Warming to the Task

If there is indeed a fire burning within Kevin Garnett, as he often says, then his eyes are the pilot lights. They stand ready to ignite his Minnesota Timberwolf teammates and inspire them to run harder, ready to lift their fans out of the seats and inspire them to cheer louder.

The eyes stand out even among that elongated face that fascinates photographers. It is a face so taut that when he smiles it looks as if the corners of his mouth are being pulled back by ropes.

Six years ago, during Garnett’s third season in the NBA, William Nelson answered a knock on his door and saw that face outside his home. Nelson was Garnett’s coach at Farragut Academy in Chicago, and Garnett came to visit him while he was in town to play the Bulls.

As he joked with Garnett and his Minnesota teammate Malik Sealy, Nelson noticed a change in his former pupil.

“The fire,” Nelson said. “I just saw him grow up from a kid to that fire.

“It was awesome. He looked real intense. There was something different about it ...

“Somebody had unleashed the beast.”

Garnett had passed a milestone on the way from teenage curiosity to outright manly force. Until then he had been something of a novelty, the first player in 20 years to go from high school straight to the pros. After that third season he would not average less than 20 points or 10 rebounds a game again.

He has been an All-Star for seven consecutive seasons, a member of the NBA’s all-defensive first team five straight times. Along the way he signed the richest contract in NBA history.

Now it has all come together. In his ninth season, Garnett made The Leap, symbolized not by any particular flight to the hoop but by his short hop onto the scorers’ table to exhort the Target Center crowd after the Timberwolves defeated the Sacramento Kings in Game 7 to advance to the Western Conference finals. Although Garnett scored more points and grabbed more rebounds than anyone else in the NBA -- only the fifth player to accomplish the feat and the first since Bob McAdoo in 1974-75 -- and was an overwhelming choice as the league’s most valuable player, that was not the definition of success this season.

To make it worthwhile, for the Timberwolves to get a semblance of a return on the $126-million investment they made in Garnett in the form of a six-year contract that ran through this season, they had to move beyond the first round of the playoffs.

Seven times they had qualified for the playoffs, but all seven times they failed to advance to the second round. Last year, as the fourth-seeded team, marked the first time they had home-court advantage. They had the misfortune to draw the Lakers, underachievers throughout the regular season, yet playoff-prepared by virtue of their three consecutive championships.

This season the Timberwolves added the playoff-savvy Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell. They produced the best record in the Western Conference, and the top playoff seeding that came with it. Then they put away the Denver Nuggets in the first round. The conference semifinals at last. And when it was time to move even further ahead, with all eyes on him in Game 7 against Sacramento, Garnett produced a true MVP performance: 32 points, 21 rebounds and five blocked shots, all on his 28th birthday.

“It was the most dynamic all-around performance I’ve seen in his nine years,” Coach Flip Saunders said.

“Your best players and the coach are the ones that take most of the heat when it comes down to it. I think there’s no question that he understood.

“He said down the stretch, ‘Give me the ball. Play off me.’ You could say he felt extremely comfortable and confident.”

Now they’re in the conference finals, facing the Lakers again. They trail, two games to one, in the best-of-seven series, with Game 4 tonight at Staples Center.

It’s not even close to the most daunting obstacle the franchise has endured.

The onetime nucleus of Garnett, Stephon Marbury and Tom Gugliotta that took the Timberwolves to their first playoff appearance in 1997 splintered when Gugliotta left as a free agent to get away from Marbury and Marbury forced a trade to get back to the New York area. Sealy was killed by a drunk driver while on his way home from Garnett’s birthday party in May 2000. Terrell Brandon, the former All-Star point guard brought in to replace Marbury, was injured during the 2001-02 season and never came back.

After that, the league snatched draft picks from the Timberwolves for violating salary-cap rules by signing an under-the-table deal with forward Joe Smith. Simply making the playoffs for seven consecutive years amid all that turmoil was an accomplishment in its own right.

“There was one constant,” Nelson said. “That was Kevin. There’s no way some team can go through all that and continue to make the playoffs.”

Nelson had known for more than a decade that Garnett had the leadership qualities to get it done.

He first saw him in the summer before Garnett’s junior year, at a Nike camp in Indianapolis. When Garnett, who was about as thick as a sheet of paper, was assigned to his team, Nelson thought, “You guys trying to set me up? How you going to give me a skinny guy when all the other guys have the big ol’ big men?”

Thanks to the skinny guy, Nelson’s team of “so-so” players wound up winning the tournament.

“We kicked all kinds of butt,” Nelson said. “He was by far the toughest, most aggressive player in the camp.

“When he walks in the gym, there’s a certain amount of leadership ability that he has that gets people to follow him.”

