The Next Big Thing: Renardo Sidney

I thought I'd post a great piece that Tommy Craggs wrote for the New York Times back in November on high-school hoops phenom Renardo Sidney (6-10/270 pf/c), and Sidney's meanderings through high school hoops, AAU tournaments and college hoops recruiting. This is an extremely well-written, well-researched and compelling article, and well worth the minutes to read. You'll find the original NY Times article here, along with some pictures. Enjoy.

The Next Big Thing
By TOMMY CRAGGS
New York Times
November 2, 2008

The lightning arrives in great, thwapping bursts, and the night sky over New York City is a series of bright fissures. The world outside Renardo Sidney’s hotel looks gorgeously broken. Inside, Sidney is sitting in a gloomy nook, tapping distractedly on his Sidekick. He is one of the best young basketball players in the land, an 18-year-old with a molten game whose career, though he is not yet out of high school, has already become a morality play about the state of contemporary basketball. He is 6-foot-10 and about 270 pounds. In two years, maybe less, he will be a well-paid professional basketball player, and perhaps at that time, too, he will shrug his massive shoulders when he is asked why he still sucks his thumb.

“I’ve been sucking my thumb since I was a kid,” he says. “Sometimes, I do it just to do it. Like, when I’m mad.” He also travels with a lucky blanket. His father — Renardo the elder — is seated across the table. He chuckles. “It’s a sheet,” he clarifies.

Renardo Jr. is large in ways you don’t often see in people his age, less like a heavyset teenager rounding slowly into shape than a longtime athlete who has spent his off-season at the buffet. He has always been big, though, starting at birth. As his father recalls, even the doctor said damn. By middle school, he stood 6 feet 5 inches tall, but he had yet to outgrow his old compulsions. One of his coaches, Trent Hysten, used to kid him: “You look just like a big baby. Get your thumb outta your mouth.”

Sidney is frequently called a man-child, but maybe the most precocious thing about him is the already long arc of his career. Next spring, he will finish his senior year having attended three high schools in two states and having played for three summer travel teams since 2005. A nationally known quantity since before his eighth-grade year in Jackson, Miss., where his middle school charged $3 admission to his games, Sidney was considered the best player in America in his class by the time he reached high school. Some had penciled him in as the top pick in the 2010 N.B.A. draft. “They were talking about him being the next Magic Johnson,” says Tom Konchalski, an influential talent scout.

From the beginning, however, Sidney represented a different sort of high school star, in part because, strictly speaking, he wasn’t a high-school star. He didn’t even join a high-school team until his sophomore year, and caused a minor stir when he told The Washington Post that high-school ball is “not that important.” Of course, for Sidney, it wasn’t, but that’s not something a young player is supposed to say out loud.

Instead, to the dismay of many scowling traditionalists, Sidney was almost wholly a product of the summer. He made his name in the demimonde of summer basketball: what the sneakers companies call grass-roots basketball and what most everyone else calls, in slightly misleading shorthand, A.A.U. basketball. (Many, but not all, of the events fall under the purview of the Amateur Athletic Union, a nonprofit that promotes and oversees amateur sports.) What they’re talking about is the ecosystem of shoe-company-sponsored summer traveling teams, shoe-company-sponsored summer tournaments and shoe-company-sponsored summer camps.

It is a vast, roiling Dodge City of the hoops landscape, lying as it does outside the reach of high-school coaches and the regulatory arm of the N.C.A.A. — an unsavory world, in the popular imagination, of street agents and shoe boxes full of cash and chest-thumping 16-year-olds with Adidas stripes branded like bar codes on their foreheads. And largely for that reason, summer ball has become a catch-all symbol of basketball indulgence, blamed for everything from the death of the bounce pass to the corruption of America’s youth to the occasional failures of the grown men who represent USA Basketball on the international stage. It is something like basketball’s bad conscience.

