Nate Robinson, Little King

On a Monday afternoon in mid-March, the New York Knicks had scheduled a photo op for Nate Robinson, the team's pint-sized guard who has steadily become its brightest star, in front of an 80-foot billboard the team was unveiling to hype Robinson's February victory in the NBA Slam Dunk Contest. Alyson Furch, a Knicks PR official, directed the crowd, parrying reporters' requests for interviews with Robinson while tapping away on a BlackBerry and periodically announcing "Nate's e.t.a." The media scrum tensely awaiting Robinson signaled that the 24-year-old Seattle native had become a legitimate celebrity on the world's biggest stage.

A few TV cameramen sprinted down the street. What just happened? Did they have lookouts? Was Robinson there? A handful of photojournalists followed them, then returned to the pack. False alarm—Mötley Crüe was taping an interview in the studios of Fuse, a cable network owned by Cablevision, the Knicks' parent company. The Crüe, who attracted their own, smaller media sideshow, had left through a side door, and reporters dashed off to catch them. This explained the crowd of balding, 40-something men holding 12" LPs of Mötley Crüe's Theatre of Pain, who until now had seemed to be waiting in the street to see Nate Robinson.

Furch received a call saying Robinson was close, so the reporters decamped to the corner outside Macy's department store. Robinson would be dropped off on 33rd Street and walk one block to meet the crowd and pose in front of his billboard. Ten minutes passed, and suddenly Robinson was standing on the corner. Would New Yorkers, famous for their indifference to celebrities, pay him any mind?

"Nate Robinson!" called a voice from inside a McDonald's. Another guy backpedaled in front of Robinson, snapping cell-phone pictures. Robinson hardly noticed the attention because he was looking across the street for his mother, Renee Busch, who had flown in from Seattle to witness her son's newfound stardom. "Mom!" Robinson yelled, and pointed to the northeast corner of 34th Street and Seventh Avenue, where the cameras were waiting.

At the light, Robinson stood next to a heavyset teenage girl whose jaw dropped upon seeing him. "That's my boo right there," she said emphatically. A chorus of Caribbean men around the corner spotted him and shouted in near unison, "Robinson! Turn around, boy!"

When he reached the cameras, the crowd swelled to more than 100 onlookers. Shutters clicked madly. A sidewalk evangelist stood behind Robinson, proselytizing while waving her Bible: "Thank you, Jesus! God bless you!" A Knicks employee tried to convince Robinson to climb a streetlight for the cameras, but Robinson demurred. After two minutes, Knicks officials whisked him down the street and into Madison Square Garden.

The crowd dissolved while a few stragglers stared at Robinson's 80-foot likeness. "Dude is the truth," said one of the last onlookers.

The billboard shows Robinson dressed in the green Knicks uniform and the kryptonite-green Nikes he wore at the NBA slam-dunk contest, where Robinson defeated Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard, the league's reigning dunk champion and self-styled "Superman." The billboard pays homage to Robinson's winning dunk, with his feet splayed wide, a basketball cocked in his right hand, and his mouth a gaping "O."

In the contest, Robinson struck this pose to jump over the 6'11" Howard. On the billboard, the phrase "LEAPS TALL CENTERS" is between Robinson's legs instead of Howard's massive frame. There's a hint of surprise in Robinson's eyes, as if the camera had caught him at the moment he cleared Howard and saw the rim approaching. The look says "Am I really doing this? Am I really on this billboard, looming over midtown Manhattan?"

The billboard pays tribute to the unbridled joy of playing basketball. That sense of fun, even more than Robinson's mammoth vertical leap, is the hallmark of his game. On the court, Robinson never stops yapping, laughing, or gunning. He attempts nearly impossible moves to feel the freedom and sheer pleasure of hanging, twisting, and contorting to make a shot—or just to see if he can pull them off. Often it turns out he can, but even when Robinson crashes to the ground and loses the ball, he peels himself off the floor and hustles back into the play with a stifled grin. At least he tried.

"Some people get caught up in making this a job and not fun," explains Robinson. "I feel like every time I play basketball I'm just floating. Different guys, they let the fun get away. It's like Peter Pan—if you lose the fun, you can't fly. I will never lose my joy, so I will always be able to fly."

Robinson describes himself as a "small guy from Seattle," and factually there's nothing wrong with that statement. Standing 5'9" in shoes, he's nearly a foot shorter than the average NBA player, and he grew up down the street from Seattle's Rainier Beach High School, where he played as a teenager. But Robinson's self-description is a bit like Barack Obama calling himself a "skinny guy from Hawaii"—those four words leave out some marquee facts.