Gilbert Arenas is virtually unknown in the UK, where only the most famous and marketable NBA players enjoy any name recognition. In 2021, the Guardian described him as a ‘clownish Steph Curry antecedent turned podcast host.’
I wouldn’t have any idea who Arenas was, but for encountering a strange and memorable magazine profile in 2006: ‘The Pathology of Gilbert Arenas’.
Gilbert, then 24, was a Point Guard for the Washington Wizards. His nickname was ‘Agent Zero,’ and he was fast becoming a cult figure.
Produced for the US edition of Esquire, the profile was written by Tom Chiarella in the format of a psychological report.
It was an approach that could have seemed gimmicky. Yet it felt like the only possible way to address Gilbert’s idiosyncratic approach to basketball and life.
It became one of a few articles that I kept for posterity and reread every few years.
Life on a desert island
Coach Eddie Jordan referred to Arenas’s offbeat approach as ‘Gilbertology’
Chiarella’s piece has the usual biographical anecdotes. There are underwhelming rookie pay cheques, locker room antics, mind games by LeBron before a missed clutch shot.
But those details are secondary to what the Washington Wizard’s coach Eddie Jordan described as ‘Gilbertology’: the offbeat philosophies and rituals that set Arenas against the grain.
This certainly manifests in his behaviour. Arenas ate 12 burgers at a time, started impossibly ambitious collections, filled up his voicemail to avoid receiving messages, and trained himself to sleep on a couch next to his bed.
But it was also there in the strange dreams he reported (a basketball court on a desert island, surrounded by fans on jet skis) and his desire to totally efface himself from life outside of the game.
Many hours to fill
If Arenas is the subject of the piece, the main theme is Time and How to Manage It.
Most of us can’t appreciate the boredom that confronts sports professionals outside of training and game days. To borrow a phrase from Raymond Chandler, “mostly they just kill time, and it dies hard.”
Too much unstructured time can leave players feeling jaded or worse, can push them to go looking for trouble.
Chiarella outlines the conundrum:
He is simply dealing with time. There is so much of it in the NBA.
It’s the thing that surprised him the most when he came into the league. There’s practice at 1:00, there’s a game at night, and that’s it.
Even though it’s late, there are so many hours left to fill until he will find sleep on the couch in his bedroom that night.
Life in limbo
The Arenas of 2006 took a militant approach, walling himself off from distraction and placing himself in a kind of limbo.
He trained alone in the Verizon Center late into the night. He never left his hotel room on the road. He barely left his house.
Other guys will be out, the steak house, the clubs, just rollin’. Me, I’m fine. Time is falling off. Sun’s coming up. I’m doing more sit-ups than the night before.
I’ll watch three or four movies. I’ll watch infomercials. The last thing I bought was this colon cleanser. I just got talked into it. I’m like, Man, he makes it sound so good.
Like Arenas himself, that 2006 profile exists in a kind of glorious, impervious limbo
This oddball monasticism is partly driven by a relentless focus on winning.
At other times it felt like Arenas was removing himself from reality. He locked himself in his home and accumulated huge volumes of entertainment media with the goal of never having to leave.
I checked in on Arenas occasionally in the years since that Esquire piece. His captivating weirdness never quite translated into basketball immortality.
He had his fair share of success, setbacks and scandals on his way to achieving his present status as a podcasting elder statesman.
But I’ll never tire of revisiting that strange 2006 profile. Like the player it describes, the article exists in a kind of glorious, impervious limbo.
Whenever I read it, I find the ghost of that 24-year-old player still running late-night laps in Verizon Center, as yet untouched by time or reality.
