This was no pro forma goodwill appearance by an athlete; Davis was greeted not as a celebrity but as a familiar figure in the community. No one wanted his autograph or photo. They just wanted to catch up. The crowd of onlookers included his sisters, aunts, nephews and grandmother. They chided him for everything from his tardiness to his attire. (At an aunt's behest, Davis quickly removed a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words TYSON VS. GIVENS.)

Davis grew up a few hundred yards away, in a two-bedroom house on 85th Street. Today, as they did then, gangs and drugs pollute the neighborhood, and iron bars barricade most buildings, even the storefront churches. Davis and his sister Lisa were raised by their maternal grandparents, Luke and Lela Nicholson. While Davis didn't necessarily feel poor relative to his friends and neighbors, he remembers his sixth-grade trip to see Cirque du Soleil at the Santa Monica Pier. "The acrobats were cool, but what was really cool was running around in the sand," he says. "We lived in L.A., but for a lot of us it was the first time we'd ever been to the beach." Under Lela's roof there was one overriding rule: There had to be more to life than sports. "My grandma would always say the same thing," says Davis, "If I take that ball away, who are you?"

Davis would go on to become an opulently talented Basketball star, arguably the best player ever to come out of Los Angeles, an NBA All-Star with a $13 million annual salary. And for all the fatuous talk of athletes "crossing over" into other fields?which too often means losing one's shirt producing a vanity album or making a forgettable cameo on a forgettable sitcom?Davis, perhaps more than any other athlete, successfully pulls it off. Here's B. Diddy, the politically active, socially committed, entrepreneurial, movie-producing Basketball player. "Every time I talk to him, he has something different going on," says New Orleans Hornets center Tyson Chandler, a longtime friend. "It's like, I can't keep up!"

The 6'3" Davis has put a twist on the familiar deliverance-through-hoops narrative. Basketball is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The sport is less who he is than what he does. But is that a good thing?

DAVIS SAYS he can pinpoint the precise moment that his life changed. Before his seventh-grade year he was approached by Daryl Roper, the Basketball coach at Crossroads School, an overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly white private institution in Santa Monica, peopled mostly by the offspring of the Hollywoodocracy. With its chess club and its student parking lot filled with imported sports cars, Crossroads could scarcely have been further removed from the public schools?"typically overcrowded and underfunded," he says?in Davis's neighborhood. Roper, who also grew up in South Central, says that he "saw Baron's amazing charisma" (as well as his ball handling skills) and encouraged him to interview at Crossroads. When Davis was offered a place and a waiver of tuition, which approached $20,000 a year, the decision to attend was no decision at all. "Grandma was like, 'You're going. Period. Let's get a bus map,'" he says.

After a few months of adjustment Davis fit in fine, moving easily between the struggles of South Central and the comfort of Crossroads, where he counted Kate Hudson and sons of Denzel Washington and Dustin Hoffman among his classmates. "I called it Disney World; I saw that there was a better way of life [than the inner city]," he says.

Davis's interest in activism was piqued during his two years at UCLA, where he met Jim Brown and took a class on actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. As a rookie with the Hornets, then based in Charlotte, Davis befriended Marshall Rauch, an entrepreneur and longtime North Carolina state senator. "On a lot of Sundays he'd come over and bombard me with questions about politics and economics," recalls Rauch, now in his mid-80s. "He absorbed everything, and you knew he was going to use it someday."

In the summer of 2006 Davis, who was then with the Golden State Warriors, addressed the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C., about health issues and the obesity crisis affecting minorities. He also attended the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City that September. During the trip he met with the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Davis spoke with him about life in the inner city. "There's just this lack?lack of education, lack of safety, lack of opportunity, lack of health care," he says. "Barack really listened and engaged. He told me, 'If you're serious about restructuring the inner city, use your platform.'?"

When Obama announced his candidacy for president, Davis was quick to volunteer, hosting fund-raisers and cutting checks. (He and Obama aide Reggie Love texted each other congratulations on election night.) "Our country is at a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would put it," says Davis. "I feel like this [election result] is a new beginning, for the U.S. and even for the world. It feels good to say you were part of something bigger than yourself."

Davis's other significant nonbasketball pursuit is his production company, Verso Entertainment, which he founded with Cash Warren, his friend and Crossroads classmate (who is perhaps best known as Jessica Alba's husband). The company's maiden project, Crips and Bloods: Made in America, is a full-length documentary directed by acclaimed filmmaker Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys), tracing the history of the gang culture in South Central. "I think Baron was particularly taken with it because this was his community," says Peralta. "He was like, 'If I had made a few different choices, that could have been me.'"

