Midway through the second quarter of an early-season game against the Memphis Grizzlies, the rookie power forward for the Phoenix Suns, Amare Stoudemire, flying diagonally across the paint, made an unlikely but life-affirming attempt to convert a low-altitude rebound into a reverse put-back dunk. Only that he's 20 and what the N.B.A. auditors of flesh and bone call ''a freak'' enabled him to even imagine that he could make this play. From a little triangular section of seats right behind the Suns bench, reserved for homeboys, lovers, swindlers and kin, Stoudemire's people looked on. Among them was Marwan Stoudemire, Amare's 14-year-old half-brother, whom Amare brought west with him from central Florida and enrolled in a private Phoenix day school. Marwan is not a freak. He wears a metal cast of the Cartoon Network antihero ''The Brain'' on a chain around his neck, has a heartbreaking smile and soft, ancient eyes, and if anything, he is small and slight for a ninth grader. After the game, when he told his brother's towering teammates that he touched the rim that afternoon, all he got was rolled eyes.
But as his brother stretched for that rebound, Marwan, before anyone else in America West Arena, sensed the possibility of highlight-footage immortality and sprung from his seat. In his excitement, he spilled hot chocolate on his immaculate powder-blue Ecko sweatsuit; as he ruefully dabbed at the stain, his cellphone rang. The call, exhorting him to be cool, was from Michael Walker, Amare's homeboy and roommate, sitting two seats away. Unfazed, Marwan looked over at Alexi, an Arizona State sophomore Amare met at a Nelly concert, and blamed her for the spill.
''My fault?'' said Alexi, a big ''A'' dangling from her wrist and calligraphy scrolling up her lower back.
''That's right,'' said their other companion, Artis Wilson. Wilson, 6-foot-6, slim and stylish and a former schoolyard legend himself back in Lake Wales, Fla., is the former husband of Carrie Stoudemire, Marwan and Amare's mother. Wilson is also Marwan's temporary guardian, which might explain why he jumped to Marwan's defense. ''And don't be sitting back all quiet,'' he went on to tell Alexi. ''This ain't the opera, girl.''
On television, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the outcome of games actually matters. In the comped pews, it's plain that every salaried second of official N.B.A. action is pure anticlimax, a 48-minute celebration of the blessed fact that the drama of getting there is finally over, and that for the millionaire players and their friends and family, it's all good now, at least for a while. When Walker yelled ''Big Al,'' second-year reserve forward Alton Ford pointed back, chuckling, and even Amare, who plays with a glazed-over deadpan he calls his ''swagger,'' sneaked quick handsome grins at his girl, Alexi.
Just before the half, Carrie Stoudemire joined the party by phone from Florida, where she was serving four months at Lowell Correctional Institute. One hand cupped over his Nokia, Wilson connected his ex-wife, in prison, to her son's heroic exploits on the court. ''Amare. Fifteen feet straight away. Jumper. Net. And now some Grizzly is trying to take it to the hole. REJECTED! I tried to warn the boy before he did that, but he wouldn't listen.''
Before she and Wilson were cut off by her prison curfew, the ex-couple giddily discussed her imminent transition from inmate to front-row N.B.A. mom. I couldn't hear Carrie, but this was Wilson's end of the conversation: ''You aren't going to sit here and be cool. . . . You may try to be cool, but you ain't never been cool. . . . I'll be what kind of cheerleader? . . . Oh, that's really funny. . . . Well if I put that on, what are you going to put on? A grass skirt?''
For all the joking, there was an undercurrent of anxiety, because Carrie Stoudemire, who because of numerous convictions has been in and out of jail for much of her sons' childhoods, was getting out the next morning. At 8 a.m., she would step through the gates and climb into a limo that would take her to Orlando, where $40,000 of jewelry would be waiting along with the $100,000 Mercedes Amare bought her. Then on Saturday morning, after two days of shopping and primping, so, as Wilson put it, ''Carrie can arrive in style,'' she had a ticket on the red-eye to Phoenix.
Female genetic lottery winners become supermodels. Male genetic lottery winners play professional basketball, and this week in Manhattan, the N.B.A.'s 29 general managers will divvy up the planet's annual harvest at the league's draft. To refine their thinking, they will have reviewed ad nauseam the results of the 2002 draft, in which the first choice was a 7-foot-5 21-year-old from China; the fifth, a 7-foot 19-year-old from Georgia (as in Tbilisi, not Atlanta); and the seventh, a 6-foot-11 behemoth from Sao Carlos, Brazil. But the best of all of them was the ninth pick, Stoudemire, a 6-foot-10, 245-pound teenager from Lake Wales, Fla.
It is too soon to deliver a verdict on all of last year's choices, much less fully understand the critical indicators. But one question every G.M. will have tried to answer is how Stoudemire, who recently became the first player directly out of high school to be named the N.B.A.'s Rookie of the Year and whose first-season numbers easily outshone previous high-schoolers turned superstars, like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and Tracy McGrady, was still around at No. 9.
