Before he was ‘Boogie’ Four-time All-Star DeMarcus Cousins, nearing his debut with the Warriors, is one of the NBA’s most polarizing players. A trip to his hometown of Mobile, Ala., reveals the beginnings of ‘two different DeMarcuses.’

Before he was ‘Boogie’ Four-time All-Star DeMarcus Cousins, nearing his debut with the Warriors, is one of the NBA’s most polarizing players. A trip to his hometown of Mobile, Ala., reveals the beginnings of ‘two different DeMarcuses.’

MOBILE, Ala. — DeMarcus Cousins furrowed his brow and scratched his beard, puzzled by a hot-pink box touting a “gooshy foot bath” that’s “oddly satisfying.”

“What’s with the spa treatment?” the Golden State Warriors center, smiling warmly, asked the 7-year-old girl with the “Glitzy Spa” in her shopping cart. “Your feet be hurting that much?”

On a rainy afternoon in early December, Cousins had taken 100 elementary schoolkids on a shopping spree through a Target store in his Alabama hometown. After a grueling road trip with the team he hopes to join as an active player within the next two months, Cousins arrived here by plane at 2 a.m. But a little sleep deprivation wasn’t going to keep him from attending this seventh annual Santa Cuz event.

DeMarcus Cousins of the Golden State Warriors greets children attending the Santa Cuz Holiday Shopping Spree event at Target in Mobile, Alabama, Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018. DeMarcus Cousins of the Golden State Warriors greets children attending the Santa Cuz Holiday Shopping Spree event at Target in Mobile, Alabama, Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018. Photo: Jeff Haller / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Jeff Haller / Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Warriors’ DeMarcus Cousins: What a trip home revealed about the NBA enigma 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

In between posing for photos, the 6-foot-11, 270-pound “Boogie” Cousins chatted with the kids about what they were buying. When a 7-year-old boy told Cousins that he was getting a Monopoly game to take to his day care, Cousins said in his Southern drawl, “That’s really cool, little man.”

It was a day that showcased the sweet, caring side of Cousins — a stark contrast to the Cousins most NBA fans have come to know.

Thanks to run-ins with coaches, teammates, opponents, referees, fans and media members over his eight-year career, he’s been tagged with the worst of labels: thug, malcontent, locker-room cancer. That stigma, not just his torn left Achilles tendon, is why Cousins — a four-time NBA All-Star in his prime — reverted to what he called his “last resort” last summer and signed a one-year, $5.3 million contract with Golden State.

But to many in Mobile, Cousins is still “Marc,” the self-described mama’s boy who loves a good prank, doesn’t drink, didn’t have a driver’s license until he reached the NBA and has never been arrested. In this slow-paced port city of 190,265, nestled along the Mobile River and bell-shaped Mobile Bay, lie at least some of the answers to a query that’s confounded the league since he entered it:

Who is the real DeMarcus Cousins?

“Everything that he knows began in Mobile,” said Danny Pritchett, head coach of Cousins’ Amateur Athletic Union team. “He can make anywhere his home, but Mobile is where his heart is.”

More than eight dozen students, handpicked from five local schools for good behavior and strong grades, sat in an airport hangar on the southern edge of Mobile wearing green T-shirts with a caricature of Cousins in a Santa Claus costume. In front of them were tables lined with gifts: Puma duffel bags, backpacks, sweatshirts, stocking caps and $200 gift cards that they would soon spend at Target.

“I didn’t have the best Christmases growing up, but my mom and family did what they could,” Cousins told the kids. “I’m just spreading the joy, spreading the love and helping out in any way possible.”

Though his father lived in Mobile, Cousins had little relationship with him growing up. Cousins’ mother, Monique, supported her six kids — four girls, two boys — as a licensed vocational nurse, moving the family to Birmingham when Cousins was in fifth grade. As her children’s itineraries got more chaotic, she worked in home health care or nursing homes, picking up assignments when she could.

DeMarcus, her second-oldest, took medication for attention deficit disorder during elementary school, but he stopped after the sixth grade because it made him feel listless. Around then, the growth spurt hit. By his 12th birthday, he stood 6-4.

During trips to the grocery store, Monique made sure to keep an eye on her gangly preteen. Not yet comfortable with his long limbs, DeMarcus often knocked over displays or bumped into shopping carts, drawing glares from store employees and shoppers. Monique explained that he was just a boy, that looks can deceive.

