Kevin Garnett is sitting in the shadows. It's where he can often be found off the court. Watching, studying, the luminous whites of his eyes the only clue that he's there. An old woman is cleaning his hotel suite in Puerto Rico. Before she leaves, he stands up and sweetly imitates her, how she walks, smooths her hair, picks something up from the floor. She laughs. Imagine, a 7'1'' black man pretending to be a 5'2'' Puerto Rican maid and capturing her perfectly. It takes an eye for detail, acute coordination and, above all, a desire to lose yourself, if only for a moment. What's freaky is how good he is at it.

"One thing I can do," he says, "is impersonate." He can do it on the basketball court as well, making him, bar none, the toughest all-around matchup in the league. How do you guard someone who can shuffle through personas the way a kid flips through bubble gum cards? How do you get around someone who can switch from Gary Payton to Scottie Pippen to Dennis Rodman to David Robinson?

But all that mimicry has everyone wondering something else. When is Garnett going to see himself as the force to be reckoned with, rather than the universal wrench, forever adjusting his game to serve those around him? He's the kid who speaks only when spoken to even though he knows the answer. In five languages. That's why Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders preaches over and over again to KG: Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness if you can't control it. Saunders wants Garnett to realize that he can impose his natural advantage and dominate any game, at any time, in much the same way Tim Duncan does. Until then, everyone will keep wondering when Kevin will become, simply, Kevin.

The only way the Timberwolves can break out of their first-round-and-out playoff dance is if he, as the Army recruiting ads say, becomes all that he can be. Saunders wants Kevin to force teams to put their power forward on him, rather than their 3, opening things up for Joe Smith. He wants him to defend shooting guards, allowing 'tweener rookie Wally Szczerbiak to stay on the floor to provide perimeter firepower. And he wants Garnett to use his precision passing to give Terrell Brandon three-point looks that the point guard has never had before. But above all, Saunders wants Garnett to demand the ball when the game is on the line. He wants him looking to score, not trying to set somebody else up.

If that's ever going to happen, now is the time.

Garnett spent much of the summer going to the gym alone. Even the half-dozen buddies from his hometown of Mauldin, S.C., the guys who live with him the better part of the year in Minnesota, were left behind at the house. Garnett understands that he is going to have to lead the Timberwolves at both ends of the floor this season. The offense once ran through Tom Gugliotta, but he bolted for Phoenix a year ago. Stephon Marbury was always eager to take the shot at crunch time, but now he's in New Jersey. So, to make the isolation complete, Garnett escaped the Old Block Family (OBF), as his homeboys are known.

"I was the third option when Googs and Steph were here," Garnett says. "It's different now, so I went into my own little world this summer. I didn't want anyone keeping up with me, anyone seeing me. I wanted to see how far I could push myself. I had to train my body to go, stop, go, recuperate in 15 seconds, get the rebound and be the first downcourt."

The hard work showed in Puerto Rico this summer during the Olympic qualifying tournament for next September's Games in Australia. The U.S. team got rock star treatment, but only Garnett received standing ovations (four in all) during the two-week event. He won over the initially anti-U.S. crowd, which was eager to boo the collection of millionaires if they gave any hint of dogging it. His trademark became an enormous defensive play on one end, followed by a resounding dunk at the other, or vice versa. Either way, the crowd would roar as he gulped for air.

He won teammates over, as well. Duncan, who didn't like the trash-talking by Garnett in their first-round playoff series last spring, still sees KG as a bit too excitable. But he came to understand that Garnett's passion to win was simply bubbling over. "He's a little loud, a little high energy, but he's cool," Duncan says. "I have more respect for him now because I've never seen anyone who wants to win as badly as he does."

Tim Hardaway also revised his impression: "He's into the game and ready to play," he says. "He's so hyper, I always thought he wasn't. But the mental aspect of his game is much better than I thought."

In Puerto Rico, Garnett acted, at first, as if he were some high school kid who had snuck into the locker room, which isn't that far from the truth. Save for Duncan and the rookies, the Dream Teamers are considerably older than Garnett, who's still only 23. He would tell them about his wall at home with posters of Payton and Vin Baker from their college days, about seeing Jason Kidd in a high school tournament when Garnett was a kid. "After our first exhibition game," says Payton, "he was jumping up and down, asking us for our jerseys and autographs."