One insight the G.M.'s could take from the early returns is that getting caught up in anything but a coldblooded appraisal of genetic endowments is bound to break their hearts and get them fired. Every team knew Stoudemire was the funkiest athlete in the draft, a monstrous combination of length, hops, quickness and power. But it was the soft data that led them astray.
And there was so much of it. For starters, Stoudemire was raw even for his age, which was only 19. It's one thing for a top American prospect to emerge from high school without an education, but we expect our matriculating man-children to be fluent in basketball. Stoudemire played only two years in high school, but cannily spun his inexperience as evidence of staggering potential. ''When I go on to college or the N.B.A.,'' he told Slam magazine while he was in high school, ''and get somebody to teach me basketball, man, it is over.'' Nevertheless, his best move, which is getting the ball with his back to the basket, turning on his defender with a terrifying suddenness and throwing it down in his wincing face, is difficult to pick up from a chalk talk.
Then there was the disquieting fact that Stoudemire's Cypress Creek High managed to win just 16 of its 29 games in his senior year. What kind of dent would Stoudemire make on the league if he could barely lift a high school team above .500?
But what had general managers really freaked was the Stoudemire family. Chaotic households are the smithies of the N.B.A., but Stoudemire's first coming of age was precarious by any measure. His father died when he was 12, and his mother has been in and out of jail on a variety of convictions for theft and forgery. During Stoudemire's middle-school years, his mother yanked him and Marwan out of classrooms as she moved abruptly among various towns in Florida and New York State. Between sophomore and senior years, Stoudemire switched schools seven times. What Stoudemire said about Marwan, who lost his father when he was 7, also applies to him. ''Growing up without a mom or dad,'' Amare told me, ''is going to be tough on anyone.''
It was certainly tough on Amare's older brother, Hazell Jr. After spending a year in juvenile detention, he led Bradenton Southeast High School to a record of 35-0 and a Florida state championship. Yet even the bona fide prospects of pro stardom could not keep Hazell out of trouble; he is now doing three to nine years for drug dealing and sexual abuse at a prison in upstate New York.
General managers aren't shrinks, but they've absorbed enough Dr. Phil to know that some measure of childhood stability is necessary to becoming a productive, law-abiding adult. League rosters may be stuffed with the sons of absent fathers, but entering the league without either parent is pretty much uncharted terrain. Surely, empathetic G.M.'s thought, a kid making the jump straight out of high school is going to be in over his head without his mom.
Before the draft, the Suns were leery of Stoudemire, too. ''We do an extensive background check,'' says Bryan Colangelo, the general manager and son of the Suns owner, Jerry Colangelo. ''The information that turned up was nothing I would say would cause great concern.''
They also had Stoudemire sit down for a psychological test, as they do with all prospective players. ''It's a brief 10- or 15-minute sketch of who that person is,'' says Colangelo, a Cornell graduate who was struggling to sell commercial real estate in New York when his father welcomed him into the fold. ''It's prepared by a sports psychologist and administered by a team counselor and graded and prepared by an outside firm.''
Even after they drafted him, the Suns behaved as if Stoudemire might surface on the police blotter without full-time baby-sitting and remedial input. As the season approached, they talked of weaving him ''the perfect cocoon'' and recruited Scott Williams, a veteran who as a teenager lost both his parents in a murder-suicide, to be his good neighbor in the locker room. The assistant G.M., Mark West, was charged with monitoring his comings, goings and cash flow.
Seemingly oblivious to all this attention, Stoudemire came in and took care of business, dunking as mercilessly on the heads of N.B.A. All-Stars as he had on overmatched schoolboys. More than that, he fired up a Suns team that had entered the season with decidedly modest expectations. And there hasn't been a whiff of off-court malfeasance. When the traffic from Scottsdale made him late to a preseason practice or two, he moved closer to the downtown arena. He organized his life around simple routines, chilling on his couch after practice, napping before games and limiting his night life to trips to the mall for ''something to chew on'' at the Cheesecake Factory.
When I arrived in Phoenix, Amare was living with his old friend Michael Walker; he had his brother Marwan set up in a Scottsdale town house under the caring eye of Artis Wilson. The season was young, and things had settled into a calm rhythm. But nothing has ever stayed that way for long in the Stoudemire household.
Unlike many players' mothers, who are unwilling to uproot their lives to move to a city from which their son might be traded at the drop of a hat, Carrie Stoudemire was coming to town to reinvent herself and stay. And everything the team had heard from Stoudemire's agent, John Wolf, indicated that she would insist on being a major part of the picture, if not run the whole show.
