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If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Cleveland
Have something to say about Rick Reilly's musings? Click here to submit a comment -- and be sure to check out Reilly's Mailbag. Don't miss The Life of Reilly (Total/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, $22.95) -- a best-of compilation of Reilly's columns and features, with a foreword written by Charles Barkley, available now at the CNN/Sports Illustrated Stuff Store and bookstores everywhere.
Except now the personnel manager walks in and says, "Pack your stuff. You're moving to Milwaukee. Tonight." You're stunned. You won't even have time to say goodbye to your friends. You'll have to pay someone to move your Buick and all your stuff. You'll have to sell the house, get a new bank account, stop the newspaper delivery. How are you going to tell your girlfriend? Either you move or you get out of the lucrative widget game entirely -- and make one hundredth of what you're making now. So you go. You're in Milwaukee for five months. You're happy, until the boss walks in and says, "Pack up. You're moving to Orlando. Tonight." You go to Orlando. Six months later it's on to Denver. Then Miami. Then Cleveland. You go. You go. You go. If you don't go, then you don't work. You're beginning to hate widgets. Welcome to the life of NBA power forward Chris Gatling, who has been traded more often than Yahoo! stock. He has been traded seven times in five years. Seven! He's been traded four times in the last year and a half! "I know what my next tattoo is going to be," says Gatling. "A little Bekins moving van. Right on my butt." The U.S. Post Office is about six change-of-address cards behind on Gatling. His mother isn't quite sure where he is. He doesn't even get telephones installed in his apartments anymore. He just has a cell phone. Come to think of it, Gatling gave up getting apartments. He stays in hotels. All the time. Road hotels. Home hotels. Road room service. Home room service. If he ever got a real phone, he'd probably dial 9 for an outside line. Right now he's staying at the Residence Inn in Cleveland, after racking up checkout bills the size of the Pentagon Papers at hotels in Miami, Denver and Milwaukee. Sure, the Cavaliers' general manager told Gatling, "Relax -- you're home now," but Gatling stopped trusting general managers a long time ago. The last time he trusted one was in Dallas, in 1997. The man said Gatling was part of the family there. Why wouldn't he be? He'd just made the All-Star team! So he built the house he never had as a kid -- wine cellar, big Jacuzzi, everything. The Mavericks traded him to the New Jersey Nets in midseason. Look, Gatling's not asking anybody to run a telethon for him. He knows he's outrageously paid. It's just that putting your head down on a pillow mint every night gets old. "It's hard to figure," he says. "If I were just a mediocre player, I could see it. But I dive for loose balls. I take charges. Coaches seem to like me. Fans seem to like me. Maybe I should do what other guys do, the bad guys. You know, show up late, cause trouble. Those guys get all the endorsements, stay on one team. I know we get paid a lot of money, but sometimes you just feel like a piece of meat." Gatling has a home in Oakland he rarely sees, a home in Dallas he rarely sees, a seven-year-old daughter in Chicago he rarely sees. (Her mother, whom Gatling never married, takes care of her.) He doesn't get involved seriously with women. "I won't do that to someone," he says. He doesn't make close friends anymore, either. "Why? Two months later you're somewhere else," he says. "I got one best friend: myself." Hate the coddled NBA players all you want, but these are still people being shipped around like Christmas hams, people with lives and problems, just like anybody else. When Gatling was traded to New Jersey in February 1997, it was a godsend because his mother was dealing with breast cancer and he got to stay near his parents' home in Warren, N.J., a house he had built for them. A season later the Nets shipped him to Milwaukee. "It's not right," Gatling says. "There ought to be a rule about it. You shouldn't be allowed to do this to a person." That's why what happened to Gatling last Thursday, trade-deadline day, was such a complete and utter shock. Nothing. Twenty-two players in the NBA were traded that day, yet somehow, Gatling wasn't one of them. He was so happy, he had a bakery make up a giant cake for what he called a "not traded" party he threw the next night. First staying in Cleveland party ever thrown. Issue date: March 5, 2001 Have something to say about Rick Reilly's musings? Click here to submit a comment -- and be sure to check out Reilly's Mailbag. Don't miss The Life of Reilly (Total/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, $22.95) -- a best-of compilation of Rick Reilly's columns and features, with a foreword written by Charles Barkley, available now at the CNN/Sports Illustrated Stuff Store and bookstores everywhere.
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