[Scottoant93Participant]

The memory begins with a beautiful day in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a summer day, presumably, but the specific date is now lost on Sundiata Gaines.

He’s 4 years old, decades from becoming a point guard on the Nets. He’s standing in front of a photocopy store, looking in the window while waiting for his brother to return from the supermarket. The family needs groceries, or maybe something else. Gaines can’t remember. A man with a suitcase walks up to the store. He’s an off duty police officer, an NYPD detective, but that’s not understood until later.

The suitcase drops.

"I knew something was wrong. I knew I was bleeding," Gaines says. "I didn’t want to touch it, but my mother was over there panicking. It kind of felt like a quick sting. I was kind of alert at the moment. I was calm. And then my mother started panicking, then I’m in a state of panic – what’s going on, what’s going on."

Gaines was shot in the neck. The bullet went through the right side and out the back under his hairline. One inch in another direction and it would have ripped through his jugular vein, killing the toddler. Somehow the impact between the sidewalk and the suitcase triggered the gun inside, and apparently Gaines was standing in the wrong place.

An ambulance arrived and the medics cut off his clothes.

"I remember details like it was yesterday," he says.

To the average person, a vivid preschool memory might be as innocuous as a climb up the monkey bars, or as special as the first time setting eyes on a sibling.

For Gaines, it’s getting accidentally shot by a police officer blocks away from what would become the Barclays Center. It’s sitting in a hospital for two weeks, sometimes alone. It’s carrying around shock and silence for years, allowing it to "kind of become me as a person." Then it’s transforming the experience into inspiration.

"It reminds me, you got a second chance at life, so you’re here for a reason," he says.

That reason, for now, is to bide his time playing basketball in the Republic of Georgia while waiting for this NBA lockout to end.  Gaines isn’t the type to complain or drown in a woe-is-me complex. But the timing of this lockout couldn’t have been worse for the 25-year-old from Jamaica, Queens. 

He put in his work at Archbishop Molloy High School, flying under the radar of a much more heralded NYC hoopster, Sebastian Telfair, even though their head-to-head battles favored Gaines. He was undrafted out the University of Georgia, so he trudged through a season in Italy, a stint in the D-League and multiple 10-day contracts in the NBA. Gaines finally got his guaranteed contract from Nets GM Billy King in March and kaboom: a frustrating, formidable work stoppage.

 

At least there’s hope. Real hope. The sides are meeting and there’s progress, perhaps with an outcome of games by Christmas. The last thing Gaines wants is a lost season. Such a drastic measure would likely mean Gaines falls back into the free agency pool, joining two rookie classes and two free-agent classes in a battle royal for contracts – "the biggest whirlwind ever," as Gaines describes it.

"It’s real tough. Imagine now, I have a contract now and if we don’t have a season, I’m back to being a free agent again," Gaines says in a phone interview last week. "It’s like being back to square one.

"To me, it just seems like the sides are going back and forth. Lot of millionaires and billionaires arguing over money and at the same time losing out on money which could potentially be a loss to everybody – over some millions of dollars which, they could have made that during the season. It’s tough, I’m pretty sure it’s tough for the fans. But hopefully, something gets settled. I think it will."

For Gaines, it seems, there’s always an upshot to misfortune. It’s a lesson he learned at 4 years old. "You have to make the best out of the situation and never feel sorry for yourself," he says.

One day he was shot accidentally. Not too long after, his father, Ronnie, introduced him to basketball. When 10-day contracts with the Timberwolves and the Raptors went nowhere last season, Gaines’ NBA career was resuscitated because of a passport.

There’s a unique story to Gaines’ arrival in a Nets uniform: Deron Williams and Jordan Farmar were banged up as March began. The Nets needed an able-bodied point guard for a two-game trip to London. GM Billy King reached out to Orien Greene – a previous 10-day invitee — but he was out of town.

So King called Gaines, who was home in Queens with a valid passport and ready to jump on a plane. The Nets won five straight after his arrival, including an impressive victory over the Celtics.

After another 10-day contract, the Nets gave him a two-year deal.

Two days later, he fractured his hip on a freak play.

"I remember (King) told me that, ‘We had intentions of keeping you for a while but if you’d have fractured your hip before, we probably would have had to part ways with you.’"

Gaines says it’s going well in Georgia, where his team, B.C. Armia, leads the league and – depending on if the NBA lockout is over — could face Williams’ squad, Besiktas, on Nov. 15.

 

Gaines also has a chauffeur and three American teammates to help ease the language barrier. Georgian is a difficult language, Gaines admits, and his time at the University of Georgia offers no help. But travel is minimal (eight of the 11 teams play in the same arena), and he has a new apartment to himself.

It’s a lot better than the hospital bed. In part because of the moments he was alone in St. Vincent — between visits from his mother and father — Gaines says he developed despondency.

"I was really lonely in there. That bothered me a lot," he says. "I think by me getting shot, it kind of over the next couple years of my life, where I was kind of in a stage of reserved and quiet and over the course of that happening over five, six years, it kind of became me as a person. It put me in a state of shock."

That eventually changed. Gaines wasn’t the most talkative player in the Nets locker room, but the only trace of the shooting are the two scars — a two-inch mark on the side of his neck and a smaller circular one where the bullet exited in the back.

Gaines says he received a settlement when he was 18, but "no amount of money is worth a life." The cop who owned the gun – and who owned the copy story – died a few years after the incident, Gaines says.

And 21 years later, Gaines can recall it without any emotion or hesitation.

"I remember like it was yesterday, but it doesn’t traumatize me in any way," he says. "It’s just a day in one of my old memories."

It’s a memory he hopes will be joined soon by the lockout.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/jersey-nets-guard-sundiata-gaines-reflects-gunshot-wound-cope-nba-lockout-article-1.975980#ixzz1dRQ8t93w

 

 

 

[butidonthavemoney]

Yada "Bloody" Gaines is, and always has been, a beast.

[aamir543Participant]

^ Your just happy he won you guys that game against Cleveland.

But yeah, what an experience, and I guess he was the one firing the bullets when he made that fadeaway three for the win over Lebron, lol.

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