The team got a glimpse of her volatility last summer when Frank Johnson, the Suns coach, accompanied Stoudemire to his mother's sentencing hearing in Florida. The bitter paradox of her most recent legal difficulty is that it was based on attending last year's N.B.A. draft. When she left for New York last June without permission, she violated her probation. It seems cruel to punish the biological urge to witness the moment your son becomes a multimillionaire, as well as to give the party afterward for which Wolf got stuck for the $3,000 Champagne bill. But impulsiveness had cost Carrie Stoudemire before.
''Carrie didn't actually think they would violate her, because she had been doing so good on probation,'' Wilson says. ''Plus she had paid back all this money for restitution and done everything she could to get off probation early. I think the problem was that the parole officer and Carrie had some words before, and I think that's 75 percent of the reason for the lady violating her. Carrie is the type, she is going to speak her mind. She may regret some of the things she says later, but at the time, she's going to say it.''
Johnson says that at the hearing, Carrie Stoudemire was considering trying to work out a new deal that would have allowed her to come to Phoenix and help her son set up house. It was a move, he says, that could have backfired in the form of a much longer sentence. In a highly emotional encounter, Amare was able to persuade her ''to just do the time and get it over with.'' And according to someone close to the team, Carrie Stoudemire did not help her cause at the hearing when she kept her sentencing judge waiting for half an hour.
Still, in the middle of all this drama, Carrie Stoudemire managed to exert her will on the organization. ''We all had dinner one night,'' says Johnson, a former N.B.A. journeyman who was entering his first full season as head coach. ''Afterward, she and I stayed in the car and talked for two and a half hours. She filled me in on Amare and what he needs. It was extremely valuable. Carrie's a very strong-willed woman. She'll tell you what she wants. She's got very definite rules she believes in, and if they're not followed, she'll let you know.''
Part of what makes Carrie Stoudemire so tough is that nothing in her past will embarrass her into receding into the woodwork. As Wilson sees it, that refusal to quietly accept the hand she's been dealt is, for better and worse, who she is. ''Unless you're someone who knows that you're never going to make more than $30,000 a year your whole life, it's hard for you to judge someone like Carrie,'' he says. ''Carrie is the boldest woman I've ever known.''
All of which made the team's preparations for transforming her into a happy member of the Suns family, particularly through a program for parents dreamed up by the younger Colangelo, unlikely, if not laughable. ''The idea,'' says Colangelo, ''is to bring everyone in for a weekend and put them up in a nice hotel. It will be sometime in the year; we're still working on the dates. This is not just for Carrie, and we're going to get them to realize what our organization is about, help them understand what we expect of their sons and what they should expect of their sons and what they should expect of life in the N.B.A.''
Colangelo is particularly proud of the name he coined for his little retreat, which he has yet to hold. ''I call it N.B.A. Moms 101,'' he says.
After practice one afternoon, I followed Stoudemire and Michael Walker back to a small, stone-sided ranch house with palm trees out front that Stoudemire was renting in a nondescript upper-middle class grid 10 minutes from the arena. Except for the loaner Caddy in the garage -- Stoudemire's Escalade was getting the requisite N.B.A. $50,000 Gucci makeover -- the place looked abandoned. The small pool in back was half empty, the shades drawn and the front yard burnt to a crisp.
Once inside, my hosts disappeared into their bedrooms so Stoudemire's pit bull and I could get acquainted. After a lonely morning in the backyard, JT had abandonment issues of her own. Beside herself, she bounded off the floor to paw my chest and root between my thighs with her stony prehistoric snout.
For distraction, I scanned the minimal furniture. A couch and chair faced a big-screen TV, and between them sat a stack of video games. The only personal effects were a handful of Polaroids of Stoudemire and his older brother posing in front of a phony backdrop of palm trees and sand taken last summer at a correctional facility in New York.
Since Hazell Jr. is also 6-foot-10, and 70 pounds heavier than his brother, the two are a formidable sight, particularly staring down over huge crossed forearms. Knowledgeable observers insist that it's still not clear who is the better player. Certainly, Hazell, whose nickname in high school was Baby Shaq, was more intimidating and, according to his mother, made Amare, himself on the aggressive end of the spectrum, seem like a puppy. Maybe that is how it goes for would-be entertainers from America's gladiatorial class. Exceed a certain level of aggressiveness, you become an inmate. Stay just on the right side of it, you get a sneaker contract.
Hazell, who is just 26, may still be young enough to play pro basketball when he gets out, if not here then overseas, but he has never had his younger brother's passion for the game or capacity for sidestepping trouble. Burney Hayes, a Lake Wales cop who cared for Amare and Marwan during their mother's absences, blames adults who let him down for Hazell's difficulties. ''Hazell learned at the wrong time how easy it was for him to make people back up,'' Hayes says. ''And if he sees you're intimidated, oh, he's going to play on it.''
