that.”

Carter turned out to be a nice, soft-spoken, humble young man who was never in trouble.

On the court, however, there was nothing humble about him. He struck poses after dunks and big shots, stomped around, gestured to the crowd, taunted opponents.

Of course, all the young NBA stars did that. No one mentioned it until he went to the Olympics and showed up the host Aussie team. After that, the land Down Under decided he was the original Ugly American.

It was one more thing going wrong. Even if Michelle’s involvement had a wholesome family-value sound, this was a new world for her too.

The agent she picked was Tank Black, a charmer from the rough-and-tumble world of football agents, as opposed to the more polite world of basketball agents.

By Carter’s second NBA season, Black was in jail, convicted of swindling clients and laundering money.

Black had passed up the bigger sneaker companies to sign Carter with Puma, which promised to make him its star. When the big promotion fizzled, Carter began complaining about the shoes and trying to get out of the deal.

An arbitrator finally ruled that the only way was for Carter to pay Puma $13.5 million. Nike wound up paying it, when Carter signed with the company for $30 million over five years.

Fame at Carter’s level was a problem all its own. Leaving college as a junior in 1998, he was only the No. 5 pick, behind Michael Olowokandi, Mike Bibby, Raef LaFrentz and Tar Heel teammate Antawn Jamison, but within 15 months of his first pro game, Carter was the leading All-Star vote getter.

Then he followed his 2000 dunk-show triumph with a string of dramatic last-second, game-winning shots, one a three-pointer here against the Clippers.

He hit the wall in the playoffs in a three-game sweep at the hands of the New York Knicks, averaging 19 points and shooting 30%.

While he was at the Olympics, becoming infamous, his own cousin, Tracy McGrady, left the Raptors, saying they were Carter’s team. Carter was stunned. Asked what he expected to score the first time he played McGrady, he said, “Pick a number between 30 and 50.”

They have since made up. Things have returned to normal . . . if by normal you mean Carter’s every gesture is interpreted as a signal about his intentions in 2003, when he will be a free agent.

Teams all over are dumping salary, getting ready for the summer of ‘03, starting with Jordan, the Washington Wizard president, who’s sure to come calling to explain what he really meant about Carter and Bryant.

Carter gets asked about free agency all the time, the way he used to be asked about becoming the next Jordan, but he’s still rolling with the punches.

He isn’t unpleasant, but he won’t discuss it, or things as routine as rules changes--”I just play, whatever the rules are. You ask some of the older guys, they’re the complainers.”

At the All-Star session, he was similarly uninterested in Bryant’s fine for missing the media session, the dunk contest he was sitting out and the age-old question about the modern generation.

“I’m just an NBA player, living the dream and going out here and trying to play hard every night,” he said. “So whatever people think that we’re not this, we’re not like Jordan, [Charles] Barkley, [Larry] Bird, whatever--oh well. This is a new era. This is just how the game’s played now.”

The game is played with more visibility now, a bigger press corps, more money, higher stakes.

He’s just, as he once put it, “a little nobody skinny kid, who everybody knew could jump, from Daytona Beach,” trying to keep his feet on the ground.

Superstar in a Bubble

I don’t think he’s going to be in Toronto. I think he’s going to come back to the States.

--McGrady, on Carter’s future

Now, it seems, everybody has an opinion on everything he does.

Opposing players criticize him for styling for the fans and taking excessive numbers of three-pointers, rather than driving to the hoop, speculating he’s protecting himself for 2003 and his big contract.

However, Carter’s scoring average keeps going up (18 as a rookie, 26 last season, 28 now) as do his three-point percentage (29-40-41) and his free-throw attempts (5.4 to 6.7 to 7.1).

Everything around the Raptors is evaluated in terms of its impact on Carter. McGrady’s exit, bad. The possibility of losing free agent Antonio Davis this summer, bad. That Davis was close to just-traded Mark Jackson, bad.

Carter’s joke about the situation . . . not so funny.

At the All-Star session, Carter was asked about Chris Webber’s situation in Sacramento, which had been blown up by Webber’s willingness to discuss it, at length and in detail.

“Me?” Carter asked. “What? They don’t care about me, man! They don’t care about me, man! Not like that!”

Of course, Toronto basketball fans care about little else. A Toronto writer asked Carter about it later. He said he was only kidding.

The Toronto press corps is stressed out enough, because Carter has a distressing habit of staying low-key in smaller gatherings, then performing in bigger settings, meaning they often get the bland version before he drops some bombshell on ESPN or some American magazine.

Nevertheless, the best bet seems to be that he will leave.

The Raptors, without McGrady and possibly without Davis, will be hard-pressed to get better. NBA players aren’t born internationalists, most of them, not when they have a choice. Nike is notorious for cadging to get its stars into major markets and that doesn’t mean the biggest market in Canada.

In the meantime, Carter is only 24. This is only his third season. What can anyone expect of him?

“These days, so many of the younger guys think they’re God’s gift to the game,” says former teammate Jackson, a tough judge. “He is very refreshing. Willing to learn, willing to listen. And he’s not all about himself. Great, great kid.

“He only surprised me because he’s better than I thought he was. I knew he was special, I knew he was a superstar, but he’s so much better than he knows. . . .

“He handles it well and that’s tough, because when you have everybody around the world telling you that you’re God’s gift to the game and the next Michael and half-man, half-amazing, it can be quite easy to get caught up in that and start believing it. But he’s a guy who just wants to get better. He’s willing to listen and learn.”

So Carter listens, now to Davis and Charles Oakley, who was with Jordan in his early days in the league.

Around him, all may be tumult, but at the vortex, where Carter is, it’s still calm enough.

“Life’s still simple,” Carter says. “You just have to know when and where to go. It’s simple--now.

“Not at first, because I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what you could get away with . . . where you can go or what you can do without being bothered and have a normal life.

“I’m not going to say I have a normal life now, but it’s still simple. I enjoy my house a lot.”

That’s in Toronto, for the moment, anyway.