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nasty breeze coming off the ocean. Now we're the ones banishing little kids to this rim, they all joke.
Back in middle school, Devin and Rudy used to walk over here every summer morning and shoot thousands of jump shots. Drills in the heat.
As 13-year-olds, they once had a game at J.W. Wright in Baltimore County, losing to a team they should've beat. Afterwards, Rudy came charging after Devin.
"Why you ain't giving me the ball? You the point guard. You sup- posed to get me the ball…"
Devin said he couldn't get it past half-court. Everyone was too tall for him. The defense was too tight. He couldn't get it to the team's star player in his spots.
"That's your job! You're the point guard!" "You're the best player on the team! Come and get it yourself!"
Devin mocked Rudy, telling him that he wasn't Jesus Shuttlesworth, the cult figure born from the – at the time – recently released movie He Got Game. It went on and on. Devin jokes the exchange was like Kobe telling Derek Fisher to give him the ball instead of Bryant getting it himself. "We were 13!" laughs Rudy.
and they were all his sons. On weekends, they always went roller skating at Skateland.
"On New Year's, that's where everybody was," says Gay's cousin, Kylin Sims. "If you missed New Year's, it was like 'Pshh, what's wrong with you man?'"
Rudy still comes back to Dundalk as often as he can, back to where he's treated normal, back to where it all began before the summer in high school when he went from top-20 in Baltimore to top-five nationally.
"There weren't a lot of basketball influences," says Gay of his childhood. "I went out there and did my own thing. If I couldn't do something, I would just go practice it. I remember I couldn't dunk, so every time I went to the gym I tried to. I couldn't shoot, so I changed my shot on my own at least three times. I couldn't dribble, I worked on that."
He still does. Since his rookie season, Gay's scoring, playmaking and defensive numbers have all nearly doubled; and last season, he averaged career highs in nearly every other category outside of his 19.8 points and 6.2 rebounds a night. But there was no basketball this summer. Not when he missed out on the best ball the city of Memphis has ever seen. Not when he missed out on what could've been his defining moment. An accident took all that away.
Gay spent the hottest months at Athletes' Performance in Phoenix,
"I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG. BUT IT WAS ONE OF THOSE SITUATIONS WHERE YOU DIDN'T REALLY WANT TO BELIEVE IT. IT WAS LIKE,
'OKAY, I'M GOING TO GO BACK IN THE LOCKER ROOM, AND THEY ARE GONNA DO SOMETHING AND I WILL COME BACK OUT.'"
At 9 a.m. the next day, they made up by hitting that blacktop with the broken rim. The next year, they beat that same team by 40.
"Well," says Devin, "it turns out he was Jesus Shuttlesworth."
We came here because Rudy wanted us to see his family. Not his blood – although his mother, Rae Lynn, his father, Rudy Sr., and his late grandfather, Richard Austin, played major roles in his develop- ment. His fam. The crew. From Ashwin Ferguson – the light-hearted man who's been cutting his hair and driving Rudy and his friends around Baltimore since seventh grade – to Ashwin's son, Devin, their friend, Patrick, and Gay's cousin, Kylin. The crew even includes the tiny gym at Sollers Point Tech, the red brick high school that none of them attended but where all of them played.
Upon entering the Fergusons' living room – a room with a red patterned carpet, a glass table sitting in front of the couches, a TV switched to ESPN and "Jazz Sessions" pictures lining the walls – it's almost like we've been put in a time machine.
"As they grew up, the house was theirs," says Ashwin as he cuts their hair in the kitchen. "The house was more theirs than mine." Waiting to get his own shape up, Rudy is pissed. He missed the first episode of Entourage's final season last night.
"That's my show," he says to no one and everyone. Someone jokes they're the Baltimore version of Entourage. It fits. They were all so tight as kids, many people assumed Ashwin was the father
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Ariz., doing work with Pilates and free weights to regain the range of motion and activate the shoulder's smallest muscles. If it was up to him, he'd already be going all-out, but the doctors say he won't be back to 100 percent until late October.
"I couldn't even do this," he says about the initial injury, raising his arm just above his head. Ah, yes. The injury.
Sunday. May 15, 2011. That was when Memphis finally missed Rudy Gay. It took them long enough. They survived for a while without him. Three months to be exact. But it all caught up to them in a Game 7 season-ending 105-90 loss to Oklahoma City in the Western Conference Semifinals.
"The worst part about missing the playoffs is the fact that I've been with this team five years now, and I've been on the team when we were nothing," says Gay. "People came in and basically beat the hell out of us. They beat the hell out of us every night, and we struggled to get 20 wins."
On the night of Feb. 15, Gay posted up Philly's Evan Turner, taking two hard dribbles before turning over his left shoulder and going up for a shot in the lane. Turner slapped down at the same time and upon impact, Gay immediately winced and collapsed in pain – his hands clutching his left shoulder, his body cradling his left arm.
"I knew something was wrong," says Gay. "But it was one of those situations where you didn't really want to believe it. It was like,