Taking Off

Beignets, anyone?

Or grits?

Baron Davis is traveling light and moving fast these days, although just where, he can’t tell you.

It could be Charlotte, where the Hornets now draw flies while the city tries to figure out how to keep the team but lose its owners ... or New Orleans, where the owners say they’re headed, although tickets are moving slowly and Commissioner David Stern is maintaining an ominous silence ... or none of the above.

Davis could be a free agent in the summer of 2003, at 24, having just become an All-Star for the first time at 22, and will be one of the hottest tickets in a star-studded class.

It’s been some trip too:

* 1997-1998 season: Blows out knee as a UCLA freshman, requiring major surgery.

* 1998-1999: Returns with a heavy brace but regains much of his form. Assured of being a top pick, declares for the draft. Doesn’t want to play in Charlotte, which has the No. 3 pick, and has his agent so inform the Hornets. They take him anyway.

* 1999-2000: Rides the bench while the other top picks--Elton Brand of the Chicago Bulls, Steve Francis of the Houston Rockets and Lamar Odom of the Clippers--are tearing it up, which makes him look like the dud of the lottery.

* 2000-2001: Becomes starter.

* 2001-2002: Becomes All-Star. Now averages 19 points a game and ranks in the top 10 in assists, steals, minutes and, in a surprise, three-pointers.

“When he first came to me,” says Coach Paul Silas, “you could almost categorize him as a non-shooter. And after the first year, he stayed after the season and worked for, like, 14 straight days on his shot and it started to come....

“He works perhaps harder than anybody on my team. And that was the only thing that was missing. He had everything else--athleticism, could handle the ball, could go to the hoop strong, knowledge of the game.

“He’s probably my smartest player. He really is, he’s just brilliant. But he’s young. That’s what you have to understand, he’s going to have his highs and lows because he’s only 22.

“He has all it takes to be a star in this league. If he keeps his head and keeps progressing, I think he has star written all over him.”

Just as they always said he did.

Of course, at one time or another, they said lots of things about Davis.

Malfeasance, Nonfeasance

I spend a lot of time trying to analyze what Boston did wrong, what the Lakers did wrong, what the Pistons did wrong. How do you stop that major fall after a long-term championship team? ...

Boston probably could have traded Kevin McHale or Robert Parish four or five years ago and gotten talent to keep themselves going. And instead of trying to dump James Worthy in the last two years of his contract, if the Lakers had moved four years ago, they maybe could have gotten ... but I don’t know. It’s not easy to do.

If it ever came that I had to move Larry [Johnson], it’d be a tough decision.

--Hornet President Spencer Stolpen, January 1993

*

Let’s see, what was missing in the Hornets’ plans to avoid a major fall after becoming long-term champions?

Oh yes, a championship.

Owner George Shinn and Stolpen, his right-hand man, were out of their gourds from the get-go. They were in their sixth season, having made the playoffs for the first time the previous spring, when Stolpen delivered the above exercise in exuberance.

They were full of themselves to bursting, packing their huge, 23,000-seat arena nightly--for 10 consecutive seasons--and lucking into one top lottery pick (No. 1 choice Johnson in 1991) after another (No. 2 Alonzo Mourning in 1992.)

Unfortunately, there was a problem with Johnson’s back, which everyone thought was minor in the summer of ‘93, when Shinn, valentines passing before his eyes, gave him a 10-year, $84-million extension, though Johnson still had three seasons left on his old contract.

Aghast, Stern asked Shinn if he realized he’d given one player almost three times the $32.5-million expansion fee the league had charged him.

Not that the Hornet bosses were easy to impress or depress. Said Stolpen of the other NBA owners, who wanted to tar and feather them:

“I think a lot of them are just jealous that they didn’t have an owner and/or a player to put those two things together.”

No, sometimes things don’t turn out the way you think they will.

Johnson was never the same player again. He’d be dumped unceremoniously to the Knicks, who were desperate enough to take his mammoth salary, three seasons later.

By then, the Hornets were in the midst of a talent drain, 27 free agents leaving from 1996 until last summer when they finally got one--Jamal Mashburn--to stay.

That doesn’t count Mourning, who forced them to trade him for Glen Rice ... or Rice, who forced them to trade him for Eddie Jones and Elden Campbell ... after which Jones left as a free agent.

It also doesn’t count Kobe Bryant, whom the Hornets drafted and (oops) traded to the Lakers (helping them rebuild from the James Worthy days) for Vlade Divac ... who left as a free agent.

So, when the 19-year-old Davis, who dreamed of being a Laker or, at least, a Minnesota Timberwolf so he could play with Kevin Garnett, told the Hornets he wouldn’t play with them, he was only carrying on a grand tradition.

He wouldn’t go to Charlotte to work out. The Hornets had to scout him off videotape.

It was good enough.

“I’ve known Arn [Tellem, Davis’ agent] for 1,000 years,” says Silas. “He tried to talk me out of it. I just told him, flat-out, ‘Arn, we’re taking him. If he wants to sit out a year and go back in the draft, that’s his choice but we’re going to take him.”

