"Whatever happened to..."
I was fucking around looking at some old NCAA tapes, and remembered Allen Iverson's backcourt mate Victor Page. I always wondered what happened to him. What I found out fucked my head up.
Colin Powell stay the fuck out of this post...
Without Bad Luck, He'd Have No Luck at All
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By JOHN BRANCH
Published: March 24, 2006
Victor Page lost his right eye when he was shot in the face in Washington in November 2003. He hopes to be fitted with a glass eye.
WASHINGTON, March 23 — Behind the black patch over Victor Page's right eye is not an eye at all. It is a hole, deep and lifeless, where an eye was before Page was shot in the face.
Victor Page, right, with Georgetown teammates Allen Iverson, left, and Joseph Toumnou in 1996.
Page hopes someday to have surgery to be fitted with a glass eye. It is another in a line of unfulfilled hopes. A decade after leaving college, he still dreams of playing in the N.B.A., too.
"Oh, every day," he said. "That's all I do. Because that's all, basically, what I know. I don't really know too much about nothing else. It's basketball. That will always be my dream, forever."
Page is 31. Ten years ago, he was a flashy freshman guard on a talented Georgetown team, the most valuable player of the Big East Conference tournament. The Hoyas, a power under the longtime coach John Thompson, advanced to the quarterfinals of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, finally losing to Massachusetts.
Four of Page's Georgetown teammates, including Allen Iverson, would move on to the N.B.A. Page expected to be there, too. He led the Big East in scoring as a sophomore in 1996-97. Then, like Iverson the year before, he left Georgetown for an early start to an N.B.A. career.
That is where potential collided with reality. Page was not drafted. He became a small-scale star for a Continental Basketball Association franchise in Sioux Falls, S.D. He kicked around Europe and toured with the Street Basketball Association, based in Washington.
Then, two days before Thanksgiving in 2003, sitting in a car on the same block where he grew up, Page was shot in the face, chest and leg.
Now, as Georgetown rekindles lost glory — a victory over Florida today in Minneapolis would put the Hoyas, coached by Thompson's son, John Thompson III, in the quarterfinals for the first time since 1996 — Page is trying to get his life in order.
He grew up on the broken streets of southeast Washington, always hoping to outrun trouble, never able to shake free of its shackles entirely. He converted his basketball talent to little more than a blur of highlight-reel memories and sordid news accounts.
"He has a lot more rough edges than others," Matt Rosner, basketball director for the Street Basketball Association, said.
Page always dazzled coaches and executives with ability and intensity, and sometimes frustrated them with his seesawing attitude and mounting baggage.
There was the arrest his senior year of high school — before a season in which he averaged 31 points a game and led McKinley Tech to a district championship — for cocaine possession and a number of gun-related charges. There were the 22.7 points a game he scored for Georgetown as a sophomore, the fourth-highest season average in university history, on a team that made the N.C.A.A. tournament.
There was the game on Dec. 25 during his rookie year playing for the Sioux Falls Skyforce, when he grabbed a broom from behind the basket and chased and jabbed an opponent with it. The replay still appears on blooper shows.
"The Christmas Day Massacre," the Skyforce owner Mike Heineman said with a chuckle Thursday. The team has a soft spot for Page, a fan favorite who became the franchise's career leading scorer — since passed — in his four-plus seasons there.
In 2004, the Skyforce retired Page's No. 20 jersey. Page was there for the ceremony, less than three months after he had been shot, wearing a patch over the spot where his eye used to be.
On Thursday night, he wore the patch, a Georgetown warm-up jacket and a long chain around his neck with a photograph of Tupac Shakur dangling from it. Quick with a toothy grin, he sat on a couch in a downtown hotel room, thoughtfully trying to make sense of his life.
At best, he will get his basketball career on track again, he said. At worst, others will learn from his story. He is mature enough to understand that he does not want his life to be viewed as a waste.
Page measures that life in episodes, not by the calendar. Time is broken into before and after: Things happened before or after his mother died, for example, or before or after he was shot the first time. Even with that, he has to delineate; Page was shot again last summer.
