This is not what you expected, and Anthony Mason knows it.

When you followed him out of AmericanAirlines Arena into the warm, neon-lit, stiletto-heeled Miami night, you had no intention of winding up in this chair, cheap carpet under your feet, smoke and disco music in the air, mirrors on the wall and a well-endowed blonde wearing nothing but a pair of glittery eight-inch heels draped all over you. You're not exactly complaining, but you're uneasy about how this looks. You were simply hanging with Mase and a couple of his buddies, hoping to determine how a scowling hulk of 'tude and testosterone with a history of confronting coaches, roiling locker rooms and running afoul of the law has flourished in Miami, of all places.

And, more important, whether he could stay this way if Alonzo Mourning returns at the end of March -- which remains a possibility -- and his role is reduced. Or if his good behavior is tied to his being in the last year of his contract and wanting another one.

As you follow him through the strip club, you begin to wonder if nothing has changed, and he simply hasn't been caught. Evidence for both sides begins to emerge. He has one drink and calls it a night after an hour or two, leaving you to close the place with his friends. But you also know this devout Christian, one of the founders of the NBA's postgame midcourt prayer circle, hasn't joined a church in Miami, yet knows exactly where to find this jiggle joint.

Of course, there's another nagging thought -- what are you doing here? Being here merely as a tag-along observer would be one matter, but you're a participant now, courtesy of Mase's pocketbook. What was the alternative? Stop at the door, hail a cab or ask to go elsewhere? Right. You would've been on your own, with no story and no chance of getting Mase to trust you enough to offer the insight he's refused everyone else. So you made a choice, and as you sit here pondering the journalistic integrity of having Gia in your lap, you catch a glimpse of Mase. He's leaning back in his brown slacks and shirt, a diamond-studded gold cross hanging around his neck, no drink in hand, no girl gyrating in front of him, simply surveying the scene. He turns, senses your unease and grins. He's been where you are now -- pressured to do something simply to be accepted -- and paid mightily for it.

Which is why, when you see him the next day, and the day after that, and anywhere outside his circle of friends and family where you're not at least as vulnerable as he is, he does not smile. He doesn't even acknowledge you, putting off a vibe that is as good as a blinking red sign that says, "Stay Back!" It's puzzling until you stop worrying about what this 6'8", 255-pound man with the deep-set eyes, jack-o-lantern smile and shaved head might do to you. Because it becomes clear he's far more concerned about what you might do to him.

"You could charge me with assault right now," he says. "Your word against mine. Just like that." You're in his hotel room and the big blinking sign is momentarily off. He casually cleans his ear with the big safety pin used to keep his practice gear together, something he does again the next night in the locker room, an interesting habit for someone who doesn't have a tattoo because he hates needles.

"You can't let people in," he says. "I used to look at stand-off people like Karl Malone and Patrick Ewing and say, 'That's terrible.' But you never hear about them in the papers, either. Now I know everybody is always looking for something negative with me, so the more I keep to myself -- which is not my personality -- the more I think I stay out of trouble."

He cups his hands around his eyes. "I'm like this now: I'm on my way to the game, going straight to the locker room, not looking around, go out and get my warmup shots up, come back in, read my Bible, lay on the heat pack, look at film and get to playing the game. This is what society has made me, because when I was outgoing and acted like everybody was the same, I got burned."

His selection by the Eastern Conference coaches to this season's All-Star squad, and coach Larry Brown's decision to start him in place of injured fan selection Grant Hill, are proof that the league no longer reviles him for his half-dozen police blotter appearances over a 12-year period. That includes what happened on All-Star Weekend in New York three years ago. Mase, a Hornet at the time, was back in town and agreed to appear that Friday night at a friend's cancer charity benefit at York College. As he tells it, a half-dozen buddies from the old neighborhood showed up as well, picking up two underage girls at the event and asking Mase if his limo could take them to a party.

Mase says he complied and then went to visit a nearby aunt before going home to spend the rest of the evening with family. The girls charged that he and one of his cousins had sex with them at the party. Forensic tests implicated the cousin while clearing Mason of everything but terrifically poor judgment. The New York tabloid headlines wiped an ugly smear on commissioner David Stern's All-Star bash, which was long over when Mason pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor of endangering the welfare of a child.

"My lowest moment," he says. "Giving them [his friends] a ride is something I would've done 15 more times if nothing had happened. Now I'd tell them if they want to hook up with some girls to get their address but get them out of my car."

