playstation
Selfless Service
Sitting Pretty
By Carmen Renee Thompson
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Lying on his back, hands folded behind his head, and still breathing hard after 40 minutes of full-court run, Quentin Richardson gazes up at the glassed-in viewing area overlooking the courts at Hoops Gym just outside of the downtown loop in Chicago. He's staring at his new fiancée, singer/actress Brandy, but she doesn't see him. She's too busy trying to convince her 2-year-old daughter, Sy'rai, to stop pulling her blue dress over her head. When she does glance down at her man, their eyes catch and hold, a current running between them.
Excuse Richardson for feeling like the luckiest guy in the NBA. The 24-year-old swingman everyone knows as Q is about to enter his fifth season, and his life sure seems to have fallen into place. He's just had the good fortune to escape the clutches of the Clippers, having been inked by the Suns to a six-year, $45 million deal. He's engaged to a glamorous woman who's a superstar in her own right. And he's got influential folks believing a step up to greatness is a matter of time. Michael Jordan handpicked him for his Jordan Brand line, and the dog tags that accompany his shoe include this short summary: "Instant offense and future superstar." While his arrival in Phoenix doesn't quite rank with the A-list moves of this action-packed off-season -- Shaq to Miami!, T-Mac to Houston!, Steve Francis to Orlando! -- by all indications this could be the season Richardson earns his own exclamation point.
Q already stands out at Hoops, and not just because he's the only one Brandy, 25, has come to watch. Antoine Walker, Juwan Howard, Eddy Curry and Ben Gordon work out, but it is Q who is positioned as the big man among big men. In the barbershop-like weight room, his gregariousness dominates. "Look at his earrings! He's got that new money. I'll bet he's got an Escalade!" he jokes to Andre Brown, an unsigned free agent whom everyone has dubbed Light-Skin Killa. The harangue gets a laugh from everyone in the room.
"It's the big one, Weezy!," Richardson exclaims, as he chest-presses 60-pound dumbbells. Yeah, right. At 6-foot-5, 238 pounds, Richardson is broad-shouldered, broad-chested, broad everything. Luck did not give him this body. He's proud of his rep as a weight room workhorse. Richardson took off two weeks after the season, and then he went back to work. It's the same schedule he's kept since high school. On the court, he smiles after a bump on a defender elicits this response: "Damn! That boy is strong as an ox!"
Aside from basketball, Q's major indulgence is playing video games. Lately, he's been playing a lot as new teammate Steve Nash. He rarely plays himself, except to check the accuracy of the game's rendition of his moves. This year he's expecting to see major improvement in his virtual self. That's because last season was his best yet: 17.2 points, 6.4 rebounds and 2.1 assists a night; seven 30-plus point games; an NBA season-high eight treys in a game; a career-high 44 points against the Nuggets.
Obviously, the Suns are also looking forward to a performance boost. Although the Clippers (2854) seemed worse last season just 'cause they're the Clippers, the Suns were just as dismal (2953). Of course the biggest difference between the two is that the Suns actually pursue high-priced free agents. Their wish list was small this summer. "Steve Nash was 1A and Q was 1B, or vice versa," says coach Mike D'Antoni. Nash came first, signing a five-year, $65 million deal. "We wanted to get talent," says D'Antoni, "but we wanted bang for our buck."
Bang. Nash and Richardson will mesh well with Amare Stoudemire and Shawn Marion to give the Suns a group that can run the floor, shoot from the perimeter and crash the boards. This team is a millennial version of the Suns of old, with Richardson providing the low-post presence Sir Charles gave them back in the day. "It's good for him. He's taken a back seat long enough," says Knicks assistant and fellow Chi-Town native Mark Aguirre. "I wouldn't have let him go, especially without getting anything in return."
Not to mention that in the deal the Suns also acquired an easy get to sing the national anthem at home games.
* * *
IT WASN'T luck that brought Q and Brandy together last July at Magic Johnson's charity party in LA. It was guts. Q walked up to her cold turkey and introduced himself. "It was like magic," says Brandy. "I got butterflies. I was like, wow, this is crazy, but I feel so comfortable with this guy." But she refused to call him at first. "I called her a couple of times, but she wouldn't really talk," says Q, who didn't date seriously in LA. "Then one day, she called out of the blue."
In the short time since, they've both had reason to hesitate -- he more recently because of the publicized revelation that she had only claimed to be married to Sy'rai's father; she initially because of the playboy stereotype of ballers. "I didn't want to get my heart broken," Brandy says. Q hung in there until she realized he didn't play to type. She says he opened up to her. He says she is the best person he's ever met. When she began to show up at Clippers games, she set the media scrambling to figure out whose No.1 fan she was. Life was good.
