Gilbert Arenas turns 30 today, and who knows how scary this is for the artist formerly known as Gazo the Prankster. He now sits at home and waits for a chance to play basketball again, his quietness magnified by its deviation from his known personality. The video below of Washington fans reacting to the Arenas trade from Washington was shot around 50 hours after he was sent to the Orlando Magic in mid-December 2010.
Gilbert Arenas once called himself the Black President, but the way he governed the basketball court and his world around it after injuring his knee in 2007 was far from diplomatic. The former star’s fall from grace in the nation’s capital is, however, fitting of political scandal.
Many have painted Arenas a complicated person, from fans to media to teammates to team personnel. But he’s not as dense as a mortgage-backed security. No, it’s the digestion of Arenas that was always complicated. One story one day, another the next. His antics were often a disruptive force, pardoned by organizational higher-ups and accepted in the best “boys will be boys” way possible. What former coach Eddie Jordan once dubbed as “Gilbertology” often spilled into the headlines. The NBA has had characters galore, but Arenas’ idiosyncrasies and flaky personae, at their height, were unmatched.
He carried the insistent whimsy of a child with the ability to drop 60 points in a game, something that’s still only been done by nine different players 16 different times in the last 26 NBA seasons — Tracy McGrady, Allen Iverson, Karl Malone, David Robinson, Tom Chambers, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Jordan (four times), and Kobe Bryant (five times). Arenas’ brand of roller coaster fun captured basketball fans in Washington, and dragged franchise to its only sniff past the first round of the playoffs in the last 28 seasons.
