Leon Smith is an oil well. He's a bank vault. A goldmine. A blockbuster movie. If only, if only, if only. Leon Smith is an inch or so short of being seven feet tall and he plays basketball very well. Leon Smith is also 19 years of age, parent-less, volatile and hurting. Plenty of people still look at him though and all they see is NBA dollars and Nike endorsement deals.

Last summer Leon Smith jumped straight from Martin Luther High school here in Chicago and into the bubble world of the NBA. He was drafted by the San Antonio Spurs and quickly traded to the Dallas Mavericks. He headed south. It would be sun. Leon would have money.

On Thursday the Mavericks visited Chicago handing the local Bulls their 13th defeat in 14 games. It didn't matter much to Leon Smith though. He is in a free-fall of his own. He had other business in Chicago on Thursday.

By rights Leon Smith should have slipped through the cracks long ago, pouring himself sacrificially into the lists of grey statistics which Chicago wears as its underside. His mother abandoned him at birth. He drifted into the welfare system and became a ward of state for 14 years, moving from institution to institution. He grew big and tall and if you are big and tall and black in Chicago nobody places a cello in your hands or invites you to help split the atom or bring down Microsoft. You play hoops and you hope for the best.

Part of Leon Smith's problem is a lifetime's worth of whispered encouragement. "You da man Leon" is the harshest thing anyone has ever said to him.

Just about everywhere that Leon Smith has been people have befriended him and attempted to hang onto that friendship until the money begins falling out of the big guy's pockets. When he finally got to the NBA his idiosyncrasies were such that he couldn't cope with a team situation, with the disappointment of life as a boot camp rookie in a millionaire's army. He walked out of his first training session.

The Dallas Mavericks tried to ease the learning curve by sending him to Europe or to a lesser north American league. Very, very, few 19-year-olds manage the trick of skipping college and making it straight into the NBA. Nobody was asking Leon Smith to go to Siberia. Yet the people who whisper nice things in Leon Smith's ear told him he didn't need that sort of crapola. Smith and his new employers reached stalemate.

In mid November, he had yet to play a game for the Mavericks when he went to buy a car at a Dallas dealership. Somehow he wound up putting a rock through the rear window of the car. When police arrived at his apartment to arrest him they found him unconscious on the floor, his face painted green. He was rushed to hospital where he told doctors he had consumed 250 aspirin in a suicide attempt.

Smith had been dating a 16-year-old schoolgirl back in Chicago. They started up last spring and ended about a month ago. Cappie Pontdexter plays basketball for Marshall High along with a couple of her sisters. She is a good enough basketball player to be virtually assured of a pro career of her own when the time comes. Some day she will look back on this period of her life and wonder what was going on and who was guiding either her or her boyfriend.

She was along for the ride during the heady days last spring when Leon signed up for the NBA. They were photographed together as the big money came gushing in. Leon Smith got Cappie's name tattooed onto his arm. They were the more-money-than-sense couple.

She broke up with Leon Smith about a month ago and he took it badly.

How badly? On Saturday morning Leon Smith ended up in court. Or rather his face did, beamed tele-visually up from a holding cell. He had no lawyer to represent him, just his old high school basketball coach who in a poignant attempt at loyalty attempted to conduct legal business in a whisper so outsiders and reporters couldn't hear.

Smith had been arrested twice in the space of 24 hours on his way to this point in his turbulent life.

On Thursday he was bundled into a patrol car and subsequently charged with aggravated assault having allegedly threatened Cappie Pontdexter and her brother at gunpoint outside Marshall High School. He had presented himself at the school and offered Pontdexter $30,000 for her family.

He had been released in Friday morning on the understanding that he would check into hospital under the auspices of a deal set up for him by the NBA players' union. He decided after his release that he wasn't going down that path and drove in the direction of the house of his ex-girlfriend despite being barred by court order from contact with her or her family.

THIS time he got himself arrested for breaking the window of Cappie Pontdexter's mother's car and for ramming the vehicle with his own car. Witnesses told the Chicago Sun-Times that he shouted obscenities about the NBA, the Dallas Mavericks and his money during the incident.

On Saturday his old basketball coach stumped up $15,000 dollars to get Smith out of jail. Smith agreed apparently that he needed help but he has agreed that before, agreed it as recently as last Thursday in fact. Everybody accepts that the situation is just about hopeless. Leon Smith is surrounded by a posse of people, all of whom have an interest in him but none of whom love him.

Last week he dropped out of a facility in Atlanta, Georgia, where he had undertaken to seek help. He didn't appreciate the numbers of alcoholics and drug addicts in the programme.

Through it all there is a cloud of ominous darkness hovering over the kid. His story still occupies the sports pages but nobody talks about basketball anymore. His first contract last summer put $1.4 million dollars into hands that had never known money before. Whatever is left of that and whatever will he has to sort out his basketball talents are what lie between Leon Smith and disaster.

It's an uncomfortable feeling for a city to watch the fingers of one of it's children clawing the edge. Usually people don't like to know about these desperate everyday dramas of the other world, but unless a miracle happens death or prison or poverty will take Leon Smith and the uncomfortable feeling won't go away until the stats wrap him in anonymity again.