He's Quietly Taken the NBA by Surprise
A Second-Round Draft Pick, Low-Key Landry Fields of the Knicks 'Keeps Picking Things Up at an Incredibly Fast Pace'
By JEFF PEARLMANWhen one comes to New York to star for the Knickerbockers, he is required, by law and history, to rule the town.
It's what we expect of our sports heroes, and from Walt Frazier and Joe Namath to Keith Hernandez and Derek Jeter, the stories of metropolitan social domination are endless. It is often not enough for our athletic standouts to merely dunk and pass and hit with unparalleled greatness. They need to live The Life. To revel on a higher plane. To be seen out and about, smiling from ear to ear, a young vixen on each arm, a bottomed-out bottle of Cristal left spinning on the nearby table.
Which leads us to Landry Fields.
As one of the Knicks' hotshot newcomers and, with averages of 10.1 points and 7.1 rebounds per game, an unlikely candidate for NBA Rookie of the Year, Fields has taken the city by storm. The team's starting shooting guard can be spotted everywhere, eating at the hottest bistros, strolling down the sidewalks, offering up high-fives to well-wishers left and right.
"I can't tell you how much I like it here," said Fields. "The stores, the people.…White Plains is just a wonderful place to be."
Eh, White Plains?
Based on the city's proximity to the Knicks' Westchester practice facility, as well as his desire to keep distractions to a minimum, Mr. Fields rents a small apartment not on Central Park West or in the East Village, but across from White Plains's City Center shopping complex.
"Almost every morning me and [fellow rookie] Andy Rautins hit up the Atlanta Bread Company for breakfast," he said. "Then we shop at Nordstrom Rack—that place is awesome. Brand names at half the price. There's also a Barnes & Noble, just in case we want to get our read on."
Mr. Fields can go on for hours, blathering about Legal Seafood and Target and blasé suburban bliss. But while the talk is somewhat peculiar, it is by no means contrived. Having been largely ignored during his four seasons at Stanford, then waiting until the second round and 39th overall pick of last April's draft to find an NBA home, Mr. Fields has long thrived by keeping a low profile and limited public expectations. "One day I might move to Manhattan," he said after a recent practice. "But I'm really not a glitzy type of guy."
Mr. Fields goes up for a shot against the Rockets' Patrick Patterson on Jan. 19.
Indeed, before he signed a two-year contract with the Knicks last June, most of the team's players and coaches had never heard of Landry Fields. Although he led the Pac-10 with 22 points and 8.8 rebounds per game as a senior, Mr. Fields was widely thought to be too slow, too unathletic, too predictable, too limited, too developed, too tweener-ish to make any sort of NBA impact.
It hardly helped that his accomplishments took place during a notoriously poor year for the conference. That's why Mr. Fields wasn't invited to the NBA's annual pre-draft camp or listed on the Top 100 draft prospects list by Chad Ford, ESPN's respected basketball "insider."
"I speak with a lot of teams, and now they all say they would have picked Landry had he been on the board, or if they hadn't traded their pick, or…whatever," said Chris Emens, Mr. Fields's agent. "The bottom line was these teams simply made a huge mistake. Landry played forward in college, and the experts had trouble envisioning him as a guard. And he was at Stanford for four years, and there's an enormous bias these days against seniors. So that's why he lasted so long."
What most franchises didn't know—couldn't know—was that Landry Fields was, in a literal sense, made to play basketball. Though he might lack the sinewy brilliance of Washington's John Wall or the all-around physicality of the Nets' Derrick Favors, Mr. Fields, a 6-foot-7, 210-pounder, boasts an uncommonly deep and detailed hoops pedigree.
His father, Steve Fields, was a 6-foot-6 guard at Miami of Ohio who was selected by Portland in the seventh round of the 1975 NBA Draft (he never made an NBA roster). His mother, Janice Fields, was a 6-foot forward at Highland Community College in Highland, Wash. Janice's two sisters, Sue and Trish, both played basketball at the University of Puget Sound, and Steve's uncle, Davis Barker, was a guard on Ohio State's 1960 NCAA championship team. Randy Ayers, the former Philadelphia 76ers coach, is married to one of Landry's cousins, and another cousin, Northern Arizona senior guard Cameron Jones, is a three-time all-Big Sky Conference selection who is projected to be picked in the 2011 NBA Draft.
"The game runs deep in our family," said Steve Fields. "We never, ever pressured Landry to play, but he gravitated to basketball very naturally. You can definitely say it's in his blood."
Raised in the small Orange County city of Los Alamitos, Calif., Mr. Fields spent much of his boyhood either studying or shooting hoops. He was a quiet kid, and though his long, skinny arms and Big Bird-like legs made him a gawky sight to behold, Janice recalls a boy with, in her words, "a very old soul."
"Landry's always been a thinker, an observer," she said. "He was a very late talker—a little older than 2 when he finally said something. I had been waiting for a word or two, and one day he just looks at me and says, 'Mom, will you please get me some milk out of the refrigerator?' It's as if he had the words, but he wanted to wait for the right moment to spring them on me."
Like many of his ilk, Mr. Fields took the relatively conventional AAU-and-high school-varsity route to college. Yet having grown up with sayings like IF YOU'RE GONNA TAKE SOMETHING—TAKE RESPONSIBILITY and LEARN TO GIVE—IT MAKES TAKING EASIER taped to his father's refrigerator (Steve and Janice divorced when Landry was 12, though they live mere blocks apart and maintain a friendly relationship), he wasn't merely aiming for the first college basketball scholarship.
A B+ and A student at Los Alamitos High, Landry dreamed of attending Stanford, and even took the SATs four times in order to earn the necessary score. "Landry could have gone to Arizona, he could have gone to Gonzaga," said Janice. "But we instilled a value of education in him. He wanted Stanford for basketball, but mainly for the pedigree. The decision was based on getting a great education and a diploma." Hence, on draft night Mr. Fields knew he wouldn't be selected near Mr. Wall, the consensus No. 1 pick. So he sat in his bedroom in his father's apartment and waited. And waited. And waited.
"It was all a mystery to me," he said. "I knew I wouldn't go very high, but I'd worked out for a lot of teams and heard good things. I was hopeful."
Though they lacked a first-round pick, the Knicks possessed back-to-back selections in the second round. They used No. 37 on Mr. Rautins, the Syrcause guard who has become Mr. Fields's closest friend on the team (and near-daily Xbox rival in FIFA Soccer 11).
When Mr. Fields heard his name called next, he jumped off his bed and began screaming. He ran into his father's room, then into the room of his 16-year-old sister, Celena.
"People have asked me if I was disappointed going low," he said. "No way. I just wanted to be picked and have the chance to prove myself."
If Mr. Fields's roll continues and, as team president Donnie Walsh said, "he keeps picking things up at an incredibly quick pace," the familiar narrative of the out-of-nowhere rookie making good can turn significantly more interesting.
Though the Clippers' Blake Griffin (who missed all of last season with a knee injury) looks to be the sure-shot Rookie of the Year, Mr. Fields seems destined to become the first second-round pick to make the league's All-Rookie team since Golden State's Marc Jackson a decade ago. He has contributed hope and stability to a franchise long lacking in both.
"When you're drafting late, you can't expect a kid like Landry Fields falls your way," said Mr. Walsh. "And when he does, you thank your stars. You thank your lucky stars."
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