The making of D'Angelo Russell
— -- This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Dec. 12 NFL Chemistry Issue. Subscribe today!
YOUR SON IS the starting point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, a 20-year-old cast as their next superstar. It affords you luxuries once unimaginable. Mansion shopping in Brentwood? Perusing European sports car dealerships in Beverly Hills? Dream bigger. Yet here you, Antonio Russell, are on a late August afternoon, idling in your black GMC truck outside a vacant lot in a misbegotten patch of Louisville, Kentucky. The Southern sun is kicking the temperatures into the 90s as you roll down the driver's side window and start rebuilding the wooden shotgun house from memory: the marble floors, the stained glass windows, two built-in waterfalls, one on both floors. It was the jewel of Louisville's West End, half a dozen blocks from Muhammad Ali's childhood home. Your grandparents poured their lives into it, and you dreamed that someday they'd leave it to you -- it was all you ever wanted -- and, sure enough, they did. Then you put all their blood, sweat, love and trust in the name of a family member who took out a loan against the house, even though it was paid for, and eventually it fell into the city's hands. You learned the real estate business to try to buy it back, to save it, but you couldn't. So all that exists now is ankle-high grass and a few stone steps that lead to nothing but your mistake.
You wish you had a picture handy. Oh, it was really something. There's a reason you stop here 10 minutes into what will become a three-hour tour of your son's life. Once, you couldn't bear to be anywhere near here. That home was your responsibility, and you trusted the wrong person, and look what happened. And though the pain is still there, always will be, now you feed off it, reminding yourself how easily one mistake can destroy what it took a lifetime to build -- how without eternal vigilance, the most precious things can be taken from your life and bulldozed. These days, you visit all the time. Sometimes you grab McDonald's and pull up here to eat. Sometimes you'll tell friends to meet you beside it. Sometimes you'll drive by, just because, like today, when you're snaking through Louisville, from its inner city to its suburbs, pausing at parks where your son played, schools he attended, houses where he lived. It's a lesson that shapes you.
"I can't put my kids' life and the outcome in anybody else's hands," you say. "Anybody's."
ABOUT A MONTH earlier, at high noon on a triple-digit Las Vegas scorcher, your son D'Angelo moseys into an empty hotel conference room just off the Strip. As NBA custom dictates, a player of his caliber -- drafted No. 2 in 2015 -- should dominate summer league here, and so he has. In a few months, he'll extend his hot streak into the season, serving up a buffet of 3-pointers and further evidence of his high-end court vision, establishing himself as the leading candidate to fill the vacancy left by Kobe Bryant's retirement. But he cites, instead, another goal -- a family motto, he says, one his father instilled: "Create new headlines."
"Going around the league, people know, 'Oh, he got in some trouble' or 'He didn't play well his rookie year' or 'He's a bust.' That's the headline," D'Angelo says. "I'm going to have a million more opportunities to create new headlines, and I can't wait. Can't wait."
You remember the old headlines. Vast sums of ink were devoted to D'Angelo last season when the Lakers capsized to a franchise-worst 17-65. The rookie clashed with then-Lakers coach Byron Scott, who publicly, and frequently, called the 19-year-old immature. Then in late March, a video surfaced of Russell filming a private conversation between himself and teammate Nick Young, who didn't appear to realize he was being taped. Russell, on camera, asked about Young's love life outside of his relationship with his then-fianc?e, Australian rapper Iggy Azalea. ("I'm glad you told my video all that," Russell could be heard telling Young. "Huh?" Young replied, turning his face toward Russell before the video cut out.) At a breakfast meeting soon after, no Laker would sit at Russell's table, a source told ESPN's Ramona Shelburne; in another instance, the source said, Russell came into the locker room and sat next to guard Lou Williams, who got up and walked away. The resulting tension, sources say, played a role in the Lakers' 48-point loss to Utah on March 28, tied for the worst loss in franchise history.
How exactly the video leaked remains unclear, but Russell had broken one of pro sports' most hallowed codes, exposing the inner sanctum of athlete hedonism. Even worse, he'd done so to one of his teammates. "D'Angelo Russell goes down as the worst teammate in sports history!!!!" Knicks guard Brandon Jennings tweeted in response to the scandal.
Russell's fledgling brand was dented. A high school coach in California contacted Ron Harris, a former assistant basketball coach at Montverde Academy in Florida, where Russell spent three years. "Ron, your boy D'Angelo?" he said. "The young guys out here do not care for him anymore. They don't want anything to do with him. They said they're going to stop drinking Gatorade" -- which Russell endorses -- "because of what he did to Nick Young." Says Harris, "He was like enemy No. 1 of the people for a while."
Ask family members, childhood friends, teammates and coaches to describe Russell and you'll hear "prankster," "jokester" and "fun-loving" -- and some intimate that those traits led to the mishap. "Sometimes, you can tell [players], 'The iron is hot, don't touch it,'" says Thomas Scott, an assistant/player development coach with the Lakers last season and Byron Scott's son. "Some people want to find out."
Still, others who know Russell well say the incident isn't like him at all. It was an accident, an aberration. Russell and Nick Young were friends, after all. "D went to his son's birthday party and everything," says Jamie Johnson, Russell's childhood friend. "That situation was just over the head and the video got into the wrong hands, but that's not who he is."
Russell, for his part, compares the situation -- and all of last season -- with being whistled for a foul; complaining won't change the verdict. "What I went through last year was horrible," he says. "But I can learn from it and turn it into a positive."
Listen to those words again. As his father, you recognize them; it's like listening to a tape of yourself. They are your words. These are the things you've said for years. But where were you through all of this? You try to tell yourself it's all part of God's plan. But still: You weren't there. And look what happened.
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