And it was in this system that Sidney thrived. “He blew up in A.A.U. basketball,” says Renardo Sr., who, until his contract expired recently, earned about $20,000 a year as a Reebok “consultant,” a job that mostly entailed shepherding his son to Reebok-sponsored events. In 2007, Renardo Sr. started his own grass-roots outfit, the L.A. Dream Team, sponsored by Reebok and coached by Renardo Sr. himself. (He also mentors kids and works as a sort of personal trainer for other aspiring basketball players.)

By August, however, the start of Sidney’s senior year, things had gone awry. Having relocated to Los Angeles in 2006, he was now attracting interest from a variety of college teams — among them Memphis, U.C.L.A., Texas and Arizona State, according to recruiting scuttlebutt — and perhaps even entertaining the notion, as some loose gossip had it, of playing in Europe next year. But he had put on weight. He talked wistfully about going fishing and “getting away from basketball,” which made him sound more like a 38-year-old power forward on a second tour with the Clippers. Sidney fell in everyone’s esteem. Rivals.com, a prominent recruiting site that offers a national ranking of prospects, nearly bounced him out of its top 10. A handful of scouts even figured him for a bust.

He is a “prima donna and has one of the worst attitudes that we’ve ever seen,” wrote Clark Francis, the editor of Hoop Scoop Online and a bigfoot on the recruiting scene, in a scathing evaluation of Sidney. By Francis’s lights, the kid with the thumb in his mouth had become the bogeyman of modern basketball. “As a matter of fact,” he wrote, “Sidney could be the poster boy for many of [the] things that are wrong with grass-roots basketball and is the perfect example of just how bad the sense of entitlement among many of the top players has become.”

He seemed to be saying, remarkably, that an 18-year-old’s basketball career had gone irretrievably to pot.

Some time ago, a series appeared in a newsletter under the title “Is Basket-Ball a Danger?” In it, several correspondents wrung their hands over the game’s miasmic influence on children, the unruly behavior it seemed to inspire. This is no doubt a familiar litany, especially to those who remember the moral panic that ensued in 2004 after Ron Artest and the Indiana Pacers decided to punch their way out of the Palace of Auburn Hills. The only surprise is the year the series ran: 1894.

It has been Renardo Sidney’s misfortune, more than a century later, to find himself cast as the villain in the oldest story in basketball.

The Sidneys are in New York City on this June weekend for a Nike-sponsored tournament called the Rumble in the Bronx, and the day has gone miserably for the L.A. Dream Team. The equipment manager apparently left the uniforms in Los Angeles, forcing the players to borrow jerseys from their New York rivals, the Juice All-Stars. Then the team van got lost, and the Dream Team arrived late to its second game of the day, against the New York Panthers. Renardo Sr. was further horrified to learn the game was being held in what he would later call “the dungeon,” a humid, windowless gym that effectively simulates what basketball might feel like if it were played in a blast shelter.

The Rumble in the Bronx is a relatively minor event in the summer hoops multiverse. There are a handful of college coaches milling about, mostly local. Where other summer events have the air of an industry convention, with backslapping reunions and furtive side-room deal-making, this one, at least off the court, feels meandering and almost casual; it is early June, the preamble to A.A.U. ball’s long summer.

The N.C.A.A. has worked assiduously to curb the influence of these tournaments. For years, this meant primarily a flurry of rules and recommendations, many designed to limit contact between college and summer coaches and to return the locus of the recruitment process to the high schools, where establishment coaches with better credentials could act as the key brokers between college and player. This spring, however, the N.C.A.A. and the N.B.A., with token participation from the A.A.U. and the shoe companies, upped the ante, announcing a five-year, $50 million effort to reform what the N.C.A.A.’s president, Myles Brand, called the “dysfunctional” world of youth basketball.

