The most decorated role player in NBA history pulls off the main roadway and into Liberty Park, near the court where crowds first came to see him work his game and dream his dream. Jamal Crawford unfolds his 6-foot-5 frame from the driver’s seat, casually trudges toward the back of his luxury sedan and pops the trunk.
“Here you go,” he says, plucking one of four basketballs from a pile and flicking it to Jayen Jamal (J.J.), his 6-year-old son.
Twenty years ago, Crawford would roll up to this park in Renton, Washington, just outside Seattle, in a used baby blue Oldsmobile Cutlass. Back then, he had two worries in his 16-year-old head: gas money and holding the court till dusk.
Today, on a gray Saturday in mid-July, he’s driving a pearl Mercedes S63 AMG with a full tank, and his main concern is whether J.J. will stop with those crazy, Stephen Curry finger-rolls and just try a regular layup.
Still, 20 years running, before and after the multimillion-dollar contracts, fatherhood and a record three NBA Sixth Man of the Year awards, the ritual remains:
Park. Grab a ball from the trunk. And let the metronomic rhythm of the ball pounding the pavement and the pffft of a pullup jumper piercing the thick cotton net take him somewhere else.
“I remember coming to this court, walking over by myself, shootin’,” Crawford said as J.J. dribbled at midcourt over the painted silhouette of a player. “I always thought it would just be an escape. Coming to this court took me places mentally, allowed me to dream. I just never dreamed this much … would happen.”
From a misspent youth to NBA multimillionaire, the journey includes elements of mischief, misfortune and maturity at every stop. And lessons learned every time he opened the trunk and reached for that leather ball.
Halftime, two years ago, and Crawford — long past the middle of his career — distilled his itinerant NBA life for a national TV audience in 20 remarkable seconds:
“Tim Floyd, Bill Cartwright, Bill Berry, Pete Myers, Scott Skiles, Lenny Wilkens, Herb Williams, Larry Brown, Isiah Thomas … Uh, Mike D’Antoni. Uh, Don Nelson. We have Mike Woodson … Larry Drew … Nate McMillan, Kaleb Canales, Vinny Del Negro, Doc Rivers.”
Sixteen years. Seventeen head coaches. And roughly 600 crossed-up and shook peers, all outlasted by a sinewy Seattle kid with a game from the Church League gods, whose lifelong companions since boyhood were the basketballs he has taken everywhere since he was 3.
Now 36, Crawford’s joints, limbs and rainbow release keep obliterating their expiration dates. The Los Angeles Clippers, which just signed him to a three-year deal that could pay him $42 million by the time he’s 39, have come to rely on his offense late in the game like they do with Blake Griffin and Chris Paul early.
Aside from Mike Miller running on fumes with the Denver Nuggets, Crawford remains the sole survivor from the 2000 draft class. Meanwhile, he finished second in the NBA in free-throw percentage last season (behind Curry). He’s made more career 3-pointers than all but six players. He’s one of only four players in NBA history, after Hall of Famers Bernard King, Moses Malone and Wilt Chamberlain, to have a 50-point game for three different teams. And he possesses a record that may never be broken – 47 career four-point plays. (The closest is teammate J.J. Redick with 25.)
The ageless veteran with the herky-jerky, shake-and-emasculate game, nicknamed “J. Crossover,” didn’t last this long and drain so many buckets because he avoided bad decisions or bad beats. No. He’s had a litany of both.
Rather, it’s that he kept going, learning from each mistake, personal and professional, eventually coming up with a mantra that defined him:
“Part of growing,” he said, “is letting things go that were no good for you anyway.”
THE VIEW FROM LAKE WASHINGTON
“Did you ever imagine your little brother having all this?” Crawford said to Lori Skinner, one of his two older sisters, who helped raise him.
“No, I guess I didn’t,” Skinner replied, smiling, taking in the Pacific Northwest panorama of greens and blues from her brother’s deck. This was in February, during the All-Star break, between forkfuls of waffles and bacon at Crawford’s gated Seattle home, a multimillion-dollar estate a few doors over from former Seattle Seahawks owner John Nordstrom and across Lake Washington from Seahawks owner Paul Allen’s compound.
