chris andersen wife
Chris Andersen was going to purchase his mother a firm. They would build it right in the centre of the 10 acres she had in rural God-knows-where Texas. He said he would buy her a Lamborghini, too. She laughed at that. If he only helped her pay for her meds, that would exist enough. This is what they dreamed most. A life in which they didn't have to struggle. A life in which she wouldn't have to push a janitor's broom or tend bar, which i of her Harley buddies owned.
Linda Holubec was there that Nov night in 2001, when the Denver Nuggets chosen her son with the news that they were signing him to a deal that would stop his vagabond lifestyle. They were sitting in a hotel entrance hall in Fayetteville, N.C., about to lath a van leap for some small-scale-league outpost. She would never have to lend him money for groceries or co-sign for another machine again. They had made it.
For almost his entire life they had been inseparable. She held him for hours and wiped his tears the day his father walked out on them. She sat beside him as he got his first tattoo on his 18th altogether. She scraped together tip money to travel to the far side of the world to scout him play basketball in gyms and then smoky her spectacles would fog up.
Now they were bound for Denver, and she couldn't wait to hug Nuggets GM Kiki Vandeweghe. They didn't know much about pro basketball game, only they knew they'd be rich. And they had done it together. An improbable journeying from the backwoods of Texas, where kids are more likely to become hooked on meth than play AAU ball, had reached its stop betoken.
Simply iv years subsequently, Linda's world collapsed.
Ane of Linda's friends called her subsequently seeing the words that would change her life forever slowly crawl along the bottom of the idiot box screen.
"Something happened with Chris," the voice said over the phone. Andersen had been disqualified from the NBA on Jan. 25, 2006, for violating the league's anti-drug policy past testing positive for a banned substance. He didn't have the backbone to call his mother and interruption the news. It was the spectacular finale to a down screw that began the moment Andersen scribbled his name on an official contract.
Just the door to redemption swung wide open two years afterward. On March 4, the NBA reinstated Andersen, and his former squad, the New Orleans Hornets, signed him to a contract for the residuum of the season. Linda cried both tears of joy and pain. She was happy her boy had made it. Again. But there was something else that made the news of his reinstatement almost as difficult to accept as his expulsion: the fact that Linda Holubec and her son accept not spoken in about 3 years.
During his beginning four seasons in the NBA, Andersen was known for his wildly athletic dunks and reckless intensity. He hadn't developed any real moves to speak of, and even a 10-foot pull-up jumper was sick-brash for him. But what he lacked in skill he made up for with a flooring burn down-inducing mode of play and an arsenal of eccentricities that won over fans leaguewide. The decibel level at home games soared when he checked his human-wrecking-ball human activity into the game.
Fans wore shaggy blonde wigs and imitated his signature Birdman paw gesture past interlocking their thumbs and flapping their fingers whenever Andersen threw down one of his high-flying nonetheless lovably clumsy dunks. He never averaged more 7 points or 6 rebounds in a season, simply seeing that toothy grin later he crashed into the stands trying to salvage a ball he had no shot at was worth the cost of access.
And Linda loved information technology only as much as anyone. But when the game was over and he disappeared into the tunnel, fans couldn't see what she could. That Andersen was unable to turn off who he was. That the circle of unscrupulous characters entering his world was bleeding him dry. That an NBA paycheck was like nitroglycerin in his pocket. She may have raised him to raise hell, but she as well taught him to say when.
Only Andersen had passed his breaking bespeak. For the starting time fourth dimension, his mother couldn't save him. And they would pay the price equally.
January. 25, 2006:
Hornets omnibus Byron Scott blew his whistle signaling the end of practice. Players broke off into pairs to shoot the customary postpractice complimentary throws. Shooting 47 percent from the line, this was a daily drill Andersen couldn't beget to miss.
general manager Jeff Bower had sat through exercise that twenty-four hours. He came down out of the stands and motioned for Scott, and then whispered in his ear. Scott, in turn, called Andersen over to the sideline. The results of his contempo drug examination had come up back from the league. Bower didn't take to say a word; Andersen knew he had tested positive. They spoke for three or four minutes. Andersen slouched a fleck and looked to the floor. Then he immediately left the gym and cleaned out his locker.
