Eddie Griffin Rumors

Griffin tried to focus on basketball, but he was upset at Powell, according to Barrett. He’d heard rumors that Powell had talked to agents on Griffin’s behalf. Griffin, according to Barrett, was upset that his eligibility could now be in jeopardy. “He was hurt because he felt like he didn’t tell anybody that he was leaving after his first year,” Barrett said. “He wanted to have that option of coming back. So when he heard the rumors of his brother taking money from agents and putting him in a situation where it was forcing him to leave — I don’t know if it’s true. Nobody really knew if his brother was taking money or not. But Eddie was pissed about that. And he really stopped speaking to his brother for two, three months straight.”

Griffin joined his teammates for a morning walk-through on October 13, 2003, just before the team flew to Sacramento for a preseason game. “That morning I was fine,” Griffin said to ESPN.com. “Then it just hit me in the middle of practice. I started thinking about what was going on in my life and it got worse and worse. When they told everybody to meet at the plane, I went home and turned off the phone.” Jacques Griffin called the team’s management, insisting his brother would board a commercial flight to California. Eddie Griffin instead remained on his couch for the next two days. He accepted a two-game suspension, but then no-showed a workout Van Gundy had planned for him. The Rockets suspended Griffin indefinitely. “He said it was like work,” Jacques Griffin said. “You know how basketball is, you just play it for fun. And then once he got to the NBA, it was like a job.”

For a few years after his death, his family would celebrate Griffin’s life with a cake on his birthday, May 30. But the wounds never healed, and the Griffins ultimately gave up the tradition. They’d felt this pain before, with Marvin Powell Sr., little Marvin’s father. He was Griffin’s older half brother — he helped raise Eddie, stoked his passion for the game. Powell died of a heart attack at 34 in 2001, just as Griffin was grappling with the decision whether to leave college and enter professional basketball. One tragedy, the family fears, influenced another. “If Marvin still was alive, Eddie would still be here,” said Evelyn Powell, Marvin Sr.’s wife. “Everything would’ve been so much different. So much different.”

Griffin and Barrett were in their second-floor dormitory a little more than a week after Alabama ousted Seton Hall from the NIT. Griffin picked up the phone, answered, and sobbed deeply for the next 20 minutes, until he finally told him: It was Marvin, Griffin said. He had died of a heart attack. “Now he started thinking, Man, is it my fault?” Barrett said. “I’ll never forget the day when he got the call … He’s going through it, because he wasn’t speaking to him. Now he’s got to be that rock for the family. He’s got to be that guy to do something good for the whole family to get their spirits back. So he felt like he had a lot of pressure on his hands, and he felt guilt for not speaking to his brother for so long.”

Likewise, Griffin forged a rapport with two Rockets staff members. Keith Jones, the team’s athletic trainer, and Melvin Hunt, an assistant coach, are among the people who would not let Griffin walk past them without a conversation. “He was just such a young guy and still, even though he’d went through stuff growing up, there was an innocence about him,” Jones said. “Everything was fresh to him on the basketball side and moving to Houston and everything, and it mentally seemed like he had a gleam in his eye. As time went on, the basketball didn’t come as easy to him as he would’ve liked or as anyone would’ve liked, and he lost a little bit of that light in his eye.” Jones would routinely ask Griffin how he was doing. Griffin would offer the same response. “I’m a little tired,” he’d say.

One night at the hotel, Griffin showed up at a wedding he wasn’t invited to — he quickly befriended John Dodds’s wedding party at the bar, signing autographs and offering tickets to a Nets game. When the party broke up, Dodds retreated with his bride to their third-floor room. But Griffin wasn’t done. He showed up at Dodds’s room and repeatedly banged on the door. Dodds opened his door around 5 a.m., according to the Star-Ledger. “He was sticking out his chest, trying to scare us,” Dodds told the newspaper. “It was like he thought he was all-powerful, like he was King Ding-a-ling or something.” Dodds spat in Griffin’s face and called him a racial epithet. Griffin charged him. Other members of the bridal party, hearing the commotion, quickly arrived. Griffin punched Dodds’s brother before they managed to close the door on him. But when the police arrived, they found Griffin calm and cooperative. He masked his fury. The police soon left, chalking the incident up to a post-party dispute.

Other forces in Griffin’s life pleaded with him to stay committed to playing at the highest level. “Man, hang on and wait on an NBA camp and try that,” Salmon, his former AAU coach, told Griffin. “You’re still young.” “But he was looking forward to going overseas. That’s why I never accepted the story that he drove into this train. I’ve never accepted that.”