Fundamentally, the idea is to seize control of the mechanism by which players like Renardo Sidney launch their careers. What reform actually entails is unclear, but the deal calls for the N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. to each chip in $15 million, with another $20 million coming through joint-marketing ventures. The contributions will fund an as-yet-unnamed program that will offer an alternative structure for youth basketball. The N.C.A.A. News wrote, “The new structure is designed to negate the effects of third-party influences currently working the youth basketball environment,” by which it meant “people who may not have the player’s best interests at heart.”

That this comes from the same groups that in 2005 cheered the adoption of the N.B.A.’s minimum-age rule, effectively forcing high-school stars to spend one year playing college basketball pro bono rather than leap directly to the N.B.A., is more than a little rich. The partnership was announced at the Final Four this year, and it was noted in passing that both Brand and the N.B.A.’s commissioner, David Stern, would prefer that the age rule be raised from 19 to 20, meaning most players would have to remain in college for two years. Colleges benefit tremendously from keeping the best players in apprenticeship for two years; the N.B.A., in turn, gets marketable commodities who’ve spent more time in the college star-making machinery, as well as proven players who aren’t being drafted purely on their potential.

The traditional justification is that colleges produce better, more well-rounded citizens, though in fact one study has suggested that the opposite may be true. In 2005, Michael McCann, then an assistant professor at Mississippi College School of Law, looked at 84 recent N.B.A. player arrests. He found that 57 percent of the players arrested spent four years in college; only 4.8 percent had never gone to college, significantly less than the league-wide share of prep-to-pro players (8.3 percent). In fact, one might infer from the study that the less time a player spent in college, the less likely he was to get arrested.

“The N.B.A. and the N.C.A.A. are entertainment vehicles. One pays you, one doesn’t,” says John (Sonny) Vaccaro, the 69-year-old godfather of summer basketball and the man who, in the employ of first Nike, then Adidas, then Reebok, rained shoe money on the basketball world and in so doing acquired so much clout that he is set to be portrayed by James Gandolfini — the guy who played Tony Soprano — in an HBO movie. Vaccaro walked away from Reebok in 2007 with two years left on his contract and now wanders the country as basketball’s angry prophet, barnstorming noisily against the N.C.A.A.’s tax-exempt status and the N.B.A.’s age rule. “One thing is constant,” he says. “One thing. The performers. The players. Without the players, neither of these entities can be multibillion-dollar businesses.”

Greg Shaheen, the N.C.A.A. senior vice president who oversees Division I basketball, says that “95 percent of our revenue stream goes to educating young people. I’d be curious to know if those criticizing us put 95 percent of their money toward the education of young people.”

The attacks on summer basketball typically also come wrapped in a lot of moralizing about the style of play. In particular, the reformers have made a fetish of “the fundamentals” — the stuff that, to hear them talk, apparently went out of fashion around the time Whitey Skoog left the N.B.A. and that now lies dead by the hand of Sonny Vaccaro and the summer game. It’s for lack of fundamentals that the Americans can barely keep up with those “team-first, back-to-basics foreigners,” as USA Today put it, and after the 2004 Olympics, the critics hung Team USA’s bronze medal around the summer game’s neck like a millstone. This is a preposterous argument to make now, during the ascendancy of LeBron James and the coronation of Kevin Garnett, both of whom cut their teeth in summer basketball and bypassed college ball entirely and both of whom are as fundamentally sound as anyone who passed through John Wooden’s bounce-pass academy at U.C.L.A.

Nevertheless, this is maybe the most persistent charge lodged against grass-roots ball, and because the summer game is mostly coached by blacks and played almost entirely by black kids in a black idiom, it comes freighted with all sorts of odious insinuations. In 2006, George Raveling, the former coach at the University of Southern California, fired an oblique shot at summer basketball when he told USA Today, “N.B.A. teams are realizing it’s less risky to draft internationals because they’re more coachable, more socialized, have no posses and have not been Americanized.” The racial tinge of his comment was staggering, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Raveling was not only Nike’s grass-roots director but a black man, to whom Martin Luther King gave his original typewritten notes for his “I Have a Dream” speech.

