Post#6 » by curryfries » Fri Jan 4, 2008 12:42 am
More info on the birdman's fight to return to the NBA
For a guy whose cell phone rings to Metallica's "Enter Sandman," Chris Andersen doesn't do much sleeping. On most days he's up at 4:45 a.m., taking his monstrous cane corso, Yogi, for a walk in the Rocky Mountain foothills that frame his new home in Larksburg, Colo. By 6, Andersen has usually pretzeled his 6-10 frame into his truck, headed for a gym on Denver's south side where he sweats though a headband that, pointedly, is festooned with the NBA's logo.
After that, he has oceans of time at his disposal. As the NBA season begins next week, Andersen, once a hyperkinetic forward and defensive stopper for the New Orleans Hornets, will be nine months into his two-year banishment from the NBA, after he ran afoul of the league's one-strike-and-you're-out anti-drug policy. For all the NBA brawlers and on-ice assaulters and helmet stompers and baseball juicers and the countless other purveyors of mayhem, Andersen -- whose most serious previous offense was being late for team practice -- is the only athlete in a major sport to face banishment this decade. He is not even eligible to play overseas, as FIBA recognizes NBA suspensions. So this season, it will have to fall on another player to wear the mantle of "Best Hillbilly in the NBA," a distinction Andersen's teammates once jokingly bestowed on him.
Andersen is, however, eligible for reinstatement on Jan. 27, 2008, a date he anticipates the way a prisoner does his day of release. He's staying in shape, making sure he's maintaining his playing weight of 245 pounds. He's working on his shooting, never one of his core strengths. He'll be following the results this season -- buying tickets to games if he has to -- taking mental notes on players he's confident he'll eventually oppose. "I have a one track mind right now," Andersen, 28, said last week in a soft voice flavored with a Texas drawl. "Getting back to the NBA. For me it's like getting back home."
This business of pressing your nose against the glass, watching other players take your minutes, your rebounds, your glory (your money!) isn't much fun. But most of Andersen's bitterness has dissolved by now. A first-team Free Spirit -- a player whose popularity has always outpaced his talents -- Andersen is a longtime devotee of the life's-a-journey-and-not-a-destination school. As he sees it, this latest plot twist is just another detour in one of basketball's more arresting odysseys.
Were Iola, Texas, not so dang parched, you'd be inclined to call it a backwater. If you know the back roads and drive like the devil, you can get there from downtown Houston in two hours. But few chose to. A town of 1,800 not far from the mesquites of the Sam Houston National Forest, Iola -- "10 L.A.," as the locals call it -- is home to a few stoplights, a diner (that, inevitably, serves a mean chicken fried steak), a constant pall of dust and not much else. It's here that Andersen's narrative gets going.
Putting a rural twist on a familiar NBA back story, Andersen was raised in poverty by an overworked single mom. When Chris was a young boy, his father, Claus, built the family a house in Iola. During the construction, Chris and his two sisters slept in a barn and used a bucket as a toilet. When the home was completed, Claus skipped town, leaving his soon-to-be ex-wife to raise the kids. Linda Holubec cooked at a diner and worked as a custodian at the Iola post office and police station, but money was always sparse. When you barely make minimum wage, you can work 18-hour days and still struggle. Especially with four mouths to feed and four bodies to clothe, one of them a rambunctious boy who seemed to grow an inch each month. Linda had a tough time keeping the family afloat.
Chris figures that he was around 10 when, to ease his mother's burden, he went to live with her grandfather in Tennessee. After a year or so the old man had had enough -- "I guess, like any boy that age," says Chris, "I was kind of destructive." -- and shipped Chris back to Texas. This time he went to Dallas, where Claus was living. Chris' older sister, April was there too. (Much as she's later claimed it pained her, Linda decided to forfeit her custody and split up the family for the sake of their financial survival.) But soon Claus tired of the kids and decided to go on the road to sell his art. He gave the kids a choice: they could attend military school or move into a children's home. "All I knew about military school was that they expected you to make your own bed," says Chris. "I chose the children's home."
The Cumberland Presbyterian Children's Home, a Spartan complex off Interstate 35 in Denton, Texas, had a basic rule. Run away three times and you're gone. April violated the policy after a month and was sent back to her father. Chris, then 11, was more docile. "Man, I just wanted a place to sleep," he says. For the next four years he stayed at the home and attended the local elementary and middle schools. Though both his parents were not only alive but also living in the same state, he was, for all intents, an orphan.
Linda has claimed that she tried for years to contact her son but her certified letters were never received and Claus never told her about Cumberland. In 1993, with the help of a lawyer, she finally had her custody reinstated and brought April and Chris, then 15, back to Iola. A lot went unsaid, Chris recalls, but the adjustment period was brief. Linda was the coolest mom in town. She rode a motorcycle -- as her mom had done before her -- and let her son make his own decisions. "I was with her when she got her first tattoo," says Chris, "and she was with me when I got mine."