“Then again,” he said, in a playful tone, “you didn’t see me entering my name into the draft. Remember, you said, ‘Please don’t enter. Big names are coming out right now. A.J. Guyton. Mateen Cleaves.’ ”
“I know, I know,” Skinner said.
“I told you just believe in me, just believe in me.”
“You did, Jamal. It was just so hard at the time. There were so many good players.”
He nodded toward his sister.
“You believe I outlasted all of ’em?”
Six teams. Sixteen years. Seventeen coaches.
A marathon of roster cuts and contract dumps. The times he was asked to subjugate his surreal ball skills, and eventually his starting job, for the good of the team. Playing on the big stage but often as a character actor, far from the Kia and State Farm commercials.
Crawford endured because, well, coming back from down 20 is the most recurring pattern in his life.
He ditched school until about 11th grade. Shot dice as much as he shot hoops. Ran with the wrong kids. Got robbed for wearing the wrong colors in gangland Los Angeles.
And even when he finally achieved his dream and got to the NBA, he kept getting in his own way, doing the things knuckleheads do, throwing away money and opportunity.
He also took to heart the saying, “Change is certain, growth is optional.” Every time Crawford’s environment changed, he grew with it. Adjusting, adapting, carving out a career and a life, as the ink on his right forearm reads, “Against All Odds,” he became the crossover chameleon, taking whatever form he needed to survive.
‘I’LL TAKE CARE OF THE CHILD’
Venora Skinner got pregnant at both 12 and 13 years old by two different teenage boys. She gave birth to her first daughter, Lisa, on her 13th birthday, Halloween 1966. Because her parents and extended family essentially raised Lori and Lisa, Venora Skinner was able to graduate from high school and put herself through the University of Washington, getting her bachelor’s degree in speech education, and later going into teaching and nursing.
By the time she began dating Clyde Crawford, who played with Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love’s father at Oregon in the early 1970s, Venora Skinner’s girls were 14 and 13. Finally having a bit of her own life, she couldn’t imagine midnight feedings again when she found out she was pregnant with Clyde Crawford’s baby. Her first thought was not to have the child.
“If you have this baby, I’ll take care of the child,” her daughter Lori told her. “I’ll be there for that baby. I’ll get up in the middle of the night. I’ll let him sleep with me. Please, Mama.’ ”
Lori just knew things would work out. See, Venora Skinner originally gave her second-born up for adoption.
“I was just a child having my second child. I didn’t know what to do,” Venora Skinner says now. Six weeks after dropping Lori off, an aunt spread the guilt on thick, Lori recounted, telling her mother: “That’s not something we do in our family. Go get that baby back.”
Venora Skinner obliged, and that child grew up to talk her adult mother into having one more child at 27. Although Venora Skinner doesn’t remember it exactly the same way, she notes that after the decision to keep the pregnancy, an accidental fall on black ice led to her losing amniotic fluid about two months before Jamal was born. She was on constant bed rest and her original prognosis for a miscarriage was 90 percent.
But Aaron Jamal Crawford (his middle name came from Jamaal Wilkes, one of Clyde Crawford’s favorite players) arrived — long, spindly and healthy, if slightly blue. He instantly became the boy everyone wanted.
“Can you believe, Jamal,” Lori Skinner said, laughing, “I was still there after six weeks at that adoption agency? Nobody wanted me.” Growing serious, she added, “Just think — you wouldn’t have been my brother had they not come back and got me. Do you ever think about how that all transpired? I wouldn’t have been there to tell Mom to keep you.”
Crawford thinks hard on it now. “As a kid, you don’t fully grasp it, so I was like, ‘Oh, thanks.’ Lori always looked at me like I was her son. It’s crazy, right, all the things that went into getting to this moment?
“I mean, I always feel like God had me.”
DIVINE HANDLE
The Almighty could not be reached immediately to either confirm or deny. But Crawford definitely was blessed with divine handle, a starter on any higher power’s All-Shook squad, alongside Allen Iverson, Pistol Pete, Skip to My Lou and now, Steph.
