Chris Webber stood at his locker, flashing a wide grin that quickly morphed into a grimace. It was mid-March, and he had just led his Sacramento Kings to a big road win over the Philadelphia 76ers. He was happy, even though he was in pain. Early in the game, he had dislocated a finger; his hand was grotesquely swollen. Yet Webber refused to come out of the game; in fact, his presence down low against long-time mentor Derrick Coleman, with whom he carried on a trash-talking war all night long, turned the momentum of the game in Sacramento's favor.

	Chris Webber is as aware of social issues as he is of opponents' double teams.

Not so long ago, Webber would have been considered among the league's least likely players to gut out such a courageous performance. The longtime book on Webber? Long on talent, short on heart, more style than substance. It is that conventional wisdom Webber has battled ever since entering the NBA, and it is that which fuels him today. "Nobody knows how much I want to win a championship," he said that night, inspecting the emerging colors of his hand's swollen bruise. "It's all I think about. And I want to do it so I can say to all those who said those things about me, 'Here. This is who I am. This is who I was all along.' "

You remember the popularly-held case against him. Not long ago, he was exhibit A in a widespread indictment of the "Gen X" athlete: First there was his show-boating, timeout-calling, even "underachieving" days at Michigan as part of the Fab Five, followed by his run-in with old school Don Nelson, proof that Webber couldn't be coached. Then came the frustrating years in Washington, the run-ins with the law, the bogus sex abuse charges, the failure to take the talented Wizards past the first round of the playoffs. Never mind that he'd be acquitted after a highly publicized traffic stop resulted in marijuana and traffic-related charges; turns out, he was guilty only of Driving While Black in a county, Maryland's Prince Georges, renowned for harassing black motorists. Never mind that the sex abuse charges would prove to be the work of a stranger in search of a quick payday. Chris Webber was guilty of conduct unbecoming a role model, and the Wizards' trading of him to Sacramento was widely seen as fitting banishment.

Even then, Webber knew that his story would take a turn for the better. He knew he'd find success on the basketball court and, with it, a firsthand lesson on the vicissitudes of conventional wisdom. "Once I win, you watch," he told me shortly after he was sent packing to Sacramento. "They'll bring out all the stories, about how, in 1982, Chris helped a little old lady across the street. Look, I love Muhammad Ali more than any other athlete ever, and it's funny to see how people worship him now. They hated him. People were like, 'He dodged the draft, he's anti-America, he's anti-white.' Well, he stood up and said black people were being treated wrong. If it was taken out of context at that time, at least now we all can see he was always a good person, that nothing's changed except the outlook back at that time. I'm no Muhammad Ali, but I'm saying I'd rather live the life of Ali than be a media darling."

Today, with his team not coincidentally winning, story after story recounts how Webber has matured. To me, he's the same young man I came to know during his darkest and most vilified days in the nation's capital. There, Webber took me -- a law school dropout, wanna-be freelance writer with a penchant for talking race and politics long into the night -- into his home. He showed me the Green Tree Pythons he bought to help cure his fear of snakes. We leafed through his copy of "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America," its pages dog-eared to profiles of Coretta Scott King, Johnetta Coles and Barbara Jordan. We talked about the African-American artist Eddie Barnes, whose artwork adorned Webber's walls. Even now that he's resurrected the moribund Sacramento franchise, I'm still waiting for the Chris Webber I first got to know in the mid-'90s to break through the media filter.

Of course, the conventional wisdom is no longer quite as damning as it was before he was a winner. Instead, you can hear whispers about what his playoff performances to date reveal about his character. Webber's childhood idol, Charles Barkley, is among those claiming that the likes of Webber and Kevin Garnett, in their -- God save us -- dedication to team play during a game's crunch time reveal a kind of cowardice. Webber doesn't want to be the man, this line of thinking goes, as if Webber's playoff woes to date have more to do with who he is than who he plays with or -- more to the point, given that he's in the Laker-dominated Western Conference -- who he plays against.

Similarly, as pundits ranging from Mitch Albom to Michael Wilbon suggest in the recent SportsCentury documentary, there are those who suggest that the gulf between who Webber is and how he's seen can be traced to his own inner schism, that Webber is torn between his middle-class upbringing and a hip-hop inspired desire to be seen as "real" on the streets.

But that is way too simplistic a reading of a complex character. Yes, Webber does zealously guard his sophisticated take on the world outside basketball, but it's not for fear of being outed as a soft intellectual. Instead, it's precisely because he is a student of history and has learned to resist the media call to make of himself nothing more than a commodity. That explains his angry defense of his zone of privacy earlier this year when a for-profit press speculated about his relationship with Tyra Banks. It's also tied to his latest venture; unlike other athletes, Webber has refused to simply sell his name in exchange for money. He walked away from his first professional sneaker contract, with Nike, at least in part because he didn't feel comfortable with the high cost of the shoes. Now he has become an equity partner in the Dada apparel line, heading up the company's foray into the competitive sneaker market, empowering himself and other minorities in his employ.

The sports press has become accustomed to delving into the character of those who have risen from the underclass. But what to make of someone like Webber, who, unlike so many other prodigies, was raised to be aware of the world beyond the orbit of his own celebrity? His three-dimensionality gets lost in the media glare, and what emerges, instead, is caricature.

