Ron Artest GQ Article from 2005 (long but great read)

I am so happy about this deal, I could cry. Ron Artest was my favorite player in the NBA not in a Rocket's uniform. I'm ecstatic about this trade man!! Anyway, this is a story from 2005 (right after the brawl) that is long as hell, but a great read. Artest is crazy for sure, but win or lose, this is going to be a fun season to watch!

http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_1487

Free Ron Artest!

The day of the 2005 NBA All-Star Game, Ron Artest—the league's best defensive player, the guy who would be in Denver playing in the all-star game right now if he hadn't gone charging into the stands after a fan who threw a beer at him, inciting the now infamous Brawl—is at home in Indianapolis, baking a cake. By Lisa DePaulo; photographs by Martin Schoeller

"It's an ice cream cake," says Ron Artest.

He pads over to the oven in socks with holes in them to check on his creation. "You never had an ice cream cake? See, first you make this..." He proudly shows me the empty box from the Pillsbury Moist Supreme Lemon cake mix that he whipped up this morning. "Then you put this..." Lined up on the counter is an array of cans: cream-cheese frosting, raspberry spread, pineapple spread, vanilla frosting. "This all goes in the middle, with the ice cream. I got strawberry ice cream, but then I put extra strawberries in it. Here, I'll show you." He opens the freezer door to show me the mashed-up ice cream he made, in a tinfoil pan. "Then you put the other cake on top, and more vanilla frosting, until you make it look real nice, and then we're done."

Is this a...recipe?

"Um, I guessed it." He smiles shyly. "This past Valentine's Day, for my wife, I just guessed it. Usually, every holiday or on birthdays, we get an ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins." But then he figured, Why spend all that money at Baskin-Robbins? (Things are a little tight this year, what with the $5 million he lost from getting suspended for the season.) "So I just tried to make it. And everybody said they liked it. They asked me to make it again, so I said okay." He giggles. "I hope you like it."

While Ron is in his kitchen baking, a party is going on in the rest of his house. In the living room, where one of his seven dogs has just deposited a large dump on the carpet, a group of Ron's buddies and cousins from Queensbridge—the projects where he grew up in New York—are mainlining Coronas and shooting the ****. (One of his friends later tells me that "there is a revolving door at the airport" of pals from the hood whom Ron imports weekly, paying their way to visit him in Indianapolis.) Out back in the "barn"—where Ron has his recording studio—another crowd of friends (some of whom admit they don't even know Ron Artest) are drinking his beer, though Ron does not drink. Lined up on a shelf in the barn are dozens and dozens of empty Hennessy bottles—the trophies of the knew-him-whens who've gained access to the home of an NBA superstar. Ron never complains about the people who hang around, whose livelihood depends on his success in the NBA—relatives, friends, friends of friends, so many that at one point ESPN The Magazine did a photo essay of all the people living off Artest's salary (there were thirty who posed). In fact, he says he's happiest when they're close by.

"Mommy!" He's at the sink now, washing collard greens and cleaning Perdue chicken with a paring knife.

"What, Ron-Ron?" His mother, Sarah Artest, a no-bull**** woman in a Rocawear T-shirt, skirt and black stockings, rushes into the kitchen.

"Mommy, how much of the yellow stuff do I gotta get off?"

Sarah takes the paring knife from her son and shows him how to scrape the gook off the chicken. "Thanks, Mommy," says Ron.

"I'm makin' Ron-Ron's favorite chicken," says Sarah.

When the chicken is clean, Ron assembles his cake, painstakingly covering it with gobs of canned frosting ("Does it look nice? You sure?"), then carefully places it in the freezer. In the next room, his buddies have the all-star-game festivities on the big screen, turned up to a zillion decibels. But Ron is in his own little zone. "We gonna have some good food tonight!" he says.

When everything is ready, Mommy Artest lays out her spread, and he checks on the cake.

"Oh man," he moans. "Damn!" This is unusual, because Ron Artest never curses—well, except for flipping the bird now and then on the court. But somewhere between making the collard greens and finishing the chicken and setting the table, the freezer broke, and the cake he spent all afternoon laboring over is a puddle of dripping icing and melted strawberry ice cream.