For more than a year Davis was in constant contact with Peralta, doing everything from helping to broker interviews with gang members to making suggestions for the sound track. Whenever he was in L.A., he and Peralta would watch footage together. The next day Davis would send Peralta pages of notes and suggestions. "I was really impressed by how deeply Baron was involved," says Peralta, "and how much he wanted something to be said about poor, black men and how they're not born wanting to pick up a gun and kill. At the same time, he listened, he wasn't dictatorial and he didn't overstate himself."

The film made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival last January and last month was named a finalist for an Academy Award nomination in the documentary feature category. (Verso's next project is a docudrama for HBO, ABCD Camp, starring James Gandolfini as sneaker executive Sonny Vaccaro.)

Davis is a principal in an Internet start-up, ibeatyou.com, which pits users against one another in various oddball competitions. (If you haven't seen the Davis--Steve Nash entry for Best Movie Trailer Spoof, go to YouTube and treat yourself.) He recently invested in Conga, a new club across from Staples Center. He's a spokesman for Jenny Craig. Oh, and he's planning a trip to China?"The next frontier, baby," he says?as part of his endorsement deal with Li-Ning, that country's top athletic apparel company. Otherwise, he has an abundance of spare time.

WHEN YOU'VE been involved in a successful presidential campaign, produced an Oscar-worthy documentary and include among your goals for 2009 brokering a truce among Bloods, Crips and Latino gangs, it's easy to see how tossing a ball into a basket against, say, the Milwaukee Bucks could seem somewhat trifling. And while Davis won't cop to it, there is a sense in some corners that his extracurricular activities have exacted a price on his Basketball.

The last two years in Golden State had been arguably the best of Davis's career. Last season he averaged 21.8 points and 7.6 assists, and the year before, the Warriors stunned the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the playoffs. But Davis opted out of his contract last July and signed instead with the Clippers.

Aside from the lure of returning to Southern California?closer to his family, his community and his ventures?Davis had planned to join with All-Star forward Elton Brand and form an inside-outside coupling to compete with that of any team in the Western Conference. But the plan went badly awry when Brand signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. Bottom line: Davis joined a different team from the one that he had imagined. The bottom line is also the spot that the Clippers, 4--16 through Sunday, occupy in the Pacific Division standings.

Predictably, the Clippers' pricey point guard has been saddled with blame for the team's failures. Davis and coach Mike Dunleavy have already feuded about the play-calling, and while Davis's 17.9-point and 8.2-assist averages exceed his career marks, his joie de hoops has seldom been in evidence. Typical Davis snapshot: On one series he'll break down a defender and attack the basket, soaring so high his bulky body almost appears Photoshopped in midair. On a subsequent series he'll throw the ball away, frustration apparent on his face.

Davis is finding out that the line between being perceived as a Renaissance man or a dilettante can be a fine one. Asked about Davis's competitive resolve, Hornets coach Byron Scott says tepidly, "My take on him is that he's a very talented point guard, and I'll leave it at that." Recently, Roper, the Crossroads coach who now works for Davis's foundation, had a heart-to-heart with his former player. "I told him we all get distracted by what's attainable and obtainable, but first and foremost, you're a Basketball player. Focus on what made you what you are. I want to see you be an All-Star for the next four or five years and turn the Clippers around. Movies and whatnot can wait."

Davis has heard the concern that he's spread too thin, but he is convinced that, at age 29, his passion for Basketball burns as fiercely as ever. "Basketball saved my life, it really did," he says. "I owe everything to this game. I could never be one of those players who signs a big contract and then doesn't want to play. People look at all the things I have going on and say it's a distraction. But, you know, they're hobbies. Basketball is my stage, and the failing just makes you hungrier."

He does agree with a visitor that it makes for an interesting theoretical discussion. Is an athlete's chief obligation to his talent or to his community? And if his performance happens to suffer slightly in service of the latter, is that really such a bad thing?

As he considers the topic in the back of Urban Legends, his grandmother listens in. She is now in her 80s and confined to a wheelchair, but Lela Nicholson still cuts a dignified, authoritative figure. And it's clear she's gotten the answer to the question she so often posed to Davis in his childhood. Who would her grandson be without Basketball? Pretty much who he is now.

"My grandma would always say to me, If I take that ball away, WHO ARE YOU?" says Davis.

Davis is finding out that the line between RENAISSANCE MAN AND DILETTANTE can be a fine one.

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