Arenas' Conduct Insults Memory of Pollin

[NJNJ]

It has been one thing for Gilbert Arenas not to play up to the six-year, $111 million contract that the Wizards' recently dearly departed owner Abe Pollin gave him a year and a half ago. Arenas's surgically repaired knee hasn't allowed him to play at his old form. Injury is frustrating, but it is understandable.

 

It is quite another thing, however, for Arenas not to live up to the expectations of public responsibility that Pollin no doubt had of him in the nation's capital, Pollin's beloved adopted hometown.

 

For what Arenas has been accused of doing in the past few days -- storing guns in the Wizards' locker room at their home gym, the Verizon Center, and, according to the New York Post on Friday, pulling a gun on teammate Javaris Crittenton -- is an insult of the lowest order to Pollin's beliefs and legacy.

 

As everyone knows, Pollin's club wasn't always called the Wizards. For most of its life under Pollin's ownership, which dates back to 1964 in Baltimore, it was known as the Bullets. The nickname was born from the Old Shot Tower in downtown Baltimore. It's a 234-foot brick shaft built in 1828 where molten lead was cooled in water to manufacture bullets. It stopped making shot before the turn of the 19th century, but lived on through the basketball team's nickname -- until Pollin attended the funeral of a close friend of his in 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel.

 

Rabin died the first week of November 1995 after being shot. His assassin was a young Jewish man tied to right-wing extremist groups. The murder took place at a peace rally in Tel Aviv's Kings Square.

 

"I stood in the spot...Rabin was killed," Pollin told The New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey upon returning from Rabin's funeral. "Bullets connote killing, violence, death. Our slogan used to be, 'Faster than a speeding bullet.' That is no longer appropriate."

 

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[Art]

I did not know there name had such a significance.

[AboveLegit]

I did not know there name had such a significance.

Abe means everything to not only the Wizards, but DC. He's done everything for us, and to see someone like Gil, the man Abe trusted and loved, to do something as dumb as this, makes me sick to my stomach.

 

I just can't believe Arenas would do this, I'm literally at loss of words.