Luther Wright lay on an operating table and listened to the sounds of a surgeon cutting two frostbitten toes off his right foot.

It was four days before Christmas 2004. Wright, perhaps the most enigmatic basketball star New Jersey ever produced, was flying on another crack binge, his lower body numb from local anesthesia. But he was lucid enough to hear the ping of his toes dropping from his size-20 foot into a pan — the same sound a rock-hard piece of plastic makes when it hits metal.

"Damn, I'm thinking," Wright says, "they just cut off my toes."

He knew something bad was coming as he made the one-mile walk to University Hospital from the crack houses where he'd spent most of the previous three years.

At 7-foot-2 and nearly 400 pounds, footwear was hard to find, even for a guy who once pulled down $1 million a year in the NBA. When he did find shoes, the other addicts would steal them. Sometimes, he just cut the backs off old boots or sneakers and wore them like slippers.

Now, the frigid winter air had turned the second and third toes on his right foot black with rot, and he was high and on his back, listening to that ping.

Twenty-seven months later, the former Seton Hall player leans across a table at a Jersey City diner, points an index finger as big as a bratwurst and pleads: "I've had people coming up to me saying, 'Man, I heard you was dead.'

"I want the state to know, I want the world to know, that Luther Wright is not dead. I've been saved."

The story of Luther Wright is as big as the man himself — just as it always has been. It's about what it means to be poor, black and taller than everybody else in the inner city, where the most talented kids become commodities who are discarded if they don't meet everyone's expectations.

Wright's tale offers a slice of the darkest side of basketball. It shows what can happen when a guy who is told for years the only reason he exists is to dunk a basketball discovers he doesn't care about the sport — and then realizes nobody cares about him, either.

"I put it to Luther like this," says the Rev. Manuel Donaldson, the assistant pastor at the Morning Star Community Christian Center in Linden, a church that has become the focal point of Wright's life and recovery the past 18 months. "'Luther, you've tried fame, fortune, drugs, women and none of it has made you happy. Why not give God a try?'"

· · · · ·

"For 35 years I've been on this earth, and I'm just trying to fit in." — Luther Wright

· · · · ·