The real Chris Webber, in contrast to the "middle class" label often placed upon him, was raised relatively poor; his father, Mayce Webber, he says, never made more than $20,000 a year on the General Motors' assembly line, and his mother, Doris, was a teacher. Chris was the eldest of five kids. At his parents' insistence, Webber attended Detroit Country Day prep school, where, after school, he joined Mr. Carlson's Social Awareness Club. They wrote letters on behalf of Amnesty International. They mobilized to save the rainforest. They studied the Holocaust. Throughout college, while the national media was portraying Chris Webber as a trash-talking, droopy-shorts wearing Brotha From Another Planet, he was corresponding with Mr. Carlson about the state of the world. Upon inking his first professional contract, Webber began buying African-American artifacts.

"My first piece was slave tools," he told me. "This guy in Mississippi goes through old homes and a lot of people have slave tools or slave property they didn't even know about. So I started with that. Next came some slave shackles. After that, I came across a postcard Malcolm X sent from Mecca to Alex Haley, when they were working on Malcolm's autobiography. It says, 'I'm in Mecca right now and I think the CIA is watching me.' I have some of Frederick Douglas' writings. It's the type of thing where, after you buy one piece, I just started getting crazy with it, wanting more and more."

	'I think the toughness of this job is clouded by the illusion of glamour,' he says -- which explains his vociferous reaction when the press started buzzing about his relationship with Tyra Banks. It wasn't just that it was nobody's business; it was also that, from his perspective, focusing on his social life demeans the work he's so committed to.

Currently, the Webber collection is housed at Wayne State University. But Chris has big plans for it when he's done playing hoops. "One day I'd like to start a traveling museum for inner-city kids," he says. "To show kids, 'This is what Martin Luther King's signature looked like.' Or, 'This is what Malcolm wrote.' To show kids they have something to be proud of, besides athletes. Besides guys who drive nice cars. Instead of guys who make mad money by selling drugs. People who look like them that they can look up to."

Webber's social conscience began taking shape when he was 10 years old. His mother ran a day-care center out of the home. "If there was food in the house, the day-care kids ate our food," he recalls. "We'd have to wait and eat after the other kids." Once, Chris received a Yankees starter jacket for Christmas. But the kid they called Doo Doo Danny -- "he always smelled," Webber says -- didn't have a coat and was coming to day-care in short sleeves. "My mother gave him my coat," Webber recalls. "At first I couldn't understand why. But there were a whole lot of situations like that, where I went from being mad to seeing, 'Hold on -- you help others because you know you'll be OK.' My mother wasn't slighting me. She was helping other kids, knowing that I'd be OK. Even today, her main thing with me is, 'The more you've been given, the more that's demanded of you.' Growing up not the poorest but pretty poor, but then seeing how my mother helped people taught me a lot."

Mayce Webber grew up in Mississippi, the descendant of slaves. Growing up, Chris would hear his father's stories of life on the plantation. How he had to leave school in the sixth grade to pick cotton. How the plantation owner would come to the field and disrespect his father, Chris' grandfather, in front of his own kids. How, at 8 years old, Mayce would hear the panicked talk of another lynching downtown. "He never told me those stories out of hate," Webber recalls. "If it was me, my hate might have eaten me up inside. But my dad never hated. He used to tell us, too: There had to be some black people selling us in Africa, you know? So he taught me it's not always about skin color. It's about right and wrong."

From both parents, Webber not only soaked up a world view, he learned about work ethic. I've spent time with him in gyms, watching him work to become a good foul shooter. But that doesn't make headlines. "I think the toughness of this job is clouded by the illusion of glamour," he says -- which explains his vociferous reaction when the press started buzzing about his relationship with Tyra Banks. It wasn't just that it was nobody's business; it was also that, from his perspective, focusing on his social life demeans the work he's so committed to.

That commitment was on display on those days when I saw Chris Webber, alone in a gym, far from the cameras. This is the part they don't see, he'd tell himself, all the doubters, the talking heads, the know-it-alls who hold forth about your character. This is the part where you take what they say, all those asinine lines about how you lack maturity and clutchness, you take them and replay them in your head, over and over, and it keeps you out on the court, where the only sound bouncing off the rafters is the squeak of your sneakers on the hardwood, the pounding of your dribble, and finally that sweet swish. He'd get himself worked up, muttering "take that" to the naysayers banging around his own head upon each buried jumper.

Yes, that Chris Webber -- so long considered a "natural" talent -- hasn't been given to us. The one who burns to win an NBA ring, the one who has turned every slight, every joke about the botched timeout call, into fuel. "Stuff is constantly being portrayed about you and you say to yourself, 'Wait -- that's not me,' " he says, more resigned than angry. Maybe this is when it changes. Maybe, now that he's winning, Chris Webber will finally recognize himself after being churned through the media kaleidoscope. Here's hoping that this is his moment, and, on its other side, Chris Webber will no longer lament his public image.

Larry Platt's new book is New Jack Jocks: Rebels, Race and the American Athlete, (Temple University Press), a collection of profiles of sports' bad boys. He is the author of 1999's Keepin' It Real: A Turbulent Season at the Crossroads with the NBA and is currently working on a book about Allen Iverson.