Shawn Kemp is standing next to his car, a Dodge Magnum RT with Oregon plates and 24-inch chrome rims and windows tinted black. He’s strapping 25-pound weights on each ankle. He shoves two American flags into the ground at Houston’s George Bush Park.
His hill awaits. But why the flags?
“This is the American dream,” Kemp says.
The hill stretches about a quarter mile in each direction, its summit equidistant between two green gates. The sun beams from the diamonds in each earlobe. Kemp takes a slug of water.
It’s time to head back toward the top.
Kemp’s house is a five-minute drive from the park, tucked into a swanky neighborhood called Lakeside Parkway. There’s a pool with a Jacuzzi and a waterfall in the back yard, four cars–the Dodge, a Hummer H2 with spinning rims, an Escalade EXT 300 and a Chrysler REMI–in the driveway, a bright red Vespa scooter in the garage and a pit bull puppy running around the house.
It’s clear that, at 35, Kemp never has to work again. So why is he heading toward his “sweatbox” and closing the garage door? Why is he balancing on a yellow ball, lifting a medicine ball overhead and grimacing through hundreds of crunches? Why is he jumping rope, lifting weights and trimming the fat?
“I’m going to play again,” Kemp says, speaking in depth publicly for the first time since he retired two years ago after a 14-year NBA career. “And if I’m going to play again, there’s only one way to do it. The right way. On my own.”
Kemp says this isn’t about the money. It’s about the way his legacy has been defined. You look at him and see a troublemaker, a baby factory, a talent unfulfilled. More than once, Kemp says he doesn’t care what anybody thinks. And yet he cares so much, he’s willing to leave the “Cribs”-style house and lavish lifestyle for all the things that dragged him to the bottom.
Here’s how he got there. Here’s Shawn Kemp in 2003, too fat to look at himself in the mirror. Here’s Shawn Kemp, quitting with two years remaining on his contract.
“Don’t even call me about no basketball,” Kemp told his agent, Tony Dutt.
The fall was hard. When he left the Seattle SuperSonics in 1997, he jumped like his shoes were made of Flubber. But by the spring of 2001, Kemp checked himself into a rehabilitation facility for cocaine abuse. His weight had ballooned to 317 pounds from the 260 he carried in Seattle. Kemp returned from the NBA lockout in 1998 so heavy his coaches in Cleveland worried about a heart attack. Kemp says he’d still be an All-Star if the lockout never happened.
He looks trim now, close to the player Seattle remembers. Gone are the rolls of fat and double chin that defined him later, replaced by definitions in muscle fast returning. He’s talking fast, animated, gesturing with arms spread wide to make his points. There’s a reason, an excuse, for everything that happened.
And then, at the end of every explanation, Kemp places the blame squarely on his shoulders. It’s tough to gauge where he wants that blame to go–on the events he says conspired against him or on himself.
“You see, I never blamed anybody for any of this,” Kemp says. “I put my own self in the dirt.”
Why come back? Because this isn’t how Shawn Kemp wants to be remembered.
Kemp views his descent differently than you might. Kemp sees the growth–with family, with financial security, with, most important, himself. You see a guy who can’t stay out of trouble, and all the images his name conjures.
Maybe you read the 1998 Sports Illustrated cover story that said Kemp fathered at least seven children by six different women. Probably knew, too, that he gained a small child’s worth of weight, went to rehab, sued Reebok and was arrested near Seattle this past April when small amounts of marijuana and cocaine were found in his car.
You might recall he clashed with Seattle coach George Karl in his final season with the Sonics, showing up late to practices, missing team flights and fretting over contract issues. You know how he’s remembered–as a player who could have been one of the best ever. But isn’t.
He’s married now, to Marvena Kemp, a woman he calls the family’s backbone. Kemp first spotted her on a basketball court and introduced himself at a 7-Eleven near the Seattle Center later that day. They were friends for years before they dated and nearly a decade before they married.
As always, Kemp’s reputation precedes him.
“It took me awhile [to get her to say yes],” Kemp says. “She was ready for me to change my lifestyle around.”
Their three sons–Jamir, 10, Jamar, 8, and Jaman, 4–live year-round with Marvena and Shawn in their two homes, one in Houston and one in Washington. Kemp won’t discuss his other children or even how many he has, other than to say he has never missed a child-support payment, and he won’t let his wife be interviewed.
Why come back? Because of what it felt like in 1996.
Never mind that Sonics fans booed 19-year-old Kemp “something terrible” on draft day in 1989.