When Stoudemire emerged from his room, he said we could talk while he and Walker played video games. Before I could object, he inserted a cartridge marked ''Florida vs. Florida State'' into his PlayStation2 console and collapsed on the couch, he and Walker instantly deep into the game.
On the court, Stoudemire gives nothing away, barely acknowledging his defender or even his own teammates. In his best games, he plays as if in a private fury, grabbing offensive rebounds off the backs of bewildered teammates and dunking on them almost as much as his opponents.
On his couch, he rarely took his eyes off the screen. ''Amare has a hard time showing emotion,'' Wilson told me earlier. ''You can tell when he's happy sometimes, but for the most part he always has the same look. A lot of time when he's angry, you won't actually know it unless he tells you.'' In her long conversation with the Suns coach, Carrie Stoudemire told him she hadn't seen her son cry since the afternoon when he was 12 and learned that his father had died.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about throwing callow teenagers into the caldron of pro sports, but watching Stoudemire, joystick in hand, you could sense that his transition from Cypress Creek High School to the Western Conference had been the one easy segue in his uneasy life.
Rigors of the N.B.A.? That workday consisted of a two-and-a-half-hour practice, much of it at the foul line, an assistant snapping the ball back to him after each shot so he wouldn't have to step off the stripe. After a shower, a quick check of his pager and both cellphones, 10 minutes in his Cadillac listening to the latest bit of resuscitated Tupac, he was back on his couch playing video games with a pal he's had since fourth grade.
What might have been perilous was going to college, where he would have had to share a room with strangers, go to classes he wasn't prepared for and be stone broke and surrounded by white people who weren't. Pro basketball is one of the few venues in which a poor African-American can legally make a fortune without having to spend inordinate amounts of time with people whom Stoudemire segments into ''hippies and rednecks'' and don't think it's not the cherry on the cake of his day. In Stoudemire's house as well as the Suns locker room, the TV is tuned to BET, and in the car in between them, the music is always hip-hop or R&B. When we discussed a proposed reality show about his first year in the league, it became clear Stoudemire had never heard of Ozzy Osbourne.
But if adjusting to life in the N.B.A. has been a minor challenge, getting there -- a dream he had been burnishing since his first reverse dunk at 13 -- required one bold calculated gamble after another. Before he got to Phoenix, Stoudemire bounced through six high schools in three years, including two brief stops at Mount Zion Academy, the North Carolina basketball factory attended by Tracy McGrady. In the various accounts of Stoudemire's development, all this moving around is often characterized as an example of how the system betrays the young men it is supposed to help. But every time Stoudemire jumped ship, he was operating less like a student than like an ambitious C.E.O., willing to relocate as many times as it took to find the right situation. If coaches and basketball pimps were playing him for whatever they could get, he was working them just as hard. None of it was personal, just business.
When Stoudemire was declared academically ineligible as a freshman, Hayes had Stoudemire tested for a learning disability. Instead, the test confirmed something he and his wife suspected, which is that Stoudemire has an extremely high I.Q. Though that intelligence may not have shown up in his high-school transcripts, it is clear in the way he threaded his way through the land mines of his high-school experience.
Entering the league out of high school is about aura as well as skill, and everything Stoudemire did, and managed not to do, for five years, including the decision to participate in an HBO program about his checkered high-school career, was a play for exposure. With a father in the ground, a mother in jail and an older brother heading there fast, Stoudemire never stopped plotting career moves.
An example came the summer before his senior year, when Stoudemire abandoned the Adidas-sponsored camp for the one sponsored by Nike. ''That had never been done before,'' Stoudemire says, the slightest trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth, ''switching camps and going like that.''
HBO implied that the jump was prompted by a timely visit to Carrie Stoudemire at a Polk County jail by George Raveling, the former U.S.C. coach turned Nike procurer. ''That's bull, man,'' Stoudemire says in his startlingly deep voice, the truth of what he's saying so transparent there's no need to emphasize it with eye contact. ''She was incarcerated at the time, bro, and nobody was really looking out for the fam, and Rav pays a visit and puts $100 in her commissary. She didn't even get a chance to touch the money. He put it in so she could buy snacks here and there, you know what I mean? I was going to the Nike All-American regardless. I am trying to go out of high school. On the A.A.U. circuit, I was destroying everybody. I don't mean to sound cocky or nothing, but I was doing me. I figured if I go to the Nike camp and get the player of the camp, I'd be the best player in the country, no question.''
The most impressive part of his high-school résumé was how he handled himself after being declared ineligible his junior year by the Florida High School Activities Association after a controversy over his Mount Zion transcripts, which may have been doctored by the school. In an entire year without basketball, he managed to stay out of trouble almost entirely. His only infraction was a 10-day suspension for pretending to hurl a basketball at a gym teacher, who was telling him to get off the court. She claimed that while Stoudemire had her in his sights, her life passed before her eyes.
