A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Sheed

When Rasheed Wallace was a freshman at Simon Gratz High School in Philadelphia, he could already do just about everything on a basketball court.

Well, there was one thing that gave him trouble.

“Rasheed couldn’t make a lefty layup to save his life,” said his coach Bill Ellerbee, a legend in high school coaching circles. “He would go off the wrong foot all the time.”

From the time practice started in September all the way through March, young Rasheed would mess up his steps on his way to the basket -- much to the derision of his coach and his older teammates.

And then, on the day before the Public League championship game, Wallace had his Eliza Doolittle moment.

“Rasheed got it right,” Ellerbee said. “I couldn’t believe it. It was like fireworks going off in the gym. Then he did it two times in a row. Then three times. The guys were going crazy. That’s the only thing he ever had difficulty with.”

Gratz went on to win the Public League title the next day with Wallace, a 6-foot-8 freshman, scoring 23 points in an 80-60 victory over Franklin Learning Center. Gratz and FLC would go on to play for the Pub title every year during Wallace’s high school career with Gratz winning three times.

In his senior year, Wallace led a team that finished 31-0 and was named the No. 1 team in the country by USA Today. They were so good that Wallace played just a little more than 14 minutes a game, a lesson in sportsmanship and team-building that Ellerbee instilled in his teams throughout his coaching career.

Still, the coach who won 450 games in his 20-year career demurs when asked if that was his best team.

“There’s some controversy over whether the 1990 team was better than the 1993 team,” said Ellerbee of his squad that featured Division I players at every position and a senior named Aaron McKie who would go on to win the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year with the Sixers.

“The ’90 team may have been better simply because they had the higher basketball IQ. If not for some unfortunate things, we would have gone undefeated.”

One of those unfortunate things was a bout with the flu, which affected everyone on the team but Wallace.

“That’s how he got his start,” Ellerbee said.

From such humble beginnings was born a once-in-a-lifetime talent, but Ellerbee already knew what he had with his prized pupil. He had first encountered Wallace as a 14-year-old on a team he coached for the United States Youth Games. Already impressed with his young charge, Ellerbee tried to get him admitted to either Roman Catholic, which has its own proud hoops tradition, or Episcopal Academy (alma mater of recent draftees Wayne Ellington and Gerald Henderson).

For a time it looked like Wallace was bound for EA, which is just outside the city limits but is a lifetime away from hardscrabble North Philly located as it is on the Main Line, one of the wealthiest areas in the country.

But Wallace’s mother liked the way Ellerbee had looked out for her son and wanted him to stay with the coach. Four years later, Rasheed Wallace graduated as one of the most decorated prep players in the city’s illustrious basketball history, and a talented athlete who excelled in track and on the baseball diamond as a pitcher (imagine the gangly 6-foot-10 Wallace firing fastballs at unsuspecting high school kids). 

“I was impressed with him because he took to the game so well,” Ellerbee said. “You only had to tell him something one time.”

And thus was born the essential paradox of Rasheed Wallace.

Was his play an act of selflessness so rarely seen in big-time sports to be commended, or was it selfish to deny one’s physical gifts, even for the right reasons? So talented, but also so intelligent and basketball savvy that he would do the right thing often at the expense of the individual play that only he could make.

“I would have to make him shoot,” Ellerbee said. “If he was double-teamed he would pass it back out. He remembered everything I taught him and sometimes he put it right back on me.”

It’s a charge that has stuck with Wallace through his time at North Carolina and in his various pro stops. He could be, as Charles Barkley once said, the best player in the game, or he could be the consummate teammate, but it’s awfully hard to be both.

In that, he has a basketball soulmate in Kevin Garnett, who has long been criticized for his stubborn refusal to play the game any differently in the last four minutes than he does in the first four. Like Garnett, Wallace has remained true to his basketball self; a superstar teammate if not the outright superstar that Garnett has been.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Garnett has always had much respect for Wallace. During the Celtics playoff series with the Pistons two seasons ago Garnett declared that playing Wallace was like “looking in the mirror,” and there’s a lot of truth to that. Both are long, active and accomplished defensive players -- particularly on the post -- and both love to stretch the floor with their jump shot.

But where Garnett goes 100 miles per hour every waking second that he is on the floor (even in a three-piece suit), Wallace has at times played down to the level of his surroundings. By any objective measure, and by most subjective ones, Wallace had the worst season of his career with the Pistons in 2007-08. They were disjointed from the start playing for a first-year coach in Michael Curry after five years with Larry Brown and then Flip Saunders, and once Chanucey Billups was traded to Denver in the ill-fated Allen Iverson deal the Pistons never recovered their swagger that Wallace made famous by carting around a WWE championship belt.

If anyone from that team needed a fresh start it was Wallace who endured a good portion of the blame for Detroit’s failings.

“I think (coming to Boston) is going to revive him,” Ellerbee said. “I’m hard on Rasheed. I tell him when he’s out there (messing around). I think he could have had a better year (with Detroit), but I think this will really jack up his game.

“Gee whiz, they can really create problems. If Garnett’s down low and Rasheed’s outside, you can’t double Garnett then.”

There’s another Wallace-Garnett parallel and that’s that both are highly emotional players, which is how most casual fans have come to regard Wallace; as the guy who gets called for technical fouls and occasionally blows up at the media. But there’s another side to Wallace and Ellerbee glows when asked about it.

“He’s a compassionate person,” Ellerbee said. “He really cares about people. Off the court he’s a completely different guy. He ran basketball camps and he would never charge the kids (money). Some guys have camps and they just put their name on it. He was there every single day and I think he enjoyed it more than the kids did.”

It’s all part of the complex package of skills and personality that Wallace brings to Boston, and with all of it comes a golden opportunity for him to remake his image as the ultimate role player for the ultimate team.