"I only got shot in the leg," he said. "It was an accident though. Wrong place, wrong time."
That is all he will say about it. He is uncomfortable discussing details of either shooting. The first time, in 2003, he was taken to a hospital in a helicopter. He knows the person who shot him, he said; there was never a conviction.
In 2004, Page was arrested for carrying a pistol without a license; he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation. In 2005, he was arrested for theft, but the case was dismissed; Page said it was a misunderstanding after he had borrowed a friend's car.A few weeks ago, Page's name resurfaced in news accounts when a 19-year-old cousin of his named Jerome Stroud was sentenced to 91 years in prison for his role in the killing of two teenagers in 2004. Court documents submitted by the prosecution said that Stroud's motive was to retaliate for the shooting of Page, The Washington Post reported.
"I don't want to do too much talking about that," Page said politely.
That shooting of Page occurred on Birney Place, on the block where Page grew up, near the three-bedroom townhouse that up to 11 relatives shared, living mostly on welfare checks.
"It was gunfire, drugs, women," Page said of the neighborhood. "You can get yourself into anything within a second. Anything."
When he was 10, his father died of pneumonia, Page said. His mother died of complications from H.I.V., he said, as he finished high school. He knows of two uncles who were shot and killed. His grandmother, the heart of the extended family, died when Page was playing basketball in Italy.
"I don't regret nothing I did in the past," Page said, turning a question about regrets into a reflection of his basketball pursuits. "My mother was deceased, my father was deceased, and we were struggling. We were living in a neighborhood where everything was a struggle. And I thought that I was the only one in the family that could get my family out of that situation."
But Page second-guesses the middle months of 1997. At a predraft camp in Chicago, he spent an evening at a hotel bar, in plain sight of N.B.A. team officials, then stayed out all night and missed workouts in the morning.
Instead of being drafted by the N.B.A., he went 11th in the C.B.A. draft. The N.B.A.'s Minnesota Timberwolves signed him in September, but he was cut a few weeks later — after, Page said, he was involved in a fight outside a hotel in St. Louis, injured his arm, then lied about it to team officials.
He admitted that there was more to his failed N.B.A. dream than that — a cumulative effect of being expelled in high school for fighting, struggling to qualify academically under N.C.A.A. guidelines, the arrest and the rumors. His reputation outweighed his talent.
"Most teams were skeptical," Page said. "Basically, what I want to let everybody know is, I'm not getting no younger. I'm older. It's not the same person as back then."
Page has kept a low profile since he was shot in 2003; tracking him for this article led to a knotted string of changed addresses and disconnected phone numbers. A cellphone number of his that worked last Thursday night was disconnected Friday. The account is shared, Page said, and a friend did not pay the bill.
But Page seems earnest in wanting to use his life to demonstrate the pitfalls of street life. He speaks with frankness about his transgressions, as if they were things that happened to him, not things that he did.
He has moved from southeast Washington to suburban Silver Spring, Md., where he lives with a girlfriend. He has begun speaking to schools and organizations, including the Urban League. A longtime friend named Derrick D. Price, a filmmaker and the owner of a northwest Washington store called Planet Chocolate City, is working on a documentary about Page.
Through it all, Page continued to play basketball, mostly at a gym at Georgetown. He still has the legs to dunk and a smooth, left-handed flick from 3-point range. He smiled when pondering the idea of a 30-something one-eyed N.B.A. rookie with a comeback story.
Maybe he will try the C.B.A. again, he said, even call the Skyforce for a return engagement. ("We haven't seen Victor play in four years," Heineman said.)
Regardless, Page said he was cheering Georgetown's progress through the tournament. He hopes the Hoyas find at least as much success at they did 10 years ago, when he was a youngster with nothing but the clear vision of possibility in front of him.
I was fucking around looking at some old NCAA tapes, and remembered Allen Iverson's backcourt mate Victor Page. I always wondered what happened to him. What I found out fucked my head up.
