It's safe to say that Metta World Peace chose the right career path by becoming a professional basketball player. Not only did he reach the highest level of competition in the world by making it to the NBA, but he thrived there as one of the league's toughest defenders. Four appearances on league All-Defensive teams are good indicators of that, and it's not like he was bad on the offensive side, either, averaging 13.2 points per game throughout his career and notching 24.6 PPG in 2004-05. He was an All-Star, a member of the All-Rookie team, an NBA champion... you get the point. Basketball was his thing.
But it almost wasn't, according to the man himself. In a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session, World Peace responded to a fan that asked him where he would see himself if he had never been a pro hooper. His response was quite interesting.
Good question. If I never played ball, I would've probably been a junior high school math teacher, or [potentially] a dope dealer. I was on the verge of both.
There were other interesting answers — for instance, the fact that he said Mike Bibby was the funniest teammate he'd ever had was a throwback to older days — but this one, in my opinion, took the cake. Such a candid response is what we've come to expect from World Peace at this point, but it's certainly an interesting dichotomy. One is the epitome of innocence. The other... not so much.
Of course, for someone with such a turbulent upbringing and mental health issues, as detailed in "Quiet Storm: The Ron Artest Story" — read a little snippet about the documentary here by Jemele Hill in The Atlantic — any and all career outcomes were possible, be it a multi-million-dollar athlete or someone who gets mixed up in the wrong activities. An interview with ESPN revealed some of those traumatic experiences he had when he was a child:
Different things happen in the streets that you'd be traumatized from. Things happening in the household; a brother goes away for 10 years; drug trafficking. I'm very familiar with the gun game. It just is a pile on. You got babies as a [teenager], [like] myself. All that stuff starts to add up. It's always a conflict of interests. You're in a professional world, but you're not professional. I was conflicted being in a corporate environment. It was something that I wasn't comfortable with at that age. I would drive back 13 hours on the weekend -- go right back to my 'hood and just relax for a little bit -- and drive back to Chicago [where he was drafted by the Bulls in 1999] every time we had a day off.
Though his career had ups and downs — it started off on a somewhat precarious note when he missed a Knicks workout before the draft — we're glad that he wound up on the basketball court and continues to entertain and educate us with his candid interviews on a number of topics today.
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