On the morning of February 12th, a secondhand long-distance bus, its body covered in gray and white snow and salt stains, pulled into the open-air parking lot in the backyard of the Auerbach training center, accompanied by the heavy rumble of its diesel engine.
A puff of white steam hissed out of the air valve on the car door.
Ron Artest, sporting a messy, round head of hair, stepped off the folding footrest. The dry, cold morning wind blowing in from Boston Harbor crept into his collar, making him shrink back. He wore a stiff gray fleece pullover, with half a thick brass chain peeking out from the collar, and a pair of running shoes with mud stains on the sides.
Beal Sean, the strength and conditioning assistant who had been following Artest for fourteen days straight, rubbed his bloodshot eyes as he trailed behind, a worn-out hardcover attendance book tucked under his arm and a plastic bag full of empty film canisters in his hand. Those were the records of his daily filming of Artest's training sessions.
" Ron, hurry up, Mike will be waiting in the physical testing room on the first floor before eight o'clock." Sean's voice was terribly hoarse, and he was sniffling from the cold.
Artest remained silent, bent down, and unscrewed the metal door to the side of the bus's luggage compartment, pulling out a bulging black canvas tote bag with one hand. The nylon zipper was stuck halfway shut, revealing neatly stacked homemade CDs inside, their plastic wrap still intact.
Before setting off, this canvas bag was filled with three hundred CDs that he had found in underground factories in Boston to press. After fourteen days of running around, there were still more than two hundred and eighty CDs left in the bag.
This two-week album promotion trip was completely different from the grand spectacle he had envisioned before setting off.
On the NBA court, he was a menace that every team's forwards would avoid. But in the eyes of the music scene hustlers in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland, Artest, without his Celtics jersey, was no different from stars like O'Neal, Kobe, and Webber who plunged into the rap scene—just a bunch of rich, vain, and clueless fat sheep.
His first stop was back in Queensbridge New York. He had registered Real Warrior Records, which he had funded himself, and had $200,000 in start-up capital. His annual salary was far less than Garnett's and Pierce's, so this was already a significant expense. As soon as he arrived in Manhattan and rented a recording studio, those underground producers who usually called him their best buddies on the phone surrounded him.
A mixing engineer, somewhat well-known in Brooklyn, pointed to a row of worn-out buttons on the mixing console and immediately demanded $8,000 per song for mastering, four times the market rate. Artest, finding it too expensive, asked another question. The engineer immediately ripped off his monitor headphones and threw them on the console, sarcastically remarking, " Ron, you're a big shot who's won an NBA championship, how come you're so stingy in front of your buddies? Yesterday, Troy Hudson came to record a song and dumped $20,000 on him without batting an eye. You're more famous than him, can't you even afford this much?"
For the sake of saving face, Artest reluctantly paid the money.
But when he took the master tape to radio stations to chart, he witnessed the ugly side of this industry.
In a hip-hop radio station tucked up on the second floor of an auto repair shop in Detroit Side, the air was thick with the smells of tobacco smoke and stale fried chicken bones. The black DJ in charge of the evening show, with two gold teeth in his mouth, leaned back in his swivel chair, slowly clipping his nails with nail clippers, not even glancing at the demo disc that Artest handed him.
"Want to play your songs during prime time?" The DJ blew nail clippings onto Artest's shoes and waved three fingers. "Three thousand dollars a time. Cash only, old bills only, no receipts. If you pay, I'll put your disc in the machine at ten tonight. If not, there's a trash can to the left outside, throw it in yourself so it doesn't take up my table."
Artest gritted his teeth and paid $5,000 for a chart-topping fee in Chicago. As a result, he sat alone by the drafty window of a motel that night, listening to the radio all night long. It wasn't until 4:30 in the morning, when the radio was filled with trashy ads for male enhancement drugs, that his song was played for less than a minute with the beginning and end cut off.
What infuriated him most was what happened four days earlier in Indianapolis.
A local nightclub owner, claiming to be a die-hard fan, offered to host a listening party for Artest's new album. Artest was overjoyed and carried two boxes of CDs to the event. However, when he arrived at the nightclub, he saw a poster at the entrance featuring a huge image of the Celtics ' infamous Ron Artest in person, without mentioning the new album at all.
That night, the nightclub owner sold out of high-priced tickets thanks to his name. When the party ended, the manager blocked the door of the private room with a bill for $4,600 worth of Hennessy cognac, demanding that he pay. The group of local thugs and dancers who had been chanting "Long live!" around him all night finished their drinks and disappeared without a trace.
As Artest paid his bill and stepped out of the nightclub's back door for some fresh air, he witnessed the nightclub's cleaner carrying the two boxes of CDs he had delivered, dumping them all into a stinking green metal trash can in the back alley. Several drunkards were standing next to the trash can, urinating, the urine dripping down the plastic seals of the boxes.
Artest's fists were clenched so tightly he was cracking, and he took a step forward, intending to throw the nightclub owner out of the second-floor window.
Sean, the accompanying strength and conditioning assistant, grabbed him from behind around the waist, pointed at the police car parked at the alley entrance, and yelled in his ear, " Ron! Do you want to go to jail? Do you want Lin Qi to fire you? Don't you want to stay with the Boston Celtics? Look at all that stuff on the ground! Those guys don't care what you sang, they just want the dollars in your pocket!"
Late that night, Artest didn't go back to the hotel to sleep. He squatted next to the trash can, picking up the CDs that weren't dirty, wiping them clean with his sleeve, and stuffing them back into his canvas bag.
At 7:00 a. m. the next morning, in Indianapolis, where the temperature was -12 degrees Celsius, Sean knocked on the door precisely on time and led him to a borrowed community high school gymnasium in the suburbs.
In the empty, dilapidated arena, only the ticking of Sean's stopwatch and the dull thud of basketballs hitting the wooden floor could be heard. Artest, wearing a soaked training uniform, ran back and forth between the baselines, sinking his five-hundredth three-pointer. He collapsed onto the cold floor, staring at the rusty steel beams above his head, and all the chaotic, restless thoughts in his mind suddenly vanished.
The world of fame and fortune outside is full of swindlers after the dollars in his pocket; only basketball doesn't lie.
Artest remembered Rasheed's oft-repeated phrase, "Ball Don't Lie."
Their understanding of this sentence may differ greatly.
But based on Artest's own experience...
The more sweat you shed, the more basketball will reward you.
Basketball never lies.