Cru Thick

Rip Hamilton has it all, and all he wants to do is share it with his hometown boys

Richard Hamilton plops his angular frame into a chair in front of a mirrored barbershop wall on the second floor of his 5,000-square-foot crib in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham. His personal barber, James Wilson, gets down to trimming the stragglers on his forehead and temples. In walks Hamilton's first cousin, Jontue Long, in a size 52 jersey embroidered with "Rip City" on the front and "Coatesville" on the back. Rip calls the jersey Jontue's tux. Henry Cooper, a friend of 12 years and Rip's personal assistant, is wearing the same jersey. Hey, at least the color scheme is different. (Rip should talk; he has over 100 of the jerseys in his closet, done in all the NBA team colors.)

Before long, nearly a dozen friends, almost all from Hamilton's beloved hometown of Coatesville, Pa., have turned the room into a comedy lounge. They rib each other the way they once did back at Ron's Barber Shop. The easygoing Cooper, who, according to Coatesville legend, once drove a moped through Ron's front window, is a quick target. Talk is of girls and old boys, the league and their next jaunt to Miami.

Tonight is Rip's 27th birthday, and his whole crew is in town for the occasion. Haircut completed, Hamilton reties his ever-present do-rag and heads downstairs. On the white-marble floor in the two-story foyer, he towers over everyone. "How many we got?" he asks. "Fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen? Who are the designated drivers? How many cars do we need? Better bring 'em all."

"Tonight's gonna be a classic!" Long says.

"Yes, siiiiir," says Rip, shouting a catchphrase he's used since high school. His boys call it a Coatesville thing. It usually signals that all is well with Rip, C-Ville or the Pistons.

And all has been quite well lately, thank you. Entering his seventh season, the 6'7" shooting guard is living a life naysayers back home told him he shouldn't dare dream about. To rub it in the skeptics' faces, Hamilton makes sure the boys he grew up with get to live it right along with him. "Being in the league allows me to meet all kinds of people and see some incredible places," he says. "I want my friends to experience that too."

"THERE USED to be a highway sign that let you know when you got to Coatesville, but they took it down," Hamilton says. "Then I looked on a map and we weren't on there. Where's the respect?"

Hamilton has made it his life's work to show the world what Coatesville can produce. The blue-collar community, framed by farmland and rolling hills, is 40 minutes west of Philly. It is a small town (pop. 11,000), but not without big-city problems. "We have everything Philly has," says Long. He means high unemployment and mean streets.

But living in Coatesville got Hamilton where he is today. Folks trudging back and forth to the steel mill in the dead of winter showed him there was no shame in working for a living. Coaches taught him that staying after practice was time well spent. Friends' parents always kept their couches and kitchens open. It takes a village, right? In Rip's mind, the loyalty he shows his hometown repays that debt. "It's where my heart beats," he says.

So even though Hamilton no longer lives there, he always keeps C-Ville close. At least one member of the crew is always crashing at his house, and when the Pistons are on the road, the "CV" embroidered on the back of his game sneakers reminds him of where it all began. There are few moments in Rip's life his homeys don't share with him. With the exception of the 15-minute drive to and from practice, Hamilton rarely goes anywhere by himself. Not to the grocery store. Not to the West Indies. "If they weren't around, I wouldn't feel right," Rip says. "Once I drove to a game by myself, and the parking attendant looked at me like something was wrong."

The group have known each other since they could walk. But they didn't really grow tight until they got to high school. Rip, Long, Michael "Spud" Hamilton (another cousin), Milton Baxter and Carl Hines all were on the basketball team. Cooper was the manager. They hung out at the barbershop when they weren't balling and studied together when they weren't chasing girls. Acing advancedplacement classes was as important as making the basketball team.

Yes, at first glance they look like most of the crews that have come before them. But don't judge the homey by the throwback. "We're not his entourage or posse," says longtime pal Mark Brown, a financial adviser with Smith Barney. His dark-blue business suits stick out among the Rip City jerseys. "Our friendship is from the heart, as real as anything there is. We all have our own productive lives, but it seems like we've been together forever."

After earning an accounting degree from Bucknell in 2001, Long got a job as an analyst at SEI Wealth Network, a suburban Philadelphia financial-planning firm. Baxter, who attended Bucknell with Long, is an engineer with Whirlpool. A touch-screen oven he designed hit stores this past spring. Wilson, the barber, just opened his own shop in DC. A native of the District, he's a relative newcomer to the crew, having latched on during Rip's rookie season in 1999.

To seal their bond and solidify their allegiance, Rip decided, in the summer of 2002, that the crew should get "CV FOR LIFE" tattooed onto their abdomens. All except Spud. "He has a big stomach," Rip says. "So we let him get it on his shoulder." Because he's usually wearing a shirt, Hamilton also has CVs on his jewel-encrusted bling and on his license plates. "It's such a great place," he says with a smile, his two front Chiclets gleaming. "When you leave, you can't wait to get back."

ASH PARK is where Rip Hamilton the basketball player was raised. Two slabs of well-worn asphalt in a small valley defined by steep, grassy hills, the place is a workaday Coliseum. Chain-link nets hang from hoops supported by steel poles that have always been hazardous to fast-breakers. Ash Park is where reps were made. That Rip (his dad, Richard Sr., had the nickname before him) and his boys had to pass through the Oak Street projects to get to the courts was just extra incentive to bring it.

Even back then, if you were playing Rip, you needed track shoes. He never stopped and never tired. "The way his heart and lungs work is a gift," says Long. In high school, Hamilton could churn out five-minute miles without warming up. These days he runs his pit bulls, Shark and Diamond, until they're on the verge of collapse-just as he does NBA defenders.

