A little more than a half-decade ago, Michael Beasley bought a farmhouse in Tennessee, about an hour outside of Knoxville. He had no ties to the area. No family living there, and no friends.
The town, its population not even hitting 1,000 people, was a blank slate for him. The last place anyone would expect to find him, he thought. Most foot traffic comes from a nearby state prison, and it rarely gets busy.
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Eventually, he plans to tear the house down and build something bigger. He spends his summers there, on 2,000 acres, splitting time between there and Atlanta.
If it sounds like Beasley, one of the NBA’s most enigmatic and colorful people, wants to remove himself from society, it’s because he does.
“One hundred percent,” he says. “Like who wants to keep running into unfaithful, unloyal people? Who wants to go to work knowing you can give more, knowing that you’re better than what they perceive you as? And who wants to hang out with all those people that think the same things I just said?”
He learned comfort in isolation, or something near it, when he went to play in China for the first time in 2014. Most NBA players who ventured there, he says, came with a handful of friends, each wanting their own apartments and to travel with the team. Beasley had been taken advantage of before. He didn’t want that anymore. He went alone.
Telling his friends no had been difficult, at first. Telling his family no had been difficult, at first. It has gotten easier over the years.
Beasley never wanted to be a cliché, even though he has often been painted as a classic prodigal son of professional basketball. His reputation — that he was wasteful of his talent and of his potential — haunts him as he struggles to overhaul it. But, at 29, he has found equilibrium.
“Now it’s like, ‘bro, fuck you,’” he says. “As simple as that. I’m at a point where my happiness should be accounted for and it hasn’t been. So I don’t do a lot of the things or give a lot of things as far as I used to.”
Beasley got to the NBA as a 19-year-old spendthrift in Miami. He had always wanted a Range Rover, so he bought one. He wanted a Bentley, so he got one of those too. Dwyane Wade had a Challenger, so Beasley scooped one up and souped it up. At one point, when he had five cars in his driveway, Bruce Shingler, a friend living with him at the time, had a question: “Mike, why?”
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When the two were out driving in the city, Beasley saw a Suburban on the side of the road with chrome wheels and a “For Sale” sign. He wanted that one too. This time, Shingler pushed back, asking for a reason.
“I don’t know,” he remembers Beasley telling him. “I’m gonna call that the dump truck. I’m gonna drive it and whenever I wanna go, take out trash.”
By the end of that first year, he says he had 11 or 12 cars. And every time he went out to a club — oh, he assures you, there were those kinds of nights — every one of those cars was there, all with multiple passengers, except for his.
That life, Beasley says, is behind him. Castigated for being a wild child out of college, when he was suddenly given riches after an adolescence of wanting and watching his youthful mistakes play out in the open, Beasley, now with the Knicks, proclaims to be a changed man 10 years into the NBA. His world now, he says, revolves around his children. He has had his heart broken and his career too, leaving him a man searching. For the basketball stardom promised to him but never earned. For a dignity restored. For a happiness he has given up on finding.
There will be no absolution, if even he wanted it, but Beasley is hoping to at least be recast. To make an argument for himself — that he is not the league’s class clown, that he deserves a bigger role than in some team’s ensemble.
“My whole career I get ‘stoner,’ ‘partier,’ ‘troublemaker,’ and I’ve gotten in trouble a few times back in the day — not even back in the day, it’s not that long ago — I got in trouble a few times and that’s like the stigma that’s still with me to this day,” he says. “It’s not even that I’m changing now because at this point there’s nothing for me to change. I can cut my hair but I tried that three times, four times already. I can get tattoos removed but nobody will notice it until they’re all gone. Even then would it change?
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“At this point, I want to be looked at different. I want to be respected. I want to be all of this and all of that but at the same time it’s like one man can’t change the world.”
His first year in New York has given him an opportunity, at least, though he wants more. Statistically, he’s having his best season since he still had a lottery pick sheen. Some in the Knicks organization, originally wary, have been pleasantly surprised. Signed to a one-year, veteran’s minimum contract in August, Beasley is the team’s fourth-leading scorer. He’s earned plaudits for his basketball IQ and, of course, for his scoring acumen. He’s “exceeded expectations,” one member of the organization says, and become a popular personality.