Then it got better. This past summer, in one whirlwind week, Q signed his big contract, got down on one knee and blinged out Brandy's ring finger with $1 million in carats.
Then he flew with his new fiancée to Phoenix, to accept his new No. 3 jersey. The two have set a wedding date for next summer. Their strategy for a successful future together is simple. "We're going to make sure we see each other a lot," says Q. Brandy agrees: "Either I'm going to be on a plane, or he's going to be on a plane," she says.
Q insists Brandy's celebrity isn't a problem. "She's always going to be bigger than me," he says. "People who don't like sports have heard of her. She's happy for everything I'm doing, and I'm the same way for her." They want to have lots of kids; Brandy says seven, Q's thinking more like four or five. But for the time being, Sy'rai, who already calls Richardson Daddy Q, will continue to get all their attention.
Family is important to Richardson, who's the youngest of five. As a kid growing up on 115th Street on Chicago's South Side, his mother, Emma, was the big hoops fan in the house. "They watched it on TV together, and she'd play with him in the driveway," says his father, Lee, who is retiring after 37 years of driving L trains for the Chicago Transit Authority.
"I call him Quentin, not Q," he says, and it's not too hard to imagine that chores were a big deal in the Richardson household. Lee made sure they got done, sowing the seeds of Q's work ethic as he, his sister, Rochelle, and brothers Cedric, Lee Jr. and Bernard labored, washing dishes, cutting grass, mopping, cleaning the basement and even the alley behind their house. The kids were always getting things done. No matter their mood, things got done.
Discipline bred determination. When he was 12, Q quit ball for a while after enduring an eight-month stretch in which his mom died of breast cancer, older brother Bernard was murdered and his grandmother, Ada, died of natural causes. But he was soon back on the court again.
"Things happen for a reason," Richardson says. "Maybe I wanted to keep playing because of all that." While whispering the names of his three lost kin before each free throw, he earned the full hometown hero experience by leading Whitney Young HS to a state championship as a senior. Two years later, he officially became a household name in Chicago when he led DePaul to the NCAAs for the first time in eight seasons.
By the end of his sophomore year, it was clear he was ready for the NBA. Still, the book on him was difficult to read. Was he big enough to play forward? Did he have enough handle for the perimeter? The Clippers took him with the 18th pick in the 2000 draft.
Richardson wasn't happy about going to LA. He figured the Clippers wanted him only because they knew he was best friends with their lottery pick, Darius Miles. "They didn't think D would want to stay," Richardson says. "They felt drafting me would wipe out that problem."
What it really did was give Q somebody to hang with, to live the life with. He and Miles went way back; they were on the same AAU team when Q was in the ninth grade. Miles' mother, Ethel, moved to LA, and her house became Q's home away from home. But Q and DMiles had rough rookie seasons, both spending a lot of time riding the pine. "When you've never had to play behind anybody, and you've never had to not be the man," says Q, "it's a hard adjustment."
Eventually, Q did get his chance (he finished third in Sixth Man of the Year voting in 2002), but losing trumped personal accomplishment. Then the Clippers traded Miles to Cleveland for Andre Miller, and Richardson got a crash course in the business of the NBA. "It was unreal," says Q. "It was like, I can't go over to my mother's house to eat anymore? Me and my boy, we ain't kicking it no more?" Richardson took it hard, but as always he found refuge in hard work. That hard work led to his best season, and his best season has led to a new life.
Now Q is ready to crack the A-list. "I'd rather have big expectations than none at all," he says. To prove the Suns have spent their money well, he's prepared to take on any role necessary. "Regardless of how many points I score, the main thing is getting minutes," he says. "Because if I'm on the floor, I'm going to do something positive for the team. Rebound, play D, whatever ... I'm going to help out a lot."
He'd better, because a critical undressing awaits him at home. Q has been teaching Brandy the game, schooling her on the finer points of pick-and-rolls and fast-break opportunities. She's a quick study, and she brings an artist's empathetic eye to her observations.
"He's hungry," says Brandy. "Basketball is so important to him. That's the way he creates, it proves who he is to himself. A lot of players out there are selfish in basketball, and they're probably selfish in regular life, too. You can see what kind of man Q is when he's on the court."
And on his skin. His tats reveal the secret of his success, particularly the one that reads, "The period of pain gives one the strength to succeed."
So yeah, Q is lucky. Not knock-on-wood, rabbit-foot lucky. His is the kind of luck born of sweat and sacrifice.
And the luckiest man in the NBA has no intention of breaking his roll.