To avoid the fate of so many around him, Stoudemire has learned to seal out the world, as if by throwing a switch. By now it has become so ingrained that his first reaction to any entreaty from the outside world is ''No,'' which can make him appear chilly and absent. Unlike the Suns star point guard, Stephon Marbury, who has been supporting more than a dozen friends and relatives since he turned pro, Stoudemire has kept the purse strings tight. ''A lot of my family, I'm not going to support,'' he says. ''You know why? 'Cause just yesterday, I was doing really bad, and they didn't support me. I wasn't doing too good just last year. They didn't think I was going to go out of high school. Now that I did, I had two cousins call from New York I never even saw before. I don't know how they got my number. They didn't really want me to send them money, but I could hear in their voice, the next time they call, it will be 'Well, I need a favor.' Well, I'm going to change my number before you even ask me.''
Lake Wales is a Citrus Belt town of 35,000, some 40 miles southwest of Orlando. The Stoudemires, Wilsons and Palmores (Carrie's family) have lived there and known of one another for a couple of generations. On a hot morning a few weeks after I visited Amare in Phoenix, I drove by the corner house where Carrie lived as a child and the now-empty lot just off Lincoln Avenue, the bar-lined heart of the town's ghetto, where Amare's father, Hazell Sr., and his nine siblings lived. Amare's grandfather moved to Lake Wales from Alabama for work in a sawmill and was later stabbed to death at a card game on Christmas morning. My guide was Earnest Stoudemire, Amare's uncle and a semiretired police officer, who told me that when he returned from Vietnam and became a cop, Lincoln Avenue was where he got ''his workout on Saturday night from the fights, shootings and cuttings.''
He also pointed to the lot where the house once stood in which Amare often lived with his father, a stylish, athletic man who had a couple of years of college and had just given up on a lawn business to sign on with a trucking company when he died at 41. ''That still makes me mad,'' says Earnest, who survived a heart attack at 39. ''The males in our family have a problem with high cholesterol. Hazell had been having chest pains and ignored them, and he knew better. If he was alive, he'd have two sons in the N.B.A. right now, because he was the one who could control Hazell Jr.''
The main drug corridor north from Miami, Highway 27, runs straight through Lake Wales and brought a crack epidemic that touched all three families and that at one point required Amare's uncle to arrest his younger brother, Hazell Sr. Years of harassment by Earnest and his colleagues have only succeeded in moving the crack trade a few blocks over to a desolate stretch that exudes a palpable menace even in blazing sunlight.
Earnest said that when he signed on with the police department, a black person had no hope of advancement, and despite a college degree, he didn't get a promotion for 17 years. Eventually, a new chief came in with more egalitarian standards, and Earnest spent 13 years as a homicide detective before becoming a captain, the highest black appointment in the department's history. Now, as a part-time officer, he does some pastoring and has an outreach ministry specializing in the eradication of evil spirits. He has performed some 1,000 exorcisms.
Most of the black population of Lake Wales is settled now, but Carrie's and Artis's parents, like many of their generation, were migrants working the Florida orange groves in spring and the upstate New York fruit and vegetable farms in the summer. Although Carrie and Artis dated briefly in 1984, they didn't get together seriously until half a dozen years later, when they found they had both signed on for the same summer upstate apple-picking trip organized by Wilson's uncle.
The two were married from 1990 to 1995, spending much of that time in New York State around Middletown and Newburgh, where Wilson, who had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy, worked at a chemical factory and did maintenance at night. They never had any children, but all three of Carrie's sons spent time with them. Hazell Jr. got into his trouble when he was living with Wilson, and Amare and Marwan were with Carrie and him when, over a matter of months, each boy lost his father. Wilson has a record, too, which he described as ''a little bit of everything.'' Like Carrie, he has also suffered from crack addiction, but says he has been clean for several years.
Amare and his younger brother spent the last couple of years of their time in Lake Wales in a corner of Burney Hayes's trailer home behind the elementary school. Their life in Phoenix is a far cry from that, and for a while at least, Artis Wilson shared in the upgrade. The afternoon after I went to Amare's house, Wilson took me to pick up Marwan after school. He sat low behind the wheel of his two-tone DeVille, gold shades fighting off the desert sun, as he made the 50-minute drive into Phoenix. Stoudemire's high-school transfers may have been self-initiated, but the earlier upheavals were not. And for Marwan, who didn't have the dream of a pro career to sustain him, they were devastating.
''Marwan almost feels like he has to keep the family together,'' Wilson said. ''When Carrie and I first got married, he couldn't sit and watch Carrie walk outside because he didn't know whether she was going to come back, and if she went outside, he would run to the door and cry. I was, like, 'Boy, sit down; she's just going to the telephone.' Over a period of time, you know it affected him more than it did Amare, but now he's going to be all right because all this is behind Carrie now, and they're coming into this new life and whole new lifestyle, and I don't think she's ever going to leave him again.''