Colin Powell stay the fuck out of this post...
Without Bad Luck, He'd Have No Luck at All
Article Tools Sponsored By
By JOHN BRANCH
Published: March 24, 2006
Victor Page lost his right eye when he was shot in the face in Washington in November 2003. He hopes to be fitted with a glass eye.
WASHINGTON, March 23 — Behind the black patch over Victor Page's right eye is not an eye at all. It is a hole, deep and lifeless, where an eye was before Page was shot in the face.
Victor Page, right, with Georgetown teammates Allen Iverson, left, and Joseph Toumnou in 1996.
Page hopes someday to have surgery to be fitted with a glass eye. It is another in a line of unfulfilled hopes. A decade after leaving college, he still dreams of playing in the N.B.A., too.
"Oh, every day," he said. "That's all I do. Because that's all, basically, what I know. I don't really know too much about nothing else. It's basketball. That will always be my dream, forever."
Page is 31. Ten years ago, he was a flashy freshman guard on a talented Georgetown team, the most valuable player of the Big East Conference tournament. The Hoyas, a power under the longtime coach John Thompson, advanced to the quarterfinals of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, finally losing to Massachusetts.
Four of Page's Georgetown teammates, including Allen Iverson, would move on to the N.B.A. Page expected to be there, too. He led the Big East in scoring as a sophomore in 1996-97. Then, like Iverson the year before, he left Georgetown for an early start to an N.B.A. career.
That is where potential collided with reality. Page was not drafted. He became a small-scale star for a Continental Basketball Association franchise in Sioux Falls, S.D. He kicked around Europe and toured with the Street Basketball Association, based in Washington.
Then, two days before Thanksgiving in 2003, sitting in a car on the same block where he grew up, Page was shot in the face, chest and leg.
Now, as Georgetown rekindles lost glory — a victory over Florida today in Minneapolis would put the Hoyas, coached by Thompson's son, John Thompson III, in the quarterfinals for the first time since 1996 — Page is trying to get his life in order.
He grew up on the broken streets of southeast Washington, always hoping to outrun trouble, never able to shake free of its shackles entirely. He converted his basketball talent to little more than a blur of highlight-reel memories and sordid news accounts.
"He has a lot more rough edges than others," Matt Rosner, basketball director for the Street Basketball Association, said.
Page always dazzled coaches and executives with ability and intensity, and sometimes frustrated them with his seesawing attitude and mounting baggage.
There was the arrest his senior year of high school — before a season in which he averaged 31 points a game and led McKinley Tech to a district championship — for cocaine possession and a number of gun-related charges. There were the 22.7 points a game he scored for Georgetown as a sophomore, the fourth-highest season average in university history, on a team that made the N.C.A.A. tournament.
There was the game on Dec. 25 during his rookie year playing for the Sioux Falls Skyforce, when he grabbed a broom from behind the basket and chased and jabbed an opponent with it. The replay still appears on blooper shows.
"The Christmas Day Massacre," the Skyforce owner Mike Heineman said with a chuckle Thursday. The team has a soft spot for Page, a fan favorite who became the franchise's career leading scorer — since passed — in his four-plus seasons there.
In 2004, the Skyforce retired Page's No. 20 jersey. Page was there for the ceremony, less than three months after he had been shot, wearing a patch over the spot where his eye used to be.
On Thursday night, he wore the patch, a Georgetown warm-up jacket and a long chain around his neck with a photograph of Tupac Shakur dangling from it. Quick with a toothy grin, he sat on a couch in a downtown hotel room, thoughtfully trying to make sense of his life.
At best, he will get his basketball career on track again, he said. At worst, others will learn from his story. He is mature enough to understand that he does not want his life to be viewed as a waste.
Page measures that life in episodes, not by the calendar. Time is broken into before and after: Things happened before or after his mother died, for example, or before or after he was shot the first time. Even with that, he has to delineate; Page was shot again last summer.
