"Everyone always wanted me to become a star, then as soon as I went pro and got the contract it was like they all had their tongues out and couldn't wait to get their piece," he says.

Wright bought a 27-room mansion and moved his mother, sister and brother to Utah, but soon grew agitated that everyone would hang around the house all day while he went to practice and earned the money. He says he continued to get high and did little to stay in shape. On the court, he played sparingly and was a disappointment from the start. He averaged 1.3 points and 0.7 rebounds during his only season with the Jazz.

In January 1994, he had his first manic episode. Police found him at a highway rest area banging garbage cans and punching in a car window with a 5-foot stick.

After the season, he entered a mental institution. Six months later, he was out of basketball and driving cross-country to Walker's home in Jersey City. Wright's brother remained behind to sell the house in Utah. His mother moved back to Irvington.

In New Jersey, the same people who once viewed Wright as a hero, told him he was a failure.

"I started running hard from my past," he said, "and using the drugs and the alcohol to ease the pain. It didn't work."

Friends tried to get him help. Former Gov. Richard Codey, a basketball junkie and Seton Hall booster, helped Wright get in to the Essex County Hospital Center and other facilities.

"You had people talking about him getting back in shape to play basketball," Codey says. "I was focused on whether he had health insurance."

When he emerged, the hangers-on dreamed of a possible comeback.

Instead, by 1996, Wright had developed a different routine. He would bounce around from place to place. He spent some nights at home with his mother and some on the streets of Irvington and Newark and in the drug dens.

Walker remembers coming home to Jersey City from Europe, where he was playing pro basketball, and hearing friends tell him Luther was "up the hill" — the neighborhood expression for people who went over to Essex County to hang out in the drug-filled underworld.

By 2000, Luther Wright, basketball millionaire, became an urban legend.

Codey remembers seeing Wright on Springfield Avenue wearing an overcoat in the middle of the summer.

Sandy Pyonin, Wright's former summer league coach, once saw him walking barefoot in the middle of winter.

The biggest of men had fallen as far as he could go.

Done with drugs

Wright, minus two toes, left University Hospital nine days after he arrived. Doctors told him if he had come a day later, he probably would have lost his whole foot. The doctors' orders were clear — stay home, stay off your foot.