Says Davis, “I thought I was going to be traded--until Paul Silas called me and said, ‘We’re taking you, that’s that, deal with it.’

“I go, ‘Charlotte, it is.’

“Deep down inside, I didn’t care, because it was going to be a dream come true, regardless.”

Well, way down deep inside.

He Had a Lot of Growing Up To Do

When I was 5 feet 5 in 10th grade, people used to say I wouldn’t go high Division I, I would probably go somewhere like Northern Arizona.

And I proved them wrong. They said when I hurt my knee that I’d never be the same, I’d never make it to the NBA but I’ve done it....

My rookie season they said, “Damn, B.D.’s not going to pan out ... he’s just another one of those UCLA guys who get to the league and don’t really do anything.” I’ve proven them wrong.

--Baron Davis

*

At 6-21/2, 210, Davis doesn’t look like the typical NBA player. More like the typical NFL strong safety.

Imagine what he looked like as a 5-3 ninth-grader at Santa Monica Crossroads High School.

It was 1994. The local hot prospects were Schea Cotton, Chris Burgess and the Collins twins, Jason and Jarron. Davis was a squat, chunky little afterthought.

“I used to run around the court and steal the ball from everybody, like, run between their legs,” he says. “It was, like, I dreamed of playing in the NBA. I wanted to, but I was small. I just wanted to get to college. I just wanted to play Division I basketball....

“Everyone was really getting recruited my sophomore year. I wasn’t getting recruited at all. I saw a magazine, HoopScoop, and I was like the last guy on the last page, out of 2,000 kids in the country in my class....

“I was somebody nobody really heard of, but I got invited to Nike camp.... My AAU coach, he went to them. I mean, me and him pretty much begged them to let me in their camp.”

Davis says he could dunk at 5-5. It got easier as he grew to 6-1 his senior year. By then, they were saying he was the next coming of Stephon Marbury.

He thought about going to Georgia Tech, as Marbury had, briefly. That is, Marbury was only there for one year, and Davis didn’t think about it for long. His grandmother, Lela Nicholson, “was like, ‘No, you’re going to UCLA.’”

Two years later, knee injury or no knee injury, he was an NBA lottery pick. Of course, a year later, when he was warming the bench in Charlotte, this didn’t look like the world’s greatest decision.

Silas had a veteran point guard, David Wesley. There was also that problem with Davis’ jump shot, which didn’t often go in.

“I was the third pick, and I think I was the only one not starting,” Davis says. “Like out of the first six, me and Johnny Bender [of Indiana].

“It was just, like, devastating really. I was miserable my whole rookie year.... It was my first time being away from home. I was homesick. I wasn’t playing, and I wasn’t playing like I knew how to play. When I’d get in, I’d be in for, like, five or six minutes and come right out. It was hard.”

Miserable as he was, he didn’t complain about Charlotte or Silas. He just got to work.

“That’s to his credit,” says Silas, “because he really suffered that whole year.”

The next season, with Jones the latest to bail, Silas opened a spot for Davis, moving the 6-foot Wesley to shooting guard. They were short, but they were good too.

The Hornets staged a surprise run in the playoffs, blowing out Miami in a three-game sweep, then taking the Milwaukee Bucks to Game 7 in the Eastern Conference semifinals, as fans, who had deserted by the thousands, rushed back into the Hive.

Days later, however, a referendum on a new arena was rejected, and Shinn and his new co-owner, Ray Wooldridge, started looking for a new home.

Not that secrecy was their forte. Each flew into Louisville, Ky., on his own executive jet, which were both parked conspicuously in the open.

Fans streamed out of the Hive. Almost unnoticed, it became Davis’ show as Mashburn, the Hornets’ leading scorer, went out for three months.

All but forgotten, the Hornets remain a young, deep, if still sleeping giant in the runt-filled East. Not that it comes up much, but Silas and team President Bob Bass have done a remarkable job of keeping up with the talent drain, bringing in dark-horse prospects such as Jamal Magloire and Lee Nailon. Their 18-14 road record is the conference’s best.

Of course, they’re only 12-18 in the all-but-deserted Hive.

“Especially after the run we had last year,” says Davis. “You see 23-24,000 rowdy fans in the gym and then you come back, season opener, and you barely have 13-15,000. It’s kind of disappointing. It’s like, what’s the point of being there?

“And you hear all these talks about if we move here, it’ll be sold out every night. It’s kinda disheartening to run out and, basically, nobody’s there, your family and friends, watching you warm up. It’s tough, man. It’s terrible, actually.”

He’s back home tonight as the Hornets play the Lakers, which is always exciting for the neighborhood kids from 88th and Towne where he lived with his grandparents, the Nicholsons. Last time in, he took 30 of them to the Hornets’ shoot-around and the game against the Clippers.

Of course, Davis will be coming through fast this time, at the end of a trip before the Hornets return to Charlotte for what could their last hurrah in the Carolinas.

Somehow, you get the feeling it’s going to turn out all right, for Davis, anyway.

*

On the Way Up

(text of infobox not included)