[V]

Backgrounder...

January 2004

Photo shoot over, Vince Carter is bundling up for the frigid Toronto air this mid-January afternoon when he notices some Polaroids on the studio's blond-wood table. They're all of him, a rough draft of what the photographer had in mind. One in particular stops him. Staring out is a preview of when his playing days are long over, dim light and shadows conspiring to make Carter appear twice his about-to-turn 27 years. And the smile is not his trademark toothy, 500-watt version, but a weary old-man-on-a-park-bench grin. It's no stretch to imagine slippered feet and a slight paunch below the photo's bottom frame. Half-man, half-a-grazing.

Carter isn't ready to hang 'em up yet, of course. He still toys with the idea of entering one more dunk contest, firm in the belief he has a few more aerial wonders to perform. Nor has he abandoned the idea of winning a ring. But having already been feted as the Next Coming, and subsequently dismissed as the Latest Disappointment, he'll work off his own definition of success from here on out, thank you very much. It's a definition that includes walking in his college graduation in Chapel Hill. And getting engaged to his college sweetheart, former Tar Heels cheerleader Ellen Rucker. And having kids and being able to play with them, pain-free.
And it includes loving that he gets to play basketball for a living.
Here's what it doesn't include: going for a few more dunks if it means risking his knees, or a few more wins if it means playing in pain, or declaring his team's superiority and then backing it up. Because he's tried all that. Playing hurt only earned him ridicule, and a bad right knee that came out of favoring the left one, and then a bad left ankle from favoring the right knee. Speaking up made him look foolish, because the Raptors didn't back up his playoff vow two years ago until after Vince called it a season and underwent knee surgery. And none of it got him closer to a ring.
"You can spend the rest of your life trying to please everybody and forget about who you are," Carter says. "But it's a conflict of interests. You start to worry about the wrong thing, and then you lose focus of the big picture, which is playing basketball. I have this job because of what I can do, and I'm going to do it. If you don't like it, I'm sorry. I hope you change your mind."
Then again, maybe you're one of those who made him the top All-Star vote-getter for the fourth time in five years (Kobe was tops in '03). That's a level of popularity attained only twice before, by Dr. J and Michael Jordan. Fans don't seem to care that he's four years removed from winning the 2000 dunk contest and nearly three away from that epic playoff battle of 50-point performances with Allen Iverson. Or that he has no championship ring or scoring title. Maybe it's because he has no arrest record or illegitimate children, either.
"I'm trying to figure it out like everyone else," he says of his All-Star reign. "To me, popular is Allen Iverson. He's the guy I'd expect to lead in votes. I don't know the how and why, but I smile every night when I think about it."
There are others who don't understand it either, only it doesn't tickle them nearly as much. For a middle-of-the-pack team in the East, Carter's next-MJ talent provides the Raptors with an edge that can put them over the top on any given night. But Carter can't be counted on to put his team on his shoulders. Every possession in the rugged East is as much a chance to wear down the opponent or draw a foul as it is to score a stylish two points. Carter can play that style, and often does, just not always, which may explain why the Raptors have hovered around .500 all season. With Toronto's fate riding on how much Vinsanity rules, it can drive a coach or teammate crazy when he appears to downshift, even for a quarter.
Case in point: the Raptors are in Detroit on a Wednesday night in January to face a Pistons team that had won nine in a row, including the last three by an average of 16 points. Vince is in attack mode tonight, which means the Pistons can't stop him. He hits three lay-ups, a pair of driving midrange jumpers and five of seven free throws to carry the Raptors to an 11-point halftime lead.
And then someone else comes out of the dressing room wearing No.15 for the second half. His third-quarter approach consists of off-the-dribble fadeaway jumpers fired early in the shot clock from just inside the arc. If there's a holy trinity of don'ts in the NBA, that's it. The Pistons roar back. For each VC fling, Toronto coach Kevin O'Neill has a different response. There's the tortured snarl, the pirouette, the head-and-shoulder slump. He gestures to head athletic therapist Chuck Mooney to include the last misfire in the next day's tape session. Finally, O'Neill outright pleads: "Vince, listen to me, drive it!"
By now, the Raptors' lead is gone, and it's a seesaw game. The real VC makes some cameos. When he attacks, the Pistons send him to the line or double-team him, and when they do he finds an open teammate. Just like that, the Raptors are ahead again. But when he relies on his jumper, Detroit invariably scores off the long rebound. During a timeout with just under two minutes left, Milt Palacio, Toronto's backup guard, says, "Vince, you've got to drive." Carter responds, "There's nowhere to go!"
Despite the protest, he tries, and is rewarded with two buckets in the paint. But it's too late. Detroit holds on, 95-91.
Neither the process nor the outcome matters to Debbie Bjorgaard and her 11-year-old son, David, sitting six rows behind the Pistons bench. Tonight's tickets are a gift from mother to son Carter is his favorite player. David is easy to spot among the sea of Pistons fans; he's the one wearing the No.15 Raptors jersey. "It's one of the jerseys I can let my son wear," Debbie says. "He has Kobe's, too, but we've had to put that away."