"I got a freezer that doesn't freeze!" he says. "This is supposed to be frozen!"

Then he cracks up laughing.

What was he thinking?

"When?" he wants to know.

That night, maybe?

"I was in control that whole night," he says. "That whole night, I was in control."

He is alone, in an office in Nashville—where he's come to meet with his new management team (and boy, did he need one)—sipping tea. And trying to explain, for the first time since it happened, why he did what he did that night in Detroit.

He's had four months to think about "the incidence," as he calls it. Four months to listen to sportswriters and commentators bloviate about what a monster he is, what a thug, what a disgrace to the NBA. Some of them called for Artest to be thrown out of the league. Others, no doubt aware that their jobs would be a lot less fun without Ron Artest to write about, felt it was sufficient to banish him for the rest of the season (seventy-two games). But this much everyone agreed on: What Artest did that night—charging into the stands after a fan who threw a cup of beer at him, setting off a near riot that has come to be known as the Brawl—seemed to crystallize everything scary about Ron Artest. Yes, in the past, Ron threw a television monitor, smashed a camera, hurled bottles of Gatorade and talcum powder and water. Hey, **** happens. But this—going after a fan—this was something special.

That night, Ron remembers, there was the usual bull**** from courtside fans. " 'Your mother is a ho,' that kind of stuff," he says. He'd gotten used to that, though it still pissed him off. "I was, like, Okay, some guy's calling my mother a ho. I probably should punch him in his face right now. No, you can't call my mother no ho. But we hear that everywhere, so I let it slide."

Then came the trouble with the Pistons' Ben Wallace. Though the Pacers were up by fifteen points with forty-five seconds to go, Artest, being Artest, commits a hard foul on a driving Wallace, who is none too amused. Wallace pushes Artest, hard, up around the neck, with two hands. Artest—all six feet seven inches, 250 pounds of him—goes flying backward. Everyone braces for a fight. But then Artest does the strangest thing. He doesn't retaliate, doesn't square off. He goes over to the scorer's table and lies down. Just sprawls out like it's nap time.

What was up with that?

"Ben Wallace was losing. He don't like to lose, so the best thing he could do is let his emotions out. I probably would have done the same thing." So he headed for the scorer's table and lay down because...he was just trying to chill? "I had to lie down. I figured, It'll be over soon." It was an odd moment to watch; all the commentators wanted to know, What is this weirdo doing now? But Ron says he knew that the crowd wanted him to react, to be Crazy Ron Artest again, and he was trying to get past all that. Plus, the Pacers were winning! "I was waiting for the game to be over with," he says. But then the beer came flying. Nobody had ever thrown a beer in his face before.

So what was going through his mind at that second?

"I was thinking, Whoever did it, let me go confront him. I could've backed off, but I chose not to, because I don't want people to think they can just throw stuff at me. That's all I was going to do: confront him. But my emotions kind of got the best of me."

Um, yeah. What happened next was nuts: Ron charging into the stands, Ron pushing, Ron swinging—but, as it turns out, hitting the wrong guy.

"See, the guy who threw the cup, I went past him. He hidded. So I confronted the [wrong] guy. And then John Green"—the guy who actually threw the beer—"he was holding me back. Then he started punching me in my face. And I'm thinking, All right, Ron, calm down. But then he starts punching me in my face! John Green. He should be on parole, he should be on probation. He should have to clean the Detroit arena by himself."

He leans in. "You want more tea?" And continues.

"You know John Green was a felon? He was a felon! And he was drinkin'. So he deserves to go back to jail. He deserves to go back to jail 'cause he lost my family five million. And he was a felon! So I took the blame for a felon. Basically."

And if he had to do it again?

"If someone punches me, I'm gonna punch him. Or somebody throws something at me, I'm gonna punch him. So I wouldn't have did...[long pause]...anything different. Because I didn't hurt nobody, and I didn't go up there with the intentions of hurting anybody. I went up there with the intentions of saying, 'Don't throw nothing at me. Don't throw no cup of beer at me.' "

That's all he wanted to do?

