Person of Interest: Rasheed Wallace

In a science class in seventh grade, my tablemates and I were asked to design a space station. For all the usual rebellious reasons, we created the Rasheed Wallace space station, complete with a bald spot loading dock. Our teacher, a very young, perpetually nervous woman who, among other traits noticed by the adolescent male, owned a dazzling collection of form-fitting skirts, asked us to redo the assignment. The reason? She didn’t think the Rasheed Wallace space station was “appropriate.”

I don’t think it ever changed much for Rasheed. In Chapel Hill, he sparked talk of wasted potential, anger management, selfishness, and how a lack of discipline could bankrupt a wealth of basketball talent. This line of discussion about Rasheed Wallace persisted for the next 15 years, through Washington, Portland, Detroit, and ultimately Boston. But it’s a mistake to think that this was just a product of media laziness (that came later), where an athlete can never break out of his original casting. Rather, Rasheed just kept finding ways to incense those moral watchdogs, who, for whatever silly reason, choose collegiate and professional sports as their medium for judgment and self-aggrandizement. This isn’t to apologize for Rasheed’s missteps, both off-court and on, but the discussion surrounding him always seemed to be amplified into something that reached past basketball and its vague code of conduct. As happened in Chapel Hill, Rasheed divided fans in the NBA because he found himself at the center of nearly every tired basketball argument. He arguably did not live up to his potential. He arguably did not take the responsibility of being a role model very seriously. He arguably placed himself over his team and derailed what could have been a championship team in Portland. He was arguably one of the most beloved players in the league, especially among the population of hoop heads who automatically celebrated anything that rankled the traditional pundits.

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