The Story of 0

"I said, 'Hey, look, say no more,'" recalls Gilbert Sr., who was a four-hour drive away in Tampa. "I'll be down there."

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When his father arrived, Gilbert slung a plastic bag with three pieces of clothing in it over his shoulder and jumped in the car.

He would never return to Apartment 9 in the Town Park Plaza North Condominiums in the Overtown section of Miami, and he would not see his mother for 18 years.

For the next three years, Gilbert lived in the house his father had grown up in on Cherry Street in West Tampa. His grandmother, Fannie Lee Arenas, raised him while Gilbert Sr. tried unsuccessfully to forge an acting career. When Gilbert was 7, his father had a romantic notion of going to Hollywood and becoming a huge star. Without an agent and armed only with an industry guide that he used to locate studios, Gilbert Sr. and his young son wound up homeless for three nights in Burbank, sleeping in the blue Mazda RX-7 hatchback he had driven across the country.

Gilbert Sr. eventually got a job at an office furniture store and was able to move with his son into the Brookstree Apartments in Van Nuys, where they lived for several stable years until Gilbert's emergence as a basketball player.

ARENAS'S HIGH SCHOOL COACH, HOWARD LEVINE, handed me a dozen photos and two DVDs this past March, saying, simply, "This is who Gilbert was."

We had just finished eating at a Chinese restaurant on a rainy night in Dominguez Hills, Calif., where Levine had performed in a Frank Sinatra tribute band, replete with tux and tails. "It's what I do," he said, as he unfastened his bow tie.

He recalled the first time he saw Arenas play in 1996, during a summer league game. "The first 10 minutes, there was this incredible explosion," he said. "I'd seen it maybe once or twice before in my life. And this lateral movement that was smooth. It was not jerky or anything that came from a 14-year-old kid. He was probably only a half-inch taller than me, maybe 5-9 1/2. But I knew."

Levine immediately pulled Arenas into a vacant corridor outside the gymnasium. "I don't know you from Adam, Gil," he recalled saying to Arenas. "I don't know your background or anything else about you. But watching you play, I know if you really work at this thing, you have a shot at the NBA. I'm not going to give you that line to make sure you play over here. I've seen a lot of basketball players over the years, but I've never seen one like you. If you put your mind to it and work at it, you can play in the NBA."

Arenas says now that Levine was so earnest that he had no reason to doubt him.

"In my mind, I was like, 'Really? I could be in the NBA? Cool. I mean, wow.' Who says that to someone at that age?"

Levine became a seminal figure in Arenas's development. Besides Gilbert Sr., he was the first person who understood and appreciated Arenas's talent and potential. That set him apart from most other high school coaches in Southern California.