Kwame is now two public things. He is Kwame Brown, symbol of self-imposed failure, the punch line to every draft-day joke. But he is also Kwame Brown, employed professional basketball player, who plays with the knowledge that nothing he does on the court can really change his legacy. He could play another five years in the league, improve every season, win a championship, sign a multiyear contract, and retire at the age of 35 with a completely adequate, acceptable second career in the books, but his name will always be synonymous with youth, petulance, and waste.
It's not entirely uncommon for a player to exist mostly as a symbol while still hacking out the last years of his playing career. Michael Jordan was in that position when he drafted Kwame. In his year in Baltimore, Sammy Sosa represented both the so-called revitalization of baseball and its worst scandal. But these sorts of conflations usually come with old age and a firm divorce from the past. (Part of the reason why Barry Bonds never really reached this point was because he never left San Francisco.) It's rare that an athlete will play 10 years in a sport and already have cemented his legacy by the time he turned 20 years old. Ryan Leaf, football player, went away quickly. Unless things take a drastic turn for the better, it looks like Greg Oden, basketball player, will slip from the public's consciousness in a couple of years.
By contrast, this will be the ninth straight season in which Kwame Brown, draft bust and pariah to every D.C. hoops fan, will suit up and play basketball in front of thousands of people who only know him as a disappointment.
