Here you will meet such varied and complex personalities as Marvin Barnes, who some experts say is one of the best natural talents ever to come into the NBA and who destroyed his career with drugs and passionate insouciance — «the last
innocent,» Walton called him; Kermit Washington, who fled from a posh Hollywood party because the movie people were sniffing cocaine; Abdul Qadir Jeelani (
born Gary Cole), a shy
young man who liked Rome better than Portland but yearned for the kind of recognition you can not find as «the king of spaghetti basketball»; Maurice Lucas, educated, intelligent, married to a Harvard graduate, yet tormented by the belief that his $ 300,000 salary was somehow demeaning.