Scott had started to suspect something when Andersen regularly began missing practices and shootarounds. He thought he'd looked pale only chalked it upward to harmless late-night partying. All the trainers would tell him was that he had "flu-like symptoms." Scott had planned to talk to him, only now it was as well tardily.
The story of Chris "Birdman" Andersen, the NBA's wild child who pushed himself over the edge, cannot be separated from that of the adult female who raised him equally an extension of herself.
A sometime basketball player in high school, now on the other side of 50 and standing a pilus over 6 anxiety, her oval confront is accented past soft features and a warm, droning Southern drawl. Her two-dozen tattoos, including permanent cherry scarlet lips and blackness eyeliner, are a product of her days running with the notorious Bandidos biker gang. Though polite and maternalistic -- "Tin I go you some tea?" she frequently asks -- her charmingly rough edges and tough-girl disposition served her well amongst the double crossers and miscreants that tend to populate a hardscrabble life.
Linda Ogle was raised in the shadow of the mist in the Smoky Mountains of Gatlinburg, Tenn., by parents who were as well Harley Davidson-riding free spirits -- Jack, a carpenter, and Kate, a waitress at a local diner.
When she was 8, her father put her behind the bike of his '54 Chevy and taught her to navigate winding mountain roads. He would sit down on the dorsum of his Grunter and let Linda piece of work the clutch and throttle equally they burned up the interstate. At ten, she fired her offset gun. The recoil of the .45 put her on her backside.
When the carpentering dried upwards, Linda's father enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to a base in Long Beach, Calif. She adapted to California easily, learning to surf after buying a lath at a garage sale for $25. When her father left for a tour in Vietnam, she decided on a career in the armed services, hoping to go a registered nurse and see combat. She got a job at Port Hueneme, just northward of Malibu, serving food in the mess hall.
1 day a tall, smooth-talking corrections officer named Claus Andersen came through her line. Andersen, who had emigrated from Denmark, oft would talk about his faraway adventures and persuaded Linda to move in with him. Three months afterwards, they were married.
Dec. 12, 2005:
The first thing you notice virtually Chris Andersen is the hair. Every bit soon equally he emerges from the locker room at the Sawyer Centre, the Hornets' temporary practice facility on the campus of Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma City, information technology overtakes yous. The rowdy, shoulder-length blond locks cover his face up, Cousin Itt-manner.
"Whassup, pimp?" he says with a crooked smile, holding out a fist. That's the second thing you notice, the jolting-but-refreshing alloy of unpolished Southern amuse, blueish-collar ethos and childlike enthusiasm that has endeared him to everyone from his hip-hop-loving teammates to the workaday, F-150-driving sports fan.
He's instructed by a team official that he's next upward to sign a stack of Christmas ornaments. He uncaps a silvery Sharpie and scribbles his signature on 71 orange and regal ornaments in 90 seconds. The 72nd is smashed to $.25 in 1 of the boxes.
"What happened, Bird?" says teammate Desmond Stonemason, taking the pen from him.
"I tried to consume it," says Andersen. "I thought it was an orange."
In a flash, the Birdman makes for the door. Niggling-used Lithuanian rookie guard Arvydas Macijauskas pushes past Andersen at the same fourth dimension and mumbles farewell in English language.
"What the hell did he say?" asks Andersen. "I don't speak that language."
We're off to a middle-school appearance, where he'll teach kids how to do his signature Birdman sign. In the parking lot he jumps in the black 2006 Ford Trek he's owned for less than a calendar month. He mashes the gas when he drove through a shallow puddle, causing the rear end of the car to pitch sideways as a mushroom cloud of fume rises from the pavement.