"And that's what I did. As I was going up there, [I'm thinking] Who threw it at me? Who threw it? I didn't go up there smacking people. I didn't hit nobody until they hit me. If anything, if I could have done anything different, I would not have my hands on the guy.... I wouldn't have pushed him...would have just went up there, just yapping and talking my piece."

So what exactly is he sorry for?

"I'm sorry that it happened. And when I seen that little kid crying on TV...man. That was bad. If my son was there, I would have been very upset about what happened, you know? That kids gotta be in the audience with these alcoholics and these felons. So I was kind of upset about that."

Clearly, he hasn't quite sorted all this out yet. But he will answer any question, and he will do so without the usual God platitudes offered up by "repentant" athletes (not to mention the kind of mea culpa the NBA would surely prefer). But like a 12-stepper who isn't sure which step he's gotten to yet, he can be wildly inconsistent—one minute contrite, the next not quite sure what the big deal is. In one breath, he will tell you that he's sorry—though not for what you think. In the next, he assures you that he would definitely do it again. The guy threw a beer at him!

"And nobody went home bloody, you know? People was hurt mentally and emotionally. But the good thing about it was, nobody was, uh...besides the one fan that went home on a stretcher—because he came to party; he was drunk—nobody really went home hurt with blood or a broken arm. So I feel good about that."

Until now, he only spoke out about the incident a few days later, most notably in an appearance with Matt Lauer on the Today show that was widely considered a disaster. He got a ration of **** for not being sorry enough, for smiling too much, for shamelessly plugging his new record label. "People said, 'Ron Artest, he went on TV and he didn't apologize.' I apologized like five times."

The night it happened, he went home and prayed. "Because, you know, I was real sad about what happened, and then the next morning I felt great."

What did he pray for?

"I just prayed, you know? I prayed for the little kid who was crying. I just prayed that, you know, I wish this never would have happened. I wish I would have reacted differently."

He cried once, the next day—when he was alone in his house, while his wife, Kimsha, was picking his kids up from school. He wept because "I felt like people were trying to end my career." So he cried, "but only for, like, two minutes."

Back in Nashville, Ron spends several hours with his new management team at Tri Star—a group that takes what they call a "holistic" approach to managing celebrities. That's for sure. Louise "Lou" Taylor, the head of the company, a warm but fiercely efficient brunet and Ron's new guru, will in the course of the next few days: deal with his real estate investments, edit his new rap song, manage his child-support payments (he fathered one of his children with another woman), arrange to have his children ferried to Toys 'R' Us, help him design T-shirts for his Web site, and—on hands and knees in Indianapolis—clean out his refrigerator with Clorox. Then she will order him to hire a housekeeper.

He spends the rest of his time in Nashville entertaining two of his four kids—Sade (pronounced say-dee), who's 7, and Ron-Ron, who's 5. It's unclear who is more excited by the day's itinerary (movies, ice cream, Chick-fil-A, more ice cream): the children or Ron Artest.

Kimsha, whom friends describe as his rock, is back in Queens, visiting her family, with the other children—Ron's infant daughter, Diamond Clear ("clear, like a diamond"), and Jeron, the 3-year-old he had with another woman when he and Kimsha were broken up. Ron has known Kimsha since he was 14, but they married only two years ago in June, when she was pregnant with Diamond. He cried through the ceremony. He says that their long estrangement several years ago was "the worst thing I ever did" off the court.

"I had to give him his space, to let him grow up to be a man," says Kimsha. But she always knew he'd come back to her. "Always. Always. I told him and I told her, yes I did. Oh, I got the stupid phone calls: 'He's with me.' Well, if he with you, Why you callin' me? I told her, 'You always keep it in mind: I'm home, and this is where he's gonna be.' " ("It took a long time," says Ron.)

He is getting Kimsha's name tattooed on his left finger, under his wedding band, and swears he is faithful, which could be a first in the NBA. In fact, he criticizes Kobe Bryant not for the alleged rape but for committing adultery. "I mean, he was married at the time, so that wasn't a good thing. To cheat on your wife with another? Uh-uh."

Ron is used to playing Mr. Mom. He says it's the upside to his suspension—having time to spend with his kids. The Artests do not have hired help. "Oh, no nanny," says Ron, spitting out the word like it's a profanity. "I like to be around, growing up with them and stuff, you know?" In many ways, they are growing up together.

