FRESNO, Calif. — Near the bottom of the driveway leading to the brown stucco one-story home on East Illinois in Fresno stands a testament to foresight, fortitude and just a few one-on-one wars.
With a portable base, tall black pole and big white backboard, the basket is one of many in a tidy suburban neighborhood whose residents spend the Fourth of July washing cars and tending to smartly landscaped front yards.
Most are tacked to garages, low enough for kids of all shapes and sizes to dunk — or at least try.
But DeShawn Stevenson's basket, the one with wheels and a worn-out net, is NBA height, tall enough that only he who is truly gifted can slam, jam and make millions through it.
"Pretty good investment," Terry Popps said as he looked up at the $289 hoop that his now 19-year-old stepson would shoot through to the wee hours of many a morning. "Real good investment."
Stevenson, a 6-foot-5 shooting guard who was the Jazz's first-round selection in the June 28 NBA draft, is about to cash in on a small fortune.
It comes a little sooner than most in his family would have guessed, or even hoped, but is considered just due nonetheless for a virtual only child whose mom spent many of DeShawn's formative years working two jobs while other relatives helped care for him.
"It was hard," said Genice Popps, who had DeShawn when she was 19 herself, "but that's what I had to do for us, to give him the extra things I wanted him to have."
Extra, like being able to drive down from Fresno to San Diego to see DeShawn's refreshingly opinionated grandmother. Extra, like not having to depend on handouts.
"She refused," Terry Popps said, "to be on welfare."
Genice Popps — who would only say she has long been divorced from DeShawn's father — refused to let her son slip through the cracks.
Perhaps that is because DeShawn's father is a man who, according to sources, died of natural causes while serving time in prison for what is generically described as "a murder rap."
"He was a Mama's boy," Terry Popps said of DeShawn, "and still is."
She watched out for him, and let others whom she trusted do the same, including the uncle who had him one summer while he was playing in the Canadian Football League.
She let him establish legal residency with his godmother for the sole purpose of following a coach to Washington Union High, a small school in a migrant farming community just south-southwest of, and far removed from, downtown Fresno.
She stood by him when the results of his standardized college-entrance exam were questioned, and when he refused to retake the test.
She was adamant about her desire to see him pursue a higher education, and she finally accepted the reality that, rather than honor a commitment to the University of Kansas, DeShawn intended to declare early for the NBA draft, go pro and seek his riches right away.
She jumped up and down the night the Jazz chose him, and she stepped in to clear his good name, like any protective mother would, when her son got into a draft-night scrap with a former friend, a Fresno State football recruit, that resulted in misdemeanor charges against two of those who fought with Stevenson.
More than anything, though, Genice Popps did what she had to do.
"What I really respect," said Vonn Webb, Stevenson's coach for most of his junior high and high school days, "is that she allowed him to make the decision that was best for DeShawn."
But it wasn't easy.
It's never really been simple for Stevenson, who was about five when his natural father went to a prison from which he would never return. No, it's never been easy, except when it comes to doing the one thing he has always done so well, the one thing he did so much better than everyone else, even when he was 15 and all the others playing were adults.
"The way he was kind of embarrassing us on the
court," Uncle Ronald said while getting a haircut from his nephew DeShawn, "I knew he was more than a usual basketball player."
For the longest time, DeShawn Stevenson was the main man in Genice's life.
"It was just me and him," she said, "for — what? — 11 years."
It was just him and her when they lived in that apartment near the Fresno airport, not the most luxurious of accommodations. It was just him and her when she started doubling-up on jobs, working a shift from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at one Fresno hospital, and from 5 until midnight at another. It was just him and her when he'd head over to his aunt's to do his homework, because Mom was off at work.
Stevenson took it all in stride, just like he handled so much of his childhood.
"He did a lot of things faster than a lot of babies," Dulcena Taylor, Genice's mother, said of the first of her seven grandchildren. "He was walking when he was six months old, and he was potty-trained by a year — that's fast for a boy."