Iola, Texas, is a place y'all've probably never heard of until now. This is nowhere. Just to Linda Holubec, this is home.
In 1982, she and Claus moved to Texas with their iii children, April, Chris and Tamie. With a loan from the Texas Veterans Country Board, they bought a 10-acre plot in unincorporated Iola (population: 236), about 100 miles north of Houston. Downwardly a clay road off County Road 170 that was used more past wild boars than humans, the Andersens raised their children. They were the simply family for 2 miles. Linda hammered together a makeshift wooden street sign on which she painted the words Bluebonnet Lane, named after the Texas state flower.
Linda says Claus promised to build her and the kids a house, and said maybe they'd raise some cattle. In the middle of the property, which sloped gently to the w, the frame of the ii-story, three-bedroom business firm went up. A week later, Claus was gone.
He had decided family living wasn't for him. At to the lowest degree not in godforsaken Grimes Canton. He was off to peddle his artwork -- landscape oil paintings were his new passion -- in more cosmopolitan places like New York City, taking with him the residual of the loan money.
Then it dawned on Linda what had just happened: Claus moved the family to rural Texas to escape California's strict pension and child-support laws, she says.
"How could you do that to your own kids?" Linda asks with tears in her optics. "All they did was love y'all, and you lot walked away from them."
The human being she loved, for whom she had picked upwardly her life and moved halfway beyond the country, had deserted her. Chris was numb. He would sit for hours in the barn with his knees pulled up to his chest, rocking back and forth. For weeks when Linda left to run errands, Tamie, the youngest, would scream, "Don't leave me."
Linda savage into a deep depression. Feeling she couldn't cope with it alone, she took the children to therapy but pulled out after a few weeks considering they had to save money.
"We had a half a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread," she says. "Nosotros had nothing."
She was unemployed, had no savings and begged Claus for kid support. Fortunately, they did accept the back up of neighbors Betty and Wesley Crenshaw, who dropped past with milk, sugar, butter and whatsoever else they could spare. Merely mostly, they lived off the state. Linda would trap copperheads, skin them and brand belts or melt what little meat they had.
When it came to the bills, Linda could no longer even tread water. Though she found work as a short order cook, a janitor and a door-to-door "Avon lady," she couldn't go on up. She was tapped both emotionally and physically. Linda sent the children to a grouping home in Dallas during Andersen's middle schoolhouse years so that they wouldn't get without food or a warm bed.
"Not being with the kids was the almost painful time of my life," she says. "You think most them every day and wonder if they're all right." The children remained in the home for almost three years before returning to Iola.
Linda'south brother, James Ogle, a Navy supply boat captain, left his job in California and emptied his savings to help them terminate the house. He arrived in Texas with a stove in the dorsum of his pickup truck. He dug a hole for the septic tank with a shovel. He built a tree swing for the girls and put a basketball goal on the befouled where Chris and his mom would shoot effectually. He bought a cow trough and filled it with water so the kids could have a pond pool considering the pocket-size pond was occupied by h2o moccasins. And with leftover tin from the roof, he hammered out a sliding board.
One day Claus collection down Bluebonnet Lane in his shiny new Mercedes with his latest girlfriend in the passenger seat. Chris spotted him and began to run toward the automobile. When he saw Chris running, his father gunned the car and took off.
"My daddy wanted to shoot him," says Linda, "and I shoulda let him washed it."
After 26 years, the hurting from the retentivity still smolders beneath the surface. Information technology took her years to accept the fact that Claus didn't want his children. She's never been able to fully explicate to her son why his begetter didn't honey him.
Until the house was completed, the family sought shelter in a Depression Era barn that was already on the property. It was like a lost page out of a John Steinbeck novel. They ready a makeshift, ane-room flat amid the hay and horseflies, across from the stalls and craven coops. Wesley Crenshaw rigged the befouled with electricity to power infinite heaters so they wouldn't freeze on those cold Texas nights. Outside, a garden hose and spigot made showering possible. Scrawny coyotes in search of food would brand bold trips up to the befouled, scaring the kids. Crowing roosters woke them every morning at dawn.