Over pancakes at a Nashville diner, Sade, an amazingly poised 7-year-old ("I look spoiled, but I'm not"), explains how her father was so distraught after the Brawl that she gave him some advice. "I don't like that game at all," she says. "I just don't want to even see it again. But I told him, 'Stop thinking about it. Think about something happy. You can't hang on to this. You should think about happy thoughts and not sad.' Because he was really, really angry. That's what got him suspended."

Her father smiles at her. "You think so?"

"Yeah. But you know, you were being aggressive because you didn't want nobody hittin' at you! If they hittin' at you, you should be able to hit at them!"

"Drink your milk," says Ron.

And another thing, says Sade. "They shouldn't have suspended my father, because he was basically the only one who was playing right."

"She didn't learn this from me," says Ron.

Later, as the family leaves the movie theater, a fan approaches Artest. He asks for an autograph but warns Ron, "You don't want to know where I'm from."

"Indiana?"

"Detroit," says the fan.

"Awww, kids! Hit him!" Ron jokes to his children.

"Daddy," says Sade. "Stop being so crazy."

How Ron Artest got from Queensbridge to here is the stuff of urban legend. He was the kid who made it out of the biggest housing project in the country, who grew up watching his parents beat the crap out of each other, who had "anger issues" at the age of 8, who came to view basketball as his best way out—even though it would entrap him in more profound ways than any housing project ever could.

Why I'm rich and I still feel like I'm in a cage, he laments in one of his rap songs, titled "Not Easy."

In his early days in the NBA—which is to say four years ago, when he was 21 and playing for the Chicago Bulls—he gave so much money away that he almost went broke. "I think I made a million a year for three years, but I didn't have none of that after those three years," he says. "But it was cool because I was helping people. I'd rather have no money than have nothing to show for it."

Helping whom? Relatives, yeah. Friends, yeah. Their cars, rent payments, vacations. And that was on top of the scads he gave to charity. But it was more than that. "I used to walk around Chicago and drop, you know, hundreds, a couple hundred at a time, in homeless people's pockets and stuff. That's why a lot of homeless people know me. Like, even in Indiana, a lot of homeless people, they show me love, because I be taking care of them. I always said if I made it, I'd want to help. But money adds up, you know? A couple thousand here or there, it adds up."

Where the love—and the rage—can be traced back to, of course, is Queensbridge.

One day this winter, his brother Daniel, who would like to play professional sports (Ron is working on getting Daniel a tryout with the Indianapolis Colts), took me on a tour through QB, as they call it. The day we arrived, it was swarming with police officers who were about to bust 37 residents on drug charges ("I knew every single one of them," says Ron). Daniel showed me the courts where Ron used to shoot hoops, even on the ice in winter; all the streets where he got injured from broken bottles, jagged license plates, riding his bike down a flight of stairs (Ron would end up in the emergency room "exactly once a year," says his mother. "We would time it"); the community center, where he made his announcement that he would be leaving St. John's early for the NBA, after which his mother barbecued, out on the pavement, for 200 people ("300 deviled eggs, fifty pounds of potato salad..."); and the apartment they grew up in, the outside of which is still jet-black from the fire that destroyed it when he was a kid. Usually, says Daniel, there'd be more drug dealers on the corners, but what with the cops and all...

"Basically," says Daniel, "the way we grew up, it was roll or be rolled."

It's hardly a unique trajectory to the NBA, but it doesn't make it any less defining. So many people have tried to psychoanalyze Ron Artest—and not just in sports columns. He's been through anger management—at 13—and three Decembers ago he was court-ordered to attend twenty-six therapy sessions after leaving a threatening message on the answering machine of Jennifer Palma, the Filipina woman with whom he fathered Jeron.

Does he think he has an anger problem?

"I think growing up, how I grew up, molded me," says Ron, "made me flip out sometimes."

There were several seminal moments in Ron Artest's childhood.

He grew up watching his dad beat up on his mom. "It wasn't like a lot, but when it was, it was bad," he says. Later, he admits it would happen "like every night. But my mother would fight back, too," he says, almost proudly. "My mother got her licks in.... Everybody flipped off pretty fast. But not just in my house—in the whole neighborhood. People had tempers."

