The Seattle SuperSonics gave $34 million to Calvin Booth this past summer. They may have given it to the wrong guy.

	James

While Booth has been sidelined and/or ineffective for most of the season because of an ankle injury -- though some suspect he would have been ineffective anyway, injury or no injury -- a fella named Jerome James has begun to make something of a name for himself.

Well, he made a name for himself a few years ago, but those names were stuff like "Blimp" and "Bubba."

After all, what else do you call a cat who weighs in at 347 pounds? That's right, 347 L-Bs. Big enough to land an F-16 on, with room enough to maneuver around and reload for another sortie.

	“	I'm trying to find my game with this new body that I have. I'm faster than I realize. Sometimes I make a move and my body is going before I can catch up with the thinking. ”
		— James

He played 16 games for Sacramento in 1989-99, but folks at Arco Arena got tired of the dents James was putting in the floor there. Every time there was a little tremor down in the Bay Area, seismologists kept coming back to a field outside Sac-town as the epicenter.

James is what we kindly call a "prodigious" eater. Perhaps it is because he didn't get a great deal of good, what with four brothers and five sisters, not to mention a father named Jessie James. (No joke.)

He says he used to be a late-night consumer of tasty, fried foods, kind of like Boss Hogg in Dukes of Hazzard. So he stopped with the KFC at midnight, and went to the BLT at noon. Somewhere, he dropped 80 pounds. We think it was found by Chandler Bing.

But it's funny being skinny, James says. He used to lumber about, knocking over players like they were duck pins and he was a 16-pound ball, or perhaps a 347-pound ball. Now, he occasionally finds himself blowing by an opponent. OK, "blowing by" may be a bit strong, except for the fact that he creates a big gust of wind when he moves. But being a little quicker is not far off.

"I'm trying to find my game with this new body that I have," said James. "I'm faster than I realize. Sometimes I make a move and my body is going before I can catch up with the thinking."

Does that mean his brain needs to do push-ups?

This is not to say that James is suddenly an all-star, far from it. But it is to suggest that at a time when Booth and Todd MacCulloch and Nazr Mohammed are getting $34 million checks cut to them even though their numbers don't combine to equal Jon Koncak's, the 7-foot-2 James might be in line for a good deal of money, should his development continue.

He has huge hands, the kind that makes your own hand disappear when you shake. His arms are like vines, swinging down by his knees. His feet, size 21s, are mammoth, which make him seem rather slow, considering he seemingly has to pick up some Volkswagen Beetles attached to the bottoms of his ankles. And he has a nice little feel for the game.

"A lot of people are going to be surprised by Jerome James," teammate Vin Baker said. "He's really hungry to make a mark in this league."

Which is why the Kings drafted him with their second pick out of Florida A&M, where he led the NCAA in blocks (4.48 per game) his junior season, before turning pro. Only then, his appetite was for Pork Rinds rather than NBA success.

Even better, though, James is interesting. Before playing for the Kings in the lockout-shortened season, James went on a nine-country European tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, where he once dunked a ball on a rim that was 11 feet, 4 inches high. Imagine what he could do now, with the extra tonnage gone. He majored in pre-law, which would have been excellent had Ruben Patterson stayed with the Sonics. He says his hobbies are carpentry and fixing televisions and stereos. So he's nice to have around when the DVD breaks down on the seven-hour flight to Miami.

	Divac

And he has some good stories. After getting cut by the Kings, he played for the team Vlade Divac owns in Yugoslavia. During a game, his team was winning, and the fans started to get angry that James and his teammates were beating their heroes.

"I literally had to fight to get out of there," James recalled. "It was the last 20 seconds of the game. They rushed out of the stands and attacked our team.

"As soon as I saw people running down the stands, I immediately jumped up and just started fighting my way to the tunnel to get to the locker room."

Hey, a storyteller, a television repairman, a former Globetrotter and a weight loss guru. Plus, he can block a few shots. That should be worth at least $34 mil, don't you think?

Around The League