"They'll never know me"
— --
DeMARCUS COUSINS IS sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles, across South Figueroa from Staples Center, where the Kings are about to play the Lakers in a heroic effort to sift through the grim remains of another bad season. Sacramento's star center is alone, suspended from the game for giving Rockets guard Patrick Beverley a gutshot three nights earlier.
This has happened many times -- three suspensions last season -- but this year, his fourth in the NBA, was supposed to be different. This was the year he finally got a coach who didn't judge on reputation. This was the year his talent would quiet his temper. This was the year there would be no nights spent wishing he hadn't put his worst impulses on public display.
The rain is hitting Figueroa at a 45-degree slant, bringing LA to a standstill. Cousins clicks through TV channels, trying to find the game. Every local station shows another giddy reporter standing at a Glendora intersection, where the rain created a mudslide. He flips through once more before conceding: The hotel doesn't carry the network that is broadcasting the game.
He's not there, and they're not here. The isolation is complete.
Inside Staples, Cousins' absence is a huge presence. Standing with a few reporters 90 minutes before tip-off, first-year coach Michael Malone says, "DeMarcus feels terrible that he's not here. He's worked so hard to get beyond this, but he has to hold himself to a higher standard."
Three days later, Cousins sits at his home locker, his wide shoulders hunched, his voice a low rumble. "I hate that I'm in this position," he says. "I can't believe it, to be honest."
It's jarring to hear a 23-year-old man speak of himself with anthropological distance, and even more jarring to hear the words arrive with such resignation. There is a person who lives inside Cousins and an image that does not. The image is out there, loose in the public arena, like a balloon after it leaves a child's hand.
He believes he is powerless to stop it, and so he does not try. He does not know what to do, and so he does nothing. It is, he admits, an approach that values personal defiance over man's better instincts. No matter. He's been fighting perception and assumption for as long as he can remember, and he knows some ironies are crueler than others: Cousins was constantly mistaken for an adult as a child, only to find himself infantilized as an adult.
"If you judge me only by my profession, you don't know me at all," he says. "Those people who do that? They'll never know me."
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