After she put the kids to bed, Linda would walk the debate line with a .38 tucked in her waistband, "looking for sidewinders, the kind that slither or walk on two legs." Linda was big on protection. Her brother gave her a .357, which she would apply for target exercise during the day. She wanted people to hear the gunshots so they knew not to mess with her.
Dec. 27, 2004:
15 minutes after practice, Andersen pulls up to Hooters, his regular hangout in Oklahoma City. Once inside, a waitress named Shasta with prerequisite 36Cs and the standard-upshot Hooters uniform -- shimmery orange brusk shorts and a white, one-size-too-minor, depression-cut T-shirt -- sidles over to take his order.
"What would you lot similar to drinkable?" she asks Andersen.
"Uh," he replies slowly. "H2o."
She heads to the dorsum for our refreshments.
"All I could call up nearly was milk," quips Andersen. "Freshly squeezed."
Hooters is as good a place every bit any for Andersen to recall the unlikely story of a self-proclaimed redneck who never had much of a program all the same still ended up the league's virtually eccentric cult figure of a ramblin' man.
From his unfiltered running dialogues to his oh-no-he-didn't wardrobe (think Clyde Frazier meets Kevin Federline), he's the latest bud on the Dawkins/Walton/Rodman family tree.
His mink coat is legendary among teammates, equally is his penchant to rock it with jeans and a trucker lid.
"It doesn't thing," says Hornets frontward David Westward. "He'll wearable it with annihilation, but that'south only Bird."
In his start go-round in the league, his spiky hair got more attention than annihilation his teams did on the court. Jack Nicholson in one case pointed to the 'practise and gave him a thumbs-upwards from his courtside seat at the Staples Center.
"I told him to put me in a movie," Andersen says. "The next 'Batman.'"
Andersen'southward earliest foray into athletics was jumping over an electric fence that was meant to proceed the cows from getting out. His idea of motorsports was playing car tag in the Navasota River lesser.
In his early teens he played baseball, but his Texas-sized strike zone limited his effectiveness. He tried football game, too. Every year the coach put him at defensive end and broad receiver because of his four.vii speed in the 40-yard dash. And every year he ended up quitting after a week or 2.
My head got so big I thought I could do anything.
--Chris Andersen
Finally, the varsity basketball game coach convinced him that if he focused on basketball, he had a chance at a college scholarship. On winter nights in Iola, the entire town packed itself into a gym that seated 300 to picket its tallest citizen transform himself into a 198-pound flyswatter.
Despite his human eraser human action, few colleges came calling because he wasn't cutting information technology in the classroom. Andersen committed to play for Clyde Drexler at the University of Houston but couldn't brand the grades he needed. Linda apologized to Drexler profusely.
But his high school coach'southward father happened to be the head coach at Blinn Inferior Higher in Brenham, and so he took Andersen. He played one flavour at Blinn, averaging x.7 points, 7.7 rebounds and 4.vii blocked shots in but 21.three minutes per game, leading all college players in blocks. On weekends, Andersen brought half the team back to Iola for barbecues. Linda always sent them off with huckleberry cobbler made from fresh berries she picked in the pasture behind the house.
People told him he could make tons of money in the pros, that his wild game could lead him out of his backwoods corner of the world.
"My head got so big I thought I could do anything," he says.
Anything except get drafted. He didn't know you lot had to officially utilise for the typhoon, not just declare.
"When I left Blinn I really didn't know what I was doing," he says. "I didn't take a plan."
His high school coach arranged for him to play a series of exhibition games with the Texas Ambassadors, a semipro traveling team fabricated up of former college players. Ane of their exhibitions took them to China, where Andersen defenseless the eye of a Chinese professional autobus when he blocked several shots into the stands. He was made an offer to join the Jiangsu Nangang Dragons.
"I didn't actually like working, so I took the offer," he says.
