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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

You Choose: Troubled Cal Or $$$

Gwen Knapp San Francisco Examiner

Shareef Abdur-Rahim traveled to a beautiful city on Saturday, went to a big park by the ocean. Vancouver welcomed him eagerly. Stu Jackson, an NBA executive of some stature, picked him up at the airport and showed him the town.

The 19-year-old was on a job interview, but he could wear jeans without fear of losing the position. This is what it’s like to land softly after making a hard choice - taking a big leap.

The 6-10 power forward didn’t jump because he knew there was a feather bed waiting. He visited Vancouver, en route to the NBA, because forces at Berkeley nudged him in that direction.

When he said May 30 that he wanted to stay in school, wanted to reverse his May 7 decision to enter the draft, he meant it. He didn’t change his mind back. It was changed for him.

“I think without the problems (at Cal), this situation probably never would have come up for me,” Abdur-Rahim said by phone from the Vancouver Grizzlies’ offices.

He spoke uneasily, perhaps touched by survivor’s guilt. Cal, his school, his home for the last year, has an NCAA investigation in its future. Abdur-Rahim has a multi-million-dollar contract in his.

Nobody can blame him for leaving. In fact nobody could’ve blamed him on May 7 if he’d left just for the millions and not because of the investigation.

But the choice became automatic last week, when coach Todd Bozeman told him the school had received a preliminary letter of inquiry about possible NCAA violations involving former guard Jelani Gardner. The letter arrived in May.

“There were a lot of rumors going around,” Abdur-Rahim said. “It was a situation where Coach didn’t really want to worry any of the players, kind of keep us, you know, out of it. But you know if something like that comes up, it’s kind of hard for it not to get out and kind of hard for us not to worry.

“So really, we just talked about it. Coach respects me as a man. I respect him as a man. So he knew I had to kind of do what was best for me.”

He still didn’t want to leave, but he knows he’s lucky. Being forced out of Cal, and into the NBA well, worse things could happen to a young man under pressure.

“I’m a firm believer in everything happening for a reason,” he said. “So you know: Man plans, and God plans, but you know God is the best planner, so I look at it like it was God’s plan for me.”

The hardest task remaining will be delicately tiptoeing through the detailed whys and hows of his departure. He has to avoid stepping on Cal.

No, he said Saturday, he hadn’t heard anything about his coach’s flirtation with the New Jersey Nets.

“Coach Bozeman told me he was going to be (at Cal), so that really had nothing to do with it.”

And no, he won’t change his mind again, although the NCAA allows underclassmen 30 days after the draft for just that purpose. Some people might doubt that. They see him as a waffler, a flip-flop artist. But sensible people see him as human - human and 19.

Jackson, the Grizzlies’ general manager, falls into the second category.

“All of us are under pressures from a variety of areas,” he said, “and I probably change my mind 18 times in a day, and not all of it becomes very public.”

Jackson represents an especially downy section of Abdur-Rahim’s feather bed. He is eager to sympathize, understand, nourish, even play tour guide on a Saturday afternoon. He has the No. 3 pick in Wednesday’s draft. He’s pretty sure he wants to use it on Abdur-Rahim.

Toronto has the No. 2 pick. NBA sources say the Raptors want Abdur-Rahim, too.

See why he left controversy at Cal - to start a civil war in Canada. He might visit the Raptors early this week.

“They’ve contacted my advisor, my people,” Abdur-Rahim said. He hasn’t hired an agent, he said, but he has an advisor, an anonymous figure who tagged along to Vancouver.

The trip was Abdur-Rahim’s first face-to-face meeting with any NBA representatives. During those 23 days in May when he entered the draft the first time, he did none of the ritual visits.

But as soon as Jackson heard the forward was available, he whisked him north.

“We went down to San Francisco the other day with a SWAT team,” Jackson said, “took a hostage into a truck, demanded that (AbdurRahim) come to Vancouver, got him into a plane, and here he is.”

On Wednesday, Abdur-Rahim and his family will be in the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J. - site of the NBA Draft. A team will call his name, plant a cap on his head. Smiles all around.

If that team is one of the Canadians, he will be extraordinarily fortunate. Most top picks are sentenced to three-year terms with the Clippers, Nets or Timberwolves. These teams live at the high end of the draft list, entrenched by their incompetence. The Canadians are expansionists, sophomores in the NBA, fresh faces in the draft lottery. So Abdur-Rahim jumped back into the draft, trailing several parachutes.