DURHAM, N.C. _ Rasheed Wallace drove around to the front of the high school, jumped out of his Ford Bronco.
"What's good, old head?" Wallace said to the man stepping out of a car in the parking lot. "You all hungry?"
A basketball game had just ended, a game Wallace had coached. Up in the top corner of the Charles E. Jordan High bleachers, across from the opposite bench _ as out of the way as you could get and still be in the building _ Wallace's own high school coach from Simon Gratz in Philadelphia, Bill Ellerbee, had sat with his former Gratz assistant, Roland Wharton. They'd taken a ride down from Philly that day to see their guy do his thing.
Nobody in the building knew the man in the top row had once coached the top-ranked high school team in the nation, with Wallace, the national player of the year, at center. Down here, history starts when Wallace became a North Carolina Tar Heel, playing for Dean Smith, even if it was before all these Jordan High players were born.
Sure, they were hungry.
Follow the Bronco _ the one with the best-personalized license plate in the history of Ford Broncos ... IMNOTOJ _ and understand that for Wallace, the winding road still goes back to Gratz. Rasheed can think back to when he started high school, a couple of growth spurts from his NBA 6-foot-11, how this Coach Ell was serious about basketball and all, but that was his job.
"When I was there, 'OK, Mr. Ell just helping,' or 'Mr. Ell just doing what he was supposed to do,' " Wallace said.
Now, Wallace uses words such as father figure, friend, caretaker, giver. Now, Wallace is the one passing out JV and varsity game jerseys he'd washed that morning, making sure the guys have a pregame sandwich wrap (but not two).
"I'd forgotten all this," Ellerbee, now 77 years old, said the next day as he leaned against a row of weights watching Wallace pass out the jerseys before the JV went upstairs to play and the varsity went into a classroom for a film session.
There are people inside Philadelphia basketball who look back and say nobody could truly control Wallace for the rest of his life, yet this man at Simon Gratz High School could get him to run cross-country in the fall and then run spring track.
Ellerbee noted that Wallace said after his senior basketball season, "I don't play for you anymore, so I'm not running track." Except the track team needed him, so Wallace ran. Ellerbee thought he had the fastest 200 time in the city that year.
"He responded to coaching," Ellerbee said on the car ride down. "That's being coachable."
Ellerbee walks a little slower these days, and Wallace's dark beard is flecked with gray. He is among the Ellerbee alumni coaching major college ball (Aaron McKie, most prominently, at Temple); Division II hoops; junior college girls; high school boys and girls; AAU ball; Simon Gratz itself.
Jordan High players know that when their coach is talking to them, he's locked in, eyes sometimes widening. The guys on his team say they can relate to Rasheed _ "a personal standpoint, not just player to coach," one said.
Even Wallace's attire away from his game khakis and school shirt point to a sense that it's all right to get some enjoyment from sports. More than a week after the Super Bowl, Wallace was wearing Chiefs gear two straight days: hat, shirt, necklace in Chiefs colors with a Chiefs pendant. That's been his team, he said, since he was a kid.
"When I got interested in football, nobody was cheering for Kansas City," Wallace said. "Kansas City was trash. I said, 'That's my team.' Then what happens? We get Joe Montana and Marcus Allen ..."
Sometimes, his players Google things. When Kobe Bryant died, "a sad moment," Wallace said. "Some of the guys were on their little TVs _ call them phones _ and they saw the (Nike) commercial I did some years back. 'Oh, Coach, I didn't know you were in a commercial with Kobe.' "
"I knew he was an NBA champion," said Joaquin Davis, a senior forward who has signed a letter of intent to play Division I football at North Carolina Central. "Already knew that off the rip. He was a legend at UNC, so I already knew that. I also knew that he got known for a lot of techs ... "
Yes, Wallace showed up with a certain mythology that didn't require extensive Googling. These guys trying out for his team also already knew all about "Ball don't lie," Wallace's famous credo, a belief in a kind of basketball karma.
"Playing in the neighborhood, I always say that," Davis said.
If you take Wallace's oath to its margins, go past a player missing free throws because there shouldn't have been a foul called in the first place ... take it right here, a 45-year-old man from North Philadelphia who played 16 seasons in the NBA realizing how maybe his own gifts now can be used in simple ways, personally drying up a wet spot on the court, constantly yelling "Hands!" at his teenage players.
"Trying to teach them how to play this game the right way, not how they see it on TV," Wallace said.
"He's not doing it for the money," his old coach said.
Wallace is kind of applying "Ball don't lie" to his larger endeavors. This part can get lost in the mythology: He always was known as a great teammate.
"It can go a lot deeper than the actual statement itself," Wallace said of his credo. "When the ball don't lie, you can look at it as, OK, if I put that hard work in with shooting, what's going to happen? The ball is going to go in more. If I'm doing a lot of hard work, in the gym, in the weight room, I'm putting that hard work in _ then throughout your career, that ball is not going to lie. It can mean many things."
The original meaning, the one Wallace used so many times during his NBA days, still holds. During the game, one of Rasheed's guys blocked a shot. A whistle blew.
"Oooooh," Rasheed yelled out. "Way to be there. Good block."
The first free throw missed. Someone called out, "Ball don't lie." Was that a student? Someone on Wallace's bench?
"Oh, yeah, I said it," Wallace said later. "I still say it all the time."
After this one was over, his team surviving to stay in the fight for a playoff spot, his athletic director called out to Wallace in the hallway, thanking him for telling his guys during his last timeout that they couldn't lose if they kept their heads and avoided a technical.
"Thanks for that," the AD said. "Things were getting chippy out there."
Stop right there. Send that one to the NBA league office _ Rasheed Wallace being thanked for calming things down.
The AD was right. In the game, one of the head coaches had gotten a technical ... the other team's coach. Other technicals had been called. An assistant coach. Players from both teams. There were technicals in the girls' game played just before, the same refs working that one. Seven technicals in all.
Just not Rasheed. ... One ref did tell him from across the court, "Sit down."
Rasheed said back: "Ref the game."
While no official records are kept, Wallace reportedly does have the single-season NBA record of 40 technical fouls, which could be one of those records never to be broken. The refs seeing Rasheed now know all this. The coaches talk about it with the players, how the referees don't like Wallace.
"OK, my funniest tech I ever got in the NBA was for looking at a ref," Wallace said. "My techs here, I got a tech for calling a timeout ..."
In his telling, for the ref a couple of feet away from him not acknowledging his requests for a timeout, until he stepped on the court ... bam, tech. His AD was right there, he said, saw the whole exchange.
He got one other T, Wallace said, from the same ref, as it happens, for trying to suggest the refs watch for an opposing player kicking his legs out on 3-pointers.
He knows his reputation accompanies him into the smallest gyms.
