The Truth Revealed

By the time the Batties emerged from the men's room, security guards had dragged Pierce to a stairwell. Blood streamed from six gashes on his face. He noticed his shirt was wet, peeled it back and saw his wounds, put his hands on them "to hold the blood," he says. He had been stabbed five times between his shoulder blades, too. He didn't know that, though, until the Batties had gotten him into their car and were weaving through traffic to get him to a nearby hospital. In the emergency room, Pierce kept asking, "Am I going to live?"

He was extraordinarily lucky. The surgeons were able to operate using minimally invasive instruments and didn't have to open up Pierce's chest. But for the once-mighty Celtics it still felt like another bewildering blow; the sudden deaths of Len Bias in 1986 and Reggie Lewis in '93 had crippled efforts to rebuild in the post--Larry Bird era. The Red Sox had their Curse of the Bambino, but Celtics stars were finding it hard to stay alive.

Pierce stayed just four days in the hospital and was back playing three weeks later, but some of the wounds weren't physical. Once an outgoing, almost clownish presence, Pierce kept to himself at home; the Celtics arranged for a 24-hour guard there. He talked with fewer and fewer friends and family members as the months wore on. "It really messed me up in the head," he says. "I saw a shrink, a psychiatrist, a couple of times and I was like, 'You know what, man? I don't want to talk to you no more; this is bothering me.' I didn't feel comfortable."

A year after the stabbing, Pierce went to a tattoo parlor in Venice Beach and tried to reclaim his body his way: with a massive ink job across his back, over the five purplish wounds. It was his own design—the hands of God holding his heart, with wings and a halo and the words CHOSEN ONE unrolling below. Pierce removes his shirt, steps under a spotlight in his living room, points. "When they were going over all my scars, some of the marks right here?" Pierce says. "They were hurting still."

But when, in September 2002, it came time for the trial, Pierce was not the star witness the prosecution had hoped for. By the time Pierce took the stand, two key witnesses had already recanted their grand-jury testimony. Pierce had identified one of the three defendants—William Ragland, Trevor Watson and Anthony Hurston—while in the hospital, and ID'd another two weeks later, both through photographs. But at the trial assistant district attorney John Pappas lost confidence that Pierce could provide a positive identification of his assailants on the witness stand. So Pappas didn't ask.

It wasn't a total flip, says former Boston federal prosecutor Paul Kelly, now the NHL Players' Association head, but "anybody with a sense of the system—lawyers, police officers, court officials—we all knew somebody either got to these witnesses or fear overtook them and, frankly, Paul Pierce."

Pierce laughs at the idea, pointing to the six-year contract extension he agreed to as he awaited the start of the trial. "If I was scared," he says, "why would I re-sign with Boston?" He says that he simply couldn't be sure the men in court were the same ones who stabbed him. The club was dark, the attack fast and furious. The jury acquitted all three men on the charge of armed assault with intent to murder; Ragland was convicted of assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and sentenced to a seven-to-10-year prison term, Watson was convicted of assault and battery and sentenced to one year, and Hurston was acquitted of all charges. Pierce declined to make a victim-impact statement at sentencing. He was alive. He just wanted it all to go away.

Still, one memory remains vivid. In the days and weeks after the stabbing, Pierce wondered if the gruesome news might finally be enough to flush his father out. Each day Paul would sift through the messages and supportive letters from strangers, fans, friends. "I'm here: I could've died," Pierce says. "And to never get a phone call or a letter from him? That really hurt me for a long time. I was like, Man, he didn't even reach out or nothing. That hurt me to where I was, like, If he dies? I don't even care."

AND THAT NBA dream life: Where was that, anyway? Winning titles like Magic's Lakers? Pierce had three straight losing seasons in Boston, and his own slick-haired coach, Rick Pitino, scurried back to college a failure. Hitting clubs? Being famous? It had nearly killed him, and it laid bare in nightmarish relief the flip side of being a pro athlete, what Pierce calls his "curse." Riches and adulation, of course, he had figured on. But with it came a new responsibility to care for family and friends, "all the stress that comes with you finally having money," he says. Pierce was sure his stabbing had grown out of "the jealousy, the envy" that comes with celebrity.

All that was puzzling enough, but now, after his best season yet, after Pierce had led the Celtics to the 2002 Eastern Conference finals, even his game was being called into question.