He doesn’t dribble up the floor as much as hydroplane over it. The ball doesn’t belong to him as much as he belongs to it, the space between his fingertips and the orange leather acting as an invisible umbilical chord. They’re thisclose.
Clyde Crawford remembers his son squaring up from about 17 feet in his grandmother’s backyard when Jamal was barely 9. “Shoot another.” All net. “Shoot another.” Buckets. Clyde didn’t say anything to Jamal at the time, but quietly said to himself, “ ‘Oh, boy, we got somethin’ here.’ I knew he was hungry when he started sleeping with his basketball.”
He dribbled it everywhere. If he was with his mom, sisters or aunties on the way to the store, he went behind his back and between his legs down the sidewalk of Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood — juking strangers, shaking ghosts with a spin or crossover. “People would walk down the street toward me and I would do a move on them. They’d look at me like, ‘He’s crazy,’ ” Crawford recalled.
On plane flights to visit his father and grandmother in Los Angeles, “Jamal’s personal item and carry-on were his basketball and his NBA trading cards,” Lori Skinner said.
Each time his family bought him a ball, it became his new security blanket. He carried it in his wagon, on his bike and, when he could drive, in his car. Even now, in the back of every luxury car Crawford has ever owned is at least one Spalding NBA leather game ball.
Venora Skinner just wished her boy loved school as much as that ball.
He wanted to hang with an older, rougher crowd. At 11, he was skipping school and coming home at midnight. Venora Skinner wasn’t having it. “Oh no, no, no, you gotta go with your dad,” she told him.
“I can remember he used to talk s— to me about how he was going to be a pro,” said Aaron Goodwin, the uncle of one of Crawford’s childhood friends and Crawford’s first agent, whom he recently re-signed with. “When he was in the eighth and ninth grade, he used to challenge me to one-on-one shooting contests. Oh, he was so arrogant it wasn’t even funny.
“I kept telling him, ‘You better make it because with all the junk you talk, you’re either going to be a pro ball player or you’re going to work for the department of sanitation.’ ”
Crawford began shuttling between Seattle and Los Angeles, spending fourth and fifth grade in Inglewood, California, and returning to Seattle until his eighth-grade year. He didn’t want to leave his sisters and family again, but Venora Skinner insisted that her incorrigible son needed a male influence.
“Not that I was in gangs, but I ran with some gangs,” he said. The difference? “The difference is the worst thing I probably ever did was shoot dice and skip school. I missed a lot of school.”
The bad decisions and occasional bad luck continued in L.A. He enrolled at his father’s alma mater, Dorsey High School, and soon after had a bracelet ripped from his wrist by the local Crips gang. Scared, he transferred to nearby Morningside, where his grandmother worked as a nurse. But he cut school there, too, and it wasn’t until a chance encounter with a future NBA teammate that Crawford began to realize the road he was headed down.
The moment came circa 1996, as two prideful teens sat on opposite stools at a now-defunct barbershop.
“Man, you need to watch out for this kid,” Paul Pierce, two years older than Crawford, recalled the barber telling him. “He’s got some game.”
So cocksure that he was going to make it, so completely clueless how far he had to go, Crawford began flapping his gums – even though he was academically ineligible and had yet to play a single high school game. “This is the Paul Pierce everyone is talking about?” Crawford brayed. “Man, he’s not that good.”
Pierce shot him a death stare before lighting the young’un up.
“You need to get back in school!” Pierce exclaimed. “What you doin’ ditchin’ school and hanging out here at the barbershop?”
It was as if Pierce had seen Crawford’s 10th grade spring semester transcripts from the Inglewood Unified School District: U.S. History: C-; Spanish: F; Chemistry: F; Geometry: D-; English II: F. Days absent: 17.
Crawford wasn’t going anywhere without some semblance of academic achievement. He had caught a glimpse of the world he wanted to be part of, sneaking into the old Great Western Forum during Magic Johnson’s comeback in 1995 for a Los Angeles Lakers-Chicago Bulls game. As he walked around the floor, he was almost rubbing shoulders with Tupac Shakur, MC Hammer and L.L. Cool J. He so wanted that life. Now he needed to find a path to it.