He left in December 2000 for Beijing and lived in a hotel for the entire 4½ months he was with the team. "Imagine taking a guy who had only e'er been out of Texas twice and putting him in the middle of China," says Andersen with a smile. "Just endeavour and movie that."
Oct. twenty, 2001:
On the first mean solar day of the inaugural training camp for the NBA'south new minor league called the D-League, hopefuls sat quietly in a cavernous gym in Suwanee, Ga. Nigh 200 players had been invited to compete for 88 spots on viii teams. Some fiddled with their shoelaces. Others tried their best not to look nervous.
When Keith Berth, possessor of two championship rings as a member of the Chicago Bulls, swaggered in, 1 histrion said, "Only 87 spots left."
Later, former Kentucky bespeak guard Saul Smith arrived. A low, rumbling chatter rolled downward from the top of the bleachers.
Adjacent in was UNLV'southward Greedy Daniels. "Oh, he'south quick," offered some other. And this went on all afternoon.
Finally, Andersen sauntered in. A role player reclining back on the bleachers chuckled dismissively and wondered aloud, "Where'd they find this guy?"
Just two games into the inaugural season, Andersen became the start-ever D-League call-up when the Nuggets signed him to a i-year, $289,747 contract on Nov. 21, 2001. The first complete NBA game he saw was from the Nuggets' bench two days afterward.
But the transition wasn't exactly storybook. Comic-volume, maybe. Once on the road in Memphis, he bought a pit balderdash puppy he named Red Sonja. He didn't take into consideration that the squad still had ii more than stops before returning to Denver. The coaches discovered the pup on the team double-decker on the way to the airport.
There was the time, when on injured reserve, he showed up on the bench in shorts and a T-shirt, and Nuggets coach Jeff Bzdelik fabricated him sentinel the game from the locker room. With fans he was an instant striking, only non anybody was smitten by his eccentricities. Bzdelik hated them. When he saw Andersen'due south gel-supported, inch-high spikes, he made him wash them out. Another time, he fumed when Andersen curled his hair similar Little Orphan Annie for a playoff game.
"You were never really sure what he would do next," says sometime teammate Marcus Camby.
Just Andersen didn't care, because he was in the NBA and the money was flowing. This was promising news for Linda and her married man, Norm, who needed Andersen to make practiced on his promise to strike it rich. When the stock market had crashed after Sept. 11, they lost 90 per centum of the nearly $200,000 they had saved for retirement.
But Andersen would before long part with his money for all too different reasons.
That 289K was like sand through his fingers. He began to develop a rep every bit a hard partier. He inhaled Jack & Cokes similar a wet vac and could brand a case of Bud Calorie-free disappear by himself. At first, Linda, who understood that boys will exist boys, gently warned her son.
"I've partied with the best of them myself," she says. "Merely you don't allow information technology affect your work."
Andersen would nod and say he had everything under command, but Linda could come across otherwise.
"I could tell what he was doing by the way he was running up and down the court," she says. "His lips would be all white and he would be sucking air. If I could see it from the stands, I know his coaches could."
Linda felt if she were closer to him she could help curtail his recklessness. And so she, Norm, Tamie and her i-yr-old daughter Kassie moved to Denver. And since Andersen's new home wasn't equipped with a washer and dryer, she loaded hers in a equus caballus trailer and hitched it to their truck. Norm drove the truck, and Linda followed on her Harley despite subfreezing temperatures.
"That'due south just a mother's love," she says. "I had to get to my son."
She put on several pairs of wool socks, lined her leather jacket with newspapers and wrapped freezer bags over her riding gloves. When she stopped at a gas station to clean her windshield but outside the Texas panhandle, she pulled the squeegee out of the bucket, just to find information technology continued to a block of ice. Later, the Harley broke down because of condensation in the carburetor. After 400 miles, Linda'south frostbitten fingers could no longer piece of work the clutch. They stopped at a Motel 6 for the dark, where Linda promptly rolled the Harley into the room.