When he entered the NBA back in '89, the league asked him, as it does all draftees, to recognize his status as a well-paid, highly visible pro athlete by cutting loose his hometown Slim Shadys. To Mason, that was akin to inviting him onto a high wire without a safety net. A year playing in Turkey and stints in Venezuela and both the CBA and USBL made him aware he could be sent back to the neighborhood any day. "The NBA wasn't guaranteed for me," Mason says. "I figured if I burned bridges and formed new friendships, and something happened and I had to go back, people would say, 'What do you want to holler at us for now?' The friends I make now aren't going to be there when things aren't as good. To me, the people I grew up with were going to be there whether I was big-time or not."

But he has learned that even some old friends have to be culled to avoid embarrassing his mother and his two out-of-wedlock sons, who live with their respective mothers in New York and Memphis. Even so, it's hard for him to trust the league about anything. Not when he's the NBA's most versatile one-on-one defender yet has never made first-team All-Defense. (He's earned second-team recognition once.) And not when the league has stepped back in times of trouble to see if he's cleared before embracing him again.

"When anything has happened," he says, "only my mother has said, 'He's not that type of person.' But then when I'm acquitted, you want me diving on the floor and representing you. It's not just me, it's that way with everybody. If I'm part of the NBA family, it should have my back until someone proves I did something. You think you'd have all these accusations if people knew they were taking on the league, not just the player?"

Being embraced and accepted has been a lifelong goal, and maybe that's why he knows no gentler way of keeping the world at bay than by stiff-arming it. No one grasped that quicker than his coach at Springfield Gardens (Queens, N.Y.) High, Ken Fiedler, the father of Dolphins QB Jay Fiedler. It was the elder Fiedler whose name Mase wrote in the space marked "father" while filling out forms to attend Tennessee State. Mase knows his real father, but they have no relationship. "I've never had a coach look past that exterior better than Ken, which is why he became a father figure to me," Mason says. "A father is supposed to love and treat you the same whether you're right or wrong. If you're heading down the wrong path, he's supposed to get you on the right one."

As a kid growing up in Passaic, N.J., Mason's straight-A grades dipped because he wanted to hang with friends who teased him for being a "smarty-pants," says his mother. A natural lefty, he threw righthanded in his Babe Ruth League because he wanted to play second base and knew that lefties were sent to the outfield. It was only after he decided he wanted to pitch that he revealed his true side: "I never will forget when I started pitching -- and I could make the ball do amazing things. The coach said, 'Oh, s---!'" But when Mase moved to Queens in his junior year and enrolled at Springfield Gardens, he discovered no one played baseball. "I asked, 'What do you play?'" he recalls. "They said, 'basketball.' I said, 'Okay, I'll try that.'"

Ken Fiedler claims that Mason is the NBA's best athlete, which seems preposterous when you compare the soaring Vince and the blazing Allen to the earth-bound, thick-framed Mase. But then you see him dribble through his legs and spin to the basket for a righthanded layup on Kenyon Martin. Or those quick, nimble feet matching Andre Miller's every move 20 feet from the basket. Or that brute strength keeping Shaq off the block and his eye-hand coordination in chopping the ball foul-free from Larry Johnson's grip. You consider the seven career triple-doubles and this season's near double-double average (15.9 points, 9.8 rebounds) -- huge with the controlled-shooting, low-scoring Heat -- and figure Fiedler at least has an argument.

What throws everyone off is that god-awful shooting form. Considering he's an expert on the game's every nuance, Mason's J is a mess -- feet too close together, ball held in front of his face, shot released on the way down, arc flat. The free throw form is almost as bad. He bends his knees but locks them well before releasing the ball, which occurs after a pronounced pause that induces a lane violation once a week -- right before his tip-toed lean spills him into the lane. "It's results, forget how it looks," he growls. (In fact, he's shooting 78.2% from the line.) Then he softens, denying the pause is designed to draw lane violations: "It's too much. I need to work on that."

This is his standard MO -- take criticism to heart, but only after a little squawking. That didn't work well when Pat Riley was his coach in New York, and no one expected it to play for Riley in Miami. But Fiedler reminded Mason that Riley had believed in him when no one else would. So Mason, who weighed more than 280 pounds in Charlotte last season, dropped 30 pounds to play small forward next to Brian Grant -- "When I stopped drinking, it came right off," he says -- only to hear Riley talk before the season about bringing him off the bench. "I knew that wouldn't sit well with him because he'd been a starter in Charlotte," Fiedler says. "You expect to at least get the opportunity to win a starting spot."