“That scared me a little bit, man,” Kemp says. “I was pretty confident that I was going to be able to turn some of them into cheers. I didn’t know how fast.”
Seattle was the setting for the beginning of the legacy Kemp wants now. The decline happened so quickly, it’s easy to forget that Kemp once held this city in the palm of his oversized hand.
His reputation goes national against Golden State in the 1992 playoffs, and he establishes himself as a possible Hall of Famer in the 1996 NBA Finals against the Bulls.
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The Finals featured Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Gary Payton and Detlef Schrempf. And Kemp, who just might have outplayed them all.
“He was the best player on the court,” Karl says. “No one can say he wasn’t.”
“I sit back today, and I look at TV,” Kemp says, “and I see how they talk about Karl Malone, I see how they talk about Charles Barkley. And I know the look in those guys’ eyes when they used to walk out on the court to guard me. To see the fear in those guys’ eyes because they knew what they had to deal with.”
Kemp sounds wistful looking back at this period of his NBA career. He also expresses, for the first time, regret over leaving the Sonics and the circumstances that surrounded his departure.
The worst thing, in Kemp’s mind, is that the Sonics didn’t win a championship in the early 1990s when they were built to.
“We failed,” Kemp says. “As players, we really failed.”
Shawn Kemp is standing at the bottom of the hill again, lean and looking for a chance.
The first ending to his basketball career embarrasses him. He admits playing his last four years without his trademark vertical leap. He says he weighs 280 pounds now, says he hasn’t jumped this high in five years and hasn’t been this fit since his Sonics days. He notes that he has never been seriously injured, that he’s only 35 years old and rested from two years off.
He’s doing 500 crunches a day, jumping enough rope to make a boxer proud and working with a trainer, Roberto Carmenati, on his basketball skills. After a few workouts earlier this month, Carmenati says Kemp is at 85 to 90 percent of the player he was in 1996. As Kemp tries to sell his comeback, he knows the questions will still be there, swirling around it like a cloud. The difference, Kemp says, is he’s at peace with the long odds, with the curious glances and jokes about his past. He jokes that he might come back with a different jersey number and a mask on his face. The better to fool people into forgetting about his mishaps.
Kemp even rescinds his past comments about never again playing for the Sonics.
“Never say never,” he says. “I’m not ever going to say never anymore.”
Kemp is smiling now. The smile suggests happiness. The definition in his arms suggests he’s on his way back. The cars and the kids and the waterfall suggest that he’s content.
With life, maybe. But not with his legacy.
Kemp continues to swear this comeback has nothing to do with money. For proof, he offers to let teams pay him after the season’s over, based entirely on performance. Or play in Europe, if necessary.
This comeback is about Kemp, about his family and his inner circle, about the way he wants to be remembered. Asked if he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, Kemp points to his play against Malone and Barkley.
He says he’s not asking to be recognized that way, then says “videotape don’t lie. But obviously, I’ve had some off-the-court issues.”
He says the NBA “doesn’t owe me jack.” And then says, “I do deserve a chance.”
“I know what it took back in 1989 to go from the situation I was in, no college experience, and to play the way I did and work for what I got,” Kemp says. “Without a championship, I’d be like anybody else who didn’t make it. There would be a little question mark left after. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.”
The question is which team, if any, will take a chance on Kemp. Mike Fratello, his first coach in Cleveland, says he won’t “place it outside the realm of possibility.” Dutt says five or six teams have already shown interest. Seattle isn’t one of them. The Sonics’ first question?
“How much does he weigh?”
Ultimately, the decision is out of Kemp’s hands. He says he’s going to diet on oatmeal three times a day for the next three months, continue working out, and then “something positive is going to happen. Somebody is going to come knocking. Somebody is going to hit the jackpot.”
“I just don’t know,” says former Sonics coach Bernie Bickerstaff, now general manager and coach of the Charlotte Bobcats. “What he needs to do right now is straighten out his life. At some point, you have to get on with your life. Basketball has been great for him. It’s been a great means to an end. Sometimes, you have to make that decision–where do I go from here?”
Thing is, Kemp believes his life is already straightened out. His family, his finances and his perspective are in order. His legacy is not.
“Is his story a sad story?” Dutt asks, before answering with an emphatic no. “It’s far from sad. He’s happy and content and can live his life this way forever. A lot of people would probably say that it was sad. And yes, there are sad parts. But I’d tell him all along, I don’t think he’s written the ending of his book, of his life in basketball.”
Kemp is leaving the house, the toys and the lifestyle behind.
The hill awaits.