The NBA's Age-Old Dilemma

In a way, everything seemed to be a coded message to the kid. There were messages hidden in the streamers that shot from the ceiling, the ones that he didn't get to feel drifting upon his shoulders. There were messages in the fireworks that sparked upward in bright colors he didn't get to see. And there were the messages sent to him by his teammates, some of them stated and some of them left unstated, in the way they won without him.

The Washington Wizards have played themselves into a future. They're a young team getting better by the season and by the second, a team that improved even in the span of a best-of-seven playoff series against the Chicago Bulls. And then there is Kwame Brown, who missed it all because he is still ostensibly the Wizards' youngest player, lagging behind while the rest of them go about maturing as a team, and who is in danger of becoming a poster child for an NBA age limit, a walking cautionary advertisement against drafting teenagers.

When the Wizards begin their series against the Miami Heat and Shaquille O'Neal, they will again be without Brown, suspended for the rest of the season for a juvenile lack of professionalism. The Wizards are still waiting for Brown to grow up, and wondering if he ever will. But the larger question is what NBA teams expect when they go into the business of child-rearing. The Wizards' difficult job with Brown can be summed up in a single phrase. "It's parenting," says NBA Commissioner David Stern.

"It's sad because this is when we could really use him," Antawn Jamison said. "He has a big body and he could've played and made a difference. We needed him. But we've just got to find a way to do without him. It's hard for a moment when you think about it, because you wish everyone could have enjoyed it. He could have gained a lot of confidence and experience, and it's not going to happen. We still love him, and I wish he could come back. I hope he's learned that things happen for a reason. I have all the belief in the world that he'll finally get it. And I hope I'll be with him when he does."

It's tempting to blame someone for Brown's predicament, whether Michael Jordan for making him the No. 1 pick, or former coach Doug Collins for berating him, or Brown himself. The anger toward Brown from the crowds at MCI Center has been palpable; spectators are angry because the commitment you make when you jump straight to the NBA from high school is to grow up faster than other people. You sign on the dotted line to do that. But what if you can't? What if there is no one to blame for Kwame Brown?

Take the title of NBA draft pick away from Brown. Don't think of him as a multimillionaire professional athlete; don't think about his 7-foot height, or build, or promise. Let's examine his behavior separate from all that. The pouting self-absorption. The hypersensitivity to criticism, or any imagined slight. The insistence on respect, and yet the stupid misjudgments, from a scuffle in a bar, to speeding in his car.

All of these behaviors look a lot less aggravating when you don't superimpose "NBA draft pick" on them. Instead, they can be placed squarely under one heading: twenty-something kid doing stupid things in the grip of a prolonged adolescence.

Brown is essentially good-natured, talented and tremendously intelligent. He is also still, partly, a boy. This is not an insult to Brown -- nor is it a suggestion that he should be excused for his behavior. It's simply the reality of the situation, and it's a reality NBA teams have to address better than they have so far. Either they should pass an age limit, and quit drafting Kwame Browns, or they better start reading some parenting books, and bone up on their Sociology 101 and developmental psychology while they're at it.

If they did, they might better understand what they're dealing with. One of the things they'd discover is this: Increasingly, sociologists recognize that adolescence is a not a neat timeline segment that ends at 18 or 21, but instead is amorphous and can extend well into a person's twenties and that other ambiguous stage called "early adulthood." Sociology "is not our business," Stern says. NBA officials can't solve the intractable problem of how to turn children into professionals without half or wholly ruining them. Nor can they persuade teams not to play the lottery on schoolboys in hope of finding the next LeBron James, or persuade those schoolboys to turn down millions of dollars. That leaves just one option: an age limit.

"Players aren't going to walk away from the pressure and the promise, and teams aren't going to walk away from the potential," Stern says. "So we wind up trying to legislate it."

It's of course impossible not to contrast the behavior of Brown with that of Gilbert Arenas, his 23-year-old peer who grew up in basketball the old-fashioned way, playing collegiate ball at Arizona. All Arenas did this week was lead his team and do whatever he could to protect Brown. He fibbed for him and then faced public embarrassment for it, he called and checked on him, and he included him in an informal workout at MCI Center.

Arenas was still loyally pleading Brown's case after the game. "You'd never know it, but he's happy for us and he's cheering us on," Arenas said. "He's part of this team. He knows he made some bad decisions and some selfish decisions. But he's still here and working out, on the off chance that he can come back."

The mysterious progress toward manhood can't be legislated, or regulated -- it can only be encouraged. The hope is that Brown is not locked into his current state, but will grow into a wholly formed person. The villains of Brown's past are gone. Doug Collins and Michael Jordan are no longer here, screaming, "When are you going to grow up ?" In their place are the calm and patient Eddie Jordan and a host of teammates issuing a simple invitation: Join us.

Wouldn't it be lovely if Brown, as a grown man, would respond by saying the following: I'd like to start here, and now, and I understand that it won't be easy, or instant.

"It's not about what he's learned," Arenas says. "It's what he's going to learn. This is what he's going to learn -- and it's going to make him grow up a little faster -- you have to fall before you can grow."

One of the final passages to adulthood is the central recognition that the future consists of more than the next 10 minutes, or 10 days. It also consists of the recognition that when you reach a speed of 120 mph in your car or drive drunk or don't show for practice, it's not about what you might do to your invincible and autonomous self but what you might do to others. That a mistake, while regrettable, is not anything you ever have to repeat again. That every act is redeemable and that the self is not permanent but marvelously supple, and that the days ahead are a blank gift in which a person can remake himself in a moment through a single realization, in any fashion he pleases. A fresh start is not something you can demand from others or find via geography, but have to find within.