He wasn't that way with the rookies, though. When Richard Hamilton missed breakfast and had a friend try to sneak him a box of food to the back of the bus, Garnett sent it back. When new T-Wolves teammate Szczerbiak coasted through an early game, Garnett told "Pretty Boy" he needed to start boxing out. He also told Szczerbiak he'd need to lose 10 pounds to be quick enough to play on the perimeter for Minnesota. "He was definitely acting like a leader," Szczerbiak says, "and I have no problem following him."

When Garnett arrived at T-Wolves training camp three months later, Saunders noticed another big change. "Before," Saunders says, "he'd go with the flow. Now he knows he's our go-to player. Now he realizes he has to force the action more than he has before. Or more than he wants to."

***

Garnett has lived in the Midwest for the last five years -- four in Minnesota after spending his senior year at Chicago's Farragut Academy -- but so much of who he is and is not comes from Mauldin. His mother, Shirley, raised him there alone, more interested in teaching him Southern small-town manners than in seeing him play basketball. As he walked through back hallways of the team hotel in Puerto Rico, he greeted everyone he saw, once ducking his head into a manager's office just to say hello. When a woman and her son approached him in the hotel casino -- he was off to the side on this occasion, sitting and watching -- to deliver a lecture about staying humble, Garnett charmed her so thoroughly that she walked away wishing him a championship.

"I was raised from a woman's perspective," he says. "A friend of my mom once asked me if I had a girl. I looked at my mom and she said, 'Answer her.' I looked for her permission first. That's just how I was raised."

To accommodate. To follow. "If everybody had jeans on, I'd go back inside and put some on," he says. He'd rarely go to play hoops unless he had his neighborhood buddy, Jaime "Bug" Peters, with him. His decision to leave Maudlin stemmed from a high school hallway brawl that ended with Garnett in cuffs in the backseat of a police cruiser. Garnett says he was just following the crowd that day, and all charges were soon dropped. He headed north with his mom, swearing he'd never be a follower again. But after befriending another star at Farragut, Ronnie Fields, he said he'd go to college wherever Fields planned to go, even though Fields was a year behind him.

For all his fame, Garnett retains his Southern perspective and manners. He couldn't imagine deserting Minnesota as Googs and Marbury did -- or deriding it as J.R. Rider, Christian Laettner and Pooh Richardson have. The ice fishermen have embraced him, and he returns the favor. "I even like Minnesota's cold weather because it keeps you focused on what you need to do," he says.

In Puerto Rico, he drained a can of juice while talking to reporters. His eyes drifted above their heads in search of a garbage can. Excusing himself, he walked down a hallway in search of a place to dispose his trash. That brought him near an area roped off for fans seeking autographs. A 7-year-old girl jumped up and down at the sight of KG, screaming and waving her autograph pad. Garnett silenced her by leaning over to get face-to-face and holding a finger in front of his lips. His hands full with his gear bag, a portable CD player and the can, he clamped the can in his mouth and began signing. Finished, he returned to the reporters, answered more questions, then carried the empty can onto the bus.

Garnett is doing Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface, a movie he figures he has seen about 40 times. "I stayed loyal to you," says the 7'1'' black man, now playing a five-foot-something Cuban. "I made what I could on the side, but I nevah turned you, Frank. Nevah."

If he sees something once, that's usually enough. Two years ago, Saunders devised a play called "New York" from scratch to set up Garnett for a last-second shot against the Knicks. It failed because Garnett got tripped up. Hundreds of plays later, Saunders resurrected it in this year's training camp. "New York," Garnett said, immediately recalling how he blew it. Then there was the Timberwolves' postgame team dinner in Seattle a few years ago, when Garnett impersonated everyone on the team, one by one, including the equipment manager. Even with his mouth shut, he does imitations, putting a table napkin on his head and transforming it from Tupac's signature bandanna wrap to a sheik's turban to something resembling a nun's habit. And, of course, he does Marbury, his soul mate since they became phone pals after hearing of each other through prep hoop circles, Marbury in New York and Garnett in Mauldin.

