HoopsHype.com Rumors

Keyon Dooling: Hey everyone thank you for all the love and support that you guys give me daily.FYI I won't be returning this season #StayTuned @CelticsLife Twitter

Boston Celtics, Free Agency, Keyon Dooling 

Though player liaison Keyon Dooling would consider coming out of retirement, Ainge said yesterday that the former Celtics guard is not an option. Boston Herald

Boston Celtics, Free Agency, Trade, Danny Ainge, Keyon Dooling 

Four months after retiring from the NBA, Keyon Dooling is considering a return to the game. The 12-year veteran guard began increasing his workout routine on Tuesday should he receive a call from the Boston Celtics. "I'm definitely considering," Dooling told CSNNE.com Tuesday evening. "I've upped my exercise starting today and if Doc (Rivers) gives me the word I will be ready." CSNNE.com

Boston Celtics, Free Agency, Keyon Dooling 

Doc Rivers said before Tuesday's practice that he has spoken with Keyon Dooling and informed him to starting getting in shape for a possible return. Dooling told the Globe on Sunday that he would consider coming out of retirement. He retired this summer despite agreeing to a one-year contract extension with the Celtics. "He would be the closest for me if we had to go in another direction (at point guard)," Rivers said. "We'd have to find out if he could still do it. He knows our stuff. He's the easiest by far. He's going to (get in shape) anyway." Boston Globe

Boston Celtics, Free Agency, Doc Rivers, Keyon Dooling 

Gary Washburn: Doc Rivers said Keyon Dooling coming back is a possibility and he has told Dooling to start getting in shape #celtics Twitter @GwashNBAGlobe

Boston Celtics, Free Agency, Keyon Dooling 

Gary Washburn: Keyon Dooling tells the Globe he would contemplate a comeback. "I'm not in shape, but yeah I would." #Celtics Twitter @GwashNBAGlobe

Boston Celtics, Keyon Dooling 

REPORTER: "Who has been the most vocal leader when you talk about you guys getting your swagger back?" RONDO: "Besides myself? Keyon Dooling has actually helped. He's been in the locker room, helping guys out. His personality, I think it started with him, and I just try to play my songs in here. They're so hot. I will let you guys listen to them yet, but a couple of my tracks at play in the year just to get the guys going before the game." YouTube

Boston Celtics, Rajon Rondo, Keyon Dooling 

They weren't. And only now, after opening up about a tormented childhood that included sexual abuse starting at age 5, does Keyon Dooling appreciate why. "When we'd go fishing," the former Cardinal Gibbons, Dillard High and Miami Heat basketball standout says from his Boston-area home, "I would try to hurt the fish, tear their heads off. "Right in the New River, where would go fishing and crabbing, I'd catch the fish and go to work on them. I never could understand where all that anger and all that pain came from." South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Keyon Dooling 

The trauma was profound, incomprehensible, horrendous. "A gentlemen touched me," he says of the encounter. He was 5, but trying to act older, as he says so many others at that time in his Sistrunk Boulevard neighborhood were. There was an invitation to watch pornography from a teenage friend of a relative. He wound up being coaxed into performing oral sex. That was the start. "When it happened so young," he says, "you could think it was routine." Eventually he began smoking, drinking, "becoming sexually active at a very young age." South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Keyon Dooling 

Yet there is no desire to return to Fort Lauderdale to offer any testimony other than that he plans to offer in counseling youth. "I mean, for me," he says, "I spoke about the gentlemen who touched me. I knew his first name. I don't even know his last name. For me, that's not my particular battle because of the statute of limitations and where I am in my life. That's not what I want to do. I don't want to fight that battle with that person. That's not where I would get the satisfaction. "Where I would get the satisfaction is preventatively, putting together something to help youth, and also when it happens to people, giving them an outlet or a resource to go to." South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Keyon Dooling 

He lost his father, then had family and friends asking him for money even while he was grieving at the funeral. He wanted to retire from basketball, but nobody in the family he supported would support his decision. He lost a child in the womb. And then there was all that sexual abuse he endured and kept hidden for so long — hidden from his wife, from his mother, even from himself when you consider how unaddressed it had been until he arrived broken and scared recently at a psychiatric ward. “You’d be amazed at what you can block out of your mind,” Dooling says now. “As an athlete, you block out pain and noise to create focus. If I had addressed my sexual abuse earlier, I don’t know if I could have reached my potential. The pain and hurt were so deep that it was almost shattering to deal with. Meltdown might be an understatement for what I had. Some people might call it a midlife crisis or losing your mind.” Miami Herald

Keyon Dooling 

He located the roots of his repressed pain in his childhood, and dealing with emotions, addressing them instead of pushing them down, cracked him open. You don’t find a lot of feelings in the locker room. Pain? Tape it up or inject it and keep on running. The only emotion he’d ever had about his sexual abuse was unaddressed anger, and the professional in him kept that hidden behind the smile. “Post-traumatic syndrome,” he says now. “When you are playing, you never had time to breathe or deal with or accept. It kind of overwhelmed me. Shell-shocked me. All these memories/feelings/emotions that I had been compressing, keeping down, blocking out. I was able to face all those things I had been running from my whole life. I’m happy this happened to me so I can help others.” Miami Herald