Riley attributes their volatile relationship to equally competitive natures and attention to detail, but it's more than that. At a bowling/billiards event for season ticket-holders, both were suitably charming, but Mase made sure he rolled the highest score and Riles made certain he dominated the pool table. Both keep their personal circles tight. Both can be paranoid -- particularly about the media undermining them. Riley insists on being interviewed over the phone, even by a writer staying in the same hotel. Two Heat beat writers recently talked to him separately about completely different story angles, but he gave them identical quotes. Mase's answering machine messages warn callers who have nothing constructive to say to "call ... some ... body ... else! You got nice things to talk about, pleasant things, positive things, I'll get back to you."

Both also believe they understand basketball better than anyone, and that is more likely to upset Mason's charmed Miami existence than another escapade. Mase now knows Riley won't respect his on-court judgment if it's flawed off the court. Cutting back on his drinking has done wonders in enabling him, at 34, to survive Riley's workouts. (Collectively, the Heat are virtual teetotalers for just that reason.)

In New York, Riley routinely got in Mason's face about not following team rules. The only incident of insubordination this season came recently when Mason and Duane Causwell were sent home from Minnesota for being five minutes late to a team meeting -- a meeting called to discuss just that sort of minor indiscretion, which Riley saw as chipping away at the team's resolve. Mason still believes Riley's screw-tightening is excessive, but where he would've aired that view publicly in New York, he's kept it under wraps in Miami.

It's worked for both of them. The loss of Zo to kidney problems forced Riley to make Mason the power forward and focal point of his offense. Mase has had just enough freedom and the Heat have had just enough success to keep them both happy. With 22 regular-season games left, they are just one game off last season's division-winning pace -- despite losing Zo and, more recently, Eddie Jones. But if Zo returns, what then? Riley insists there's no significance to Mourning practicing with the team again (including a full-court scrimmage). Or to his being in practice shorts with ice packs on his knees before a March 4 game at Cleveland.

In any event, Riley plans to have a playoff roster spot for Zo, just in case, and there's been a renewed sense of urgency around the team in recent weeks. One Heat source says there's even a target game the last week of March for a "Zo sighting," barring any setbacks in his treatment.

"The power of Mase's personality and game evolved where he became Zo," Riley says. "It wasn't something I was looking for. Can they do it together? Only time will tell."

Mason would happily return to small forward and co-star with Zo, but he still wants to be a floor general. He knows that view could impact the Heat's desire to re-sign him, which is why he abandoned plans to build a place in Miami. "They hadn't won any championships before I got here, so I don't think you would say Mase should be out of the picture if Zo returns -- not intelligently," he says. "It's going to take some maneuvering. I don't have to be the focal point, but don't have me on the floor if you don't want me to make decisions. My versatility demands that."

Such demands created rifts elsewhere, which is why the rest of the Heat were leery about the Aug. 1 nine-player trade with Charlotte. "I thought he was one of the biggest asses in the league," says Anthony Carter. "But he's a great guy and I enjoy playing with him."

"I think he's a nice guy now," says Dan Majerle, "but I didn't know that before."

"I heard it both from Charlotte and New York that he wasn't a team player, that he was a cancer," says Tim Hardaway. "Everybody here wanted to show him that we didn't know what it was like in those other places, but it can be different here. You work on your attitude, we'll work with you. Not to be just a defensive player or a decoy, but part of our team."

Mase has, of course, become the biggest part. No one sets a more punishing screen or is quicker to draw and then pass out of a double-team, unless it's Zo. And he has used his body to block drives the same way Zo swatted the ball. "I voted for him as an All-Star because he was the MVP of a winning team," says Pistons coach George Irvine. Mason wore a dread wig to the All-Star dunk contest in honor of teammate Brian Grant, who he felt also deserved to be an All-Star. He would've worn the wig in pregame introductions as well, but one of his sons hid it. "That's a whole other side of Mase most people don't know," Grant says.

It's the side that makes him reluctant to flat out tell you to leave his room, even though you've been there well over an hour. So he starts the shower, fiddles with his PDA, turns down your offer to pay him for the lap dance and talks staring out the window, hoping you'll get the hint. All the while, the TV is on, tuned to a reality-TV court drama, Mase's voice mingling with a TV commentator saying, "His alibi did not check out ... He remained behind bars until his trial ... A man who was wrongly accused and convicted ... "

Either because it's familiar or meaningless, Mason doesn't hear a word.

This article appears in the April 2 issue of ESPN The Magazine. E-mail Ric Bucher at ric.bucher@espnmag.com.