Stevie Francis carries a stolen Maryland driver's license, proof that you can take the boy out of the 'hood but not the 'hood out of the boy. Anyone who has seen him play already knows that, of course, from the pregame dropping of his shorts right on the court to tuck in his jersey, to the primal postdunk holler, to the -- good god, is he actually skipping? Now there's this hands-on-head signal -- wolf ears -- meant expressly for the fellas chillin' on the block. So the pilfered license is merely more evidence.

"She looks like me, doesn't she?" Stevie says proudly, gazing at the license. There's a resemblance, but as fake IDs go, it's a lousy one. The license is made out to Brenda Wilson, who's wearing a red-leather pillbox hat in the photo. She's beaming into the camera, radiating goodness. Stevie takes the license everywhere, keeps it in the top slot of a fancy leather wallet whose color is not that far from the pillbox hat's.

The license is why Stevie jumps so high, why he plays every game and every practice for the Houston Rockets as if he'd snuck in hoping to prove he belongs before they kick him out, why his snub of Vancouver couldn't have been more misleading. He couldn't dunk when Brenda Wilson, his mother, still kept that license in her own wallet, before she died of a heart attack five years ago in the midst of a battle with cancer. Then he stopped trying to dunk altogether, staying away from organized basketball for two years. Run wind sprints? Work on his game? For what? What possible payoff could there be, now that he couldn't play in front of his mom, now that he couldn't make her proud? He'd join a pick-up game on the playground, but his heart wasn't in it, not like the days when he literally broke a guy's ankle as an eighth grader, working an inside-outside dribble into a crossover. They still talk about how an ambulance happened to be outside -- the gym was beneath a firehouse -- and they had to carry the guy upstairs, where they strapped him onto a gurney and took him to the hospital.

When the mourning fog finally lifted, and Stevie got back to playing, he'd grown from 5'9" almost to his current 6'3". When he ran, he'd skip as if someone were lifting him off the ground with each step, holding him airborne for just a split-second longer than everyone else. And when he really tried to lift off, it was as if someone had grabbed him under the arms, the way Brenda did when he was little, and launched him into the air. As Stevie sees it, the growth spurt and the tremendous hops were Brenda's way of saving him from a street-corner life. Her license, swiped from his stepfather's wallet, is his reminder.

"I believe that 100%," he says. "It's not like I did toe raises or lifted weights during that time. There's no way I could grow so much, jump so much higher. It has to be."

Stevie believes Brenda Wilson gave him a license to fly.

Francis' dislike of Vancouver, not his love for his mother, is what most NBA fans first learned about him. Nobody does disappointment quite like Francis, and that lower lip that jiggles as he bounces through the lane drooped almost cartoon-like on draft night when the Grizzlies made him the overall No.2 pick. Lifelong trait, says Tony Langley, the Takoma Park Boys & Girls Clubs coach Francis credits with teaching him the game. "He did not have a problem shedding a tear after a loss." An opponent was in trouble if Stevie got upset sooner. "If you ever see him teary-eyed on the court, watch out," says Timothy Cooper, the Takoma Parker who nicknamed Stevie "Wink," in part because he drank that soda, in part because he was as quick as one. Even in a Rockets practice scrimmage, Francis' face clouds over if his team falls behind. He sets up his teammates until the score is tied and it's time for the closeout shot. He takes and makes. "Damn, Franchise," someone on the losing team says. "That's what I'm talking about," crows teammate Matt Bullard.

"That's why I knew Stevie would be successful," Langley says. "He wanted to win at everything. Wind sprints, scrimmages, everything. We have an annual summer festival and Stevie still holds the record for raffle tickets sold, more than 400 in a day."

But the draft's national audience knew none of that, making Francis' pout far less endearing. The prevailing thought seemed to be, how dare this little-known punk be upset? They looked at his résumé -- three high schools, three colleges -- and crafted an answer. He's one of those guys. Thinks he's better than he is, bolts if anyone doesn't agree with him to find someone who does. Wants it his way, always. Catch a snippet of Francis rising over some fool, banging a dunk in his face and then howling in celebration, and the image is clinched.