Blazing speed, though, wasn't always on DeShawn's side. He excelled first in soccer as a youth, and later in other games. Almost always the MVP, no matter the season, no matter the sport. Except for one.
"He was just horrible in track," Genice said. "He participated."
That's what happens when your feet are men's size 15 heading into high school. But DeShawn didn't mind. He had other pursuits.
Besides basketball, there was also football.
Stevenson was in the seventh grade, a class level he would repeat. Coaches at Clark Intermediate School tried him first under center, and understandably so: One of Stevenson's four uncles on his mother's side is Steve Taylor, the former University of Nebraska quarterback who went on to a pro career in Canada, passing through places like Edmonton, Calgary (where Stevenson spent that summer), Saskatchewan and Hamilton.
Bulging eyes as he tried to call cadence and remember plays, however, were a dead giveaway: A QB DeShawn was not meant to be. He soon moved to receiver, a position Webb — later the coach at Washington Union — just happened to coach at Clark.
"As a football player," Webb said, "he was incredible."
As a basketball player, he was much better than that. Webb — the coach DeShawn calls "24/7" — knew that even as he watched Stevenson play football.
As he marveled at the seventh-grader's legs during crossover drills — "Damn, look at that kid," he said to himself — Webb also heard DeShawn talk about what he could do with a basketball.
"He always told me how good he was," Webb says with a laugh.
One day, Terry Popps recalls, Stevenson — quiet and reserved as a child, nothing like 1-year-old half-brother Tyler, who scoots around the house banging picture frames on glass tables and reaching for anything and everything that might fit into his mouth, including the rook, knight, queen and king from a living-room chessboard — was sitting on the end of the bench, and didn't have the nerve to speak up and say he was good enough to play.
"He wanted to quit, because, he said, 'The coach doesn't play sixth-graders,'" Popps said. "He didn't get anything, because he didn't say anything."
The next day, Stevenson was bragging, trying to convince Webb he was the real deal. Shortly after trading the football field for the gym, the coach was sold. Not long after, it was Webb who was selling Stevenson. He called Darren Matsubara, a summer travel-team coach known as "Mats" to everyone but his girlfriend and his mother.
"The kid's gonna be great," Webb remembers saying to Matsubara, whose Fresno-based club is called Elite Basketball Organization. "Mats, I'm telling you that right now."
Matsubara doesn't normally watch eighth-graders, but he finally relented: "That," he said, "is when I decided, 'This kid, he's special. '"
That school year, the one in which he shot up from 6-1 to 6-3, Stevenson showed why.
"He got his first dunk in the eighth grade," Terry Popps said. "We were there. I'll never forget that — DeShawn was so excited."
Who wouldn't be after doing what Stevenson did? See, he didn't just stuff the ball. He slammed it.
"Off the glass," Stevenson said. "First, I didn't know I was going to do it. It was on a fastbreak. Somebody threw the ball up, then I just dunked it."
Said Popps: "I think he surprised himself."
Don't bet on it.
Clark, the intermediate school, feeds into the Clovis school district, home of the high school Stevenson was districted to attend. Clovis, Webb said, is a football town. Basketball is not top priority there. Football, by this time, was no longer a priority for Stevenson.
"He just didn't think it was wise for him for him to play football," Genice Popps said.
"Basketball was more fun," Stevenson said.
It only made sense in his mind that Stevenson go to Washington Union, where the academic programs may not have been as strong, but where Webb was now head coach of the varsity basketball team. Doing so meant leaving behind Clovis, and teammates and classmates like Chris Sims, the ex-friend who would later fight Stevenson on draft night.
Terry and Genice decided it was best to let him go. Their whole goal was to get Stevenson a college scholarship, and this, they thought, was his ticket to just that. "We wanted him to go to the best coach for him," said Terry Popps, a route driver for UPS.
Doing so, though, meant Stevenson could no longer call home 'home.' At least not on paper. Genice Popps, who today works as an ultrasound technician for the cardiologists at Fresno Community Hospital, did not take the address change lightly.