He first displayed those skills at his hometown high school in Mauldin, S.C. That’s where he was raised, primarily by his mother, Shirley Irby Garnett. He would see his father, O’Lewis McCullough, and McCullough’s parents occasionally in the summer. But after Garnett’s junior year, McCullough mostly followed Garnett’s career from afar.

Shirley Garnett (her maiden name) married Ernest Irby when Kevin was 7, and divorced him 13 years later.

Kevin played basketball until he was dragged off the court, and when he sprouted past his friends on his way to nearly 7 feet tall, he became the star for the Mauldin Mavericks.

But in May of his junior year a white student suffered a broken ankle in a fight, and Garnett was one of five black students charged with assault in a case filled with racial overtones. Garnett completed a pretrial intervention program for first-time offenders, and the charges were dropped.

Garnett never discusses the incident, not even with his closest friends. Because of all the publicity the case received in South Carolina, his mother decided it would be better for him to start clean somewhere else.

“She got him out,” Nelson said. “It was his decision where he wanted to go.”

Garnett wound up in Chicago, playing for Nelson at Farragut Academy, living with his mother and his younger sister in an apartment one floor above Nelson’s. In his senior year he was the No. 1 prep prospect in the country and made unofficial recruiting visits to Michigan and South Carolina. But he couldn’t meet the minimum score to satisfy the NCAA’s initial eligibility requirements.

Nelson and Garnett decided Garnett would take his talent straight to the pros. They consulted with NBA executives, even talked to Bill Willoughby, who went from high school to the NBA in 1975.

“I knew his skill level,” Nelson said of Garnett. “I think it was confirmed that he could be the one.”

No one had done it since Willoughby and Darryl Dawkins in the ’75 draft.

Garnett heard the criticism, that he and his coach were nuts, that their “Hoop Dreams” mentality would lead to a “Hoop Nightmare.”

“I let that pile up and just sort of torched it with a burning fire,” Garnett said.

There are those flames again.

“I have a personal fire within myself,” Garnett said. “I’m motivated off what people have done in the league and the past tense; being considered part of the future was a burning desire within me.”

And his game quickly cooled the criticism.

Players on other teams regularly list Garnett among their favorites in the league -- as a person and player.

“He’s a big-time team player,” two-time MVP Tim Duncan said. “He pushes his squad. He’s incredibly athletic, and I think he’s really found his game. He’s really putting it all together.”

Garnett’s jump shot, released from high above his head, is virtually unblockable. He uses his long arms to deposit the ball in the hoop or throw down ego-hurting dunks. On defense, he’s so protective of the basket that he goaltends shots he can get to after the referee’s whistle blows a play dead. (Just something he started doing in high school, as if offended by the opponent’s attempt to get a free basket. “It’s like, what are you doing?” Garnett said.) When called upon, as with Cassell’s back injury that limits his mobility and availability, Garnett transforms into the world’s tallest point guard and brings the ball upcourt.

Sprewell, his new teammate, said: “My opinion of him, it’s even higher now that I’ve had an opportunity to play with him, just because you see a guy on a daily basis, you see the commitment he has to winning, the preparation, what he’s been able to do on the court. It just makes you respect him even more.”

Said Cassell: “If you look in the dictionary, you need a perfect teammate, Kevin Garnett would be that. He cares about feelings and everything. He respects me like he respects the last guy on the team. No one gets treated differently.”

Cassell called Garnett the best player in the league, “By far. What position can’t he play? What position can’t he guard?”

Robert Horry, who has played with Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon and Duncan, said Olajuwon was the best of the three. Cassell, a teammate of Horry’s and Olajuwon’s in Houston, said, “It’s Kevin-Dream, Dream-Kevin. You can toss it up in the air some nights. Kevin is that great.

“Hakeem Olajuwon, of course, was a bad boy.”

Hakeem, Shaq, Duncan ... Garnett’s name belongs among the greats of his profession. And now he has a chance to eclipse the biggest name in Minnesota.

Yes, the guy who just went back to using his name again.

“He’ll probably in a way surpass the Prince level,” said Jimmy Jam Harris, a Minneapolis native who has co-produced hit records for Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men with partner Terry Lewis. “Because Prince, even at his biggest level, was always sort of un-embraceable and untouchable. A little bit aloof. Kevin is none of that. Kevin is out there. He’s very touchable.”

Garnett has established mentoring programs to connect minority students with businessmen and holds holiday parties for disadvantaged youths.

When he arrived in Minneapolis as a 19-year-old draft pick in 1995, he sought the advice of Harris, one of the most prominent African Americans in the city. He finally got his chance to speak with him when they crossed paths in a supermarket parking lot shortly before Thanksgiving. They wound up talking for an hour.

