Sometimes a nickname is too perfect. And if nobody else will bestow it upon you, well then you might as well give it to yourself. That's why Gilbert Arenas wrote "GABW" on a basketball he used to carry with him.
Gilbert Arenas Boy Wonder.
It started a few years back when Arizona teammate Jason Gardner decided the dynamic duo backcourt of he and Arenas should be known as Batman and Robin. It never caught on...except with Arenas, who morphed his role to Boy Wonder.
"That fits me because Robin was the young guy who never paid any attention to authority, and that's how I am," Arenas said. "I do the opposite of what everybody says...."
"He really is the Boy Wonder because you never know what he's going to do next," Chris Mills said. "He can be destructive and kick holes in the wall and then two seconds later is on the bus laughing up a storm. I don't know if it's a split personality or what."...
The craziest thing Arenas has done? His teammates roll their eyes.
"We can only choose one?" asks Adonal Foyle before casting his vote for Arenas' tendency to break clipboards when angry.
Mills goes with Arenas' habit of ripping up cards for no reason when the guys are playing on the team plane. Antawn Jamison chooses Arenas' recent prank in Chicago, where he threw all the towels in the shower so that rookies Mike Dunleavy and Jiri Welsch had none to dry off. Then he started a snowball fight on the team bus.
"He's definitely 21 going on 12," Mills said. "His mind hasn't caught up to the number on his birth certificate."
The Tuscon Citizen reported that Gilbert often played pranks on super-serious Arizona teammate Gene Edgerson, "creating tension between the two." Jason Gardner was once asked about Gilbert's pranks at Arizona, and refused to go there.
"It could mean a little trouble for Gilbert," Gardner said. "Maybe even cause him not to start."
There were the countless tales of his locker room wrestling matches with Awvee Storey, including
this one from Esquire:
"You know, when you have aggressive people, they have to relieve some of that. And I'm one of those people. I don't care--I wrastle. Wrestling. Hurting. I'll bite, punch him in the side....Our personalities clash because he's a bully and I don't like being bullied by anybody."
Storey was also the target outside the locker room, as in
this tale of pranking:
"It drives some guys crazy, but I love it. One of my favorites was sneaking up on my teammate Awvee Storey. He has a bad attitude, and I just have to try and get him to smile. One day he was on the toilet reading the paper, and I snuck in with a water hose, turned it on him and sprayed him for, like, three minutes. He had all his clothes on, and he got soaked. It was hilarious. But for some reason he still wasn't laughing."
There was
the famous paintball shootout involving Gilbert and Andray Blatche and various friends, in which Gilbert's team won:
They ran out of CO2 pretty quick because my team had most of it so one of Andray's friends yells, "Aww, it's not fair!" and they started to bail and jumped back over the wall. But one the kids was a little too heavy. His name is Jamar. That's 'Dray's cousin. Jamar couldn't get over the wall because Jamar has been eating one too many Twinkies.
So Jamar got stuck in my yard with the five of us. We gave him the chance to walk out like a man, or cry like a girl. He did both. He cried like a little girl while he was walking and running while we were shooting paintballs at him. I told him, "Hey, come in the lion's den, you're bound to get hit."
They said that he got hit so many times that he had trouble putting his clothes on the next day.
And then there was the time that Javaris Crittenton was traded to the Wizards, via the AP.
Crittenton even was given a pair of sneakers in Wizards team colors by Arenas. Asked whether he was worried about notorious jokester Arenas setting him up with some sort of prank, Crittenton smiled.
"I've heard about Gil," Crittenton said, "but I don't think he'll do that."
Yeah. And then there was
his press conference after signing the mega-contract.
"All the little things I do out there is gonna come to a halt," Arenas said. "You know, but I think I'm up for the task. I just need to cut out some of the foolishness I do."
"What foolishness?" asked Abe Pollin, appropriately
"It's a good thing," Arenas answered. "I create hype, I create excitement, I think I can still do that. But some of the other stuff I know I've got to calm down."
By Dan Steinberg | January 7, 2010; 1:29 PM ET
Categories:
Wizards
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