What the résumé doesn't show is that he first switched high schools because his mom got a new job and the family moved a few neighborhoods away. He wanted to graduate with his friends, so he got permission to switch back to his old school for his senior year. Then his mom died, and he dropped out. He hoped to get back on track at a private academy in Connecticut, but when the tuition grant fell through, he moved back again. Hoops wasn't part of the equation; he never played high school ball after his sophomore year. A stunning performance at an AAU tournament in Florida got him to San Jacinto (Texas) Junior College. Then he transferred back east to Allegany (Md.) CC when his grandmother took ill. He passed on a chance to be drafted that summer because, like every kid in Takoma Park, he dreamed of playing for Maryland.

To truly understand Francis, stop in to see the D.C. Warriors practicing at the Takoma Park Community Center. That's where those dreams are born and an alternative to the streets is offered. The 12-year-olds are told to line up single-file, and when they're slow to do so, conditioning coach LaBarry Williams sends them to the baseline to run sprints. The penalty for cursing is being force-fed a half-bar of soap. On tournament trips, LaBarry has been known to get them up at 5:30 a.m. to do 500 jumping jacks and run sprints. They still open practice jumping with the same heavy ropes and passing the same heavy ball Francis used.

The discipline once led to a lot of turnover, Langley says. His talented players could easily find a coach promising special treatment elsewhere. But Francis' involvement provides counter-attractions, without sacrificing the tough demands. The team goes to a half-dozen tournaments a year, with Francis picking up the entry fees and all travel and room and board expenses. If they balk at any drill, nothing ends their protests quicker than saying this is what Stevie did.

What they don't know, of course, is that Stevie wasn't star material then, just a point guard setting up the other players because he couldn't jump or shoot as well. They'd laugh at his dunk attempts and how he'd keep marks on the wall to track his miniscule growth. (Stevie is so proud of his new physique, he arrives early to Rockets practice, lifts, then practices bare-chested until Hakeem insists he put on a jersey.) They called him Big Head or Bart Simpson because of his noggin's size, joked about his baseball-bat legs (which remain thin except for the odd knot of calf muscle almost at the back of his knees) and teased him about his gaseous emissions whenever they did leg lifts. "The scoring is really a recent phenomenon," Langley says. "Up until 12th grade, he couldn't dunk the ball."

The highlight clips don't do him justice either. They don't show him sneaking over to pick the brain of radio analyst and former Rockets point guard Calvin Murphy. SportsCenter showed his last-second exhibition-game windmill dunk against the Sonics last month but didn't find him huddling with coach Rudy Tomjanovich seconds earlier, after Shammond Williams had driven by him with the Rockets protecting an eight-point lead. "Should I have fouled him?" he asks. "You should have stopped him," Rudy says. "I was protecting against the 3," Stevie says, "but I got you, Coach."

And for all the trickery in Stevie's game, there's a purpose behind every move. He doesn't wrap a pass around his head unless that's the only way to complete it. He'll break down a defender only because the shot or pass he has in mind requires it. It's a marriage of playground and textbook ball that could take the NBA to new ground. He is unique because he never stayed in one college system long enough to have his individuality hammered out of him, and yet he's mastering the game's subtleties. He, along with a handful of other players skimping or skipping on the campus experience, are proof that collegiate ball is not the best way to go for everyone. Students of the game don't need to carry books.

"He's always understood that the object of the game was to win," Langley recalls. "I never had to say, 'Steve, what was that?'"

Langley remembers Stevie's head being as quick as his feet, such as when he used playground etiquette on a kid taking the ball out. "Check," he said, and then laid the ball in when the kid handed it to him for what proved to be a two-point win. Another time, Stevie saw that the referee's position had confused the other team into leaving one of his teammates unguarded under the basket. Stevie pushed his inbounder away, took the ball, faked a pass to him and found the unguarded teammate for a layup. Even now, when Langley watches the Rockets on the community center TV bolted high on the wall, he gets more excited about Stevie's fundamentals than his acrobatics.

