Whatever happened to Dajuan Wagner?

Watching Wagner watch a basketball game, I got the sense that he was having to hold himself back, using all the power in his 6-2, 200-pound frame to stay off the court. Those who know him say Wagner's personality is defined by the game. On the court, he's a killer. Off it, he's shy.

Wagner is now 28, at a point in his life when many in South Jersey once believed he'd have a trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame all but locked up. But Wagner wasn't in town on an East Coast road trip. He didn't have a few games off from playing with the Cavaliers, or the Warriors, or anybody else. In fact, it's been more than 5 years since he's played in the NBA. "It's hard to tell a 28-year-old that you're at the end of your career," says his father, Milt, now an assistant coach at Auburn. "He hasn't even hit his prime yet."

That's the thing about Wagner, though. He never said it was over. Not on Facebook or Twitter. Not on YouTube. Not even to the local newspapers. He didn't hang it up so much as he just disappeared.

That's why I was at a high school basketball game in Cherry Hill on a crappy Tuesday afternoon, staring at him from across the gym. After years of hearing rumors about Dajuan Wagner, after reams of unreturned letters, of unaswered phone calls and unopened doors, I had found him at a basketball game. If it was truly over, I wanted to hear him say it.

Looking at Wagner, his face still round and boyish, his shoulders still thick like grapefruits beneath his shirt, it's hard to believe it's been more than a decade since he slammed an exclamation point on all the hype that once surrounded him - when on Jan. 16, 2001, he scored 100 points in a high school game and established himself as a player so skilled on the hardwood that the "Messiah" tattoo on his left biceps seemed an apt nickname.

He had already been a local star for years by then. In Camden, people talked reverently about Dajuan Wagner when he was in middle school. In high school, he was one of the nation's best players, scoring more points in New Jersey than anyone before or since. He averaged more than 42 points per game his senior year, and became a regular in the pages of newspapers and magazines all across the country. If anyone saw trouble for Wagner, or believed his destiny was to be anything but an NBA star, they were drowned out by those in Camden who believed he was, at least on the court, flawless.

He went on to play in his one season at the University of Memphis before being drafted sixth overall in the 2002 NBA draft by the lowly Cleveland Cavaliers, a team in dire need of a savior. Just before Christmas that year, the 19-year-old rookie dropped 33 points against the Toronto Raptors. His future seemed certain. "He's going to be a great player in this league one day," Raptors forward Morris Peterson told the Associated Press after the game.

But Wagner would never have a better game in the NBA. For the next 3 years, health problems toppled along like dominoes: a bladder infection, torn cartilage in the right knee, an inflamed liver and pancreas, a sprained ankle, and another surgery on the same knee. He seemed to be the Icarus of basketball, punished for flying too close to the rim. The least worrisome of his problems - chronic stomachaches - had been with him since Memphis. Yet they eventually turned out to be his biggest problem, causing him to lose weight and sapping his strength. When he was finally released by Cleveland after 3 years, he was diagnosed with colitis, a debilitating inflammation of the colon.

Soon after surgery to replace his colon in October 2005, he began a comeback. Plenty of teams expressed interest. "Today, he is more skilled than anybody on the Sixers except Allen Iverson," Dick Jerardi wrote in the Daily News after watching Wagner score 57 in a sweltering summer-league game in 2006.

The Golden State Warriors signed Wagner to a 2-year contract worth $1.6 million. But he scored only four points and was released only a few months later. In the summer of 2007, he signed with Poland's Prokom Trefl Sopot, averaging 8.3 points in six games. "He's a finisher and he's tough," a man with a thick accent says in a YouTube video of Wagner's Prokom highlights. "Now with the Polish team, he's looking to re-find his form."

He never did. After hurting his hip and reinjuring his knee in Poland, he returned to South Jersey, his career seemingly over.

On my first day as a part-time sports reporter at the Courier-Post, Wagner scored 33 points for Camden High School. Those days, his presence in the paper was unavoidable. Although I had never seen him play live or met him in person, it was easy to believe the hype around him; he seemed to live up to it almost daily. By summer 2002, I had moved on to covering news for the paper, and Wagner's body had already begun to turn on him.

I didn't follow Wagner's every move in the NBA, or hear about his health problems in Cleveland. I was busy covering crime in South Jersey, where I spent a lot of time in Camden, one of the nation's most dangerous and poorest cities. I sat in courtrooms, waited for reports in the police station, and visited rowhouses, taking notes while grandmothers grieved over their babies - some gunned down only a block or two from the church where my mother was baptized. One thing I did know was that Wagner's rookie season was over when I wrote this sentence: "A federal indictment names 13 defendants, including an alleged drug supplier described as the stepfather of former Camden High School basketball star Dajuan Wagner."

Wagner was often in the courtroom during the trial of his stepfather, Leonard "Pooh" Paulk. It was his fame, the fear that his family could be kidnapped and held for ransom, that led Paulk to stockpile weapons, his defense attorney claimed. Federal prosecutors saw it otherwise, believing Paulk was a violent drug dealer. Wagner never testified and never said a word to reporters before or after the hearings. By the time his stepfather was sentenced, Wagner was recovering from colon surgery. Paulk was given a life sentence.

When I came to the Daily News in 2008, the idea was to bring some South Jersey to the paper. Basically, anything I found interesting from Trenton to Cape May Point was fair game for me to write about. I still wound up in Camden quite a bit, looking for a homeless boxer, covering the trial of homegrown terrorists, listening to prostitutes choke up when I asked about their kids. By then, I had lost track of Wagner, as had almost everybody else.

Over the years, people had seen him around: standing on the sideline during his son's football games; dishing out advice to youngsters at local basketball games; hanging out in Camden with his friends and family. His legacy in the city - where he once shoveled snow from basketball courts to play ball, where he led the Panthers to a Tournament of Champions victory, where he was once described as the "Prince of the City" - is forever etched.

"The things he's done, he has to be the best who ever came out of Camden," says Milt Wagner, a former Camden star himself, who won an NCAA title with Louisville and an NBA championship with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Not everyone was enamored with Dajuan's presence, though. Police officers I spoke with in Camden would often bring up his name in passing, saying they had seen him here or there, driving some big SUV. Wagner owned a big, new house in West Deptford. I got the sense some cops felt he should stay there.

In October 2008, I wrote a story about Rasheed Land, a Camden man who allegedly had gone berserk while high on PCP and injured two police officers. Police said Land was an enforcer for some drug operations. They were annoyed that Wagner, Land's cousin and friend, had bailed him out of jail. When Land was shot and killed less than a year later, the Inquirer wrote that "police accounts have not involved Wagner in the shooting."

Last year, I stumbled upon a story in the Newark Star-Ledger that talked of a Dajuan Wagner comeback, a topic Wagner seemed somewhat reluctant to expound upon. He wouldn't talk about his finances. He wouldn't let the reporter see his home, or talk with his family, or take a picture of his son. He did say it was Dajuan Jr. who inspired him to give it one more try.