Pritchett recalled when Gary Williams, an assistant coach with the AAU’s Birmingham Storm, was searching for local talent and spotted Cousins keeping the book at the scorer’s table during a middle school basketball game. Assuming he was a junior or senior in high school, Williams asked him whether he knew of any seventh-graders who wanted to play travel ball.

“I’m in seventh grade,” Cousins said.

Like many kids in Alabama, Cousins fancied himself a football player. He had played only pickup basketball. A homebody, Cousins didn’t like the idea of leaving town for tournaments; he worried about plane crashes and car accidents.

But Monique, concerned her son would get injured playing football, insisted that he join the Storm. In his first weeks with Pritchett, Cousins uttered little more than a two-word refrain — “Yes, sir” — as he struggled through such basics as layups and bounce passes.

“The scary thing was how fast he improved,” Pritchett said. “He was so determined that, whenever I showed him something, he did it over and over until he got it.”

Cousins started pestering Pritchett daily for one-on-one work. When Pritchett wasn’t available, his sons led Cousins through drills.

By the time he entered E.B. Erwin High School in the Birmingham suburb of Center Point, Cousins was a 6-8 forward with the ballhandling and passing ability of a point guard. Word of the ninth-grade sensation traveled quickly. Unable to accommodate the crowds he drew, Erwin officials moved multiple games to nearby Jefferson State Community College.

When a reporter from the Birmingham News interviewed him, the young star was candid about his goals: “I want to be the best. I want to be a legend in Alabama.”

His devotion to that ambition was clear during a Nike All-America camp in St. Louis the following summer. Cousins was reaching for a loose ball when an opponent elbowed him in the face and knocked out two front teeth. Blood still dripping from his mouth, Cousins rushed out of his dental appointment that afternoon. There was another game to play.

Days later, the college recruiting website Rivals.com ranked him as the top incoming 10th-grader in the country. Cousins had played organized basketball for little more than two years.

“I didn’t handle all the attention well,” Cousins said. “That was part of my struggle growing up. I always viewed myself as a regular kid. I was a product of my environment. Nobody where I came from has ever really been in those situations or knew how to handle those situations.”

Those closest to Cousins have a tough time reconciling the petulant bully often portrayed in the media with the big-hearted jokester they know off the court.

“There’s two different DeMarcuses,” said Monique, who now lives in the Mobile suburb of Spanish Fort in a house Cousins bought. “When he’s on that stage, he’s that fiery competitor. But when he’s off that stage, he’s that laid-back DeMarcus, that funny DeMarcus, that giving DeMarcus. That’s what we see all the time.”

It doesn’t help that Cousins purposefully keeps his circle small. Outside of his mother, siblings, fiancee, two young kids, longtime manager Andrew Rogers, and a handful of former teammates and childhood friends, few are close with him and get to know his softer side.

Cousins considers community outreach efforts such as Santa Cuz — to many NBA players, a photo opportunity — a personal experience not necessarily meant for public consumption. Still, Cousins, the second-most ejected player in league history, won the inaugural Offseason NBA Cares Community Assist Award last year for his service work in Alabama, New Orleans, Sacramento and South Africa.

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“He really can sniff out BS,” said Otis Hughley, who was Cousins’ head coach at Mobile’s LeFlore Magnet High School. “And I don’t think he goes out of his way to do that. It’s just that people have been so disingenuous throughout his life.”

Soon after Cousins started to gain national buzz as a ninth-grader, high-profile AAU teams — with their free flights, sneakers and tickets to NBA games — tried to poach him from Pritchett’s grassroots operation. The Storm relied on parent volunteers and car washes to help fund their budget, but Cousins didn’t care. Pritchett had been a father figure when he sorely needed one.

Cousins noticed how recruiters’ demeanor changed once he told them he was sticking with the Storm. To them, Cousins began to see, he was nothing more than a commodity.

One afternoon, Pritchett pulled him aside after practice and asked whether he liked how his mom was living. When Cousins said, “We’re doing OK,” Pritchett told him that he had the talent to provide his family with a better life.

The coach’s message resonated, and Cousins made the game his focus. Throughout high school, he didn’t date. Cousins attended an all-star camp instead of the prom. While his friends cheered the football team, Cousins hoisted shots alone in the gym.

The only obstacle to his goals proved to be his temper. After getting into a physical altercation with a faculty member on a school bus after a game, Cousins was suspended for the second half of his sophomore season at Erwin High. His repeated assertions that he was defending himself didn’t keep the incident from staining his reputation. It would follow him to the University of Kentucky and, ultimately, the NBA.

