Standing amid a sea of Carolina Blue seats, Antawn Jamison stares up into the rafters and laughs. It’s a Zippy the Pinhead sort of laugh, but that’s understandable given the circumstances. He is standing in his basketball heaven wearing a midnight-blue Warriors T-shirt, a souvenir from his current residence in basketball hell. The juxtaposition might drive anyone a little nutty.

Only that’s not what he finds funny. After pointing out his No. 33 jersey, hanging “right next to Mike’s” in the first row reserved for the school’s seven National Player of the Year Award winners, he directs your attention to Vince Carter’s No. 15, hanging directly behind his in the less prestigious second row. That’s when he breaks out the “Hee-heeee!”

This is part of Jamison’s annual pilgrimage to scrape off the doubts and disappointing losses that three previous NBA seasons have heaped upon him. As each mile passes on the two-and-a-half-hour drive between his parents’ house in Charlotte and his hoops mecca, you can practically see the furrows in his forehead unfold. Elsewhere he’s been cast as everything from a bust to a ball hog. Here he rose from lightly recruited high schooler to everyone’s College Player of the Year in ’98 and was once timed holding the ball for all of 53 seconds for the Tar Heels while scoring 35 points against No. 1 Duke.

The Tar Heel faithful have not forgotten. A man lurks 20 rows away for more than an hour just to snap a photo of Jamison for his son. When Twan walks down Franklin Street, the main drag, heads slowly turn and voices exclaim, “That’s Antawn Jamison!” When he slips into the Dean Dome for some pickup hoops only to find a girls’ summer camp, he is besieged by squealing ponytails looking for autographs. And when he stops in the Tar Heel basketball offices, everyone comes out from behind their desks for a handshake or a hug.

Above all else, Twan’s a man of faith, something he learned from Annie Lee Jamison, the grandmother who stoked his NBA dream when others whispered he didn’t have the brains to survive college or the skills to go pro. Annie Lee, who died of a heart attack without seeing his UNC glory, taught Twan to believe in himself. She also showed him the feeling of power that comes when others believe in you. Maybe that’s why he beats the drum for such unlikely prospects as Larry Hughes, a loose-cannon shooting guard the Warriors still hope will become a steady-handed point guard. Or why he risks embarrassment by suggesting the Warriors, if healthy, can be a playoff contender this season and a future sellout draw on the road.

But true believers sometimes need to be reminded with tangible proof, symbolic or otherwise, that what they’re seeking can truly exist. It’s why he wears an angel pendant and considers it sacrilegious to wear a cross strictly for fashion. It’s why he pulls Annie Lee’s ring from his locker before every game to talk to her. Most of all, though, it’s why he visits Chapel Hill to remind himself that he once ranked ahead of Carter in the basketball universe. It doesn’t matter that only he, and perhaps Zippy, believe the basketball universe can be so ordered again. “I feel like I’m an elite player,” Jamison says. “But there’s a whole lot of people who don’t feel that way.” For now, a whole lot of people consider Jamison the tweener forward at the center of a debate over who is the bigger fool -- the Warriors for acquiring him in exchange for Carter and cash on draft day ’98, or Twan for signing a $90 million-some extension (exact value to be determined by next year’s cap) this past summer that will add six years to his Golden State tenure.

Granted, the Warriors’ original deal looks less misguided than it did on opening night three years ago, when Jamison came off the bench to score one point in five first-half minutes while Carter poured in 16 to beat the Celtics. No one took into account that the lockout that season robbed Jamison of the training camp he desperately needed to make the transition from college 4 to pro 3, a transition that Vince -- a perimeter player at both levels -- skipped. Now it was Carter’s turn to be in the front row -- Rookie of the Year, All-Rookie first team -- while Jamison took a backseat on the All-Rookie second team.

The following season wasn’t much better. Twan led the Warriors in scoring (19.6 ppg), but 19 was also the number of Golden State wins. Carter, meanwhile, led the Raptors to their first playoff berth and the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal, made the All-Star team as the leading vote-getter, was third-team All-NBA and had an entire arena howling like lunatics All-Star Weekend as he won the slam-dunk contest with an outrageous array of dunks. Jamison sat out the second half of the season following knee surgery.

“The first year it didn’t matter, I pulled for him,” Jamison says. “The second year I was like, ‘C’mon, Vince, slow up a little.’ I have to give him credit for keeping everything positive between us.”

The third year hurt Jamison in an entirely new way. He had spent the summer -- two sessions a day, five days a week -- working with Warriors strength and conditioning coach Mark Grabow. “He works, too,” says Grabow. “Some guys come in but don’t get a lot done. He’s on time and goes hard every day. He wants to get better.” But two games into the season, Twan discovered not only that Hughes and Mookie Blaylock would errantly fire at will, but that coach Dave Cowens liked to split the small forward minutes between Jamison and Chris Mills. It was the same situation Twan faced under P.J. Carlesimo at the beginning of the 1999-2000 season, and he wasn’t about to relive the experience. (So what if Mills hit a three with 4.7 seconds left to win the season opener?)

When Twan’s complaints surfaced early that season, the timing couldn’t have been worse. An inflamed right ankle ended Mills’ season after 15 appearances, and Danny Fortson needed foot surgery after six starts. Jamison had all the minutes he could handle now, but his early grousing stuck with the team and those covering it. To the public, Jamison’s back-to-back 51-point performances in December and his 24.9 ppg -- seventh in the league -- were reason to rethink the bust label. But to certain Warriors, it was proof that Jamison was too focused on catching Vince. Forgotten was his unselfish Tar Heel legacy, or that he wore No. 7 as a rookie, believing it would be disrespectful to ask veteran journeyman Duane Ferrell to give up the No. 33 Twan had worn at North Carolina.

