Baron Davis last played in an NBA All-Star game in 2004; he last played in any kind of NBA game in 2012. But here, at downtown Los Angeles’s Biltmore Hotel, Baron Davis runs the place. As he tours me through Sports Lifestyle in Culture, the pop-up hoops-themed art exhibition he’s convened here, he gets stopped every 30 or seconds or so by well-wishers, fans, colleagues old and new. Former slam dunk champ Brent Barry (Davis calls him by his nickname, "Bones") rolls through with his kids; he'll soon shatter the high score on pop-a-shot airbrushed with Davis’s image. Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley mill in the lobby. Chris Webber—"C-Webb! What up!"—is corralled by Davis just as we’re sitting down to talk. My mom always told me that the world doesn’t revolve around me, and I’ve found proof: this corner of the world clearly revolves around around Baron Davis.
Davis speaks deliberately, today barely above a whisper, and with the slightest surfer’s drawl—Cali boy through and through. He finishes nearly every thought with some variation of “You know what I mean?” He spent 2016 playing in the NBA’s developmental league, and has spoken at length about his desire to play again, but sitting in the hotel lobby, wearing a canary-yellow satin jacket and icy-white Jordans I can only describe as regal, he’s not worried about a comeback. He’s just trying to figure out how to be a good L.A. ambassador this weekend. “Lot of friends who are gonna get in town last minute and be like, Yo, what's going on?,” he says when I ask what he expects.
The role of social director suits him. The 38-year-old grew up in South Central, played high school ball in Santa Monica at Crossroads (a school better known for teaching Hollywood scions than fielding strong hoops teams), spent two years at UCLA, and, after stints with the Hornets and Warriors, starred back home for the Clippers.
And because he’s so deeply Los Angeles, Davis has also found himself enmeshed in the world of Hollywood. He drops in to Kevin Garnett's Area 21 show on TNT to hang, wears a parade of aggressive hats (today, a bucket), and shares his spiciest takes. He’s produced a few movies, with more on the way (a documentary about George Gervin is forthcoming, as is an Amazon series set in the high-stakes world of youth basketball). And if Baron Davis’s Los Angeles bona fides were ever in question—they weren’t, but pretend they were—a recent series of paparazzi photos of Davis with Laura Dern should rest his case. (When I ask him about the photo, Davis hems, haws, and lays out some thoughts on the perils of the Internet before ultimately deciding not to answer.) Davis manages to gently guide his well-wishers away, and dismisses his videographers. Friends will stop and chat anyway, and he takes the time to respond, ask after them, take photos. That's just what happens when you're Baron Davis, the bucket-hatted mayor of All-Star Weekend.
GQ: It's a big weekend for L.A., and you're an L.A. guy. How does it feel being here?
Baron Davis: It feels good. We've got these young guns: we've got three or four guys from L.A. in the All-Star Game.
Who's the L.A. guy on top right now?
You think Harden, you think Westbrook, you think DeMar DeRozan from Compton. Paul George, he be out here. Man, take your pick. But when I think about L.A., I don't think about nobody with a crown. I think about it more like we're all brothers. It's big brothers and little brothers, but it really ain't nobody fighting for no crown.
That's a New York thing. One guy's the king of the hill.
That New York thing is, everyone's trying to be the biggest kingpin. Out here, because basketball is such a lifestyle for us, it's all about team, and it's all about hanging out with your brothers. So it's different. Because that's the one thing that keeps us out of trouble.
Someone walking through the lobby catches BD's eye.
You’ve gotta be on hospitality duty.
I gotta be on who-knows-what's-gonna-happen duty! We're out in public places. Cuckoo birds out here. Someone could pull out a gun or some shit.
I hope not!
Well, if somebody walk in here with a trench coat, I'm gonna definitely break the conversation to focus on him.
Three more people enter, and take a photo with Davis.
Sorry ‘bout that.
You're Mr. Popular. I want to talk to you a little bit about the basketball work you've been doing. Is Area 21 as fun as it looks?
It's incredible. It's just fun being around KG and his energy. He keeps the place live and on point. And it's real. It's an opportunity to really voice your opinion.
It's not sanitized.
There's no gloss on it. It's as real as it gets with him.
How does he keep his hood up on his head?
Man, that's just his floss! That's his flavor.
You got a little bit of heat for wearing a beanie the other day. I thought you looked tremendous, but is there anything you want to say to the haters?