This is the type of respect Carter craves. And he's even beginning to get it from his current teammates, who are learning to appreciate the way Carter conducts himself. At least he no longer hears that he lacks leadership skills, a frequent refrain from one-season wonders like Keon Clark and over-the-hill veterans like Antonio Davis. (Clark left as a free agent two years ago; Davis is now in Chicago.) Newcomers Jalen Rose and Donyell Marshall are more than happy to share the load with Carter. "When you play against him, you're just worried about his scoring," Rose says. "But he can also dribble, pass and shoot. And I've found out he's a good teammate. He doesn't consider this a one-man show."
Of course, Carter's skills have always been above reproach. It's his heart that's been suspect. The night after the Pistons loss, the Raptors are in New Orleans. Carter takes off for a dunk but comes up short and lands out of bounds, clutching his right knee. No one on Toronto shows any concern. Even when he's helped to the bench, and then to the locker room, the Raptors go on, business as usual. Morris Peterson, meanwhile, limps around on an ankle that had him on crutches the night before, logging 39 indispensable minutes in a 78-74 overtime win. "Soldiers don't sit," he says later.
That works for O'Neill, who has hung a "MEN WORKING" sign on the door leading to the Raptors' practice court. But publicly, O'Neill accepts that his star doesn't have a hard-hat mentality. "I just see him as a young player who is still developing," O'Neill says. "The burden of a star can sometimes be overwhelming. Everyone expects you to come through every time. You can't."
Carter understands that now. More than that, he's comfortable with it. It doesn't hurt that expectations have slipped. The Raptors, once dark-horse title contenders, will be lucky to make the playoffs. Carter, the leading scorer on the gold medal-winning 2000 Olympic team, was a prequalifying fill-in last summer for the 2004 squad. His jersey is still a top-20 seller, but it was once one of the top two. Though he still has a signature Nike shoe, LeBron is now clearly the center of Nike's basketball universe. "This is a great position to be in," Carter says. "I don't have to be considered the best player, I don't have to be the most popular. Being in the middle is great for me."
Heretical as it sounds, Carter will no longer buy into the play-like-there-is-no-tomorrow credo. Play hard? Sure. Chase a title? Super. Destroy your body and forfeit the pleasures of a normal life for the sake of winning, when there's no guarantee that will be enough? No thanks. "The thinking with the doctors and teams is to get you healthy and back on the court," says Michelle Carter, his mother and business manager. "But the great misnomer is 'healthy.' They patch you up. I tell Vince to listen to his body. You're Vince, I say, not invincible."
It would be easier to convince the Carters that their priorities are out of whack had Vince not been so electric for Team USA in Puerto Rico. After taking the entire summer off to rest his surgically repaired knees and gimpy left ankle, he was the VC of old. So when he began the regular season cracking off three 30-plus games in the first seven, the great expectations returned. His average field goal attempts, up from 21st to eighth in the league, and free throws per game, up from 57th to 16th, suggest he's being more aggressive than last season. If the Raptors haven't scared anyone yet, it may have as much to do with adjusting to a new defensive system and a sideline full of injuries (to Palacio, rookie sensation Chris Bosh and Michael Curry) as with Carter's performance.
It's possible the source of Carter's All-Star popularity is selfishness. Maybe the masses think that, by making sure he's around All-Star Weekend, there is at least the chance of getting another demonstration like the one that earned him the half-man, half-amazing tag. They want to see him hang from the rim by his elbow after jamming the ball with his entire arm inside the basket, as he did at the 2000 dunk contest. Could it be that in Carter's case, the promise of style has trumped the potential of substance?
"If you're starting a team, there are probably eight or nine guys you'd take ahead of him," Rockets GM Carroll Dawson says. "But this is a league where athletic ability has moved to the forefront. You come to watch people do what you can only dream about. And he does that, maybe better than anybody."
Mom prefers the new Vince precisely because she wants him able to do what everybody else can. She sees Raptors GM Glen Grunwald hobbling around on a bad knee, injured after his playing days at Indiana U. were over, and pities him because he can't play with his 18-month-old son. She sees a different future for her own son. "I don't want him to live for this moment," she says. "I want him to live for a moment in 2012."
Similarly, forfeiting a few hours of rest before the seventh game of the 2001 Eastern Conference semifinals to walk in his graduation ceremony remains, to this day, a no-brainer.
"I wouldn't trade seeing him come down the stairs in his gown for all the money in the mint," Mrs. Carter says. And whatever his scoring average, she doesn't think it can match the value of Vince personally answering e-mails submitted to his website every few weeks.
"A lot of people take a guy being genuine and humble for being soft," Rose says. "That's a mistake. A lot of people want the things he has, and I like the way he handles them with humility."
Funny how stuff like that can still matter. Djanka, the studio manager at the photo shoot, knows nothing about basketball, but she too has an opinion about Carter. "That face," she says sharply, jabbing at the Polaroids, "will sell a lot of magazines. You know why? Sincerity. If you've been around this business for a while, you know what sells. People look at the eyes. They know a good soul when they see one."
"That," she says, finger poised to squash Carter's mug again, "is a good soul."
This article appears in the Mar. 01 issue of ESPN The Magazine.