When she got to Denver, she found Andersen'southward finances in a mess. There was no discernible pattern to his spending, except that it was total tilt. Andersen had never received any formal money-management preparation from the league.
He lacked both the skill and desire to balance his own checkbook. As long as his ATM card worked, he was fine. Linda sabbatum down with a pile of his bills and statements and tried to make sense of it. She noticed a repast he had in New York was charged 3 times for the aforementioned amount. Then she saw the thousands of dollars in shoes he bought for his ever-ballooning circumvolve of new friends. There was a bar nib for $900. He would regularly hire limos to have his friends out on the town.
"Stay in, order food, play video games," Linda urged him. "You don't take to get out every nighttime."
When she searched the Internet for his name, she would find signed Nuggets gear he gave to his friends on sale Web sites. Meanwhile, he stopped making the payments on the Expedition she had co-signed for, and her credit was destroyed.
Later a while Andersen began giving her $500 a month for her diabetes medicine and painkillers for the two cracked vertebrae she suffered during a training exercise in the Army. But he made expert on little else.
The house he promised her seemed but a pipe dream. She fleck her tongue when she found a receipt for a $5,000 designer purse he bought ane of his girlfriends. "I had a $x denim purse and fabricated my ain apparel," scoffs Linda. When he bought another girl a Jaguar, she was hurt and confused. This wasn't her son.
Just Andersen was a magnet for hangers-on. There was the pretty schoolteacher from Dallas with a penchant for expensive clothes. ("She only loved Gucci," says Linda.) And the bellhop he met while partying at a downtown Denver hotel. ("He left when the money dried up.")
Then there were his pals from Iola. He often wrote checks to encompass their bail when they ran afoul of the law. In one case he dropped four 1000 on tickets when the Nuggets played in Houston. When Andersen bought his outset firm just southwest of Denver, his friends would prove up to play video games and potable beer. Linda was miffed when one of them got the idea to drive one country over to buy illegal fireworks one summertime.
Andersen was drinking more than than ever. She felt similar a stranger in her son'south dwelling. Then 1 day Linda reached her breaking point. One of Andersen'southward friends was playing a fiddling too roughly with Andersen's girlfriend and began choking her with a scarf. Adrenaline surged through Linda's veins. Her protective maternal instincts took over. She grabbed the guy and put him in a headlock.
"I told him I ride Harleys and I tote guns and y'all don't want to be messin' with me," she says. At that point she decided that she'd had plenty.
Linda and her son were fighting all the time. If Andersen was going to drown in a destructive lifestyle, she wasn't going to watch him do information technology. The side by side mean solar day she told her husband and the kids they were going back to Texas.
The three-day expedition back home was a sad and arduous journey. The seismic change in the female parent/son bond had left her drained. She felt powerless. All she wanted to exercise was cry.
When they got domicile, the piddling house looked sadder than always. She half hoped information technology would just fall over. It took them all day to hack downward the six-foot-loftier weeds that had sprung upwardly. Venomous chocolate-brown recluse spiders hovered in the corners of every room. Termites had decimated the siding. The blackness mold upstairs was similar wallpaper. A family of rattlesnakes had taken upward residence in the closet next to some dried-out pasta. They fed on the droves of field mice -- the ones that lived in the walls and dared venture onto the counters.
Jan. 21, 2006:
The Hornets milled nigh in the visiting locker room at Madison Square Garden. After dismantling the Knicks 109-98 for their 20th win of the flavour, spirits were high.
Andersen emerged from a back room and ran a towel through his floppy hair. In his right mitt was a can of Bud Light. He chugged one-half the tin, then belched.
"Now that's what I call an energy drink," he said.
Despite the off-court difficulties he had managed to keep placidity for and then long, Andersen had played his way into his biggest payday ever, signing a four-year, $14 million deal with the Hornets in the summertime of 2005. He had developed such a following that the squad used his likeness on billboards to sell flavor-ticket packages, fifty-fifty though he was the team'due south 7th-leading scorer.