I ask Vaccaro about the attacks on the style of summer play. “Are you crazy?” Vaccaro says. “The style of play? What was the style of play in U.S.A.-Spain [the 2008 Olympic gold-medal game]? Tell me, where was the defense in United States-Spain?

“I’m tired of that. I’m tired of the vilification of these kids,” he goes on. “It’s sinful. It’s ethnic cleansing. Street basketball to them has a connotation — they think street basketball is black. Well, they better hope it’s black, because the majority of players playing the game has been black since they allowed blacks to play.”

Brian McCormick, a coach and trainer who self-published a book on youth-player development, suggests the real problem with summer ball is that it “creates a system of overtraining,” with players bouncing from the high-school season to the summer season and back again with little break. Sidney estimates he plays close to 100 games a year. “Players are going, going, going,” McCormick says.

In many ways, Renardo Sidney’s game was built for grass-roots ball, which, because of its fast tempo and showcase nature, tends to reward versatility. Last year, The New York Times called him “the epitome of camp evolution.” But Sidney does not suffer from a lack of fundamentals. He has a clean flick-knife of a jumper, smooth from anywhere on the court. He has the ballhandling ability of someone a foot shorter and five years older, and there are a lot of tiny felicities to his play: touch passes and no-looks and footwork out of an Arthur Murray studio. His is a veteran’s game. In fact, it’s possible he appears too fundamentally sound, that he relies too much on the sort of deftness that won’t sustain him in college and the pros. At his size, at this level, elegance can look more like nonchalance.

At the New York tournament, Sidney is arguably the best prospect in the gym, and there are plenty of glimpses of the player he has been celebrated for being, not to mention the player he might become. But he also has a maddening tendency to drift, and in a game against the Panthers, he hardly leaves a mark. Triple-teamed on offense and mostly inert and grabby on defense, he manages only a handful of points before fouling out with several minutes remaining. The rest of the team looks equally skittish and tentative, and L.A. loses by a dozen, dropping the squad to the Rumble’s second-tier silver bracket. Renardo Sr. leaves the court hurling insults over his shoulders at a ref: “You can’t foul out the No. 1 player in the country with 10 minutes left!”

By the time I see the Sidneys back at their hotel later that evening, neither is in much of a mood to chat. Renardo Jr. rubs his knee warily and hovers over his phone, barely lifting his head to answer questions. Renardo Sr. is hoarse, still exercised over the tournament, the conditions, the cost. And then, of course, there are the refs. “You can’t just get these guys off the street or at a liquor store,” he says.

Renardo Sr. is in his pajamas, and his eyes look a little rheumy. He is not a big man, or at least he doesn’t look it, sitting here next to his son, but he certainly has an outsize presence. He favors shades indoors and enormous, billowing T-shirts that have tigers on the front and hang down to his knees, making him look short-armed and skinny-legged; on each hand he wears a fat, gleaming bowling ball of a ring, spoils of a 2007 California Division III state championship won by Renardo and Renardo’s older brother Tacus while at Artesia High School in Los Angeles.

In talking about his younger son’s career, Renardo Sr. occasionally slips into the first-person plural, in the way that agents often do. For instance, when talking about whether the family’s history with Reebok — the deal expired this summer — will influence his son’s shoe preference in the pros, he says: “We’re gonna be with anybody that got the most money. So if you see us with Ponys on” — Pony being a minor player in the shoe game — “you know Pony came over.” Later, when he mentions Renardo Jr.’s nickname, the Difference — a nickname no one else seems to use, by the way — you can almost see the shoe commercial dancing in his eyes.

