HBO implied that the jump was prompted by a timely visit to Carrie Stoudemire at a Polk County jail by George Raveling, the former U.S.C. coach turned Nike procurer. ''That's bull, man,'' Stoudemire says in his startlingly deep voice, the truth of what he's saying so transparent there's no need to emphasize it with eye contact. ''She was incarcerated at the time, bro, and nobody was really looking out for the fam, and Rav pays a visit and puts $100 in her commissary. She didn't even get a chance to touch the money. He put it in so she could buy snacks here and there, you know what I mean? I was going to the Nike All-American regardless. I am trying to go out of high school. On the A.A.U. circuit, I was destroying everybody. I don't mean to sound cocky or nothing, but I was doing me. I figured if I go to the Nike camp and get the player of the camp, I'd be the best player in the country, no question.''

The most impressive part of his high-school résumé was how he handled himself after being declared ineligible his junior year by the Florida High School Activities Association after a controversy over his Mount Zion transcripts, which may have been doctored by the school. In an entire year without basketball, he managed to stay out of trouble almost entirely. His only infraction was a 10-day suspension for pretending to hurl a basketball at a gym teacher, who was telling him to get off the court. She claimed that while Stoudemire had her in his sights, her life passed before her eyes.

To avoid the fate of so many around him, Stoudemire has learned to seal out the world, as if by throwing a switch. By now it has become so ingrained that his first reaction to any entreaty from the outside world is ''No,'' which can make him appear chilly and absent. Unlike the Suns star point guard, Stephon Marbury, who has been supporting more than a dozen friends and relatives since he turned pro, Stoudemire has kept the purse strings tight. ''A lot of my family, I'm not going to support,'' he says. ''You know why? 'Cause just yesterday, I was doing really bad, and they didn't support me. I wasn't doing too good just last year. They didn't think I was going to go out of high school. Now that I did, I had two cousins call from New York I never even saw before. I don't know how they got my number. They didn't really want me to send them money, but I could hear in their voice, the next time they call, it will be 'Well, I need a favor.' Well, I'm going to change my number before you even ask me.''

Lake Wales is a Citrus Belt town of 35,000, some 40 miles southwest of Orlando. The Stoudemires, Wilsons and Palmores (Carrie's family) have lived there and known of one another for a couple of generations. On a hot morning a few weeks after I visited Amare in Phoenix, I drove by the corner house where Carrie lived as a child and the now-empty lot just off Lincoln Avenue, the bar-lined heart of the town's ghetto, where Amare's father, Hazell Sr., and his nine siblings lived. Amare's grandfather moved to Lake Wales from Alabama for work in a sawmill and was later stabbed to death at a card game on Christmas morning. My guide was Earnest Stoudemire, Amare's uncle and a semiretired police officer, who told me that when he returned from Vietnam and became a cop, Lincoln Avenue was where he got ''his workout on Saturday night from the fights, shootings and cuttings.''

He also pointed to the lot where the house once stood in which Amare often lived with his father, a stylish, athletic man who had a couple of years of college and had just given up on a lawn business to sign on with a trucking company when he died at 41. ''That still makes me mad,'' says Earnest, who survived a heart attack at 39. ''The males in our family have a problem with high cholesterol. Hazell had been having chest pains and ignored them, and he knew better. If he was alive, he'd have two sons in the N.B.A. right now, because he was the one who could control Hazell Jr.''

The main drug corridor north from Miami, Highway 27, runs straight through Lake Wales and brought a crack epidemic that touched all three families and that at one point required Amare's uncle to arrest his younger brother, Hazell Sr. Years of harassment by Earnest and his colleagues have only succeeded in moving the crack trade a few blocks over to a desolate stretch that exudes a palpable menace even in blazing sunlight.

Earnest said that when he signed on with the police department, a black person had no hope of advancement, and despite a college degree, he didn't get a promotion for 17 years. Eventually, a new chief came in with more egalitarian standards, and Earnest spent 13 years as a homicide detective before becoming a captain, the highest black appointment in the department's history. Now, as a part-time officer, he does some pastoring and has an outreach ministry specializing in the eradication of evil spirits. He has performed some 1,000 exorcisms.