Soon, word filtered back to Jamison that oft-injured Erick Dampier and wild-child Bobby Sura were sniping about his shot selection. “To put all that work in and have my teammates hating on me, not wanting me to be successful, that was tough,” Jamison says. Peace was brokered when both sides separately met with Warriors basketball counseling specialist Tom Mitchell. Jamison followed up by talking directly to a few other teammates.

“I just told them it’s not about me, it’s all about us,” Jamison says. “We all had to look deep inside and see what was important. So far, it’s been a 180. Those are the two guys I’m closest with right now.”

He was tight with Hughes early in the summer as the two encouraged each other’s off-season workouts in every-other-day talks. By August, though, Hughes had disappeared. Jamison isn’t giving up on him, but it has him hoping rookie swingman Jason Richardson lives up to his Rookie of the Year hype. “People have this impression that I’m a selfish player,” Jamison says, unable to keep the hurt from his voice. “I’d hear people wondering how I was going to cope if Jason is a superstar. What? I want him to be great.”

When talk of his rivalry with Vince arises, everyone assumes it’s about points scored and All-Star teams made. He insists it’s not. At the end of his career, he hopes what he did to elevate the Warriors will favorably compare to what Vince did to lift the Raptors. “Making the All-Star or Olympic teams won’t satisfy me,” Jamison says. “If we don’t go to the playoffs a certain number of years, if we’re not selling out every night, I’ll consider my career a failure.”

Those aspirations would have been easier to achieve elsewhere, and no one would have blamed him had he at least tested the free agent market. But in his mind, that would have been selfish. He knows his suffering the past few years pales compared to the almost decade-long misery Warriors fans have endured. And working hard to achieve a dream is a Jamison legacy. His dad, Albert, worked construction all day, grabbed a few hours of sleep and then drove a forklift at a candy factory at night. His mom worked double shifts, too, making bed linings during the day and cleaning offices at night. “They’d come home dead tired, but they never missed a game or a tournament,” he says. “That’s commitment.”

Their example also produces Jamison’s guilt over being the unmarried father of a 19-month-old daughter, Alexis, who lives with her mother in Memphis. Making time and setting an example for her, he says, is why he went out exactly twice while on the road all last season. “We saw those values back on draft day,” says Warriors GM Garry St. Jean. “You have to have talent, but you also have to have character.”

It doesn’t sound like much, but the Warriors probably wouldn’t have received that unwavering commitment from Carter, who was reluctant to stay in Toronto despite the success the franchise has had during his stay. “I’ve only been at Golden State three years, the fans have been there a long time,” Jamison says. “The anger I feel, imagine what they feel. I want to be their savior.”

Jamison’s Velcro-swatch eyebrows bunch as he navigates his silver 500S Mercedes sedan over Chapel Hill’s torn-up roads, past the skeletons of new buildings. He has decided the monumental task of turning around the Warriors can’t happen unless he switches allegiance from UNC to Golden State. But it surprises him to see the campus moving on too. “That wasn’t here a month ago,” he says, pointing through the windshield at the frame of a multi-story building.

It bothers him to think that alums have stopped flocking back to Chapel Hill since Matt Doherty took over the program, but all that is put aside once he steps onto the Dean Dome floor. In a late-night pickup run with a few familiar faces -- former Tar Heels Shammond Williams and Brendan Haywood and current UNC players Kris Lang and Melvin Scott -- he wins three of four, throwing down a thunderous sidewinding jam on Haywood. “Welcome to the League,” he says.

Afterward, during a postgame run to Hector’s, a cheap-eats spot on Franklin, Jamison is on his cell phone checking on Alexis and her mother, Dorcas. He’s learned that when a Warriors game is on TV, Alexis will point to the screen and say, “Da-da!” He couldn’t wait to be on the Grizzlies floor Nov. 12 and wave to her in the stands. “I’ve created a human being,” he says. “As best I can, I want to give her what I was given -- two parents. Her future is in my hands. How I raise her, how I carry myself.”

Carter remains comfortably ahead of Jamison on the playoff (2-0) and All-Star (2-0) appearance scorecards, and Toronto was within a Vince jumper last season of going to the conference finals. But the last few months have seen the gap between them narrow. Carter has been chastised for everything from his lackadaisical defense (Jordan) to crunchtime absenteeism (Charles Oakley) to attending his graduation ceremonies the morning of Game 7 against the 76ers (several Raptors). “I would’ve never done that,” Jamison says. “I need the whole day to prepare.”

And while Toronto is ecstatic that Vince also agreed to a six-year extension, he did so only after the team’s other free agents committed. Jamison, conversely, was recruiting this past summer. When he stops by Williams’ Chapel Hill pad to borrow a ball and hears that Williams wants out of Seattle, he suggests a Bay Area reunion. As he gazed up into the Dean Dome rafters, weeks before completing negotiations on the extension, he said this would be his last pilgrimage. From now on, he would think of himself as a Warrior visiting his old stomping grounds, rather than a refugee coming home.

“In 10, 12 years I want to go back to the Bay Area and have that feeling there,” he says. “I want to see my name up there next to Rick Barry and Wilt Chamberlain. That’s where I want to be a legend now.”

Should you hear laughter some summer day from The Arena in Oakland, you’ll know who it is.

This article appears in the November 26 issue of ESPN The Magazine.