"I wouldn't send him anywhere," she said, "unless it was like home."
Stevenson 'moved in' with godmother Kim Benton, a woman Webb called "the salt of the earth . . . she loves that boy to death."
Enrollment at Washington Union prompted inevitable accusations of recruiting against Webb, who denies that was the case: "I didn't even ask him. That was something he and his parents decided to do."
On weekends and holidays, Stevenson returned to his room under the roof of Terry and Genice. But his legal residence allowed him to attend a school with two gyms and a student population — depending on the comings and goings of migrant farm families working in the decidedly rural community of Easton — of about 500.
Easton is a study in contrast from the Fresno neighborhood where Terry and Genice live, the one in which a few turns leads to a road with a sign that informs the entrance leading to the grand splendor of Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks is but 49 miles along California Highway 180.
Each is bordered by strawberry fields forever, and rows of everything from apricots to almonds, plums, peas and all sorts of nuts, berries and melons.
But Easton is not suburbia, where shiny sport utility vehicles dot the drives and the tulips are pruned to perfection.
No, Easton is a place where bars cover the windows of the pizza place and pool hall across the street from Washington Union High. A place where fresh fruit and veggies such as lettuce and lima beans are bought at wooden roadside stands, not name-brand superstores. A place where locals eye a visitor in a rental car suspiciously, and the burritos are some of the best this side of the border.
Easton isn't suburbia, but it is somewhere where sports are taken seriously. Where coaches lead bare-chested athletes through drills at the football stadium down the street from the high school on a warm summer afternoon. Where the half-dozen tennis courts out back look to be in better shape than many of the sprawling, tan classroom buildings at Washington Union.
Easton is also a town that tends to get lumped with Fresno, especially when it comes to the exploits of Stevenson, a Parade and McDonald's All-American who led Washington Union to a California Division 3 state championship in his junior season.
It was early in his days at Washington Union — Stevenson played on the varsity as a freshman, naturally — that the rest of the basketball world got their first glimpses of the kid who walked at six months and dunked in the eighth grade.
Notre Dame head coach Matt Doherty was then an assistant coach under Roy Williams at Kansas. Webb said that when he told Doherty he had a freshman he wanted him to check out, "Matt was like, 'yeah, right.'" Doherty came anyway, and was in the stands when Stevenson dunked — with his left hand.
"Matt stood up," Webb said, "and pointed at me."
The Jazz got their first look when scout Richard Smith saw Stevenson at the end of his sophomore year, a time when his body was starting to fill out. Stevenson had not even started working out with weights yet, but already, Webb said, "his legs are incredible, phenomenal . . . powerful. The fact he played soccer when he was young — that's probably why his legs are like that, along with some God-given ability."
By the time Webb got Stevenson into his weightlifting class in his junior season, the kid still wasn't sold on the benefits of barbells and leg presses. "Like most of the basketball players," said Webb, who is now back at Washington Union after spending a season, DeShawn's senior year, as an assistant coach at the University of Wyoming, "he'd make excuses — because it hurts."
No matter.
"He's the most athletically gifted player I've ever been around," said Webb, who has produced his fair share of college products, including Chris Jeffries, who led the University of Arkansas in scoring before deciding to transfer and play closer to home at Fresno State. "Chris (Jeffries) is great, but Chris is no DeShawn."
It is Stevenson's athleticism, Webb said, that will ease his transition from high school to the NBA, with no stop in between.
"He could tip-toe through the tulips, and get it done," Webb said when asked about a comment that Stevenson plays like a ballet dancer who has never taken lessons. "The only thing the college game would get him is playing experience against better competition."
Stevenson seemed bound for college — he committed to Williams' program at Kansas over Missouri, UCLA, Duke, Georgia and Kentucky, among the many that recruited him — until a red flag was raised regarding his score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
According to published reports, Stevenson scored 450 (out of a possible 1,600) when he took the test for the first time, as a high school sophomore. According to the family, he actually scored 720 when he took the test for the first time, as a high school freshman. Either way, the score fell short of first-year NCAA eligibility requirements.
