More questionable developmental thinking in sportswriting

In this week's edition of "the deformed lovechild of free darko and fire joe morgan," let's look at one Miami sportswriter's concerns about all-but-certain top-two NBA draft pick Michael Beasley (I put the stuff in bold):

"I'm still a kid," [Beasley] says. "I'm learning day by day."
...From a personal standpoint, that's comforting, considering the pandemonium he has left in his wake.
No, this is not Caron Butler selling drugs and stashing
guns, only to learn ultimate lessons in solitary confinement.
This, instead, is the kid who sees how far he can push,
without ever pushing too far, the kid who places a dead rat in a teacher's
drawer, who signs his name in as many places as possible in prep school, who wore pajamas to his high school cafeteria, who once put glue on his cousin's underwear, who was suspended from kindergarten — yes, kindergarten — for cutting off a girl's pigtail.
The sum total: Banishment from more high schools than there are grades in
high school. In all, he attended seven schools in five states, a journey that
concluded at Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, Mass.
Since high school? Nothing more than a speeding violation.
Of course, "since high school" is just one year ago

I'm going to disregard the "banishment from.. high schools" part, after saying: This refers to a Washington Post article from last year that many people who know Beasley, including many quoted and referenced in the article, misrepresents and takes out of context Beasley's short tenure at these schools. (Basically, what all that boiled down to was the Beasley left schools for a variety of somewhat reasonable basketball reasons; "somewhat reasonable" if we consider the common practice of private high schools recruiting 14 year olds, and adults encouraging said kids to transfer schools for the purpose of increasing their exposure to potential endorsers, etc. Ultimately, Beasley left every school with the endorsement and encouragement of supportive adults in his life, who, while certainly having different priorities than I do, sound like they did care about the kid).

Anyway, let me get this straight. You want your reader be concerned that Beasley has certain, shall we say, temperamental or personality traits that will make his legacy more like that of Derrick Coleman or Vin Baker than Malone/Barkley/McHale/whomever. This is a fair concern, I guess, though I think it has more to do with the fact that, in this draft narrative, the other sure-fire top two 19 year old has been fairly arbitrarily granted the status of "mature, wise, non-uppity player," than anything driven by a realistic assessment of these two very young people.

So yeah, assuming this is a fair concern, assuming that Rose's perceived maturity is more a product of his own psychology than that of a tired old sports narrative that gets trotted out whenever we have to compare two hard-to-compare athletes, let's consider the evidence employed here. The writer uses the redemption of Caron Butler, a Racine, Wisconsin native famously "arrested 15 times before he turned 15." (Oooh! Was he the 7th son of a 7th son? Does he like Iron Maiden as much as I do?) Now the writer seems to assume that it was solitary confinement that redeemed Mr. Butler. While I'd really, really doubt that, let's say that something drastic was required to turn Butler away from his life of "selling drugs and stashing guns." The writer also seems to be assuming that Beasley has lacked this character-developing experience to redeem him from his past sins. I don't think that maturity is dependent on trauma, but I'll buy the fact that many times young athletes who've never heard "no" in their life might need a little extra reality check to be the kind of person we might hope.

The premise that I can't buy, not even for a second, is that any of this stuff Beasley did is all that worrisome. Cutting off a girls' pigtail? Cruel if a teenager does it, creepy if an adult does it. If a kindergartner does it? DUDE. THE KID WAS 5. He had NO IDEA what he was doing. (And what is with "-- yes, kindergarten--?" We're not talking about drug dealing or spousal abuse in kindergarten, which would be truly shocking. But anyway.) Playing a scary prank on a teacher? "Graffito tagging," as Marge Simpson worried about? Wearing pajamas in a high school cafeteria? Would this be the high school he attended that consisted of a basketball team and 12 ESL students that exists as an AAU vehicle, or one of his actual high schools? Either way, WHO CARES? Am I so off-base in thinking that this is fairly average behavior for a bored high school boy?

Even if I am off-base, and I'll admit the dead rat is a little creepy, I don't think that anyone sees these as more worrisome than bringing a gun to school, selling crack, and fathering a child at 14. These were things that Caron Butler did as a kid in Racine, and, by all accounts, he's become not only one of the best players in the Eastern Conference, but a really nice guy. Beasley was a kid who never had structure in his high school life, didn't have age-normative social expectations to make use of, and who responded to being treated like a star/investment in a way that many people would-- pushing limits in a relatively nonmalicious way. Ultimately, Beasley's mischevous response to an unstructured, chaotic environment in his teenage years is useless for predicting future behavior.