Growing Pains

Brown looks stricken.

"Squid," he repeats.

"You should have just let him eat it," Ferrell says with a laugh.

What Brown knows, and what he does not, has been a source of continual surprise for the Wizards, and they have not always been amusing surprises, either. The fact is, when Jordan, in his role as the team's chief executive, and Coach Doug Collins decided to make a 19-year-old fresh from his senior prom at Glynn Academy the No. 1 draft pick, they had no idea what they were actually getting themselves into. Isiah Thomas, the head coach of the Indiana Pacers, tried to tell them. "You're going to be shocked," Thomas said. "He won't know a thing about basketball."

Basketball was the least of it. With Brown, the Wizards have found themselves in the business of child rearing, of caring for a 6-foot-11 baby-man who has required far more careful handling and feeding than they bargained for.

He fooled them. The Wizards' youngest player only looked fully formed. The problem was Brown's deceptive physique; he seemed so ready-made. He was beautiful, they all agreed, your eye couldn't help but go to him, in everything he did, just picking up the ball. He was lightning quick for a big man, and he could handle the ball, which meant he could make a play the length of the floor. "Skills people dream about," Collins says. When he worked out against fellow high schooler Tyson Chandler, he had no conscience whatsoever, which was what they liked most; he was reckless and unschooled and he decimated Chandler in one on one, and oh, they'd seen things like this before, hadn't they, and what it was, well, it was the real thing.

And he seemed so level-headed, smart and self-assured. "If you draft me, I'll never disappoint you," he told Jordan.

"He's mature, articulate, he's 6-11, and got all this talent, and you think he's ready to help us immediately," Collins says. What they couldn't see was the inside of him. The lungs that were underdeveloped. The softness that came from never having been really pushed, from not having lived alone in a big city, from never having been away from his mother. "Inside, he's mush," says his youth pastor from Brunswick, the Rev. John Williams.

There was the time they discovered that he was eating Popeyes fried chicken for every meal, including breakfast, because he didn't really know how to grocery-shop. The sports management firm that represents Brown, SFX, assigned Richard J. Lopez, a 36-year-old business manager, to shepherd him. Lopez found that he essentially became a parent.

Lopez took Brown to a Giant supermarket and helped him fill a cart with food. Then Lopez drove Brown home to his rented apartment in Alexandria and hard-boiled a dozen eggs for him and put them in the refrigerator.

One morning before a Wizards game, Brown called Lopez, and said, "I have nothing to wear. Everything's dirty."

Lopez knew Brown had a closet full of new suits -- he had helped hang them there. "Kwame," he explained, "you have to take those suits to the dry cleaners." That was fine, Brown said, but he didn't know how to do that, and he still didn't have anything to wear.