Beasley has never had trouble being liked. Even in his darkest periods in the league, he’s left those around him with a positive impression. Lon Babby, the former Suns president of basketball operations, calls Beasley a “good guy and terrifically talented player” even though the team released him 14 months into a three-year, $18 million contract that helped capsize his tenure there. He can still recall Beasley fondly, laughing at him jumping to the front of the team’s charter plane, grabbing the microphone away from a stewardess and announcing “This is Michael Beasley” to a team now captured by his presence.
But Beasley isn’t searching for friends. He is trying to change perceptions, even if it may never be possible. His life is pockmarked by unseemly incidents and by serious accusations. He is a basketball vagabond. His reputation, he believes, has cost him jobs — a theory substantiated by one NBA executive — and cost him respect. Is there anything he can do to overshadow his past? Will anyone believe he’s capable of change anyway?
Beasley may have never been more content playing basketball than his one year at Kansas State. During the 2007-08 season, he was a star. He remains close with Frank Martin, his coach. He spent portions of the last two summers in South Carolina — where Martin currently coaches — working out and hanging out with Martin and Shingler. It’s where he can go and still not be asked to pick up a check.
It’s as close as he can come to recreating what he had as a freshman, where he slayed Big 12 opponents and flipped tires further than the length of a football field every time he missed class. He was named the conference’s player of the year and dubbed himself Martin’s best tire-flipper.
“At the time I was an adolescent with a pure mind so I didn’t know what happiness was until I figured it out,” he says.
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“I was pure. I was naive. I think that’s my best part is being naive. So I missed a lot of, I guess, BS that most people noticed.”
He declared for the draft as a freshman, went second overall, and his career started on a downward spiral almost immediately. He was fined $50,000 for lying about his involvement in a rookie symposium incident where security found two women and the smell of marijuana in a room he shared with two other players. He’s been arrested twice, in two separate states, for marijuana possession or the suspicion of it. Most seriously, a woman accused him of sexual assault in 2013, which police investigated but never filed charges. Two years later, the woman sued him in civil court but the suit was dismissed without prejudice by a judge in 2016.
The arrests and the allegation have become part of his story, defining him as much as his own disenchantment with his career. Beasley wears them all, inked on his psyche more permanently than any tattoo on his skin. He worries what his 8-year-old daughter will see when she Googles his name, or that a classmate will run over and tease her about her father. Ask what he’d be most disappointed in her seeing and he’ll recite his whole resume.
He cannot choose a nadir because he believes there has never been a crest, keenly aware of how he’s labeled.
“I’m a bust,” he says. “I’m a bust… I’m a bust, right? I’m the Kwame Brown, like they said. My career is a low point.”
If Beasley is a bust, it’s only when set against expectations. He has made more than $37 million from NBA teams over his career, and he averages more points per game than Nicolas Batum or Serge Ibaka. This was not how expected it to go, though. Not for a player who owns one of the most dominant freshman campaigns in college basketball history. A talent so bright that Beasley, naturally right-handed, made it to the league playing with his off-hand.
Entering the league, Beasley thought he would be its best player by his third year. But turbulence hit early and he believes his career went sideways almost immediately. He averaged 13.9 points per game his rookie year, mostly off the bench, as Miami won 43 games. He was a starter in every game he played the next season, but he believes Erik Spoelstra consigned him to the bench in fourth quarters because the Heat coach didn’t think he could play defense. In Minnesota, Rick Adelman brought him off the bench for most of his second year with the Timberwolves, which Beasley believes turned him into a reserve. Signing with Miami in 2013, he says, “was the worst thing I could have did in my career. Because that made it easy for Erik Spoelstra to peg me as an off-the-bench microwave guy.”
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If Beasley feels like the victim at certain points of his career, there’s also been self-sabotage. He and those around him readily admit he made mistakes. His year in Phoenix was a low point. He went there in 2012 with ideas of putting himself back on track and was gone before the next season began. His second arrest for marijuana in two years was the final straw for the Suns, Babby says.
Beasley denies that he ever had a drug problem, and says he doesn’t smoke in-season.
“Do I have a problem? Maybe,” he says. “Did I have a problem? Maybe. But I don’t think so. Even with the problem I still made a better life than 99 percent of the population.”
His immaturity cost him when he was younger, though, and he and some in the league believe that stain continues to haunt him. Beasley, those close to him say, is kind and boisterous, wide-eyed but sometimes too trusting. He lives life at a high volume.