Sarah says she was beaten regularly. "Many, many, many times. One time I couldn't even put sunglasses over my eyes. I mean, very bad. But I did fight him back. Don't think he was just beatin' on me."

"Okay, yeah, that might've bothered him, you know?" says Ron Artest Sr. "I don't like to talk about it because it's negative and it's behind me. All I can say is, I've been with my fiancée for sixteen years and never laid a hand on her. It takes two to tango, and maybe he don't see that. She did some evil things to me; I did some evil things to her."

By all accounts, Ron Sr. never laid a hand on the kids and in fact was a good dad. "He was a lousy husband," says Sarah, "but he was a very good father. Always playing with them, doing things with them. And a hard worker." Even when they separated, he stayed close by to continue to raise his kids—plus three more of hers from a previous relationship. "If you could just cut off the part with me," says Sarah, "he'd have been the most perfect person in the world."

The kids remain devoted to him, and he to them. He's one of the few family members Ron does not fully support (he works the night shift as a security guard). On his answering machine, he proudly states: "This is Ron Artest Sr., father of NBA All-Star and Defensive Player of the Year Ron Artest, of the Indiana Pacers. Leave a message."

I asked Sarah what Ron, the eldest son, did when her husband hit her. "Oh, they was just kids," says Sarah. "They woulda got hurt trying to help me out. There was nothing they could do."

Later, I ask Ron the same question. What would he do when his mother was getting beaten? "Just watch." His eyes fill up. "I was too small to protect her." At least, that's what they tell him. He gets uncomfortable for the first and only time that we're together and admits he still feels a lot of guilt about this. "I wish I could have..." He composes himself. "I wish I could have stopped it."

When he was 13, after years of acting out—fights in school, suspensions from school; "I had a bad attitude; I had a bad temper"—and after his parents separated for good, he was sent by his teacher to anger-management therapy. "It was group therapy, and it was in the projects, so people know you goin' to therapy," says Ron. It was not the best way to be cool in the projects. "But I loved it," he says. He loved his therapist, who'd "get a bunch of us together who had tempers, and his big thing was, 'Things is not as bad as it seems.' So that kind of helped me, you know?"

Basketball redeemed him—at least in the eyes of those in the hood—and his rage fueled him on the court. He was relentless, determined. Even when Ron was young, it was clear that he might get the big ticket out. But he says what he really wanted to be was...a math teacher. "I did real good in math," he says. He thought it might be a nice life.

Around the time he was going to therapy, his family's apartment was burnt to ash; the fire was the result of some electrical problem. He lost all his sentimental things, but what he remembers most is how the family was moved into a temporary one-bedroom place and that it was "great." "It was about thirteen of us—in one bedroom." He had seven brothers and sisters. Plus some nieces and cousins. And his mom and dad, who had gotten back together briefly after the fire. The entire floor was covered with twin mattresses. "It was like a big bed. Then we just had more mattresses. We put one going into the kitchen. Then one going this way to the bathroom. And one that's coming this way to the living room. My mother and father had the pullout couch, so they had the nice bed."

"It was the greatest," he says. "It was less arguing, for some reason, more joking. We was just so close."

Then, when he was 15 and already a basketball sensation, his baby sister died. Her death—at 2 months, from SIDS—crushed him. Years later he sings about her in his rap songs. He has her name, Quanisha, tattooed on his arm. He was in Arizona, in a basketball tournament, when he got the phone call. He flew home in time for the funeral. "I just couldn't play," he says. "And then I seen her. It was an open casket. There was, like, this little baby in there. It was unbelievable, unbelievable."

The baby was buried with the first MVP plaque that Ron had earned. His mother held him as he laid it in the casket. Every year on Quanisha's birthday, the Artests gather to release white balloons at 6:01 p.m., the time she was born.

To this day, her death haunts him. "I wish I never went on the basketball trip," he says. "All the time, I wish I didn't go. I didn't get the chance to hold her as much, kiss her as much, you know? And I mean, maybe I could have did something" if he'd been home that night. Maybe, he says, he'd have heard something or been able to save her. "I should have been there."