There are, by my count, 182 Reebok logos inside the gym on the small campus of Philadelphia University, the site of July’s Reebok All-American Camp, where Sidney makes an appearance. They are everywhere: on backboards, scorer’s tables, doors, wall pads, folding chairs. They’re affixed to the railing on the track high above the floor, nearly 100 of them encircling the gym. I don’t even bother counting the Reebok shoes and the Reebok uniforms and the Reebok pencils and the Reebok lanyards and the Reebok signs that some poor soul had to hang on lampposts all around campus. Reebok-Reebok-Reebok-Reebok-Reebok. With every repetition, the word seems stranger to the eye, and it occurs to me later that I have no idea what it means. As it happens, “reebok” is the Afrikaans rendering of “rhebok,” an antelope that reminded European settlers of a type of deer called the roebuck, a word that many years later could be found adjoined to the word “Sears.” These are heady connotations: imperialism and commerce. One hell of a give-and-go.

I mention the logos to Christopher Rivers, Vaccaro’s successor as Reebok’s director of basketball. He seems flattered. “I’m gonna have someone else count ’em,” he says, adding that the placement is anything but haphazard. “Everything is done strategically,” he says. “There isn’t a place you can shoot a picture without getting a logo.”

The origins of the camp go back to 1984, when, under Vaccaro’s midwifery, the ABCD Camp was born. It stood for Academic Betterment and Career Development, though no one ever used the full name, and depending on its creator’s allegiance, ABCD has been a Nike camp, a Converse camp, an Adidas camp and a Reebok camp, though it was always, above all, a Sonny Vaccaro camp. It was Vaccaro, a promoter of high-school all-star games, who first paid college coaches to outfit their teams in Nikes, Vaccaro who signed Michael Jordan to his first shoe deal, Vaccaro who hugged Kobe Bryant just moments after he was drafted. And as he moved from company to company, taking his camp with him, a new event would sprout up in ABCD’s place, the various camps and tournaments running concurrently. The basic aim never changed, however: to give scores of the nation’s best high-school players exposure in front of the finest college coaches in the country (and vice versa), and to bury those kids in a hail of shoe logos.

“There’s never been anything in the history of amateur basketball as successful as the ABCD Camp,” Vaccaro says of his creation. “And for this [the players] are vilified. Summer basketball and summer camps, starting with the Nike camp, the ABCD Camp, have been the epitome of what basketball is.”

Vaccaro is the first person to cop to the venality of the summer circuit. “It’s a cesspool, and we start the process,” he told the authors of “Raw Recruits,” a 1991 exposé of college-hoops recruiting. A few years later, he told The New York Times’s Robert Lipsyte that “what I’m doing is morally wrong. But it’s not in my power to stop it.” In the bizarre moral universe of basketball, summer basketball has the virtue of being honest, at least on occasion, about its wickedness. When I asked one A.A.U. coach, Damian Johnson, how one best goes about building a program, he talked nakedly of putting together “the best team money can buy.” (At the high end, a team, often set up as a charity, might get $100,000 from a sneaker company, tax-deductible, in addition to donations from a variety of benefactors who may or may not include college boosters and agents. That covers the costs of shipping a team around the country, as well as remuneration for the coach.)

Every sport exploits its prodigies, but none seems to cause the vast and unceasing tut-tutting that summer basketball does. Two years ago, O. J. Mayo, the nation’s most coveted high-school player and maybe the purest product of the summer system to date, picked up the phone and called U.S.C.’s head coach, Tim Floyd, to whom he had never spoken and who thought so little of his chances to sign the superstar recruit that he hadn’t even sent Mayo a brochure. “Coach,” he said, according to one account, “this is O. J. Mayo. I’d like to come to your school.” When Floyd asked for Mayo’s phone number, he answered, “No. I’ll call you.” As Rodney Guillory, an associate of Mayo’s, had explained to Floyd, Mayo wanted to market himself for a year before the draft and decided Los Angeles was the best place to launch his brand. Mayo, in effect, was recruiting Floyd. When an ESPN investigation later alleged that Mayo had received cash and gifts from a “runner” for an N.B.A. agent, his saga became a handy symbol of the ultimate corruption of basketball. But what, in the end, was harmed besides some outdated notion of amateurism? Certainly not Mayo. He played a single season at U.S.C. and then, in June, was taken third in the N.B.A. draft.