Kevin Durant grew up with Beasley in Maryland, played basketball with him, spent time with him almost daily from the time they were 11. Beasley, he says, was always laughing and smiling, a person who was always trying to have fun. The same teenager kicked out of Oak Hill Academy for tagging his name in as many places as possible in a contest with Ty Lawson until he went too far and got it on a school administrator’s car.
Durant learned when to stop joking around and when to lock in. Beasley never had the people in his life to teach him, he says. What some saw as immaturity, Durant saw as life management.
“I hate to compare it to this but him being so happy and not taking anything too serious was like drugs to him,” Durant says. “It’s like ‘I need to feel this way in order for me to make the other stuff in my life numb.’ Know what I’m saying? That’s what he did to cope. That’s why he’s laughing and joking around and never being that serious people want him to. He used that as his coping mechanism to deal with so much bullshit that was going on that neighborhood, that basketball community, just everything.”
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Beasley was young and new to money when he joined the Heat. He made $4.3 million as a rookie, unleashed from lifelong hardship at 19 and dropped into South Beach. Before he started cashing NBA checks, he says he had never seen $100 in his bank account.
Youth and financial freedom is a dangerous combination for anyone. Beasley had both and public scrutiny. Everyone makes mistakes at that age, on college campuses and in the shadows. His were broadcast in the news.
Whenever he tripped up or had something new to answer for, Alonzo Mourning, a mentor for Beasley, would come to him and try to bring context. Beasley, he’d say, hadn’t messed up as much as he had at that age. What would you do, Knicks teammate Jarrett Jack says, if you were 19 and had $2 million, with another $2 million coming?
The delta between the public perception of Beasley and the way his friends see him is a mile-wide. To NBA fans, Beasley is a screw-up, forever irreparable. To Durant and Jack, who grew up in the DMV and know how his life has taken him from poverty to riches, he is a survivor who deserves credit for sticking around as long as he has.
“As soon as I got a dollar, everything I ever dreamed of, is like, ‘let’s go do it, right now,’” Beasley says.
“You don’t make the right decisions all the time but you penalize me for making the wrong ones or going with the wrong ones that people made. We all need to grow up and just because I play basketball and I was good. You all forced me to grow up a little faster than most.”
A trip to China in 2014 may have saved him. He left Grizzlies training camp in October — after signing a non-guaranteed deal it was uncertain whether he’d earn a roster spot — and signed with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association.
For the first time in his career, he was alone. Beasley used it as a chance to center himself. He left behind any entourage he may have had in the U.S., finally separating from a group of people he thought was leaching off him but was too reluctant to drop. Friends noticed a change in his mentality when he returned.
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“It’s ironic that I had to go halfway around the world,” Beasley says, “to find myself.”
While in China, he crossed paths with Delonte West, the former NBA veteran, who was playing there too. West, he says, was misunderstood, a victim of society’s inability to deal with mental illness. Each person has their demons, he says, and he grabbed hold of his but after he had suffered.
When Beasley went to the NBA, he brought his friends and family — “My whole hood” — and paid for it. He lost money. He had it taken from him. Beasley recognizes now how wrong it was, but couldn’t escape it at the time, feeling indebted to anyone who had once helped him, no matter how small the favor.
“You had to,” he says. “It’s guilt. Our families and our friends from our neighborhoods, they all guilt-tripped us into believing we have to pull them up once we get out.”
“We (were) all tricked from a young age we have to take care of anybody we ever knew or we can’t go back to our neighborhoods. We’re loyal to the wrong thing. I was loyal to the wrong people that never deserved it. I was never loyal to myself. That’s where part of the monster come from.”
In 2008, a few months after he got to the Heat, he fired Joel Bell, his agent. In 2011, Bell sued for breach of contract after Beasley signed a shoe deal with Adidas soon after. Beasley countersued, alleging Bell conspired with Curtis Malone, a Washington D.C. AAU coach, to get Beasley to sign with Bell when he went pro and that his mom received payments to help steer him there. If the strife with Bell was professional, the fallout with Malone felt personal. Malone had taken Beasley into his house when Beasley was 13. Beasley was longtime friends with Nolan Smith, Malone’s stepson.
Beasley and Smith had a falling out too. They stopped talking in the spring of 2011, just as Smith, a former Duke star, was about to be drafted. Beasley says Smith was advised to avoid him because of the draft and that Smith didn’t answer when Beasley called and texted him on the day Portland picked him that June.