Garnett wasn’t the first to consult Harris. Garnett just came at him differently.

“Another player who was up there asked me how to get paid,” Harris said. “This is your town, Jimmy. How do you get paid up in Minnesota?

“Kevin asked me: ‘What do people expect from me? What do I need to do in the community? What expectations do people have of me?’ Those kinds of questions.

“That told me that he was interested in being a quality human being. The basketball was going to be the basketball for him. There was nothing I was going to tell him there. He was going to be a quality human being, and that’s what he was interested in.”

But Garnett does keep his guard up, be it the chain-link fence around his estate in the Minneapolis suburb of Orono, or his reluctance to let anyone into his personal circle.

“KG’s one, it takes time for anybody to build trust with him,” Saunders said. “That’s just the way he is. The main thing is, if you’re honest with him, you let him know where you stand as far as positive and negative, I think he shows that you can care about him. What he does, before he’s going to open up himself and really care about you, he wants to know there’s something there.”

He doesn’t make himself readily available to the media anymore. He rarely speaks after practices or morning shoot-arounds, and after home games he disappears into the trainer’s room for up to an hour before coming out to talk to reporters.

“I’m very wary of people,” he said to a dozen or so reporters who surrounded him after practice last week. “I don’t even know half you guys. I’m wary right now.”

One stranger caught his eye. When Harris’ wife, Lisa, brought her sister Brandi Padilla to see the Timberwolves play the New York Knicks in late 1996, Garnett caught a glimpse of Padilla and was so distracted by her beauty that he threw a pass out of bounds.

Garnett called Terry Lewis to find out who she was, learned she was staying at the Harris house, then kept calling until he could meet her. They became engaged this January.

So he’s about to take another step forward in his life, even though his giant strides have always seemed to keep him ahead of everyone else’s pace. He was an All-Star two years out of high school.

He was the upstart kid who was keenly aware of the NBA’s legacy, watching tapes of classic games as a youngster and making a point to introduce himself to the members of the NBA’s 50 greatest players who gathered at the 1997 All-Star game.

The guy who didn’t go to college also is among the most creative speakers in the league when he decides to speak. He once explained the source of his values with, “If I was a Caesar salad, the croutons would be my friends, the lettuce would be my family and the dressing itself would be my mom.”

His description of Saunders’ effect on the Minnesota locker room: “You know how, before the teacher gets in the classroom, somebody’s picking a fight, paper airplanes going here, somebody’s in the bathroom, a girl and a guy in the coat closet kissing, lots of messing around? Then the teacher comes in, everybody settles in, they’re focused. Teacher starts the lesson and the day goes on. We come in, we’re cracking jokes, we’re wrestling, talking trash. Flip comes in, coaches come in, settle us down, ready to play, focused in, and we go out and get a ‘W.’ ”

He caught criticism last week for using weapon and war terminology to describe his mental preparations for Game 7 against the Kings. The next day he apologized, acknowledging the war analogy was inappropriate while soldiers are in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He understands basketball’s place in the world and is more than capable of keeping it in perspective. When asked this season about the pressure of big games he said, “Pressure is 10 kids, two biscuits, no job.”

Garnett won’t have to worry about sharing biscuits any time soon.

He was paid $28 million to play basketball this season. And even though he took less money in his new deal to give the Timberwolves salary-cap flexibility, and his salary will be $16 million as opposed to a potential $31.5 million next year, he’ll still pull in $100 million over the next five years.

You could say it’s money to burn.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Stepping Forward

Forwards who have won regular-season MVP award and how each did statistically that season:

*--* MVP Season Player Team G FG% Reb Ast Pts 2003-04 Kevin Garnett Minnesota 82 499 13.9 5.0 24.2 2002-03 Tim Duncan San Antonio 81 513 12.9 3.9 23.3 2001-02 Tim Duncan San Antonio 82 508 12.7 3.7 25.5 1999* Karl Malone Utah 49 493 9.4 4.1 23.8 1996-97 Karl Malone Utah 82 550 9.9 4.5 27.4 1992-93 Charles Barkley Phoenix 76 520 12.2 5.1 25.6 1985-86 Larry Bird Boston 82 496 9.8 6.8 25.8 1984-85 Larry Bird Boston 80 522 10.5 6.6 28.7 1983-84 Larry Bird Boston 79 492 10.1 6.6 24.2 1980-81 Julius Erving Philadelphia 82 521 8.0 4.4 24.6 1958-59 Bob Pettit St. Louis 72 438 16.4 3.1 29.2 1955-56 Bob Pettit St. Louis 72 429 16.2 2.6 25.7

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* season shortened because of lockout