His Burden of Proof

Caron Butler tilted back his seat, looked out the window of the chartered jet at the landscape fading beneath him and realized he would have to prove himself again.

Butler had just been part of the trade that fractured a city’s sports psyche -- Shaq went where? For whom? -- and he fully understood that the familiar specter of adversity would accompany him for a while.

On his way to a city with disproportionately high basketball expectations, Butler paused for a talk with himself, just as he had at another key juncture in his past, back when he was locked in a solitary confinement cell.

“People have always said I’m a troublemaker ... I’ve always been able to show them they’re wrong,” Butler told himself. “It’s time to show some new people who I am, what I can do.”

Butler is about to begin his third NBA season, his first with the Lakers after being acquired from the Miami Heat in July. That he has made it to the NBA makes him one in a million. That he didn’t become a statistic of another kind is equally noteworthy.

Butler is from Racine, Wis., a working-class city of 85,000 30 miles south of Milwaukee. There are a handful of million-dollar homes on the banks of Lake Michigan, but there were none in Butler’s neighborhood, which was well into the latter stages of decay and drug corruption as best defined by the nefarious activity at the gang-infested 18th Street park.

Butler was raised without a father. His mother, Mattie Paden, worked two factory jobs -- making vacuum cleaner motors on an assembly line and using a glue gun to fasten cardboard displays for store windows. She never refused the chance to make extra money at either place.

While his mother worked, Butler’s exploits gradually became more outlandish.

He started slap-boxing fellow students at the playground, which evolved into street fighting, which brought the attention of the Racine Police Dept. Then he began dealing drugs. Then he got a gun. All before age 15.

Butler said he was arrested and appeared in juvenile court “eight, nine times, easy.”

“I was trying to fit in with a group of fellas,” Butler said. “My uncle was a drug-dealer, selling drugs forever. Another uncle had been caught selling drugs.... That’s all I saw.

“I didn’t see Rodeo Drive. I didn’t see South Beach. I didn’t see a guy riding through in a Bentley that he got because he was the head guy at a music company. I didn’t see Shaq. I didn’t see Kobe. I didn’t see Michael Jordan. That wasn’t visual to me yet. I didn’t have cable.

“I only saw that some guy’s a drug dealer; he’s on the corner and he’s got a crack house. Look at the car he’s got. Look at all the money and all the people that follow him because he has that. And I said, ‘I’m going to have that car and I’m going to have that house.’ That was my mind-set.”

Instead of wealth and adulation, he found embarrassment and humility.

The court, tired of Butler’s familiar face, acted forcefully when he was found possessing a gun and a small amount of cocaine on his high school campus in 1994. Butler was 14.

His mother couldn’t be reached by the school. She was working. So school officials called Butler’s aunt, Tina Grandberry.

She was aware of his numerous run-ins with the court system, but she always believed he would straighten. She broke down that day.

“They had him in handcuffs in school,” Grandberry said. “I couldn’t believe it.... I was like, ‘Drugs and guns in school? What is your problem?’ He just held his head down. He said not a word to me. I was so hurt. I cried when I was there. I had to leave. I was like, ‘No, not Caron, not this.’ I could see it happening to other people, but not him.”

But it was him. Butler spent three months in a county jail, then was sentenced to 14 months at the most secure juvenile detention facility in Wisconsin, Ethan Allen.

Enclosed by electric fences with razor wire, Ethan Allen was a tuberculosis sanitarium until it was converted to a boys’ facility in the 1950s. The 70-acre site in Wales, northwest of Racine, detains delinquent adolescent males who commit drug offenses, burglary, car theft, sexual assault and murder.

Butler gets a faraway look in his eyes when he talks about his time there.

“I’ve seen it all,” he said. “I’ve seen boys’ manhood getting taken away from them. I’ve seen fights, seen people get cut up, people attempting to hang themselves, people attempting to escape and getting cut on the wires and getting 100-some stitches.”

Within a month of his arrival, Butler was sent to three weeks of solitary confinement because he fought with a member of a rival gang from back home. There was a bunk, a toilet and one small windowpane in his cell. Food was slid into him through a small opening.

“That’s when I got tuned into Caron,” he said. “It was just me and a room. There wasn’t no books, wasn’t no light beyond solar light. It was just me in a room, and a little glass window. I learned a lot about Caron during that stage. I used to do my push-ups and sit-ups and just sit back and think, ‘I’ve got to do something.’ ”

Butler’s mother, tired but determined after completing a double shift at one of her factory jobs 60 miles away, visited him twice a week.

“I really believe that him watching his mother come up there to visit really changed him,” Grandberry said. “It hurt him so bad to have her come and visit with her eyes bloodshot because she never got any sleep. The day he walked out of Ethan Allen, he turned into a changed man.”

But before that happened, Butler picked up a basketball.

Playing for Keeps

Once a month, Ethan Allen occupants were allowed to spend $20 at an on-site snack shop. The money they spent had to be earned while working on-campus jobs; Butler earned 36 cents an hour as a kitchen assistant.