This summer, Vaccaro was instrumental in the decision by the prized point-guard recruit Brandon Jennings to spurn Arizona — he had not yet qualified academically — and instead play professionally overseas, sidestepping the N.B.A. entirely and making Jennings a wealthy man. (He was reportedly inspired after he and his mother heard Vaccaro on the radio discussing Europe as a viable option for newly minted high-school grads.) Playing in Italy for Lottomatica Virtus Roma, Jennings will earn $1.2 million this season in salary and endorsements. If all goes well, he will be a top-10 pick in next year’s N.B.A. draft.

To see Mayo work the phones, or Jennings draw a paycheck in euros at an age when he’d normally be running suicides for Lute Olson, is to see the players gaining the leverage that probably should have been theirs in the first place. For Mayo and Jennings, the supposedly dysfunctional summer game was in fact perfectly functional.

The Philadelphia camp is a disorienting affair. It’s not immediately clear who the intended audience is. There are only a handful of fans and a smattering of talent-scout gurus, plus of course the coaches. The coaches are there to recruit, certainly, but because of rules that bar contact with the players — the coaches can’t even use the same bathroom — it seems more accurate to say the coaches are there to be seen recruiting. They are marketing themselves and their schools just as surely as Reebok is hawking sneakers. The players, for their part, seem to try very hard to pretend they’re not being watched, though you catch them feigning a limp now and then after a blown layup. They’ll also glance toward the stands from time to time, up to where Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino and Billy Donovan and other Division I coaches are sitting.

On the floor, some of the players look drum-tight, as you might expect — but not Sidney, who is the only one mugging in his camp photograph. He has a mixed week. Midway through, he submits to the indignity of a press conference devoted almost entirely to his weight. In games, he turns himself into the camp’s tallest guard, firing away from the perimeter though he is easily the biggest guy in the gym. He also finds himself fencing with the refs again. In one game, he picks up three fouls in a minute, and from where Renardo Sr. is sitting, there comes a hoarse, concussive sound. “Boooo!” And then another: “Booo!”

“He’s gonna be up there as one of the all-time players [who make you] just shake your head and wish he’d wake up and figure it out,” Hoop Scoop’s Clark Francis says later. “Four years ago he could play any position, do things on the perimeter. He wasn’t heavy. And now he’s basically an underachiever. It’s a tragedy.” (Francis, it should be noted, thinks Shaquille O’Neal is an underachiever.)

If his performance is indeed a disappointment, perhaps it’s only because Sidney is being measured against the absurdly high standard he set for himself. “He’s the victim of the cancer of early success,” says Tom Konchalski, the talent scout. “They may have adult ability, but they’re kids. It’s unrealistic to expect a maturity level you find in an adult.” The Sidneys themselves are sanguine about Renardo’s prospects. As of September, Francis had dropped Sidney to 39th in his rankings (he had once held the top spot) and had named him the biggest disappointment for the second summer in a row, but as both father and son are fond of saying, “the only ranking we care about is David Stern’s.”

During one game in Philly, I find myself sitting behind Rick Pitino. I mention the common criticism of Sidney, that he can often look like he’s saving himself. Pitino snorts: “Saving himself for the Lakers.”

The story goes that when his son was a seventh-grader in Jackson, Miss., Renardo Sr., then a security guard, approached a local A.A.U. coach named James Wright. “He saw me and said, ‘Coach, I got a son in the seventh grade, about 6-foot-5.’ Oh, really? Sure,” recalls Wright, now an assistant coach at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. “He said, ‘Coach, he wants to play on your team.’ I said just bring him by. He brought him by; I worked him out. . . . This guy’s a pro. It took me five minutes. I told his dad, ‘You sure you want me to coach him?’ And his dad was just shocked. He didn’t think he was that good. It was ridiculous. . . . He had no clue what that kid was.

