Ron Artest was one of the NBA’s bad boys.
“His polarizing personality led to him being involved in some of the most infamous on-court altercations in NBA history. In 2004, World Peace, then a star on the Indiana Pacers, was involved with what the New York Times referred to as the ‘one of the worst’ brawls in sports history when his team played against the Detroit Pistons,” Ebony reported. The incident became known as “Malice at the Palace.”
As a result nine players were suspended and Artest got an 86-game suspension. This is still the longest suspension in NBA history for a non-drug-related offense. He also had to pay a $5 million fine.
Now the life and times of Artest and the journey in how he became Metta World Peace has been captured in a new Showtime documentary called “Quiet Storm: The Ron Artest Story” (directed and produced by the former ESPN feature producer Johnny Sweet).
“It’s called ‘Quiet Storm.’ It’s the story about Ron Artest. I changed my name in 2011 and [the documentary] is about my early days in the league,” World Peace told Ebony. “It goes through the evolution of my career starting out and getting drafted and situations that got me suspensions in the NBA.”
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“I watched it and it’s like, Oh boy, I gotta relive these moments,” Metta World Peace, who won a championship with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2010, told The Atlantic. “The people I was affecting, we never sat down together, so we never actually experienced those moments together. I never knew how they felt. They didn’t know how I was feeling. On a TV screen, you get a chance to see everything.”
In the film, World Peace talks about his troubled childhood in the Queensbridge housing projects in New York, where he often saw his mother and father physically fighting. And he opens up about his 2007 arrest on domestic-violence charges (to which he pleaded no contest). He ent to therapy afterward.
“The documentary’s main message, in all this, is about growth. World Peace, once considered an enemy of the league, won the NBA’s prestigious J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award seven years after the Palace fight. He auctioned his NBA championship ring and raised $650,000 for mental-health charities,” The Atlantic reported.