Iola High is a small structure, charming in its way, the kind of rural school where 40 kids makes for a large graduating class. It's not hard to stand out, particularly when you're a serial extrovert, one of those people with a gift for making everyone in your orbit feel comfortable. Even as a freshman, Andersen was at the center of the social scene, and as frustrated as the teachers could get by the kid's love of attention, they never stayed mad at him for long. "Oh, everyone liked Chris," recalls Randy McDougal, the school's athletic director. "He wasn't a genius and he wasn't a dunce, but he was a real friendly kid who played all the sports."
He could high jump more than six-and-a-half-feet. He could effortlessly catch passes as a wideout. He could cover acres in centerfield and, at least before his strike zone became untenably large, clear fences with his swing. But he was best at basketball. Asking Andersen to hit an open eight-footer was approaching the outer limit of his range. Not that it mattered. A sensational athlete, he was known in East Texas for thrilling opposing crowds with his dunks and blocked shots. By his senior season, he was encroaching on 6-10 and, though playing against rinky-dink schools, was routinely blocking 20 shots a game.
Given the opposition, it was hard to gauge Andersen's skills. And his grades weren't exactly endearing him to colleges either. But he caught the attention of some small programs. He settled on Blinn Junior College in Brenham, Texas, where he played for a season. His athleticism and inexhaustible energy camouflaged skills (such as they were) that were almost cartoonish in their rawness. He was a minor star there and had designs of playing for Clyde Drexler, the coach at the University of Houston. Then hubris intervened. Broke, impressionable and something other than sophisticated, Andersen listened to the whispers that a pro career awaited.
He dropped out of school and signed with Jiangsu Nangang of the Chinese Basketball Association. He was barely 20, a juco drop-out, 16 time zones from Texas, and a million interplanetary miles from Iola. His personality, though, offset any culture shock. Notwithstanding a refusal to eat the local delicacy of turtles ("I was like, I respect y'all's ways, but I'm headin' to McDonald's, fellas" he recalls.), Andersen took pains to fit in. Predictably, the dunking, tatted up Texan became a cultural oddity in China, beloved by the fans. "He played with such energy, like a different speed from other players," recalls Yao Ming, an opposing center in the league that season. "He was different but the fans could always tell he was having fun."
Andersen made $40,000 for the five-month season, validating his decision to leave school. Yet when he returned to Texas, he foundered. He pinballed from one minor league team to the next. During a stint with the Fargo Moorhead Beez of the IBL, he was devouring a bag of chips when he bit down on his tongue piercing and broke a molar. Andersen figured he'd add it to his growing compendium of crazy stories; but the busted tooth exacted a price on his game and caused him to be cut from the team a few days later. Even his own agent wasn't returning his calls.
The main arteries were clogged, so Andersen traversed the back roads to get to his destination. If only by virtue of his height, he wangled his way into some regional leagues in Texas. The gas money required to get to the games sometimes exceeded the $50 stipend he got for playing. He also finagled his way into the Westside Tennis Club, the Houston facility that becomes a crucible for NBA players during the off-season. Going full-court against the likes of Tim Duncan and David Robinson, Andersen held his own. "He did on defense, anyway," says John Lucas, the former NBA player and coach who is the de facto summer camp counselor at Westside. "On offense" --and here Lucas contorts his face -- "that boy could dunk. Period. When I say period, I mean PERIOD. That hoss had two off-hands!"
In 2001, Andersen was an early cut at the Cleveland Cavaliers camp and was drafted into the NBDL for its inaugural season. He was only averaging six points for the Fayetteville Patriots when the Denver Nuggets called. Then a wretched, injury-ravaged team, the Nuggets were in need of fresh bodies. Drexler, who'd become an executive for the franchise, recalled that quirky kid from Texan, whose game was an alloy of energy and athleticism. "It was like, 'What do we have to lose?'" says Drexler. Andersen had taken an impossibly convoluted route, but he was finally in the NBA.
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The NBA is, at its core, a business. For players, production is the coin of the realm. Still, no matter what he did on the court, Andersen had a disposition that made him virtually cut-proof. Denver coaches quickly saw how infectious the kid's energy was. He played "Cowboy basketball," as Drexler called it, rebounding and defending and swabbing the court with his body. He once gashed his arm on the floor. He whipped off his headband and asked the team trainer, Jim Gillen, to fashion a tourniquet with it so he could stay in the game. Another time, he suffered an elbow injury and played with his arm in a sling. And he did everything at a speed that suggested he was not one to pace himself. He once blocked Karl Malone's shot so exuberantly the Mailman smiled with grudging admiration and remarked, "Damn son, you gotta calm your ass down."
On account of his exceptional leaping ability, Andersen assumed the nickname "Birdman," and he migrated plenty around Denver. He was a fixture in diners and bars and car dealerships and Starbucks. While he was never at a loss for confidence when he played, around town he was the Accidental NBA Player, the dude who happened to play for the Nuggets but always forgot to act the part. "Everyone knew the Birdman," says Steve Hess, the Nuggets' strength coach and a close friend of Andersen.
Like most NBA rookies, his infusion of cash was short-lived. A walking clich