“He was so versatile,” Wright continues. “A freak of nature with length, ballhandling skills, and the kid’s 6-foot-5 at 12 years old? That’s a pro.”

Soon enough, Wright was calling Christopher Rivers at Reebok and then Vaccaro himself, suggesting they invite the boy to Reebok’s Camp Next. About watching him for the first time, Vaccaro says, “A blind man could see. There was no question he was gonna be a great player. From that minute on, the family and I started a rapport.” Sidney debuted at ABCD the summer before ninth grade and was named co-M.V.P. of the underclassmen’s all-star game, and from there his stardom was assured.

And that’s when high-school basketball got in his way. In his freshman year, Sidney hoped to play for a former University of Mississippi assistant, Wayne Brent, at the private Piney Woods School. The Mississippi High School Activities Association, however, ruled him ineligible. In Mississippi, private schools can only draw in-state students from within a 20-mile radius of the school, according to the association’s executive director, Ennis Proctor; the Sidneys lived 28.6 miles from Piney Woods, according to Brent. Had Sidney attended a public school, he would have gone to Forest Hill High School, where, some local observers pointed out, Proctor had once served as principal. Sidney practiced with Piney Woods and watched from the bench during games, and that summer seemed to indicate he might skip high-school basketball entirely, which raised eyebrows among the message-board set.

“My thing is, what makes high-school basketball the alpha and omega?” says Reebok’s Christopher Rivers, who is black. “White people, traditionally. Indiana. Playing for your school’s great, but he’s not playing as a hobby, so he can go out on a Friday night, score 17 points and go to the pizza parlor. He’s playing because it’s his career.”

So the Sidneys, including Renardo Jr.’s mother, Patricia, and two of his three siblings (Tacus and a sister, Tiarra), decamped for California. “To be honest,” Renardo Sr. says, “L.A. was the last resort. It was between Atlanta, Texas and L.A., and it took us a little bit of time to make that decision. We went to L.A. a couple times. We’re good friends with Master P,” the rapper, who also runs an A.A.U. team out of L.A. “You have to do what’s best for your family.”

It was a good fit. Sidney’s new school, Artesia High, ran a highlight video at the team banquet at the end of the season, with a U.C.L.A. assistant coach in attendance. “I was watching his mouth drop,” says Loren Grover, Artesia’s then head coach. That year, there were plenty of highlights to choose from. “There was one fast break in a playoff game against Simi Valley. The point guard, Lorenzo McCloud, just threw it to the rim. It was, like, ‘What are you doing?’ And Renardo comes out of nowhere, catches it in midair, throws it down right behind him and dunked it. He never even saw the rim. Just . . . wow.”

Is basketball a danger? Is Renardo Sidney a danger?

We’re sitting in a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, not far from Fairfax High School, where Sidney has just started his senior year and where his team will likely once again contend for the city and maybe the state title. This morning he was run ragged in the school’s gym, under the whistle of John Williams, a freelance trainer and former N.B.A. big man whom everyone called “Hot Plate” to distinguish him from the lankier John (Hot Rod) Williams, the springy former N.B.A big man.

Sidney transferred to Fairfax for his junior year, just months after winning a state championship at Artesia. There were a number of factors, according to his father, including Patricia’s new job in the Hollywood area. And though he doesn’t mention it, the fact that Coach Grover had left Artesia for Pomona’s Diamond Ranch High School — for reasons Grover won’t discuss, other than to say he had been placed in “a difficult situation” — no doubt figured in the decision as well.

At the moment, however, Sidney and I are chewing over the matter of the mohawk, a hair style that Sidney wore, briefly and regrettably, earlier this year. He thinks it had a good deal to do with his problems at a tournament in Arizona in May, when he recalls earning at least one technical foul every game and getting tossed twice. “The mohawk made me kinda crazy,” Sidney is saying.

