Metta World Peace says he’s not the same person Bulls fans knew as Ron Artest.
“I was young (in 1999) and a lot of that was a blur. When I was with the Bulls I was very dysfunctional. It was a short stay, 2½ years,” Peace told Inc. while chatting about his NBA days and plans to joins Ice Cube’s Big3 league in its second season next summer.
“I kind of overwore my welcome. I was just too young at that time. I had tried to get back. It was a place where I wouldn’t have minded playing again, but sometimes it’s just too late.”
Could it be that World Peace, who once had an NBA reputation for being anything but peaceful, has gotten older and more reflective, more measured in his words and action?
“Tell all those people shooting all those guns in Chicago to chill out. And all the people that are supposed to be educating the kids, do better, because they’re not doing a good job. … Whoever’s running the city of Chicago sucks and they should quit and let somebody else run it.”
Or not.
There will probably always be a little Artest in World Peace.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat myself. For what?”
The Bulls drafted Peace in 1999 (when he was still named Artest), the second of two first-rounders along with No. 1 overall Elton Brand. “Jerry Krause is great — thank you for drafting one of best wing defenders ever to play basketball. He saw something that I didn’t see. He always told me that I was going to be a real good offensive player.”
But when the offense didn’t come right away, he got frustrated, he said. “I never was focused on fundamentals, (developing offensive) moves and being level headed. I was always focused on the fight.”
“I actually hated going to work every day because I was frustrated with so many things,” he said.
The fight was what carried Peace for a while. Long before he charged into the stands after a fan hit him a cup during the infamous “Malice at the Palace” brawl in 2004, he was about the fight.
“It’s hard to understand how you’re feeling, or you don’t even know, that’s why sometimes people seek counseling,” said Peace, who grew up in New York’s Queensbridge projects. “It was that type of control that I didn’t really have as a 19-year-old. For me basketball was always about survival because I was just trying to get out the hood, right?
“When I got to Chicago, I’m like, I’m just trying to survive, and anybody I got to step on or break, so be it. … It’s pretty much impossible (to get out that mentality) unless you had someone along the way telling you, ‘Hey, when you get there (to the NBA), everything going to be all right. You made it.’ For me, it was the other way around. I actually started to bite down a little more. And I took more risks.
“Different neighborhoods (in Chicago) I shouldn’t have been in, I was at places I should not have gone, doing things that I should not have done. And then I was still in mindset of somebody from the urban ghetto community in survival mode. Everything I’ve ever seen I thought I needed to do — and that’s any and everything. It took me a while to get out that mindset,” Peace said.
It wasn’t until the Bulls dealt him to Indiana in 2002 as part of a package for Jalen Rose that the process of changing his mindset started. (Former Pacers executive) Donnie Walsh is where things really started to turn around,” Peace said. “He was really into me as a person, he didn’t really care about the game. He took time to figure out what was going on?”
Peace also credits former NBA player development vice president Chrysa Chin for playing a major role in his transformation. He averaged a career best 24.6 points per game during his time in Indiana and lasted 17 seasons in the league with the Lakers’ finale in April.
Since then he has served as an assistant coach for two-time champion Palisades High School girl basketball, coached the Venice Basketball League’s The Panda’s Friend (named after another of Peace’s monikers), worked on building his management company (singer Lyrica Anderson is one its clients) and took digital analytics courses at UCLA and business analytics courses at Concordia University Irvine last summer.
In fact, his schooling was the reason he couldn’t accept former teammates Stephen Jackson’s and Jermaine O’Neal’s invitation to join them in the inaugural Big3 league last summer, now he relishes the opportunity.
“I think the Big 3 is great,” Peace said. “It’s a way for people who still want to play basketball they can still play. … It still feel like I can play basketball. I still play full-court, but you know what, three-on-three’s is great, too. And it’s still a great atmosphere.”
If Big3 returns to Chicago next season, it will bring Peace’s basketball career full circle in a way, he said, though he downplayed its emotional significance. “For me it will be where the struggling kind of stops. Because for me to get to the NBA was all about just getting out the ghetto. And Chicago got me out the hood. It’s nothing life-changing about it. It’s more like this is where I got out of my neighborhood. That’s all it’s going to pretty much going to mean to me, nothing more than that.”
Twitter @_phil_thompson
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