He doesn't say it, but it hangs in the air. Yet another time that the Great Defender failed to protect his loved ones.

Later, he returns to the topic of the Brawl. "Nobody's 100 percent strong, you know? At the time, when they put the whole blame on me—if I would have crumbled, it would have hurt my family. I didn't have time to really show too much sadness, because I had a lot of family I got to, you know, support. I had a household to run."

Back in Indianapolis, Ron wants to show Lou the new house he bought next door. He hasn't even seen it yet, but he bought it because it was next door, and he wants to move more of his family to Indianapolis. He already bought a house here for his mother, and he wants to move Kimsha's parents out next.

He pulls up to the house in his used SUV ("I only buy used cars; better value"), and he and Lou and his father-in-law, Nathan, case the joint. It's a bare-bones house with rickety cabinets and rust stains all over the kitchen floor.

"Looks like the pipes burst, Ron," says Lou.

"Oh man, they were telling me to put the heat on, and I didn't. I forgot. I guess that's why it busted like that. I messed up."

While Lou takes a look around, Ron turns to me. "This is a nice house, though." His father-in-law concurs. "There's another bedroom downstairs."

Lou returns. "Ron?"

"What do you think?"

"I'd bulldoze it."

"Really?" asks Ron. He looks a little shaken.

"Really, Ron."

"Is that expensive?" asks Ron. "To bulldoze?"

"It's cheaper to tear it down and rebuild." Lou explains that it would also add more value to his property.

"Really? Well...okay." Out of her earshot, he whispers, "I wasn't gonna do anything. I would just, you know, wipe it up a little."

Ron decides he needs to see Doris.

Doris is his 78-year-old neighbor, the one he recorded a rap song with. The sportswriters had a field day with that. How weird is this guy?

"Ronnie, honey!" says Doris, throwing her arms around him and smothering him with kisses. Ron giggles. They sit on the couch, in front of the table with white doilies and angel statues, holding hands.

"I love this boy," says Doris, "like he's one of my own." She's a white woman, with soft white curls. She explains how they first met. She brought a pistachio cake to the door, to welcome the new neighbors, and a six-foot-seven-inch black man answered. They became friends. Then, one day, she showed Ron her karaoke machine, and they started singing together. "She sang real good," says Ron, so he asked her to help him record a song. Doris thought she'd died and gone to heaven. Who knew, she says, that Ron Artest would fulfill a dream she'd had for sixty years: to be a professional singer. In 1944 she was picked for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra but couldn't take the gig because she had to follow her husband.

"I would do that," says Ron.

He'd give up his career for his wife?

"Definitely."

"He has a lot of tenderness. And kindness," says Doris.

"She did it in one take, too," says Ron.

"Oh, honey," says Doris. "The person I see in Ron—I don't know if anybody else sees it or not, but I do. Now, I've never seen him angry, other than..." She points to the TV. Both she and Ron crack up laughing.

So what did Doris think of the Brawl?

"First of all, I will probably cry." Ron pats her hand. "But when Wallace fouled him the first time, if I could have gone through the screen, I would've. Honey, that was not an easy or light foul. It knocked him off his feet and he slid across the floor. But Ronnie got up, composed himself, and he went on with the game. I was so angry at that man. And that fan. If people are going to the games to drink and carry on, they should be caged, just like wild animals. You get your beer, there's your cage over there; go get in it. It's the liquor," says Doris.

"Right," says Ron.

"And I was so mad at that David whatever-his-name-is [Stern, the NBA commissioner]. I have yet to figure out how one man can make such drastic decisions for a family. I will never understand that. And, by golly, they just better not ask me. In all seriousness, I haven't quite gotten over it yet. And I don't know that I ever will."

It is late at night, back at Ron's house. The remains of the failed cake sit on the counter. His buddies are still partying—and watching basketball—in the other room. Ron is mopping the kitchen floor. He does this while he sits on a stool in the kitchen—his arms are so long he doesn't even have to stand to reach the corners.

He is taking this time to explain his other "incidences." There've been so many, Ron admits, that's probably why his latest suspension was so severe: He was a repeat offender.