He called Lori Skinner and told her he wanted to return to Seattle and get serious about school. When his father and his grandmother rejected his pleas, telling Crawford he was just headed for trouble back home, he hatched a plan to run away.
In the days before a laptop could print a boarding pass, his sister bought Crawford a one-way fare to Seattle and mailed it to his father’s address. He checked the mail before his father or grandmother every day until the ticket came.
Because he didn’t want to tip them off, he buried a suitcase in the backyard two weeks before his scheduled flight. Rather than emptying his bureau drawers all at once, he got home each afternoon and painstakingly folded the clothes he had worn to school that day, went to the backyard and packed the suitcase, one outfit at a time. On the day of the flight, he dug up that little red suitcase, brushed off the dirt and got a ride to the airport from a friend’s parent. His sister was waiting for him at the gate as the plane landed.
He left behind only a handwritten letter, dated July 5, 1996, which now sits in a scrapbook his father and grandmother gave to him last summer (along with the failing report cards, baby pictures of Jamal and yellowed newspaper clippings of Clyde’s and Jamal’s high school games from different eras).
Dear Grandma, I feel very sorry for the way I have been disrespecting you of late. I should understand that what you are trying to teach me is things I am going to need to make it in life. But I still do feel strongly about going back to Seattle, nothing against you, I just like it better there so I am sorry.
Love, Jamal.
“I wouldn’t say heartbroken when he left, because I always knew God had his back no matter what,” Clyde says now. “But you think about what you could have did better.
“I was a father, but I wasn’t the best father, I wasn’t no Ozzie and Harriet or no angel. I could have been around more, spend some more time and energy with him, instead of being out in the streets, going to the club, hanging out. But Jamal really wasn’t trouble. He had such a beautiful soul and he was such a sweet kid.”
BLOWING UP
When he left Seattle for L.A. at 13, Crawford was a 5-foot-9, skin-and-bones eighth-grader. By the time he returned, he was a 16-year-old junior and had grown to 6-foot-4 on his way to almost 6-foot-6. He still had Wheat-Thin limbs, but his strength wasn’t an issue because his game had blown up.
He began showing up at Liberty Park’s courts every day and playing late into the night. As he made grown men swipe in vain at his devastating crossover and destroyed the competition with a lethal mix of showmanship and ruthlessness, crowds of people hurried over, hovering along the fence.
“When he showed up at our school, no one had ever seen anything like it,” said his friend Sylvester Dennis. “Crossovers. Deep 3s. No-look dimes. It was like the Globetrotters — but real. I remember our guard refused to check him going down the court because Jamal began dribbling it between his legs, walking backward, and he didn’t want to get embarrassed. Then our coach starts going crazy, yelling at him, ‘Guard his a–! Check him!’ ”
Asked what happened next, Dennis said flatly, “Jamal embarrassed him.”
His game was a first-take mixtape: half Meadowlark Lemon, half Magic, all nylon. Seattle has reared a bevy of blue-chip guards over the past 20 years — Jason Terry, Brandon Roy, Nate Robinson, Isaiah Thomas. But no one made a gymnasium pulsate on Friday night like Crawford. No one had lines of people snaking around the building, waiting to see him glide and manipulate the ball with such elan.
In his first year of organized high school ball, Crawford was the city and state player of the year and led Rainier Beach to a state title. By that summer he was among the top 100 recruits in the nation and going into his senior year he was named to Parade magazine’s All-America Boys Basketball Team.
He had originally committed to Jerry Tarkanian at Fresno State, but with an extra year to accrue the credits needed for college, he changed his mind when Michigan began pitching him.
Yet one hurdle remained. He needed a high enough score on the SAT to become eligible to play as a freshman.
Despite a decade of resisting formal education, he finally approached school as seriously as basketball. This was it, the barrier between being just another schoolboy legend and a future pro. “The moment of truth — it could go either way,” he kept saying to himself.