"I think he just went in there," Genice Popps said, "and didn't know what he was doing."
When he finally took the test again, late in his senior year, Stevenson scored 1150; this fact seems consistent for all involved. Practice exams and test-specific prep work was a big help, the family said. But the dramatic jump was challenged by test administrators, who reportedly refused to release the score to schools and — as a method of addressing the insinuation that he had cheated — demanded that he take the SAT again.
DeShawn refused.
"I was pretty mad," said Stevenson, wearing an Orlando Magic T-shirt that he received during a workout and holding Tyler in his lap. "But it was all right."
The seed to jump straight to the NBA had been planted.
Genice Popps had other ideas in mind. She was insulted that the score was questioned, and frustrated she couldn't get straight answers from those doing the questioning. Still, she wanted her son to go to school — if not Kansas, at least a smaller school where he could benefit, however briefly, from the college experience before going pro.
Mom was pushing Stevenson one way, encouraging him to pursue an education. Coaches like Matsubara and Webb extolled the virtues of declaring for the NBA draft.
Times were tense.
"I can't even have a civil conversation with DeShawn because of all that's going on," Genice Popps told the Fresno Bee at the time. "I can't even have a relationship with my son, because there is so much going on.
"If I knew he was ready and this was his choice, I could probably support him. But I don't think he knows what's ahead of him. . . . The reality of this is dividing my family apart. This is reality — that something like this can come between a son and his mother. It's really sad."
Said Webb: "It was a tough situation for everybody involved, because everybody wanted what was best for him."
DeShawn knew what was in his heart. Still, Webb pushed Stevenson, trying to make sure it really was, and telling him he knew that this whole process had to be trying.
"I said, 'I know it's overwhelming,'" Webb said. "He said, 'No, not really, because this is what I what I want to do.'"
Even Genice, who considers these times the most trying of her motherhood, eventually became convinced of that.
Webb: "I said, 'You know what, G? If the decision is made, the only thing we can do now is just support him.'"
Genice: "We had our differences. It came down to the (SAT), and all the problems he had with his test. He was adamant about not taking the test again. . . . We were still torn, but I knew he wasn't going to take — retake — the test. I knew what was going to happen, and that's when I said I would support him."
Now, no one in the family doubts he will make it.
"No, because that's something he wants to do," said Dulcene Taylor, the 64-year-old retired grandmother who spent 30 years working in the administrative offices of school systems in San Diego and Fresno. "And when you put your mind to something, you can do it."
And something else: "I could accept that," Dulcene said of DeShawn's decision to pass on college and go pro, "because he didn't cheat. I know he didn't cheat."
The decision was made. The task ahead: Make the rounds, visiting the many NBA teams that wanted to get an up-close look at this kid who had just turned 19 last April.
He went to Orlando, which had three first-round draft choices. He went to Sacramento twice, and Seattle twice. He visited with the Los Angeles Clippers. And he worked out in Phoenix, Vancouver, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Charlotte, Indiana — and Utah.
He arrived, with Matsubara in tow on every trip, to some hotels at 3 in the morning. Up at 6 a.m., breakfast at 7. Work out for one team, then move on to the next.
"For me," said Matsubara, who along with Webb has helped Stevenson's teams travel the country so that he and his teammates can play quality competition, "that was a good test — to see if this is what he really wanted."
It was, and this time no one questioned Stevenson's score.
When he came to Utah, Williams — the Kansas coach was coincidentally in the Salt Lake area at the time — was there to watch. What he saw was a kid he had once called "the most-gifted recruit" he had ever pursued working out for an NBA team, certain to never play a minute for the Jayhawks. Still, Williams had nothing but compliments for Stevenson and his family.
The Jazz liked what they saw, and heard, and were thrilled when Stevenson — passed over by Orlando, and by Sacramento, the team he thought would take him — was still on the board when they were prepared to pick at No. 23 overall.