Keyon Dooling 

Have you forgiven the people who molested you, Keyon? “Heck, yeah,” he says. “Heck, yeah. Heck, yeah. If I would say I’m all peace and never angry, I’d be lying. But to the people who took advantage of me — because I was molested more than one time by more than one person and more than one sex — yeah, I have forgiven. I haven’t forgotten. But I have no ill-will in my heart. I don’t have a hateful bone in my body. Why have malice? I don’t have that for the people who hurt me. I feel sad for them. I hope they get help. I know they are being tormented.” Miami Herald

Keyon Dooling 

“It is weird, man,” he says. “Some people who hide sexual abuse get tormented by it. They know it, and they deny it. I couldn’t feel the emotion, but I could feel the effects because of my pattern of behavior. Some of the anger issues I had, especially at a young age, led me to start drinking early and smoking early and having sex early. It wasn’t until I got involved with sports that it was an outlet for me to get that negative energy out. I don’t know how I got myself in that situation. I’ve asked myself all these questions. “When it happens young, you blame yourself. I’m getting out of that. There is nothing I could have prevented. What I can do is raise awareness and be preventative.” Miami Herald

Keyon Dooling 

Dooling is safe now, because he was able to finally face down demons he'd kept buried throughout his adult life. He is safe because of a rock-solid wife, an organization that reached out when he needed it, and because he was willing to admit he needed help. Dooling, basically, suffered a nervous breakdown, which explained his sudden decision to retire in August after 12 NBA seasons. The breakdown culminated in a week-long stay in an asylum, and forced him to finally address the root of his troubles: the sexual abuse he had suffered when he was a child in Florida. NBA.com

Keyon Dooling 

He took this time in his life to make a checklist. One, he was in a mental hospital. Two, he didn't know how he got there. "It was like hell," Keyon Dooling is saying, from the safety of a chair in his home. "If you're not a person that needs to be in a mental institution, it's no place for you. In my opinion, if that's hell here on earth, I don't want to see it in the next life." NBA.com

Keyon Dooling 

After a lifetime of hiding the truth, Dooling now wants to tell his story, hoping that it will help kids that are in a similar predicament -- or convince potential predators to seek help before they destroy someone's life. "It started when I was five, and it happened multiple times," Dooling said. "It happened with men and women. I was abused by my brother's friend. I was five; he was about 13 or 14. But also young ladies, older ladies in our neighborhood. In my opinion, I thought I was cool at the time. I thought I was in the in crowd. I thought that was how it was supposed to be. And I was sadly mistaken. I didn't even realize the pattern of behavior I had taken on at such an early age." NBA.com

Keyon Dooling 

Dooling earned a reputation as a mentor for young players over the years, including the Pistons' Brandon Knight and the Celtics' Rajon Rondo. He was, in the NBA lexicon, a good locker room guy. He ascended to a vice presidential role in the players' union, always immaculately dressed, able to roll in all manner of different worlds, paying his mentor role forward as he had been helped over the years by the likes of Eddie Jones, Doug Overton and Adonal Foyle, among others. "It's my duty," Dooling said. "I get a lot of pleasure seeing young men, people around their game, reach their goals, accomplish their goals. Uplift their family, uplift their community. And a lot of times, cats just don't know how to do it. They don't know how to put a name or a face to that success they're striving to achieve. I kind of normalize it for them, because I've come from nothing. I've come from the slums, the City Zone, as we like to call it in Fort Lauderdale. I've had a very unique ride, a very unique journey." NBA.com

Boston Celtics, Detroit Pistons, Rajon Rondo, Keyon Dooling, Adonal Foyle, Brandon Knight 

But the past was never far behind. As Dooling was deciding whether or not to return this season -- he had an open invite, basically, from the Celtics -- his behavior began to deteriorate. The week before the family moved back up north to Boston to get ready for the season, Natosha began noticing her husband acting erratically. He began having hallucinations. "I didn't know what it was, but I knew it wasn't good," she said. "Just weird stuff that he would say, or do. I was just like, 'Hmm, what's going on? Is he OK?' I even called his momma at one point, but she really couldn't give me any answers. I knew something was wrong. Actually, I just stayed on my knees. I was just praying. That's all I know to do, just go before the Lord." NBA.com

Keyon Dooling 

He was at home, playing in the street in front of his home with his kids. A neighbor thought he was playing too roughly with the kids and called the police. There is uncertainty about how many officers showed up -- 10? 12? 20? -- but it was more than one. The Doolings were new to the neighborhood. They know the police were just doing their job, responding to a call. But a bunch of cops showing up, unannounced, banging on your door is a little disconcerting. "So I ran to the door to see what was going on," Keyon Dooling said. "I was like, 'Who is this knocking like they're the damn police?' That's what I said to myself. So when I got to the door, it was really the police. They was like, 'Get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground!' So I got on the ground." Natosha didn't know what to do, what to tell her kids. She was scared. Keyon had always been the strong one, able to handle whatever. And now he was being taken away. "I was just terrified," she recalled. "I was like, 'What is going on? Like, what are these people doing in my house?' ... And they separated us. They had the kids over here and me over there and Keyon over here. It was horrible. I was living in a nightmare. I was really living in a nightmare. I was terrified for myself, for my kids." NBA.com

Keyon Dooling