Basketball makes its own monsters. They are the outward manifestations of the game’s bipolarity — its abiding pathology, the one true fundamental, going all the way back to James Naismith and his famously unruly Y.M.C.A. charges. Naismith saw the game as a pedagogical pursuit, something to occupy the men during the cold winters in Springfield, Mass., and not incidentally to spread the robust gospel of muscular Christianity. But at the same time, he designed the game expressly in the hope that the masses could learn it on their own, no coach necessary, taking the sermon out of the preacher’s hands.

“Is Basket-Ball a Danger?,” the Y.M.C.A. newsletter asked in 1894. “The gymnasium is not a playhouse,” a director for the organization wrote, sounding many of the same notes the N.B.A. would hit a century later in demonizing its own employees as overpaid greedheads during labor strife, “and when a man gets to be a basketball fiend it is very hard to do anything with him.”

And here is Renardo Sidney, the sum of basketball’s newest fears.

“Renardo Sidney,” Reebok’s Christopher Rivers says. “Fantastic basketball player. Good kid, never been arrested, not on drugs, never kicked out of school, not failing classes. He’s a normal kid. Probably comes home late and spends too much time on his computer. But because he’s 6-foot-10 and he’s special and has the ability to make a lot of money if he continues his craft, and he’s treated like there’s something wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?”

Sidney claims that he doesn’t read his notices, and that he only hears what people are saying about him through his parents. “Ain’t nothing on the Internet but negative stuff,” he says. Still, he seems fully apprised of the charges leveled against him and his father. “That he can’t control me,” he says. “That they see where I get my attitude from. I don’t like that.” He is keenly aware that people now call him fat. “It’s true,” he says. “I was fat. I put that in my brain when I get on the floor. All I can think of, he’s fat, he’s slow, he’s lazy. So I just work harder, you know?”

He’s at 270 pounds now, down from nearly 300 and still dropping, the fruits of a steady month of workouts, sometimes two a day. He starts plyometrics training in a few days, and his father hopes to hire a personal chef soon, someone who will keep the fridge stocked with three healthy precooked meals a day. “More have been slain by supper than the sword,” as the talent scout Tom Konchalski notes. Sidney is one of the best youth athletes in the land, and now this is what basketball has become: an 18-year-old responding to fat jokes.

Which is why, when the waiter materializes, there is a particularly fraught moment as Sidney deliberates over the menu. “Do you all have that brown rice?” Sidney asks. (He eats here frequently.)

The waiter nods.

“Does it taste just like the fried rice I’ve been eating?”

The waiter seems doubtful. “If you use brown rice, it’ll be soggy.”

“But I’m saying, will it taste like what we’ve been eating?”

Sidney turns to ask his dad something, then whips back around and starts tapping his menu on the table thoughtfully.

The waiter’s pen is poised.

“Just give me the brown rice, like how you make the other rice. It has that little sweet taste to it?”

“Everything’s the same,” the waiter says. “It’s just the texture.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sidney says at last. A pause. “But no vegetables.”

The waiter scurries off, and Sidney alights once again on the subject of his mohawk. It was nothing dramatic, nothing like you might have found on Mr. T. Still, in Arizona, he found himself mouthing off constantly, especially to the refs. What would he say? “You suck,” he says. “But it’d be, like, with cuss words.” He’d cuss at his dad, he says. “I’d cuss out anybody. It [the mohawk] just made me go crazy.” People noticed, too. The University of Arizona student paper described him as “not the character Arizona wants.” So Sidney shaved the thing off and swore never to have one again. “And when I cut the mohawk off,” he says, “I was just a normal person.”

Tommy Craggs is a regular contributor to Play. He lives in New York.

MUH update: As of Dec 30, 2008, Renardo Sidney (pf/6-10/260/Fairfax HS, LA, CA) has not committed to any college. He recently visited Virginia but, most probably, he is leaning towards USC or Europe.