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« on: March 19, 2010, 02:14:52 PM »
Love this guys sense of humor.
From Esquire
Gilbert Arenas: What I've Learned
The suspended Washington Wizard opens up on how the whole guns-in-the-locker-room thing went down
Published in the April 2010 issue, on sale now.
It started on the plane. Over a game of five-card spades — we call it boo-ray. Javaris Crittenton was losing money. He jumped in the middle of a conversation between two other guys playing and I didn't want to hear it no more. So I throw my cards down in the middle of the hand, tell them all, "I'm done. I'm getting on up." Javaris is saying, "No, this is some street crap. Where I'm from, you gotta finish the game. My money's on the line." He and another guy say it's a misdeal and they want me to match the pot. "You gotta pay that debt," Javaris says, "or we gotta take it outside." Take it outside? He said, We gotta fistfight. I start joking. I put on some music. Michael Jackson. "You wanna be startin' something ..." Everyone's laughin'. He's like, "Nah, nah, homey. This is real. You ain't gonna joke with this. You owe me my money." So I start to play "Beat It."
It continues on the airport trolley. "We're gonna have to fight," he's saying. I said, "Man, it's snowing out there. I got on white Louis Vuitton shoes. If we get in a fight and one of my shoes falls off in the snow, I'm not gonna be able to find it. I'm gonna get frostbite. Before I get into a fistfight, I'll burn your car." He said, "You burn my car and I'll shoot your knees."
Brendan Haywood is saying, "Javaris, just leave it alone. You keep talking, he's going to keep irritating you."
Next practice I come real early, and I get word that Javaris is there. When I see him, my mind says, Boo yow! My guns, put them on the chair. That's where the problem came in — with the "boo yow!" I wasn't using longevity thinking.
Rewind. I had a big gun collection. About four to five hundred guns. The guy I bought it from was in his seventies. He'd been collecting them for years. He had First World War guns. I bought his whole collection and added to it. I didn't need a license to keep them in my house. There was an officer who would come by and look out for them. The door was reinforced and a security system was set up. But when my kids came, I said, I can't have these guns around. We put everything in storage, but I kept four: a gold Desert Eagle. There was a Smith & Wesson 500. A Kimber. The other was an old gun with a long clip. None of them were loaded. I kept them in a lockbox in the empty locker next to mine.
I put my four guns in my backpack so nobody could see them. I wrote the note: "Pick one." Put the guns on a chair where Javaris would find them. I go in the training room where he was. I can see him — "What's this? What's this?"
"You said you were gonna shoot me in my knee. I'm giving you the guns to do it."
"I don't need you to give me nothing. I've got my own gun." He pulls one out and puts the clip in. That's when some of the other players are saying, Man, I gotta get out of here. But then he puts his earphones in and starts singing. So I pick my guns up. From there, everything settled down. He goes into the Jacuzzi. You know what? I gotta warm my knee up anyway. I go in and sit with him. We're just sitting in there talking. We didn't have no problem. It was just some fun that got out of control.
It's like I told David Stern: Anything that happens in my life, I'm always looking to see, What can I make funny out of this? But I said, I know you need to set an example. He said he wasn't trying to make me an example. He said, "I know your personality. I've got to get you out of the limelight because you're not gonna let it go. When you come back, then we build." We talked about it for three minutes, and then for the rest of the time he told me about what he wants to do with the league.