This article appears in the Oct. 11 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
By Carmen Renee Thompson
Comment on this article
Lying on his back, hands folded behind his head, and still breathing hard after 40 minutes of full-court run, Quentin Richardson gazes up at the glassed-in viewing area overlooking the courts at Hoops Gym just outside of the downtown loop in Chicago. He's staring at his new fiancée, singer/actress Brandy, but she doesn't see him. She's too busy trying to convince her 2-year-old daughter, Sy'rai, to stop pulling her blue dress over her head. When she does glance down at her man, their eyes catch and hold, a current running between them.
Excuse Richardson for feeling like the luckiest guy in the NBA. The 24-year-old swingman everyone knows as Q is about to enter his fifth season, and his life sure seems to have fallen into place. He's just had the good fortune to escape the clutches of the Clippers, having been inked by the Suns to a six-year, $45 million deal. He's engaged to a glamorous woman who's a superstar in her own right. And he's got influential folks believing a step up to greatness is a matter of time. Michael Jordan handpicked him for his Jordan Brand line, and the dog tags that accompany his shoe include this short summary: "Instant offense and future superstar." While his arrival in Phoenix doesn't quite rank with the A-list moves of this action-packed off-season -- Shaq to Miami!, T-Mac to Houston!, Steve Francis to Orlando! -- by all indications this could be the season Richardson earns his own exclamation point.
Q already stands out at Hoops, and not just because he's the only one Brandy, 25, has come to watch. Antoine Walker, Juwan Howard, Eddy Curry and Ben Gordon work out, but it is Q who is positioned as the big man among big men. In the barbershop-like weight room, his gregariousness dominates. "Look at his earrings! He's got that new money. I'll bet he's got an Escalade!" he jokes to Andre Brown, an unsigned free agent whom everyone has dubbed Light-Skin Killa. The harangue gets a laugh from everyone in the room.
"It's the big one, Weezy!," Richardson exclaims, as he chest-presses 60-pound dumbbells. Yeah, right. At 6-foot-5, 238 pounds, Richardson is broad-shouldered, broad-chested, broad everything. Luck did not give him this body. He's proud of his rep as a weight room workhorse. Richardson took off two weeks after the season, and then he went back to work. It's the same schedule he's kept since high school. On the court, he smiles after a bump on a defender elicits this response: "Damn! That boy is strong as an ox!"
Aside from basketball, Q's major indulgence is playing video games. Lately, he's been playing a lot as new teammate Steve Nash. He rarely plays himself, except to check the accuracy of the game's rendition of his moves. This year he's expecting to see major improvement in his virtual self. That's because last season was his best yet: 17.2 points, 6.4 rebounds and 2.1 assists a night; seven 30-plus point games; an NBA season-high eight treys in a game; a career-high 44 points against the Nuggets.
Obviously, the Suns are also looking forward to a performance boost. Although the Clippers (2854) seemed worse last season just 'cause they're the Clippers, the Suns were just as dismal (2953). Of course the biggest difference between the two is that the Suns actually pursue high-priced free agents. Their wish list was small this summer. "Steve Nash was 1A and Q was 1B, or vice versa," says coach Mike D'Antoni. Nash came first, signing a five-year, $65 million deal. "We wanted to get talent," says D'Antoni, "but we wanted bang for our buck."
Bang. Nash and Richardson will mesh well with Amare Stoudemire and Shawn Marion to give the Suns a group that can run the floor, shoot from the perimeter and crash the boards. This team is a millennial version of the Suns of old, with Richardson providing the low-post presence Sir Charles gave them back in the day. "It's good for him. He's taken a back seat long enough," says Knicks assistant and fellow Chi-Town native Mark Aguirre. "I wouldn't have let him go, especially without getting anything in return."
Not to mention that in the deal the Suns also acquired an easy get to sing the national anthem at home games.
* * *
IT WASN'T luck that brought Q and Brandy together last July at Magic Johnson's charity party in LA. It was guts. Q walked up to her cold turkey and introduced himself. "It was like magic," says Brandy. "I got butterflies. I was like, wow, this is crazy, but I feel so comfortable with this guy." But she refused to call him at first. "I called her a couple of times, but she wouldn't really talk," says Q, who didn't date seriously in LA. "Then one day, she called out of the blue."
In the short time since, they've both had reason to hesitate -- he more recently because of the publicized revelation that she had only claimed to be married to Sy'rai's father; she initially because of the playboy stereotype of ballers. "I didn't want to get my heart broken," Brandy says. Q hung in there until she realized he didn't play to type. She says he opened up to her. He says she is the best person he's ever met. When she began to show up at Clippers games, she set the media scrambling to figure out whose No.1 fan she was. Life was good.