As soon as Amare, who wears a diamond-studded ''Pinky'' around his neck in solidarity with his brother's ''Brain,'' signed his contract, he made it a priority to get Marwan's education on track. When Wilson and Marwan arrived in Phoenix last July, they were met at the airport by Frank Johnson and his wife, Amy, who took them to a few private schools she had researched based on Carrie Stoudemire's criteria. Her recommendation was St. Mary's in east-central Phoenix, based on its academic and athletic strength as well as its economic and racial diversity. Wilson concurred. The downside is the lengthy rush-hour commute from the town house Stoudemire is renting for Wilson and Marwan in Scottsdale.
''I get him up at 6 o'clock, make him some breakfast and drive him to school,'' Wilson said. ''Most of the time, I pick him up at 2:30. Sometimes he stays after school. Like today he has a detention because I got him there late. So that was my fault this time. We come back here. He takes a nap, gets something to eat and at 7 o'clock he goes to the Sylvan Learning Center. I get him from there at 9. We come back here, watch a little TV and talk a little bit and go to sleep by 10.''
When Wilson wasn't chauffeuring Marwan, he was on the phone. ''We got three lines in the house and two cells,'' Wilson said, ''and most of the time they're pretty busy.'' Carrie Stoudemire called a dozen times a day from minimum security in Florida; the more restricted Hazell Jr., once a day from medium security in New York. Stoudemire's windfall and prospect of long-term security has given an unexpected infusion of hope to each troubled member of his immediate family, and a lot of that hope is channeled by Wilson through the phone.
For Wilson, Carrie's arrival would be the first step in a staggered reunion that won't be complete until Hazell Jr., who is up for parole early next year, also makes it west. ''I want to see their family when Carrie is here and his brother is here and they're all back together again,'' he said. ''Because over the period of their lifetime, they have been through so much, and they had so much to overcome and so much adversity and so much that has gone wrong. You know, this to me is God's way of repaying them. Saying, you know, 'Hey, it was bad, but look at it now.' So the thing for me is to see them as a family again and look at them all together.''
Wilson took particular pleasure in the conversations between Amare and Hazell Jr. ''I love to hear them talk,'' he says. ''Amare is very close to his brother. His brother gives him advice about girls, talks to him about playing on the court and just about life in general -- watching out for people, his money, everything. Amare respects his brother's opinion and judgment about a lot of stuff.''
As the Cadillac gobbles the miles, I asked Wilson if he thinks he and Carrie are getting back together. ''No, I don't think so,'' Wilson said. ''A lot of women that know her and know me, they think it might happen, but I don't think like that, and neither does Carrie. The love, as far as being intimate, it ain't there no more. As friends, she's my best friend, and I'm her best friend.''
Wilson spoke of Amare's need to be wary of women who might want him for the wrong reasons. Wilson isn't overly concerned, because of all the people cautioning him about just that possibility. Then again, getting advice about love is like weatherproofing a shack against a hurricane. ''When it hits, it hits,'' Wilson said with a gravely laugh, ''and that's it.''
Romance is something Wilson knows a little about. He was not having trouble meeting women in Phoenix. ''I meet them anywhere,'' he says. ''If I'm at a red light, I see a pretty girl, I let my window down and speak, 'Hey, what's up?' I just have fun.''
One afternoon, he walked into a clothing store and came out with the phone number of a petite woman going through a rough divorce, and it did not seem like a lark anymore. ''I'm crazy about her,'' Wilson said.
We pulled off the highway, rolled down a side street and found Marwan, in dress-code khakis and white button-down shirt, standing outside the school in an afternoon swirl of just-released students. He bade farewell to friends, hopped into the back seat, screwed his earrings back in and was asleep before he could be asked to divulge a detail of his day.
Carrie Stoudemire did not make it out to Phoenix as quickly as planned. She wasn't on the Saturday red-eye out of Orlando or the Sunday or Monday morning flights either. And after five months in which she had burned up long-distance minutes with hourly check-ins from Lowell, she dropped out of phone contact soon after rolling out of the prison gates.
''About 11 in the morning, I called and spoke to the limo driver, who said she was in some store,'' Wilson said. ''And she didn't call back until 8 the next night.''
With her N.B.A.-playing son on a road trip, her urgency to get to Phoenix had apparently lifted. It wasn't until Tuesday afternoon that Wilson met Carrie's plane at the airport. From there, they picked up Marwan at St. Mary's and after dinner stopped by Amare's house, which Carrie found scandalously modest, because Carrie wanted to see JT. ''She's crazy about that dog,'' Wilson said.
