Thug-A-Licious

NEW YORK -- Baller, rapper and NBA rookie, Andre Williams, a.k.a. "Thug-A-Licious", was brutally knifed last night in front of thousands of fans during a heated NBA Finals game between New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers. Williams, a first-round draft pack and the league's leading rookie scorer, averaging 27 points per game, nine assists, and five steals, also dominates the street music scene with club-banging hits like "Just the Head, Please" and "How Deep U Want It?"

According to eyewitnesses, the charismatic six-foot-four-inch point guard had just left the court after scoring the final 3 of his 32 points, and giving the knicks a slim third-quarter lead, when an unidentified young man made his way to the edge of the court and plunged an ice pick into the back of William's neck. Early reports detailing the extent of William's injuries have been conflicting, but at press time his condition was listed as extremely critical.

Five years ago William's and two childhood friends were implicated in a vicious pool-hall robbery and massacre that claimed three lives. However, the immensely popular 25-year-old, whose court skills have been favorably compared to basketball legend Michael Jordan and is rumored to have nine children with eight different women, was never formally charged.

All of this comes at a time when the sports world is being inundated by influences of rap music and hip-hop culture. And in entertainement industry where sex, money, and power rule, it seems the fine line between the good life and the hood life(a.k.a. criminal life) may forever be blurred.

Damned isolation

But Louis, it's just to painful to shrink back into the shadows--Manue, the sleek and nameless gangster ghoulie again creeping up on helpless mortals who know nothing of things like me. So hurtful to be again the outsider, forever on the fringes, struggling with good and evil in the age-old private hell of body and soul.

Please forgive me if I sound bitter.

I dont have any right to be. I started the whole thing, and I got out in one piece, as they say. And so many of our kind did not. That part is inexcusable. And surely, I shall always pay for that.

But you see, I still dont understand fully what happened. I dont know whether or not it was a tragedy, or merely a meaningless venture. Or whether or not something absolutly magnificent might have been born of my blundering, something that could have lifted me right out of my irrelevance and nightmare and into the burning light of redemption after all.

Sebastien Caron is in the hospital.