Show confusion on or off the court, and either will strike quickly. A cameraman once made the mistake of saying "Huh?" to Garnett.

Huntin'?" asked Garnett.

Cameraman: "Wha?" KG: "Water?"

Cameraman: "Wh..." KG: "Winter?"

Cameraman: "Who..." KG: "Hou-dini? Damn, you're running through all of them."

Later, Garnett explains. "That's Steph stuff. Middle of a game, up by 20, he'd say something and I wouldn't hear him and go, 'Huh?' He'd start right in. 'Huntin'?' Right there on the floor, he'd have me going."

Garnett's reverence for Scarface explains why he and Marbury remain close friends despite Stephon's defection. Tony Montana was willing to do anything to succeed. That the only avenue available proved to be his undoing was not his fault; nor was the family loyalty that led him to shoot his best friend. Garnett can only guess at the allegiance Marbury has to his 50-some family members in Brooklyn's Coney Island. While KG might refer to various friends as "a father" (record producer Jimmy Jam, Terry Porter, Sam Mitchell), or "a brother" (the entire Dream Team), he has never had either; his only sibling is younger sister Ashley. "We have a saying, 'You can't knock the hustle,' " Garnett explains. "You can't get mad just because a man is trying to lift himself up. If you're my friend, I want the best for you. I want you to be at peace."

That is what Marbury wanted by going to New Jersey. Aside from getting back to his New York roots, he got back his own domain. He knew he'd always be No. 2 in Minnesota, even though he saw himself as the player who got the T-Wolves to the NBA penthouse. "We'll see who's really good now," Marbury says. "Now everybody has a fresh start. They had Googs, Rider, Kevin, and they still didn't go to the playoffs until I got there. I love KG, but what's good for him may not be good for me. You have your pain, I have mine. You like to be hot, I like to be cold. That doesn't mean we can't be tight."

Garnett agrees, reluctantly. The frustration of knowing he was outmanned last spring is what prompted him to scream at Duncan. "I wished we had another psycho out there," Garnett says. "I needed another dog jerking the chain. It's like losing at the playground and saying, 'If I had my boy here, we'd beat you,' and they say, 'Well, go get your boy.' I don't have that option. Joe Smith showed me a lot, and Terrell Brandon is like a sniper, but Steph is a predator."

Saunders has tried to wean Garnett from the idea that he can't win without Marbury. So have his friends. "We tell him, 'You have to take Mike's shoes and fly,'" says Steel, a Mauldin buddy who accompanied him to Puerto Rico. "We know he could score 50 a night if he wanted to."

Garnett shakes his head at the Jordan reference. "See, they say stupid things like that and then I have to break it down for them from a team perspective."

The reality is that his OBF is right. Even the stats are there -- he was the only small forward to average a double-double (20.8 ppg., 10.4 rpg) and led the position in blocked shots (1.77) and rebounds. Oh, you consider him a power forward? Well, he led that group in steals (1.66), and was second in assists. The amazing thing is that he led any category, since he played so many roles. With all due respect to Duncan, KG may have an edge over TD because his athleticism allows him to not only control ball flow and tempo at both ends of the floor, but score on a ferocious jam, an acrobatic drive or a horizontal fallaway jumper.

If KG doesn't consider himself worthy of such talk, at least he is trying to rid himself of the idea that something irreplaceable was lost when Googs and Marbury left. "Last season was like I drank a ton of water, then worked so hard that it took it all out of me," he says. "Now it's time to go back to the lab. We're at Square One."

***

During the last game in Puerto Rico, the crowd cranes its collective neck to follow Garnett. He has become such a one-man highlight show that even reporters are yelling, "Throw the oop!" as Kidd and Payton see who can throw the higher lob for Garnett to snatch and slam.

There is one last dunk/blocked shot combo, and then KG looks toward the section of seats where his OBF friends are sitting. He launches a fist into the air, yelling toward the ceiling, "Put five dollars on the yo!" He is referring to the longest of long-shot bets in craps, a gamble that the dice will come up in one particular way. But the payoff is enormous.

Kevin Garnett is finally betting on himself.

This article appears in the November 15, 1999 issue of ESPN The Magazine.