“So this is how you prepare for the game, huh?” Trevor Ariza asked his teammate Pat Beverley, as the former observed the latter sitting in a corner of the locker room, hunched over a notebook.
“I’m releasing my emotions through the power of charcoal drawings,” Pat answered. “It helps me stay focused.”
Trevor’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t know you were an artist. Let me see.”
Pat clutched the notebook to his chest. “These are private drawings which represent my most closely-held beliefs and attitude,” he replied evasively, wishing that his teammate would leave him alone. “They’re not to be gawked at like a museum piece.”
“I wanna see what you drew,” Trevor persisted, reaching for the notebook, but it was held even tighter to Pat’s chest than before. “Come on man, I promise not to make fun.”
Pat shook his head violently. “No!”
“Yo Clint, help me get this dude’s notebook, he’s bogarting his drawings,” Trevor called out.
Pat saw Clint Capela coming over and wanted to escape, but he was stuck in a corner with no way out. Not wanting to risk any damage to his precious notebook of drawings, he voluntarily handed it over to Trevor. “Fine,” he muttered. “They’re really personal though.”
With Clint looking over his shoulder curiously, Trevor struggled to comprehend the somewhat abstract jumble of stick figures and scrawled words. Then, his eyebrows furrowed. “It says ‘Westbrook will die tonight’, and it looks like you’re…dismembering his body with a chainsaw.”
“I told you they were personal,” Pat said sullenly.
Trevor continued to flip through the pages, all of which were covered with multiple charcoal sketches of Russell Westbrook dying in various violent ways. The drawings were often captioned with generic proclamations such ‘Westbrook will pay’ or ‘I hate Russell Westbrook’. Finally, having seen enough, a disturbed Trevor handed the notebook back to its owner. “Uh, those were cool drawings, man. Not psychotic at all.”
“Yeah, cool drawings,” Clint agreed. “Please don’t kill us.”
But having been given back the tools of his art, Pat was already hard at work at the next drawing, and after that, he was not bothered again.