"When he makes that serious bounce pass or pulls up for that short jump shot he developed because we didn't have three-point lines on our courts, I'm like, 'Yes!'" Langley says, pumping his fists.

Stevie going aerial can be such a sight that the Rockets coaches can't help falling out. When he dunked and yelled against the Sonics, Rudy T and his staff snuck looks at each other and then laughed into their clipboards and suit lapels, struggling to compose themselves as they walked off the court. "The good thing about Stevie," says teammate Carlos Rogers, "is he hasn't realized he's in the NBA yet. He's just playing basketball."

The NBA being a big-money business now, that free-spiritedness scares some people. They want players to share the corporate sheen, the lockstep 'tude. Have fun, but don't go overboard. Francis understands. That's why he happily signs autographs and shakes hands and promotes the NBA any way he can. He just can't help it if the raw thrill of living this life, having these skills, overtakes him. For reasons beyond his control, he missed out on his best years of high school ball. He wondered if that would preempt playing in college, even if he grew those precious extra inches. Not even kids who kept it all together made it to the NBA from Takoma Park, so that was pure fantasy. And yet here he is: not just a pro, but a point guard again, finally, projected as the team's cornerstone, blessed with a 43'' vertical just barely out of the box. Wouldn't you go a little nuts too?

And to turn his back on the old neighborhood would be an insult to Brenda, as if her life and the life she made for him were bad. So he walks the fine line of staying connected with the old neighborhood and rejoicing that he made it out. He went back to Takoma Park this summer, taking teammate Cuttino Mobley with him, and checked out Maple Avenue, T.P.'s unofficial downtown. This is where he was that cold March evening in '95 when his cousin Stacy rang Stevie's pager a dozen times from the hospital. When he called and heard Stacy crying, he hung up and told his best friend, Dave Davis, to drive him home. He knew it was about his mom, who had been forced back into the hospital after a week at home, thinking she had the cancer beaten. Instead, that big heart had burst.

An honor-roll student from fourth to eighth grade, he dropped out and spent most of his time in the house or hanging on Maple Ave, a very bad scene. "It was straight skid row back then," says Davis. "Anything that could happen, would." Francis knew he could go either direction. "You either go for the good or the bad," Stevie says. "You have to make a decision. Seeing guys getting shot, seeing how devastated their families were, I didn't want to do that to mine."

So he called Langley again. "I think her death fueled his passion even more toward the game, because he'd lost his No.1 love and needed to replace it," Langley says.

Francis and Mobley picked up the wolfpack signal -- both hands held at the top of the head, fingers extended -- from the Maple Ave regulars as a way to pay homage to a special play and their homeys. But Stevie's grandmother, Mable Wilson, warned him that millionaire NBA players can't afford to hang in the 'hood. When Francis was robbed of his jewelry in a New York barbershop last summer, her point hit home. Now he drives around, dropping in on pick-up games to show he's still part of the neighborhood, but staying off the block.

"I can pick my spots without letting somebody take me down," he says.

He handled the Vancouver situation badly, especially when he said he didn't want to play there because he wanted to stay close to Mable. That was partly true. Bigger reason: Maryland coach Gary Williams had promised he'd play point guard, but Francis spent the season as a shooting guard in an offense that most benefited center Obinna Ekezie. So why would he believe the Grizzlies when they said they'd slide incumbent point guard Mike Bibby, not him, over to 2?

He tried to short-circuit their interest quietly, calling weeks before the draft to express his feelings and saying he wouldn't work out for them. A Grizzlies contingent flew to Maryland anyway, to see Stevie work out on his own and then have dinner with his agent, Jeff Fried. Francis stopped by on his way home from the gym, still wearing his workout clothes. The restaurant dress code required a sport jacket, so they gave him one off their rack, several sizes too small, and put it on over his sleeveless T-shirt and sweat pants. He stopped by the table, feeling ridiculous. "I saw Brian Hill sitting there all stiff," Francis says, "and I just knew it wasn't right."