That they actually selected him was a departure for the organization, which has never before drafted a high school player.
It was also a controversial decision of sorts, at least in the mind of Jazz star Karl Malone, who was upset he was not consulted about the pick, and who questioned just how much of an impact a 19-year-old can make on a team desperately trying to win an NBA title before he, guard John Stockton and coach Jerry Sloan all retire.
No matter, said Dulcene Taylor, who read what Malone had to say about her grandson.
"He's not the owner of the team, and I have no reservations telling him that," Taylor said of Malone, who has children about the same age as DeShawn. "Basketball is a business, and (the drafting of Stevenson) was a business decision."
DeShawn, still busy clipping Uncle Ronald's hair in an entryway off the parlor, overhears his grandma's smack. He tries to quell her but fails miserably. "You can tell (Malone) he can call me if he'd like," Dulcene said.
Uncle Ronald, just happy to be getting a haircut on the house, stays out of the fray. "He's the only person I can trust doing my hair, to make it look real good," Ronald said. "And at my age (43), I've got to look real good."
DeShawn first learned how to cut his own hair and now has branched out to relatives. He'll soon be rich but plans to keep snipping his own.
"To save money, and time," he said. "Plus, I don't want to wait in line."
Stevenson is now in line for what is essentially a three-year guaranteed contract worth more than $2.67-million — $828,120 in the first year, $890,280 in the second and $952,320 in the third — plus a potential fourth year, at the Jazz's option, worth more than $1.3 million.
To celebrate that and the way things went in the draft, Stevenson cut into cake that his family had ready to go the night Utah took him. Then he blundered, driving his new Lexus SUV, the one with the sweet tan leather interior, to a city-county high school all-star game that he had opted against playing in himself.
Accounts of what really happened the night of the draft vary.
Stevenson said he was sitting in the stands, signing autographs and shaking hands, when Sims, the Fresno State football recruit, and three or four of his friends jumped him — for no apparent reason other than "jealousy."
Stevenson said he threw some punches to defend himself, was chased into the stands, stumbled, and escaped again when police pulled off his attackers, only to have one or two of them chase him again into the parking lot, where he got into his Lexus "and left the scene." A school janitor who witnessed the brawl, which eventually involved about 20 individuals engaged in various fights around the gym, backed Stevenson's version of events.
Sims was detained and cited for three misdemeanors: fighting, obstructing a police officer and possession of a knife on school property. A second man, age 20, was cited for two misdemeanors, fighting and use of offensive words.
Sims, however, accuses Stevenson of instigating the fight, which witnesses, according to a police report, said stemmed from an ongoing argument over a girl; Stevenson is accused of lingering at the gym after the game and before the fight, which started after Sims returned from a locker room.
Genice Popps called authorities on behalf of her son, but Stevenson, who has not been cited, apparently has been advised not to discuss the matter with investigators. Clovis district school police are frustrated that Stevenson won't cooperate, and have suggested it may be in his best interest to do so.
Stevenson's family just wants to put the incident behind them, and they have no interest in discussing details of the evening. Terry Popps said there is no ill-will toward Sims, and he is hopeful the incident will not affect Sims' scholarship status with Fresno State.
Terry Popps kicks himself for not being with Stevenson the night of the fight but says he was too tired to leave the house after spending all day in his UPS truck and much of the night watching the NBA Draft on television.
Webb kicks himself, too, saying he knows most of those involved, and that their respect for him would have prevented anything from happening had he been present. Instead, Webb was at an Outback Steakhouse that night, celebrating Stevenson's selection by the Jazz with Matsubara and Vince Wesson, another coach at Clark who has worked with Stevenson.
"When I got the message that DeShawn was in a fight," Webb said, "I was like, 'Oh my God.'