When the Suns returned from the road, the team put out the welcome mat for the mother of their Rookie of the Year candidate with a little party before a home game. According to Wilson, Carrie kept to herself, as she did when the team invited mothers onto the team plane for a short trip to the West Coast to play the Clippers. ''Carrie wouldn't mingle,'' Wilson said. ''She never has. She's a loner. She'll speak to the other mothers at games, but she's not going to become friends in the way that they will do stuff together.''
As for relations with Wilson, all was quiet for a couple of weeks. When he would get back from dropping Marwan off at school, the two went out for late breakfasts or stayed around the house and talked and made frequent trips to the malls. There was a little testiness about Wilson dipping into an account not allocated for his expenses, but everything was essentially copacetic, he says, until she found out about the petite woman from the store.
Carrie and Wilson hadn't been a couple for years, but Carrie gave him the age-old ultimatum to stop seeing the woman or get out. By taking sole care of Marwan since July, freeing Amare to focus on basketball, Wilson had provided a crucial service to the Suns and Stoudemire, and though he had not received the salary he says he had been promised, he considered himself an employee of the family. ''And I don't know too many employers who are going to tell you who to date,'' Wilson said. Two days before Christmas, a female friend he had made in town offered her couch. ''If it wasn't for her,'' he said, ''I'd be sleeping under a bridge.''
For Wilson, it was a precipitous fall. Overnight, he lost his home, car and good Suns tickets and was summarily cut off by all four Stoudemires. Even Michael Walker froze him out. But the low point, he said, was when Carrie had Marwan call to tell him, ''You ain't never done nothing for me.''
Only Frank Johnson, the coach, and his wife, Amy, showed flickers of conscience, Wilson says, offering leads for jobs at the Phoenix airport, one of which he eventually got, and still comping him tickets to games, although they were on the far side of the arena. But Amy Johnson, who earlier in the year would talk on the phone with Wilson for two hours at a time, was in an impossible position and gradually stopped returning his calls. (The Johnsons now deny ever helping him with the job or tickets.)
And with his link to celebrity severed, Wilson lost his allure to the sales clerk. ''When I was with Amare,'' Wilson recalls, amazed by his own naïveté, ''she would make it her business to somehow get out to Scottsdale.'' Now that he was working the graveyard shift at National Car Rental and living in a little studio two blocks from her place, she wanted to slow things down.
Meanwhile, according to friends of the family in Phoenix and Lake Wales, Marwan had stopped attending school when Wilson moved out. When the team left town again for a six-game trip that passed through Orlando, Carrie followed them on the road and took Marwan with her. By the time she got back, she had resolved to move closer to Amare's place and saw no point in having Marwan go back to St. Mary's. ''I remember coming by the house one day,'' Wilson says, ''and seeing Marwan siting around playing Sega. I said, 'Why are you not in school?' He just looked at me with a little smile.''
Even with the tutoring, Marwan struggled at St. Mary's, and perhaps it wasn't the best school for him. But another disruption seemed to be the last thing he needed.
After pushing Wilson out of the picture, Carrie set about dealing with her son's other personal connections, like his agent, John Wolf. Wolf had been an unlikely candidate to have landed a rookie as prominent as Stoudemire. But throughout his working life, Wolf has shown a knack for seeing business opportunities in hard-pressed pockets. He invested part of the money he made from representing Dee Brown, his first N.B.A. client, in a small chain of coin-operated laundries, and after selling that, bought a huge liquor store with a dozen cash registers in Minneapolis. Brown, who worked for the Orlando Magic after he retired and got to know the Stoudemire family, recommended Wolf to Amare.
In the time allotted to him, Wolf did an excellent job, skillfully steering Stoudemire to Phoenix, whose young team he thought was the best fit. And in a climate in which sneaker money was scarce for all but a handful of street-minded superstars, Wolf extracted from Nike a deal guaranteeing more than $1 million a year for three years. ''It wasn't a good contract,'' Wolf told me over the phone from his office at the liquor store. ''It was a great contract.''
But it wasn't good enough for Carrie Stoudemire, and perhaps in the wake of Nike signing this year's high schooler, LeBron James, to a $90 million contract, she's right. When she told Wolf to go back to Nike for more, Wolf remembered why he had invested his share of Dee Brown's Reebok money in those laundries and quit. According to someone close to the team, Wolf felt sufficiently abused to want to quit weeks before, but he had been talked out of it by the Suns. It is crucial for a team to have a buffer between it and the player so that it can exert influence over him without becoming the direct object of his contempt. For the Suns, the prospect of having to deal with Carrie every time they have an issue with Amare is terrifying.
Especially since, at this point, Carrie Stoudemire may be in a fouler humor than when she checked into Lowell Correctional. Despite the fairy-tale improvement in her family's fortunes, her four decades of personal catastrophe follow her everywhere she goes. In a brief phone interview, the only one she would allow, she summarized her outrage. ''My life,'' she said, ''is not a joke.''