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The most painful moment came the first time they played each other that season. Beasley still hadn’t seen Smith. He waited on the court to talk him but says Smith looked past him. After the game, he waited to talk to Smith. Wesley Johnson, a friend and teammate, pestered him to leave but Beasley insisted until Johnson told him Smith would ignore him again.
“You ever had a guy look through you?” Beasley asks.
“That,” he adds, “broke my heart.”
Smith says his silence was out of confusion. Their relationship had become muddled by then, with Malone a party to the lawsuit against Bell too. He was hesitant to approach Beasley because of the drama circling them. They remained distant, Smith thinks, because neither knew how to approach the other and breach the tension.
But the tumult that engulfed him early in his career and life, Beasley says, has melted away as he found peace. He and Smith reconnected when he was in China, FaceTiming one night after going years without a word, though they still don’t talk about the past. He’s started talking to Malone, though he won’t go visit him in prison after Malone was convicted of distributing cocaine and heroin in 2014. All has been forgiven, no matter how deep the hurt was.
He lives by himself now, with two dogs, and says he spends the overwhelming majority of his time alone. He is happiest when he’s with his two kids — Beasley won’t say how many children he has in all — who live with their mom — and come visit. He no longer spends lavishly — he has just one car, a BMW.
Beasley says he doesn’t care about how he’s perceived, that only his mother truly understands him, and, yet, it’s clear he’s thought long about it too. He remains heartbroken from a doomed relationship with his ex-girlfriend, one he says had to end because she didn’t get him.
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To some, he is a caricature of an NBA player and he thinks there’s no getting past that. Teammates like him, he says, but only some respect him. He’s loud and willing to talk about anything. He listens to audiobooks when he shoots around on his own. He’s prone to seemingly outlandish comments. The people that understand him, he says, are like the ones who miss the ice cream truck when it comes around.
“My name don’t ever come up unless it’s light, a joke, laughs behind it,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s all the way a bad thing but it’s not great. I feel like an ‘8 Mile’ Eminem compared to ‘My Name Is.’ Whenever my name is brought up it’s in a ‘Slim Shady’ way and it’s funny and I’m lighthearted, but at the same time every once in a while, I like to take it seriously.”
That extends to his playing career. He bristles at being pigeonholed as a scorer, though that remains his best attribute. Beasley is thankful for the minutes he gets but feels unrewarded when he plays well, that he cannot play a more free-flowing game he plays in the summertime and not as the tertiary option limited to elbow jumpers and faceups.
His talent still garners admiration. Most nights, one NBA executive says, Beasley is still among the most skilled players on the floor. When Beasley proclaims he is as talented as Durant or LeBron James, Durant agrees.
“He is talented but there’s a certain thing that separates the talented from the way they play,” Durant says. “And I think that’s something when Mike was playing around a lot when he was in the kid, I was in the gym. Know what I’m saying? The talent probably is the same but that’s something that’s different. Y’all can figure that out on yourself.”
Beasley retains ambitions of being the focal point of a franchise but is resigned that will never happen. He wants to play into his 40s but even a long career won’t satiate him unless he gets the chance to be a cornerstone again, like he felt it would all play out when he was drafted. There are games when he starts hot, starts hitting jumpers and scoring like few others can. Durant still insists that he’s “unstoppable” when he gets minutes and opportunity.
But then those shots dry up, like they did when he hit 9-of-10 shots in the first half one night last month and only got three more in the second, and Beasley wonders when he’ll be rewarded with more than he’s getting. He is grateful, he says, but he also wants more, even as Beasley realizes that his game is not his own anymore.
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“That’s the sad part about basketball for me,” he says. “I don’t control it.”
But there is a difference between desire and acceptance for Beasley now. What he wants and what he’s assumed for himself are separate. He dreams of stardom but is willing to take less so he can keep playing, keep making money to support his children.
He wants to write a new story for himself, to lose the reputation that follows him around but believes that the changes he makes will never be enough to get noticed. Happiness, he says, is fleeting so he will take serenity instead.
Beasley may never get what he’s seeking as long as he’s in the NBA, so he looks elsewhere. He’s dabbled in painting and art recently. He’s tried writing poetry and music. He started building a car, until he found it too complicated to continue because he didn’t want to put in the hours. At least in these outlets, he has command of his life.
“I’m expressing myself but it’s frustrating at the same time because I just want to express myself on the basketball court and I just can’t.”
(Top photo: Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images)
