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MANILA, Philippines—It was a sunny morning about 10 years ago when a reedy 16-year-old Gilbert Arenas sat up on his dormitory bed in Arizona and said he’d had enough.
He was red-shirted in his freshman year, he wasn’t getting any attention during practice and, worse, whenever his father called him up, it’d be to relay the bad press that he was getting: After passing up offers from schools that promised him a thousand minutes, Arenas was getting zilch from powerhouse Arizona.
“I remember a week into my stay at Arizona, some guy was asking me what jersey [number] I’d like to wear,” Arenas said, recounting the story that has been retold in adidas commercials. “I told the guy, I’ll take zero.
“That was who I was then. I was a zero. I was nothing.”
“That’s when one day, I decided that I’d change the whole thing,” he said. “I told my roommate [then Wildcats starting guard] Jason Gardner, ‘you know what? Forget the team, I’m going to the gym where everybody was playing.’”
Arenas trotted to the Arizona gym and showed his stuff: Dunks and jumpers that made people ask him the question that, nowadays, never fails to make him chuckle.
“They’d come up to me and ask ‘man, where do you go to school?’ And I’m like—‘here,’” Arenas said, laughing. “Then they’d go, ‘you should try out for the basketball team.’ And I’d say ‘I am with the basketball team!’”
Arenas can afford to laugh at all that now. In fact, the talented 6-foot-4 guard can afford to laugh at all the hits he’d taken on the way to NBA superstardom. He has a rich endorsement contract with adidas and just recently, signed a lucrative deal with the Washington Wizards worth $111 million, one that was actually less than what the Wizards offered.
“What can I do for my family with $127 million that I can’t do with $111 million?” he told The Washington Post.
Besides, there isn’t much between those figures for a guy who started from scratch and had to work his way up. Living on $16 million less isn’t as hard as trying to get people’s respect.
“The toughest part was trying to change people’s perceptions about me,” Arenas said. “Once you’re labeled, it’s hard to convince people to change how they feel about you.”
Trying to figure out what he could have done with that $16-million difference wasn’t as torturous as wondering why guys averaging 20 points per game were making the All-Star team and why he was producing 29 points, six rebounds and five assists a night and was still not getting a call for the midseason classic.
“It was like, ‘C’mon. C’mon. C’mon. Hello. Hello. Hello. I’m here.”
But oh, do people take notice now. Not just in the United States but worldwide. During the first of a four-day promotional tour for adidas, Arenas was mobbed by a lot of fans that he declared: “I’m more popular here than I am in the States.”
And it’s easy to figure why.
“I’m the kid who worked his way up and still know what the bottom looks like,” Arenas said. “Starting from scratch has its advantages. From the bottom, when you fail, it’s not much of a big deal. You can easily pick up the pieces and start again.”
After an injury-filled season in the NBA, Arenas is ready to pick up the pieces and continue his climb to the ranks of the NBA elite. And of all the big numbers he has punched in so far, no statistic is more glaring—more satisfying, perhaps—than the fact that he has played a total of 16,112 minutes in basketball’s biggest stage.
Not bad for a guy who people once said wouldn’t get to play a single minute of the game after high school and who, one sunny day about 10 years ago, sat up on his bed in an Arizona dorm bed, figured he’d had enough and decided to embark on a Zero-to-Hero journey.