Combine his "gift" with exceptional balance and agility and you begin to get why Hamilton is such a tough cover. He has an uncanny ability to maneuver through double-teams, dash around picks and slalom in and out of a forest of swiping arms and legs. He's always in an upright posture, always ready to catch a pass and release his pullup. Over the past four years, he's averaged 19 points on just 16 shots a game. "He's a coach's dream," says Larry Brown. "He appreciates fundamentals and is always moving. You love that in a player."

It wasn't always so. In Coatesville, Rip was a dribbler. "He'd take six or seven dribbles like he was an And 1 player," says Ricky Hicks, then the freshman team coach at Coatesville Area High and now a member of the CV crew. "His energy level and basketball IQ were incredible, but I knew we had to get rid of the dribbling."

It wasn't easy, but Hicks got it done. He limited Rip to one or two dribbles before he shot and trained him to curl off chairs and shoot over brooms. He made him run from halfcourt, stop about 18 feet out, catch a pass and shoot. Hamilton returned to Ash Park in the evenings to try out the new way, playing in pickup games until the lights went off. He stopped dribbling, all right, and wound up developing a midrange game as well.

By 10th grade, Hamilton was starting for the Coatesville Area varsity. In his senior season, he and his buddies lost in the 1996 district semifinal playoffs to Lower Merion High and a kid named Bryant. "Rip definitely held his own against Kobe," Long says. "Kobe had 29, but Rip didn't expect to shut him down. Kobe had some nice dunks and played to the crowd. Rip played the same way he does now." Hamilton had 16 points, 12 rebounds and 6 assists in the loss.

Rip took his lungs and pull-up to UConn and three years later led the 1999 Huskies to a 33—2 record and the school's first national championship. Coatesville was in the stands at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg on that March night. Jontue, Coach Hicks and Brown were witness to the big win. And when Rip was drafted seventh overall by the Wizards, Coatesville got the call too. Cooper moved in to help him get settled in DC, and the others visited when class schedules permitted.

It quickly became clear that life in the pros was different. Basketball was a job now. There were more demands on Rip's time; he belonged to everyone. For the fellas, that took some getting used to. "We'd walk down the street, and people would pull him in all different directions, asking for pictures and autographs, and we'd just be standing there," says Long. "We didn't know how to act."

But when the admirers dispersed, his friends saw that the attention threw Rip too. "He was rich and famous, but he was still Rip," says Long. "He was still Coatesville." Still the Rip who, as a teen, tried to wiggle his way out of cutting the lawn at his uncle's house by saying he didn't want to get his new sneaks grassy. Imagine his chagrin when Jontue's pop bought him a pair of work boots.

The Coatesville crew have made their peace with the fans and the demands and the spotlight now. Not to mention the good life. They can always count on nice seats at Pistons games. Jontue loves the way the Bentley Coupe handles. Everyone counts meeting MJ as one of the best moments of their lives. And no summer is complete without a trip to Miami on the tricked-out charter plane.

Rip rented a five-bedroom South Beach mansion on the water for 10 days this July. The guest list read like the Coatesville phone book. By day they rode scooters up and down Ocean Drive, took in the scenery at Wet Willie's, played water basketball in the backyard pool. But the evenings were not unlike those in C-Ville. The crew played tonk and spades and retold one neighborhood tale after another. "We don't need to go out to have fun, not even in Miami," says Baxter. "All we need is everyone together. That's what fun is to us."

Reminders of home are everywhere, but none is rustier than the one that sits by the curb of the driveway in front of Hamilton's Michigan mansion. By his junior year of high school, Rip had saved enough cash mowing lawns and trimming hedges (yes, those boots came in handy) to buy a 1981 Cutlass. The body was dinged, the roof sagged, the tires were bald and it was prone to overheating. But his boys called it the Lexus Coupe, and Rip beamed when he drove it. "It would smoke so bad we had to hold our breath," says Brown. Whenever the crew made weekend trips to Storrs, they carried a list of people they could call in each state along the way if the car broke down.

After the Pistons won the title in 2004, Rip used a $500,000 bonus to purchase a Maybach. When he slips into the soft leather of the heated bucket seats and lets the 550-hp engine roar, he is cocooned in the pinnacle of automotive luxury, and he knows he's made it. But the faded paint of the Cutlass keeps him real.

So do his boys. Every August, Hamilton holds a Rip City Day celebration at Ash Park. It's part family reunion, part county fair, with plenty of hoops for the kids. This year, under the shade of 50-foot oak trees, the crew gathers around picnic tables. They hug and apply playful headlocks and elbows to guts that used to be washboards. White Air Force Ones and Rip City jerseys are-of coursethe uniform.

At one point, Rip takes a break from his host duties and sits with his friends. "Remember the time you almost had a dunk in a game?" Hicks asks the 5'11" Baxter. "That was a few pounds ago," adds Spud. "Before you looked like a defensive end."

Rip smiles and shakes his head. Ain't no crew like the one he got. Baxter's father approaches the bunch. He and Rip's dad played together at Coatesville Area in the 1970s. He starts to tell stories of his own when Rip's mom stops by to check on the boys. She greets strangers with hugs.

Then a woman in her mid-30s whom nobody quite recognizes steps forward. "Milton, is that you?" she says to Baxter. A quick review of family trees reveals they are cousins. They hug. "That's how it is here," says Hamilton. "Everyone in Coatesville is one person away from being related."

The subject of Ron the barber comes up. His shop closed a few years ago. "Let's just say Ron has gone away for a while," says Jontue. There are some chuckles, but then everyone grows quiet for the first time all day. You can see it on their faces. They know the old neighborhood is changing.

All the more reason to stay the same.

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