Then it got better. This past summer, in one whirlwind week, Q signed his big contract, got down on one knee and blinged out Brandy's ring finger with $1 million in carats.
Then he flew with his new fiancée to Phoenix, to accept his new No. 3 jersey. The two have set a wedding date for next summer. Their strategy for a successful future together is simple. "We're going to make sure we see each other a lot," says Q. Brandy agrees: "Either I'm going to be on a plane, or he's going to be on a plane," she says.
Q insists Brandy's celebrity isn't a problem. "She's always going to be bigger than me," he says. "People who don't like sports have heard of her. She's happy for everything I'm doing, and I'm the same way for her." They want to have lots of kids; Brandy says seven, Q's thinking more like four or five. But for the time being, Sy'rai, who already calls Richardson Daddy Q, will continue to get all their attention.
Family is important to Richardson, who's the youngest of five. As a kid growing up on 115th Street on Chicago's South Side, his mother, Emma, was the big hoops fan in the house. "They watched it on TV together, and she'd play with him in the driveway," says his father, Lee, who is retiring after 37 years of driving L trains for the Chicago Transit Authority.
"I call him Quentin, not Q," he says, and it's not too hard to imagine that chores were a big deal in the Richardson household. Lee made sure they got done, sowing the seeds of Q's work ethic as he, his sister, Rochelle, and brothers Cedric, Lee Jr. and Bernard labored, washing dishes, cutting grass, mopping, cleaning the basement and even the alley behind their house. The kids were always getting things done. No matter their mood, things got done.
Discipline bred determination. When he was 12, Q quit ball for a while after enduring an eight-month stretch in which his mom died of breast cancer, older brother Bernard was murdered and his grandmother, Ada, died of natural causes. But he was soon back on the court again.
"Things happen for a reason," Richardson says. "Maybe I wanted to keep playing because of all that." While whispering the names of his three lost kin before each free throw, he earned the full hometown hero experience by leading Whitney Young HS to a state championship as a senior. Two years later, he officially became a household name in Chicago when he led DePaul to the NCAAs for the first time in eight seasons.
By the end of his sophomore year, it was clear he was ready for the NBA. Still, the book on him was difficult to read. Was he big enough to play forward? Did he have enough handle for the perimeter? The Clippers took him with the 18th pick in the 2000 draft.
Richardson wasn't happy about going to LA. He figured the Clippers wanted him only because they knew he was best friends with their lottery pick, Darius Miles. "They didn't think D would want to stay," Richardson says. "They felt drafting me would wipe out that problem."
What it really did was give Q somebody to hang with, to live the life with. He and Miles went way back; they were on the same AAU team when Q was in the ninth grade. Miles' mother, Ethel, moved to LA, and her house became Q's home away from home. But Q and DMiles had rough rookie seasons, both spending a lot of time riding the pine. "When you've never had to play behind anybody, and you've never had to not be the man," says Q, "it's a hard adjustment."
Eventually, Q did get his chance (he finished third in Sixth Man of the Year voting in 2002), but losing trumped personal accomplishment. Then the Clippers traded Miles to Cleveland for Andre Miller, and Richardson got a crash course in the business of the NBA. "It was unreal," says Q. "It was like, I can't go over to my mother's house to eat anymore? Me and my boy, we ain't kicking it no more?" Richardson took it hard, but as always he found refuge in hard work. That hard work led to his best season, and his best season has led to a new life.
Now Q is ready to crack the A-list. "I'd rather have big expectations than none at all," he says. To prove the Suns have spent their money well, he's prepared to take on any role necessary. "Regardless of how many points I score, the main thing is getting minutes," he says. "Because if I'm on the floor, I'm going to do something positive for the team. Rebound, play D, whatever ... I'm going to help out a lot."
He'd better, because a critical undressing awaits him at home. Q has been teaching Brandy the game, schooling her on the finer points of pick-and-rolls and fast-break opportunities. She's a quick study, and she brings an artist's empathetic eye to her observations.
"He's hungry," says Brandy. "Basketball is so important to him. That's the way he creates, it proves who he is to himself. A lot of players out there are selfish in basketball, and they're probably selfish in regular life, too. You can see what kind of man Q is when he's on the court."
And on his skin. His tats reveal the secret of his success, particularly the one that reads, "The period of pain gives one the strength to succeed."
So yeah, Q is lucky. Not knock-on-wood, rabbit-foot lucky. His is the kind of luck born of sweat and sacrifice.
And the luckiest man in the NBA has no intention of breaking his roll.
This article appears in the Oct. 11 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