The shop was hardly a bargain: A can of soda was $3. Snack cakes were similarly overpriced to demonstrate the importance of a dollar. But Butler found another way to accrue snack-shop sweets: pick-up basketball.

Bets were made. Deals were sealed with handshakes. Winners walked away with an armful of candy and cola. Losers had to wait another month.

Butler hadn’t played organized basketball, but he carved out a reputation on the court and earned a pernicious nickname.

“They used to call me C-Murder, as in ‘He’s a killer on that court,’ ” Butler said. “That’s how I got my rep. It was intense. It was physical.”

And it led to a career, and maybe saved his life.

When Butler’s time was up at Ethan Allen, he moved home and got a job as a janitor at a fast food restaurant where a family friend was a manager. He always made sure to wear pants long enough to hide the ankle bracelet monitor he had to wear during his probation.

His behavior was exemplary.

“I thought that I should stay on top of him until I’d seen that I did not have to,” Mattie Paden said. “He was showing me.... He didn’t talk the same. He talked entirely different. I love him for that.”

But there was one more obstacle awaiting Butler.

The Racine Unified School District wanted nothing to do with him, even though his possession crimes were expunged upon the completion of his term at Ethan Allen.

So Butler enrolled at a nearby technical college under his given name, James. After six months, he and his family requested a hearing with the school board. He showed them his transcripts: all Bs.

Stunned board members asked for a few minutes to confer in private before announcing that Butler would be allowed to enroll at Racine Park High in January 1997.

He played basketball one season there, helping a team that had gone 3-19 the year before go 19-3. His personal turnaround was no less complete, and the school retired his jersey, No. 54.

From there, he went to Central, a basketball-rich college prep school in Maine. The exposure there helped him earn a basketball scholarship at the University of Connecticut, where he began a time marked by more maturation.

When prized recruit Emeka Okafor arrived for his official visit to Connecticut, Coach Jim Calhoun assigned Butler, then a freshman, to be his host.

“People said, ‘You took a kid from Racine who was struggling in high school, went to reform school, and made him the host for Emeka Okafor?’ Yep.’ ” Calhoun said. “The reason was, he once said he’d seen darkness, he’d seen light and he’d never wanted to see darkness again. It was one of the greatest quotes of all time.

“All these things that have happened to him, there’s a special sense of pride from whence he came and how hard he’s had to work to do things. When he tells his story, it’s not of grandiose, that ‘I was a tough guy,’ but that ‘I wasn’t a smart guy and I learned from it and prospered from it.’

“Carrying his life out over the last six or seven years, he’s gone on to prove all of it as true.”

Butler declared for the NBA draft after his sophomore season and was picked No. 10 overall by Miami in 2002. Quickly establishing himself as a slashing, active player, he finished third in rookie-of-the-year voting, behind Amare Stoudamire and Yao Ming.

He struggled at the start of last season because of a knee injury, found his game in the second half, and was sent to the Lakers with Lamar Odom and Brian Grant for Shaquille O’Neal in July.

“I believe this happened for a reason,” Butler said. “A lot of people forget I had a great rookie season, then came back too soon from an injury. You’ll never forget Shaq, but what we can do is establish ourselves in a way so that fans in L.A. can remember us and move on. That’s all I’m trying to prove, that I’m back and I’ll be part of this.”

Inmate to Role Model

About one-third of inmates at Ethan Allen commit another crime that lands them back at the juvenile facility or in prison.

Butler’s success has become part of the reform system.

“It’s a high-profile situation so the kids are aware of it,” said Kyle Davidson, superintendent at Ethan Allen. “It’s been something that’s been raised in some of our educational programs in the institution. A lot of treatment groups have used him as an example of someone who has been successful in life.”

Butler’s saga has also made its way through the streets of Racine as a foundation for those who need one. Jim Chones, who played eight seasons in the NBA, including two with the Lakers, is a Racine native from a different era.

More recently, Racine, French for “the root,” has had its share of fallen heroes, including Brent Moss, the 1994 Rose Bowl most valuable player from the University of Wisconsin who later fell into bankruptcy and drug troubles.

Butler returns home many times during the off-season. He plays host to charity games at the recreation center near his birthplace. He hands out free ice cream.

He has bought his mother a home and two cars. She has cut her work from 80 hours a week and two jobs to 40 hours and one.

And on occasion, he stops by the Racine Police Dept., where there is mutual respect.

“They look at me like I’m a ghost sometimes,” he said. “It’s like night and day what they see of me now. It’s like, ‘He made it.’ They look at me like, if he can do it, there’s hope.

“That’s the story they always tell me when I go down there and visit some of the police. They say, ‘We use your story just about every day with the kids, whenever we catch somebody.’

“When a guy’s going upstate [to Ethan Allen], they say, ‘Caron did it. Go do your time, come out and get another chance.’

“It may not be basketball, but it may be something. Anything.”