Again, Ron is confused about how to talk about all this, torn between showing mushy feelings about his episodes and being the Great Defender, Ron Artest. So much of his success in the NBA is because he's an intense mother****er, absolutely relentless as a player, an all-star who plays every night like he's still fighting for a roster spot. It's what made him beloved—and vilified. Does he really want to come off like a wuss to all his opponents? "That's one reason I think I didn't really show a lot of remorse. People, they trying to break me down. And I really got to show some strength, you know? I can't really show too much weakness...."

He keeps mopping.

He starts with one of his more infamous flip-outs, the time he nearly fought Pat Riley, then coach of the Miami Heat.

"That was just during the game, you know? Riley says something to me, and I reacted at it. I didn't let it slide. I went back at him. Got in his face. And then, one time, a fan threw a quarter at me, so I stuck my middle fingers up at the fan. One time."

He keeps mopping.

"Only a couple things I did that there's no excuse for. Like, we was losing by thirty points in Minnesota, and I threw a water bottle into the stands, and the fan caught it. That was the only thing there was no excuse for. I should have never did that. I coulda hurt somebody."

Um, didn't you smash a television camera at the Garden?

"Oh, yeah. The Knicks game. We lost, and I was upset because we lost. There's, like, no other way to explain it. We lost, I was upset, I took the camera off the cameraman and just broke it." He smiles. "I guess that was pretty like, you know, overboard. But I didn't hurt nobody."

I ask him about the report that they had to remove "all throwable objects" from the scorers' table in Indianapolis because of him.

"Oh yeah, they did. That's true." He laughs. "I'd be throwing, like, you know how they have powder? And microphones? Like, anytime something would go wrong, I'd rip the microphone out. Or the powder, I'd throw it on the court. Or like one time, I kinda exploded and threw Gatorade on the court. But not anymore. Actually, I'm not gonna say not anymore. But I'm doing it very, um, minimal. It's getting better."

And the time he broke Michael Jordan's ribs in an off-season practice session?

"Oh yeah. That was by mistake."

He squeezes out the mop. "I'm trying to correct this stuff."

He carefully places what's left of his ice cream cake back in the freezer—which Lou has somehow fixed. Then he sits back on the stool and says there's one thing he should have made clear. "When they said I wanted to retire to do a rap album? That's not true." He is referring to the comment he made at the beginning of this season that infuriated the sports world. How dare Ron Artest, making $6 million a year to play a game, want to take time off to cut a frickin' rap album?

So what part wasn't true?

"Honestly? At that time, I wanted to get out. At the time. There was a lot of stress."

He explains how his grandmother had just died, and when he saw all his family at the funeral he started to wonder what was important to him. Things hit home. "It was pretty bad. So I just—I was really ready to move out of this whole lifestyle, just go home and maybe get a little apartment and just have a different lifestyle." He thought maybe he could get a real job. That's why, he says, he applied for that job at Circuit City.

When Ron Artest filled out a Circuit City job application—after signing a $3 million contract with the Chicago Bulls—the sportswriters howled, of course. How weird is this guy?

"I just wanted, you know, to work. I tell my wife, I wanna get a job," he says. A real job. "When I first got in the NBA, I was a little overwhelmed and stuff." He just wanted, you know, a normal life. He explains how he was hanging out at the Chicago Circuit City every day anyway, "and the boss liked me. So I said, you know, Why not work there? I had lots of free time. It would have been fun. Plus, I would have got, you know, like 15 percent off, or something."

So he applied for a minimum-wage job, listing as his current employer "the Chicago Bulls." And then it got out in the press, and that was that. "That was bad."

What was bad?

"I couldn't take the job."

His kids rush into the kitchen. They want to watch Shark Tale again. Ron tells them it is past their bedtime, and he'll be right up to tuck them in.

When he's alone again, I ask him if he still wants out.

"Oh, no," he says. "My goodness. That was a tough time, but I have some good family support, and they helped me get through it. Which was definitely needed at the time." He says he intends to play in the NBA for at least twenty seasons. He wants to win a championship, at least one. There is nothing he loves more than basketball.

And that retirement thing?

He's over that.

"Ron-Ron!"

His friends and relatives are calling. The all-star game is over, and they're hungry again.

Lisa DePaulo is a GQ correspondent.