A Whole New Rap

This is it, Chris Webber swears, the time and place where the mystery dies. Until now, he knows, it has been nearly impossible for people to understand him, because he has scattered his talent and interests, had the best and worst sides of himself flash on the news, in game highlights, on the police scanner, and at the end of nearly a decade in the public eye, it has added up to...what? Is he, at 26, a winner? A rapper? A pothead? A spokesman for his race? A leader, a follower, a con artist? Out for his team or out for himself? A problem or a solution?

"Who is Chris Webber? What type of person is he going to be?" says Webber, who, after six seasons of largely unfulfilled promise, is playing the best ball of his NBA career. Averaging 19.8 points and 12.9 rebounds through Sunday, the 6'10", 245-pound Webber has put himself in position to succeed Karl Malone as the NBA's premier power forward and enabled his new team, the Sacramento Kings, to make a run at only its second playoff berth in 13 years. "For every good instance in my career, there's been a bad instance, so people worry and wonder, Who is this guy?" Webber says. "This is just do or die now. Hopefully, I can make them see."

It will be no easy task. Webber is, after all, a man who talks reverently of education but has yet to earn a college degree, a selfless player who has left two NBA teams wondering about his selfishness. His old high school coach speaks of his thoughtfulness, his college coach speaks of his loyalty, but his pro coach of last season, the Washington Wizards' Bernie Bickerstaff, doesn't want to speak about him at all. "I don't really know who Chris Webber is," says Don Nelson, who coached Webber in his rookie year at Golden State and now heads up the Dallas Mavericks. "No, I really don't."

Indeed, Webber so often presents conflicting images that even his ardent supporters have stopped trying to reconcile them. "You wonder how somebody this tough and at times mean on the court can be so sensitive in another realm," says Kurt Keener, who was Webber's coach at Country Day High in suburban Detroit, "but that's him. That's the essence of Chris Webber."

That Webber's essence now takes him to Sacramento, though, seems like some sort of cosmic joke. It's as if, in sending his abundant talents to a franchise renowned only for its ineptitude, the basketball fates have decided to punish him for squandering one too many golden opportunities, starting with the infamous timeout in Michigan's 1993 NCAA title-game loss to North Carolina. At Golden State, Webber won the NBA Rookie of the Year Award and claimed he wanted to spend his career with the Warriors; six months later he executed an out clause in his contract. He arrived in Washington, an ideal city for someone professing to be passionate about urban and racial issues and pondering politics as a career. Yet once again, he self-destructed.

Reunited on the Wizards with Juwan Howard, his Fab Five teammate from Michigan, Webber's can't-miss career unraveled over the course of four injury-scarred seasons and last year's annus horribilis: In January 1998 he was arrested, after being pulled over for allegedly speeding, on charges of second-degree assault, marijuana possession and resisting arrest; and then three months later he was named along with Howard in a complaint by a woman accusing them of sexual assault at a late-night gathering at Howard's house. Webber was exonerated on all charges in both cases—Howard was also cleared of sexual assault and went on to win $100,000 in punitive damages from the accuser—but nonetheless found himself under fire for partying too much. On May 14, Washington general manager Wes Unseld shipped Webber, his team captain, to Sacramento for guard Mitch Richmond and forward-center Otis Thorpe.

Unseld, comparing this year's Wizards, 13-19 at week's end, to the underachieving team that finished 42-40 last season, says, "We're not winning a lot of games, but there's a different attitude." While he doesn't attribute that change solely to Webber's exit, he adds, "This is quite a privileged life we have. We could all work for a living." Asked if he thinks Webber grasps that, Unseld says, "To be perfectly honest, I would say no."

But then, by the end of last year, Webber was having as hard a time figuring out Chris Webber as anyone else. "I doubted myself," he says. "I started to second-guess anything I did, any way that I lived."

Webber spent the off-season in his hometown of Detroit, isolated, bitter, intent on "breaking myself down" and trying to boil away in a blaze of work the parts of his personality that have stopped him from realizing greatness. But even after all that, Webber can't help himself. On March 16, under his own label, Humility Records, he released 2 Much Drama—a funny, slick, self-puncturing and self-pitying slice of his life, his unfiltered chance to reveal the real Chris Webber (a.k.a. C. Webb). The album cover features a picture only a pastor could love: A shirtless C. Webb squats on his haunches and prays while holding a gleaming silver crucifix, looking very much like a man begging forgiveness. In the notes on the back is a Biblical quotation in large type: "For he shall give his angels charge over me to keep me in all my ways."

Inside, the liner notes feature 14 photographs. One of the largest has Webber staring dead-on into the camera, extending both middle fingers to the world.