Cousins briefly enrolled at another Birmingham-area school, but was ruled ineligible after state athletic officials determined he and two other athletes had been improperly recruited. In need of her hometown support system, Monique moved the family back to Mobile.

Though she was driving her son four hours to Birmingham to practice with the Storm, she enrolled him at local powerhouse LeFlore High. Cousins had been impressed by the coach, Hughley, months earlier when they met at the state championship game, and Hughley didn’t try to pitch him on joining the Rattlers.

With little other recourse when playing Cousins, teams went at him physically, hoping to provoke him. It often worked. In the state semifinals of Cousins’ senior year, heavily favored LeFlore lost to a Birmingham team led by future NBA guard Eric Bledsoe.

In that game, Cousins missed 10 of his 12 shots before fouling out on a technical. Hughley said a referee told him years later that there had been a conspiracy to ensure LeFlore lost because Cousins had not chosen the University of Alabama.

“The basketball community in Alabama is very, very fraternal, and DeMarcus was on the outside of all of that,” Hughley said. “There was a lot of animus toward him for a lot of different reasons. As a result, he found a way to defend himself. He didn’t choose the right way. He was emotional.”

Despite being a consensus top-five recruit nationally, a McDonald’s All-American and a first-team Parade Magazine All-American, Cousins was not named Alabama’s 2008-09 Mr. Basketball.

In February 2010, before his Kentucky team played Alabama, Cousins told reporters that “probably more people (in Alabama) are hoping for the worst than anything.” Asked why his home state might feel that way, he said, simply, “I’m DeMarcus.”

More than 50 years after the abolition of Jim Crow laws, Mobile’s blacks and whites live in de facto separation. Nearly a quarter of the city’s population falls below the poverty line. Despite Mayor Sandy Stimpson’s campaign pledge to make Mobile the safest city in America by 2020, its violent crime rate is almost twice the national average.

“It’s just the struggle of being in the South, the struggle of being in Alabama,” said LeFlore head basketball coach Jeffery Pope, who was an assistant on Cousins’ teams. “It’s tough. We’re always grinding. We’re always fighting to catch up.”

Mobile has a rich athletic history. It claims five Baseball Hall of Famers: Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, Satchel Paige, Ozzie Smith and Billy Williams — more than any city other than Los Angeles and New York. The Raiders’ late quarterback Ken Stabler, another Hall of Famer, grew up just across Mobile Bay in Foley, Ala.

But when Cousins was coming up, he saw few of Mobile’s sports luminaries return home. In 2014, after signing a four-year, $62 million contract extension with the Sacramento Kings, Cousins met with Mayor Stimpson at Stimpson’s office to discuss ways to give back to the community.

“It wasn’t easy,” Monique said, referencing the tribulations DeMarcus endured as an Alabama high schooler. “But it’s about the kids; it’s not about those adults that made it hard. And if he can go back and say, ‘Hey, I did it. You can do it, too,’ then maybe that’ll encourage people to try even though people say no.”

So, Cousins returns. In September, he came to a park just behind LeFlore High to unveil a basketball court made possible by the $253,000 he donated a year earlier. Spelled out in the center circle, in big white letters, is one of Cousins’ favorite phrases: “Loyalty Is Love.”

In the morning, a couple of hundred kids packed into LeFlore’s gymnasium for the Cousins’ basketball camp. Behind the basket closest to the main entrance, to the left of his framed No. 15 Rattlers jersey, hung a huge poster of Cousins from his days with Sacramento.

That afternoon, the park was home to the third annual “Boogie’s Block Party.” A crowd of more than 1,000 was entertained by New Orleans rapper Juvenile. There was also free food and activities for kids.

“Every mayor in America would love to have a DeMarcus Cousins,” Stimpson said.

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Tattooed across Cousins’ back are six words — “Home is where the heart is” — that serve as a permanent reminder that, wherever basketball takes him, he is the child of a single mother in Mobile who worked 12-hour shifts to give him and his five siblings a chance at something better.

Cousins still struggles to rein in his temper at times, but he credits his Alabama support system for putting him on a path to give back. Earlier this month, while at that Target in Mobile, he saw a reflection of himself in the smiling kids.

“There’s a lot of good kids down there that just need a chance,” Cousins said. “Mobile, it’s sad to say, is not a place of many opportunities. I’m just a guy trying to show these kids that there’s other ways, that there’s other opportunities. Hopefully we can kind of ruin that cycle of oppression and create other avenues for these kids.”

Connor Letourneau is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cletourneau@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @Con_Chron