"I only got shot in the leg," he said. "It was an accident though. Wrong place, wrong time."
That is all he will say about it. He is uncomfortable discussing details of either shooting. The first time, in 2003, he was taken to a hospital in a helicopter. He knows the person who shot him, he said; there was never a conviction.
In 2004, Page was arrested for carrying a pistol without a license; he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation. In 2005, he was arrested for theft, but the case was dismissed; Page said it was a misunderstanding after he had borrowed a friend's car.A few weeks ago, Page's name resurfaced in news accounts when a 19-year-old cousin of his named Jerome Stroud was sentenced to 91 years in prison for his role in the killing of two teenagers in 2004. Court documents submitted by the prosecution said that Stroud's motive was to retaliate for the shooting of Page, The Washington Post reported.
"I don't want to do too much talking about that," Page said politely.
That shooting of Page occurred on Birney Place, on the block where Page grew up, near the three-bedroom townhouse that up to 11 relatives shared, living mostly on welfare checks.
"It was gunfire, drugs, women," Page said of the neighborhood. "You can get yourself into anything within a second. Anything."
When he was 10, his father died of pneumonia, Page said. His mother died of complications from H.I.V., he said, as he finished high school. He knows of two uncles who were shot and killed. His grandmother, the heart of the extended family, died when Page was playing basketball in Italy.
"I don't regret nothing I did in the past," Page said, turning a question about regrets into a reflection of his basketball pursuits. "My mother was deceased, my father was deceased, and we were struggling. We were living in a neighborhood where everything was a struggle. And I thought that I was the only one in the family that could get my family out of that situation."
But Page second-guesses the middle months of 1997. At a predraft camp in Chicago, he spent an evening at a hotel bar, in plain sight of N.B.A. team officials, then stayed out all night and missed workouts in the morning.
Instead of being drafted by the N.B.A., he went 11th in the C.B.A. draft. The N.B.A.'s Minnesota Timberwolves signed him in September, but he was cut a few weeks later — after, Page said, he was involved in a fight outside a hotel in St. Louis, injured his arm, then lied about it to team officials.
He admitted that there was more to his failed N.B.A. dream than that — a cumulative effect of being expelled in high school for fighting, struggling to qualify academically under N.C.A.A. guidelines, the arrest and the rumors. His reputation outweighed his talent.
"Most teams were skeptical," Page said. "Basically, what I want to let everybody know is, I'm not getting no younger. I'm older. It's not the same person as back then."
Page has kept a low profile since he was shot in 2003; tracking him for this article led to a knotted string of changed addresses and disconnected phone numbers. A cellphone number of his that worked last Thursday night was disconnected Friday. The account is shared, Page said, and a friend did not pay the bill.
But Page seems earnest in wanting to use his life to demonstrate the pitfalls of street life. He speaks with frankness about his transgressions, as if they were things that happened to him, not things that he did.
He has moved from southeast Washington to suburban Silver Spring, Md., where he lives with a girlfriend. He has begun speaking to schools and organizations, including the Urban League. A longtime friend named Derrick D. Price, a filmmaker and the owner of a northwest Washington store called Planet Chocolate City, is working on a documentary about Page.
Through it all, Page continued to play basketball, mostly at a gym at Georgetown. He still has the legs to dunk and a smooth, left-handed flick from 3-point range. He smiled when pondering the idea of a 30-something one-eyed N.B.A. rookie with a comeback story.
Maybe he will try the C.B.A. again, he said, even call the Skyforce for a return engagement. ("We haven't seen Victor play in four years," Heineman said.)
Regardless, Page said he was cheering Georgetown's progress through the tournament. He hopes the Hoyas find at least as much success at they did 10 years ago, when he was a youngster with nothing but the clear vision of possibility in front of him.
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See, thats whats I dont understand about athletes. These cats go to school for free. Get that degree. I know he had a dream,but shit happens. You never can predict the future or what it will bring. Glad to see he's still in good health. His misfotune would of been if he lost his vision in them both or his life. I wish him well.