"That's not him," added Webb, who characterizes the draft-night brawl as being most out-of-character for the normally mild-mannered Stevenson. "DeShawn's not a fighter. He's not a troublemaker. I've known him since seventh grade, and I've never seen him or heard of him being in an actual physical altercation (before this). He just doesn't carry himself like that."
Stevenson is not totally introverted, but he is not especially outgoing among those he does not trust, either.
"He's reserved until he gets to know you," Webb said. "He smiles, and he can be moody when he wants to be, too, but what 19-year-old isn't?"
Webb should know. His house has an open door, one that Stevenson and other young athletes pass through often. "They come here," Webb said, "and it's like they're all at home.
"And those kids — those are not problem kids," Webb added of Stevenson's small-but-tight circle of friends. "I know — I've had kids on the other end of the spectrum, obviously."
Stevenson's pals are well-mannered, sociable college kids like Richard Millsap, a 6-5 basketball buddy who is transferring this summer from Alabama State to Spring Hill, an NAIA school in Alabama, and Maurice Moore, a crack-up of a kid who is playing at a local school, Reedley, while holding out hopes of some day playing for an NCAA Division I program.
"Maurice has the biggest heart of any kid I know," said Webb, who chuckles with a cringe at the thought of his bypassing a full-ride to a Division II school so he can keep his D-1 dream alive.
These are kids who, along with DeShawn Anderson, who plays for Southeast Missouri State, and Coupe Taylor, who is transferring from Alabama State to a junior college closer to Fresno, all got to know each other playing hoops. They are kids who stand by Stevenson through thick and thin, and know him well enough that to them he's 'just D.'
"He's a good friend," Moore said. "He's hates to lose and loves to win."
"He's real modest," Millsap adds, "about playing basketball — unless he's on the court playing."
They are kids who, when they're all back home in the Fresno area, rent movies together, order pizza together and just happened to have grown up in the presence of a future NBAer.
"It doesn't really hit us that DeShawn's going to be big — until seeing him on TV," Moore said. "After we talk a few minutes, we realize . . . "
Millsap picks up the thought: "He hasn't changed any."
Adds Moore: "We're all on the same level, even though we're all at different places."
Stevenson and Milsapp, and Moore and all their buddies too, have gone at it on the court time and again, and they've worn out more than a few of the nets that have hung on the rim of that basket with the black pole and big white backboard in front of the house on East Illinois.
"When I see him on TV, it's like, 'Damn,'" Moore said. "But, to this day, I don't go too goo-goo on any of his dunks, because I know what I can do."
Milsapp and Moore chuckle over the tricks Stevenson used to win the dunk contest at the recent McDonald's All-America High School Game, in which he was also leading scoring on the winning team. They've seen him do those countless times before, and they're no big deal. Shoot, they've seen him do dunks that make the one Vince Carter used to win at this year's NBA All-Star Game contest look run-of-the-mill.
"It's weird," said Milsapp, who has gone one-on-one with DeShawn so many times, "because to us, he's not that good."
Stevenson has left the living room by now and abandoned the Mountain Dew he drank to wash down that snack bag of Cheetos. But he hears his buddies now, starting to talk their own smack, and he feels compelled to intercede.
"Oh, settle down now," Stevenson shouts from the kitchen to his buddies, who giggle at the notion that their pal will soon be off to the NBA.
"He's the only guy I know," Moore said, "who can go like three days eating just five jelly beans, and still play a good game."
Real good game, honed on a portable basket bought at the nearby Costco store.
"When we moved out here, he used to be out shooting that basketball until 2 in the morning," Terry Popps said. "I've changed that net — oh, I don't know — umpteen thousand times."
Popps reaches down into a cardboard box along the garage wall, across the one adorned by a portrait, among others, of Martin Luther King. He pulls out a couple of flat basketballs, worn as can be, a Molten FX7 and a Spalding NBA model, both looking about 10 years old.
"He used to just play and just play out there," Popps said. "And he was so competitive out there. He didn't like to lose. Didn't like to lose for anything. And he never did. Never lost on his court."
Pretty good investment, that $289. Real good investment.