Columnist Dean Juipe: ‘Earth to Rasheed, Earth to Rasheed — come in, Rasheed’

Dean Juipe

Monday, Dec. 15, 2003 | 9:22 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

He's a big, strong guy with a nice shooting touch who plays hard and is, if anything, a little overzealous. With those types of skills, fans should love Rasheed Wallace even if he tends to be an emotional wreck at times.

But Wallace is more than your everyday enigma or curiosity piece.

He is, after the events of this past weekend, now being described as Public Enemy No. 1 in the world of sports. It's a yoke that Wallace, a 6-foot-11, 230-pound forward with the Portland Trail Blazers, earned with a bizarre outburst directed toward the National Basketball Association, its commissioner and his fellow players.

I listened to the opening of the Blazers' game with the Los Angeles Lakers from the Rose Garden in Portland on Saturday night via the Lakers' radio network (on KENO 1460 AM locally) and heard the torrent of boos directed toward Wallace as he was introduced. It struck me that it may have been the first and only time in memory that a home crowd took such delight in belittling a player it normally would support in even the toughest of times.

Wallace barely touched the ball in the early portion of the game, but as it progressed and the Blazers were en route to an unexpected 112-108 victory, the fans, naturally, backed off. He finished with 28 points in a somewhat typical performance, given his proven ability to score around 18 points and grab seven rebounds per game in a pro career that dates from 1995.

But I don't think anyone who comes in contact with Wallace is in the mood to completely forgive and forget, even if he did issue a public apology for his comments that appeared Thursday in The (Portland) Oregonian.

Calling his tirade "inflammable" understates it.

Using language that I'm not even going to try and slip past the editors here, Wallace accused the league of going to great lengths to exploit young, black players. While failing to support his accusations with anything more than his peculiar brand of angst, he implied that the league intentionally sought and signed high-school age players because they were easy to manipulate, mold and discard over time.

Further, he singled out the league's highly respected commissioner, David Stern, for choreographing this strategy and for hauling in approximately $8 million per year to do it.

The words he used were coarse yet their meanings were unclear. He neither sounded like a college-educated (North Carolina) man nor one who merited a platform for such wild, unsubstantiated claims.

Something was eating at Wallace but he wouldn't really say what it was, only that he was smarter than the average "dumb a-- n-----."

Whew, the kettle that is his mind was really whistling.

"Mr. Wallace's hateful diatribe was ignorant and offensive to all NBA players," Stern said in a press release the following day. "I refuse to enhance his heightened sense of deprivation by publicly debating with him."

Stern needn't worry that Wallace speaks for anything more than himself or, perhaps, a disgruntled few. The NBA pays its players exceedingly well and lavishes them with a jaw-dropping array of benefits and rights.

The league is profitable, its players are rich and there hardly seems reason for complaint. If the league does, indeed, have exploitative tendencies, it manages to share its wealth in such a way that the money and prestige it bestows upon its players is more than compensatory.

We should all be so unhappy.

Wallace, for instance, makes almost $17 million per year despite being besieged by assorted drug-related problems and disciplinary measures of his own doing. Two seasons ago he accrued a mesmerizing 27 technical fouls, and while he cut that total to 11 a season ago he also picked up a seven-game suspension for threatening a referee outside the Rose Garden after a game.

He's one of the guys who helped build Portland's reputation as the "Jail Blazers" and who was at least partially responsible for the team bringing in a new president, Steve Patterson, this year for the sole purpose of cleaning house. One repeat offender, Bonzi Wells, was recently traded (to Memphis) while another, the recently busted Zach Randolph, would be if he didn't have such great potential.

Wallace, 29, has a contract and a reputation that make him difficult to deal, a fact not lost upon the fans in Portland who greeted his arrival on the court for the game with the Lakers with a resounding outburst of their own. Yet he plays with a passion, has terrific skills and is the only Blazer who spends his offseason in and around Portland.

Up to this past week, he was embraceable in sort of a nutty kind of way, much as the home fans accepted Dennis Rodman's missteps in Chicago, Detroit and San Antonio when he played in those cities. Likewise, baseball "bad boys" such as Manny Ramirez and Gary Sheffield are routinely welcomed by their team's fans even if they are equally despised and admired elsewhere.

But Wallace is almost treading new ground here. Speaking not so much out of turn as he was out of orbit, he managed to alienate people who otherwise care for him and who have willingly turned the other cheek in times past.

For good measure he insulted every other player in the league with his outlandish remarks and insinuations that they were nothing more than modern-day servants or slaves who perform at the whim of the plantation owner.

"It was not my intent to offend anyone," he said in an apology that bore no likeness or resemblance to the remarks that left him submerged in a tub of hot water.

I suspect it will take a few more 28-point games against teams such as the Lakers before the turmoil is lessened and Wallace can return to simply being a player the opposing teams tolerate and fans love to hate.