In that same conversation, which took place shortly after she arrived in Phoenix, Carrie Stoudemire had already found plenty not to like about her son's new employers. ''I can't talk to you,'' she said, ''because I'll tell you the truth about these people.'' Besides, she said, she has to save her story for a major cable channel, which is planning a documentary on her life.
With Carrie Stoudemire ensconced in Phoenix and Hazell Jr. set to arrive in town as early as next year, those two troubled family members could become the most delicate challenges in Stoudemire's career. Unlike Eminem, who has been so unforgiving of his imperfect mom, Stoudemire sees every line on his mother's rap sheet as proof of her commitment to provide for her family. He defiantly refers to her as ''my role model,'' ''my heart and soul,'' and someone who ''was always there even when she wasn't'' and ''had my back through thick and thin.'' But what Stoudemire is thinking and what he tells reporters may not be the same. According to Wilson, who when last I spoke to him had begun spending time with Marwan and Carrie again, Stoudemire has already expressed interest in having his mother move to Florida or New York.
Just before the end of an early-winter practice, the Suns unlocked the doors to their pristine practice courts in the bowels of America West Arena and let in beat reporters for their routine look-see of the team. For the next 10 minutes, all that could be heard in this subterranean chapel of basketball was the squeak of sneakers and the pock of basketballs.
Working with a trainer, a shirtless Marbury strengthened his release by taking tiny two- or three-foot shots with a medicine ball. At another hoop, the team's rookie swingman, Casey Jacobsen, fired up three-pointers. On a third basket, Stoudemire, wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt, black Nikes and his trademark rubber band on his left wrist, was throwing up baby hooks, casual jumpers and finger rolls. He was bouncing up and down so effortlessly that it seemed as if the energy that propelled him upward, higher than perhaps any other player can go, was coming from right out of the floor.
In Lake Wales, Burney Hayes told me that for Amare the court became a sanctuary and the ball itself a tangible piece of salvation. ''She's a little bald-headed girl,'' Hayes said. ''She won't complain; she just sustain. Bounce her, and she comes back. All she wants is more.'' And watching Stoudemire gamboling around the court, skinny legs tapering up to a thick chest and huge arms, I could see why he was so upset about being banished from that high-school court. But now he had his own perfect court, and nobody was ever going to shoo him off it.
For Stoudemire, the court remains, as it probably always has been, a refuge from family turmoil. But Carrie, Hazell Jr. and Marwan gave Amare more than something to flee from. They not only gave him a desperate need to succeed, and to succeed quickly, but the precocious maturity to handle it when he did. By the time he was 13 and his arms and legs started morphing like a cartoon superhero's, he knew that his body was not only his own best hope but also the last and only chance for his mother and two brothers.
Safely ensconced in the league, Stoudemire quickly proved that he was a hard-nosed competitor, and by the time he scored 38 points against Kevin Garnett and the Timberwolves and then grabbed 21 rebounds against the Grizzlies, he had answered all the big questions. He was more than good enough, and his skills would translate into wins for a Suns team that went on to make the playoffs and even managed to take two games from the San Antonio Spurs in the first round. As far as basketball is concerned, the greatest suspense left is whether he will develop his left hand and a medium-range jumper. After all he has been through, it hardly matters how that part of the story turns out.
The question with something real riding on it is whether Stoudemire's success will be of lasting benefit to the beleaguered family members who did so much to inspire it. Amare can pay for all the things they have never had, but in the end, it may turn out that Carrie, Marwan and Hazell Jr. did more indirectly for Amare than his money can do for them. In their way, they prepared him for, and sped him toward, his future.
At the very end of the practice session, Amare stepped to the stripe for his daily dose of foul shots. For a player who goes to the basket as hard as Stoudemire does, foul shooting is important, and this year he only shot 66 percent. But at practice, he knocked them down like a seasoned pro. It would have been hard for anyone but an expert to spot the flaws. Clearly, there is nothing much wrong with any part of Stoudemire's game or his head, and his success has once again tilted N.B.A. priorities. Just ask Lebron James, the fatherless 18-year-old with an astounding vertical leap, whose mother bought him a Hummer with money she didn't have. Had it not been for Stoudemire, Nike would never have gambled $90 million to sign James to a sneaker deal, and the Cleveland Cavaliers would not be nearly so thrilled to be making him the No. 1 pick this week. Thanks to Stoudemire, talented American high-schoolers from the worst neighborhoods are just what N.B.A. general managers are looking for again.
Correction: August 3, 2003, Sunday An article on June 22 about the basketball player Amare Stoudemire misstated the population of Lake Wales, Fla., where he was raised. It is about 12,000; the population of the greater Lake Wales area is about 35,000.
Peter de Jonge is the author, with James Patterson, of the novel ''The Beach House.'' He last wrote for the magazine about sportscasters.