Arrested 15 times by age 15, All-Star forward Caron Butler straightened out his life with the help of a tough-love coach and his burning desire to redeem himself

	Washington Wizards' Caron Butler. Simon Bruty/SI

I picked him up at the airport in Bangor, Maine, and I asked him, 'How many bags have you got?' He said he had four. I said, 'Good. That will take you only two trips to get it in the van.' And I walked off and left him. Let him make two trips carrying the bags by himself."

The narrator was Max Good, the former coach of Maine Central Institute, a prep school in the middle of who knows where. He and his wife, Phyllis, were sitting in end zone seats 16 rows from the court on which the Washington Wizards were playing the Celtics on a recent night in Boston. He was explaining how Wizards forward Caron Butler had begun his transformation from an adolescent criminal into an NBA All-Star.

"He'd flown in from Racine [Wis.] to Chicago, Chicago to Boston, Boston to Bangor, so I knew he was hungry," Good was saying. "After I picked him up at the airport I drove to a McDonald's, and I had an Airedale terrier that I took everywhere with me. We went to the McDonald's and I fed my dog, and I got something, and I didn't even feed Caron. My dog was eating and he wasn't, and I knew he was thinking, Damn."

As Good spoke, Butler was playing a typically sensational game. He was routinely slashing to the basket or shouldering off Celtics defenders to clear space for his smooth jumper, and when he went up for rebounds, he would snatch the ball above the crowd, his upper body jerking and thrashing like a swordfish against a fisherman's line. With an explosive first step and the attitude of a running back who seeks contact, he was, at 6'7" and 228 pounds, the most intimidating player on the floor. "Caron, Carmelo Anthony, Paul Pierce -- they all have great direct lines to the basket," says San Antonio Spurs small forward Bruce Bowen, who regularly defends the best wing players in the NBA. "Caron doesn't pump-fake and dribble around the contact. He pump-fakes and goes straight to the basket."

Yet in between plays on that night in Boston, the All-Star would look up into the crowd at his old coach. Rather than being distracted by his tortured past, Butler was drawing strength from it.

"And so we're driving down the highway, and it's about 35 minutes from the airport, it's a light night and you can see the silhouette of the trees because it's nothing but pine trees between Bangor and Pittsfield [where MCI is located]," Good was saying. "And Caron said, 'Coach, it doesn't seem like there's much to do here.' So I jerked the van over, and I said -- you've got to excuse my language here -- I said, 'Hey, [expletive], do you want to go back to Racine, where you had so much to do and got absolutely nothing done?' And he said, 'No, no, no, no, Coach, I'm not saying that.' I said, 'Will you learn from me and learn to shut the [expletive] up and start listening instead of talking?' And he didn't say another word."