Andersen continued to mask his partying. He went through a painful breakdown with a longtime girlfriend and turned to illegal drugs to aid him escape the funk.
Then came the drug test.
He says he didn't shed a single tear after his adjournment.
"When I expect back at everything that happened, I don't regret it," he says. "This whole thing saved my life. I needed this to happen. I don't know where I'd be today if I didn't alter my ways."
Soon subsequently his expulsion, he entered a rehab dispensary and jettisoned his destructive friends. By the summer of 2007, Andersen was fully focused on returning to the NBA. He was working out in Las Vegas with trainer Joe Abunassar and playing in highly competitive pickup games featuring Kevin Garnett, Jermaine O'Neal and Al Harrington. He got downward to a svelte 228 pounds, began to extend his shooting range and developed a reliable bound hook. His outlook on life as well got a makeover.
"I know this doesn't last forever. I'm not going to throw away what I have over something stupid," he says. "But I haven't changed a bit. I'm still the same person I always was. I but don't do the things I used to. I'thou smarter at present."
He pauses for a bit.
"And my 3-point shot is deadly."
The subject of his mother is non easily broached past Andersen. During a contempo interview at the Hornets' exercise facility when her proper name is brought up, Andersen shuts down. His bounciness disappears, and he begins to stone almost involuntarily back and forth, no longer offering the courtesy of center contact.
When asked if he shared his ordeal with his mother, he drifts off and quickly tries to redirect the conversation.
"Uh, I've been back abode a time or ii since I was suspended," he says without confidence, "y'all know, to see everybody.
"Everything's cool. Yup, no place like Iola. Mom's good."
(Two days later Linda would say they haven't seen each other since he lived in Denver.)
When a team PR official drifts by to check on him, it's Andersen's perfect escape. He chop-chop transitions to community work he'south interested in doing. He starts to boil his answers downwardly to a few words, leaving uncomfortable gaps in the conversation. He bids farewell moments later.
The sting of their fractured human relationship is as well much, but not enough for him to give you lot Linda's phone number long after they stopped speaking.
March 26, 2008:
In the players' lounge at the Hornets' practice facility just outside of New Orleans, Andersen is involved in a spirited game of pingpong with David West. After he loses, Anderson jokes with Morris Peterson most W's grade and vows revenge.
Just three players remain on the roster since Andersen last suited up, but afterwards just a month he has worked himself dorsum into the fabric of the team.
And he nonetheless loves Hooters.
"I went to one the other solar day in New Orleans," he says. "The food was terrible, but the carte wasn't bad, if you know what I hateful."
So he summons his best Borat impression to make the point, "Niiice!"
The tired Texas lord's day finally dips behind the horizon. The cattle over on Betty and Wesley Crenshaw'southward old farm settle in for the nighttime. The incessant clinking from dime-sized June bugs that recklessly ricochet off the patio's tin can roof make it sound like information technology'due south hailing.
Linda sits on the enclosed patio talking well-nigh her just son. She slowly thumbs through a stack of fuzzy pictures taken with a dispensable camera from a time when Chris would knock you lot out of the way for her banana pudding, green bean casserole and homemade biscuits.
There'due south one of him back in juco. Information technology's been so long since he had a buzz cutting. Mom and son in People's republic of china. Expect at the way he has his arm effectually me.
A mother'due south honey is tireless. She has to believe this is the year he will call on her birthday.
And she holds out hope that her son will buy her the house he once promised. On the patio her optics well up with tears. Only it's obvious information technology'due south not the house that'due south making her cry.
"I'm always hopeful that he'll come effectually," she says in a soft, wavering vocalisation. "He's busy correct now, I know. I'll give him fourth dimension. I'll let him do his matter and pray he's doing well. I know he can plow his life around. I'll never stop worrying about him no matter how old he gets."
Chris Palmer is a writer for ESPN The Mag.
Source: https://www.espn.com/nba/news/story?page=Andersen-080511
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