Dawkins: Guns have always been a part of NBA

[Stone Cold is Bout It, Bout It]

Charley Rosen / FOXSports.com
Posted: 1 hour ago     
 
 
 
 In the past week and a half, two NBA players — Chris Wilcox and Alan Henderson — have been busted for carrying guns.

This seems to be a continuing problem: the unfortunate case of Jayson Williams; charges that at least one member of Allen Iverson's posse was packing; Dennis Rodman's being nabbed with a rifle in his car and so on.
What's going on here?

The easiest rationale is to believe that, since many NBA'ers wear everyday jewelry that's worth more than most civilians earn in a year, and since players have occasionally been mugged, the guns are carried for protection.

 

Another off-the-cuff possibility is that guns are so popular because the "successful" males in the hood — pimps, drug dealers, hit men, and the like — were packing. So carrying a gun has become a status symbol.

But according to Darryl Dawkins, neither of these proposals is valid.

With the folding of the Pennsylvania Valley Dawgs — the summertime USBL franchise that Dawkins has been coaching so successfully for the past five seasons — Chocolate Thunder has become the best unemployed big man's coach around. Back when he played in the league (1975-89), Dawkins says that about half of the active players all carried guns.

"Sometimes the situation got to be outrageous," Double-D says. "One time a certain big man was teed off because a certain guard wasn't giving him the ball enough. 'People don't pay to see little guys like you dribbling around in circles,' the big man said. 'They want to see me go to work in the pivot.'"

 

"The guard's response was this: 'Well, I've got something for you.' Then he dug into his gym bag, pulled out a piece and stuck it right into the big guy's nose. 'Listen up,' the little guy said. 'I ain't no play dude. I'm a real gangsta. So if you've got anything more to complain about, I'm gonna blow a hole in the middle of your face.' Needless to say, the big man never did get the ball. I've seen this go down on two separate occasions."

Why, then, is gun-toting so common?

"Lots of reasons," says Dawkins. "When all of us were kids, there were always guns around. And our mamas used to constantly tell us to stay away from guns. ... Now, with everybody out on their own, with mama somewhere else, and with money to burn, it's only natural to do all the things that we were forbidden to do coming up — owning a gun being one of them."

As always, Dawkins has his own way of summing up the situation: "All rappers want to be ballplayers, and all ballplayers want to be rappers. And the both of them want to be gangstas."

Why?

"Because good girls like bad guys," he said.

Dawkins also believes that gun-toting is sharply divided along racial lines. "Only the craziest of white players carry guns," he says. "Steve Stipanovich was one of them. Remember him? His playing career ended when he shot himself in the foot back in 1988. What always bothered me was trying to figure out how he was cleaning his gun with the barrel pointing down."

Dawkins also recalls other white men who were armed: "The trainers. Because on road trips they carried the meal money, the emergency cash and the plane tickets."

What about the situation these days?

"Plenty of guys are still packing, but most of them are smart enough to get permits. Mostly they have .22 caliber or .25 caliber pistols. Just enough to sting somebody who gets too close. I mean, I've heard these guys talking. 'If you don't stop bothering me, I'll bust a cap on your butt.' A lot of guys chose to have their boys do the packing."

But Dawkins is dismayed at how careless some of the players can be. "They don't respect the danger," he says, "or the harm that guns can cause. I see guys in just about every locker room getting dressed after games and their final accessory is the gun that they stick down the front of their pants. They do this so that the handle shows and everybody knows not to mess with them."

Dawkins, who measures 6-foot-11 and 280 pounds, says that only guards carry guns. "That's because they were smaller than anybody else when they were kids so they always got picked on and bullied by the big guys. Centers, power forwards and some small forwards can get respect without having to rely on a shooting iron."

David Stern take note. Maybe metal detectors in the locker rooms isn't such a bad idea.


http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/3746160