One wrong move after being dealt to Houston and he might never have shed that pouty image. But he won over everybody, from Hakeem Olajuwon to the workers at the restaurant where the team practices to the national media, which voted him co-Rookie of the Year with No.1 pick Elton Brand. He had to keep two proud and aging stars, Hakeem and Charles Barkley, happy on a team otherwise built for his preferred up-tempo style. Self-serving? He repeatedly pulled up on the break to get the ball to Dream or The Chuckster. Impatient? He has yet to declare the Rockets his team, out of respect for Hakeem, even though the now-retired Barkley already made that declaration midway through last season.

When a woman in the Westside Tennis Club mentions that her son will be going away to the Naval Academy in a couple of days, Stevie takes the kid down to the locker room and gives him a pair of autographed shoes. Another restaurant worker asks if he'll sign some basketballs for an auction benefiting an injured fireman. Stevie hugs the guy and kids him about the apprehensive way he asked. When trainer/player liaison Keith Jones needed help getting Maurice Taylor to sign with the Rockets for the $2.5 million exception, when he needed help convincing Mobley not to leave through free agency for Toronto, Francis wore out his cell phone.

Oh, Francis is a talker and a kidder. (So was Brenda.) And his on-court jabber rankled more than one vet last year. But follow him around for a couple of hours and it becomes clear talking is the same as breathing for Francis. At the Rockets' preseason public scrimmage, Francis jumps onto a television set, grabs a mike and starts interviewing himself. When teammate and fellow D.C. native Moochie Norris walks by, Stevie interviews him. Then he joins a group of players who have been sent up to the mezzanine to greet fans as they enter the building, and he hands them passes for the postgame autograph session. When he sees the TV cameras, Francis complains, "Awww, can't we do this for free?"

Next he plants himself directly in front of the turnstiles, chatting up -- and startling -- nearly every fan. He sneaks up behind a camerawoman shooting Moochie, shakes the back of the camera and says, "Earthquake!" A minute later he hears Scarface over the PA system and runs to the upper concourse, talking with an usher as he sways to the music. On the way back down to the locker room, he says to the elevator operator, "Thank you, Melinda." When the doors are slow in opening, he teases her with, "Awww, Melinda."

Fact is, he has trouble demanding star treatment. When both he and rookie Stais Boseman order chicken legs and are informed by a waitress that there are only enough left for one of them, Stevie defers. After he finishes eating, he's on the phone trying to order shoes from a catalog. He's told it could be weeks before the shoes are delivered. "Oh," Stevie says. A Rockets security guard overhears the conversation and motions for Stevie to give him the phone. The guard explains who the shoes are for and gets the shipment expedited, then hands back the phone.

Bouncing around, other than on a court, never suited Francis. The first time his AAU team traveled, going to Salt Lake City for a tournament, he called home eight or nine times a day. He even wrote letters on the 12-day trip.

One reason Houston fits Francis, he says, is that it has the feel of Takoma Park. Moochie's locker is on one side, Cuttino's on the other. Another teammate, Walt Williams, starred at Maryland. Francis has already said he wants to spend his entire career with the Rockets. "This," he says, "feels like home."

But there will always be something missing, like the way Brenda gently stuck a finger in his ears to check if they were clean, or the club sandwiches and Kool-Aid she'd have waiting for him when he got home from school. Other moms would shoo their kids and friends out of the house, but even though she had a husband, three boys and a girl all living in a three-bedroom apartment, Brenda wanted Stevie and his friends around, always finding room if someone needed to sleep over.

Stevie forgets that he already showed the license a couple of weeks earlier and pulls it out again. "She looks like me, doesn't she?" he says, using the exact same line as before.

Yes, she does. But more important, he acts a lot like her.

This article appears in the November 13, 2000 issue of ESPN The Magazine.