To the haters: certain people can pull things off, and certain people can't. And when they see me on TV now, on TNT, everybody wanna chime in. But somebody gotta keep pushing the culture forward, right? If you gonna be a stiff, be a stiff. But I'm gonna finesse and wiggle. I'm gonna rock my beanies, fedoras.
Bucket hat.
Bucket hat! I'll be stepping it up. We're gonna give 'em a different look because that's who I am. And when you hear how I speak about the game, it's always to big up the players. It's for people to see the art. I ain't about to be over there farting on myself with a suit on all the time.
Do you ever feel like you were a little ahead of your time as a player? I look at the league now and see someone like Donovan Mitchell, and I think, That's Baron Davis. That's Baron Davis's game. You were a scoring point guard—and a personality, and it feels like the league is really open to that.
I may have missed the window—I wish I was playing in this era, because it'd be on and cracking! But sometimes, that's the beauty of it: maybe you missed your window, but you still get that love, and that's how you remain a classic. A lot of the young guys, they vibe with me. The Oladipos, Kyries, you name 'em. All them young dudes. Because I rock with them, and I rock with their games.
So those are the young guys. Speaking of the old guys: I was talking to Al Harrington yesterday, your old teammate, and he showed up with Stephen Jackson. Is the bond still tight with the old Warriors?
Absolutely. I got a bond with all my teammates. Well, the ones that's real. [Laughs] The ones that I'm cool with, I'm cool with. It's a bond and a brotherhood. And there's dudes on other teams I'm cool with. But them two dudes? They’re my dogs, like my brothers. We stay in the group chat. We invest with each other. Family vacation, all that shit.
You're in on the Viola business? [Viola Extracts is Harrington's cannabis business.]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just...director of marketing.
Can you tell me about how you've tried to set up your career after basketball?
For me, it's really [been about] accepting the fact that basketball is art, and I am an artist. I've always had an affinity for collecting things, and always wanted to represent things that I felt represented us. When I got hurt, I wanted to develop my skills from a storytelling perspective, do the work, read books. Develop things. To be the storyteller for basketball, period.
You guys drive the culture in a lot of ways; it only seems right that you should be able to make it, too.
We should be the ones who are really articulating what that voice looks like and sounds like. Because when I look at basketball, and what we're able to do, and how this game has been able to go all over the world, it's like a healing mechanism. It's a real festival, where all forms and all races, all music, everything is accepted. People don't realize how powerful it is, because they don't look at it that way. And so my whole thing is to change that, and to make it a part of an industry, a part of a culture, to build stories.
Is it ever challenging to get people to look at you as a producer and entrepreneur, as opposed to a basketball player?
Not so much now. People would always look at me like the ex-basketball player, but I don't really have the time for it. I can pretty much tell which way a meeting's gonna go in the first three or four minutes. Because if someone's not taking me seriously, I'm definitely not taking them seriously. I don't want to be bullshitted; I don't want to bullshit nobody. I know what I can do. If I just do the work, I can bring in the right artist with the right producer, with the right athlete, with the right story. I'm just out here trying to throw dimes, you feel me? I'm just trying to lead the culture in assists.
__You're on the DVD commentary for Step Brothers—how did that happen?
Dude! They asked me if I wanted to do it, and I was like, Hell yeah! I wanna be an actor, man!
Are you friends with them?
That was my first time meeting Will Ferrell. He walks in the room, and I've never seen somebody make you feel so fun and silly. You're just laughing the whole time. And it wasn't like he was in character; that's just who he was. I was always a fan. Elf is one of my favorites. I loved him from Saturday Night Live. And deep down inside, I always wanted to host Saturday Night Live. But I did [Step Brothers] because I was like, I wanna be an actor, I'm gonna show him how funny I am! And I got in there and I curled up. But when we started the commentary, it was fun. I was waiting for a script, and they just come in—Adam McKay, Will, what's my man's name? John C. Reilly. John C. Reilly is cold, too. They start playing the piano, and I don't know what they're gonna do. And they basically made the whole commentary into a song. And they were like, Alright, we're gonna call you in at some point. Just figure out what they're doing. That's one of my favorite things that I've done.
You got a favorite line from Step Brothers?
I'm more of an Elf guy.
What's the Elf line?If I say it, and you put this in the article...I'm gonna be attacked by elves!
