Royce White says he's ready to play for NBA team. Anxiety was blown out of proportion.

http://www.twincities.com/sports/ci_24809813/former-minnesota-prep-star-royce-white-has-an

His frank discussions earlier this year about his struggles put the story front and center, but, somewhat curiously, White now says he feels that "the anxiety story got blown out of proportion."

He explained: "The media shaped it like I'm this anxious kid and I need all this special help, but it wasn't about that. It was about creating a policy for people who have mental health disorders."

Among other things, he said, he never refused to fly, but rather, he insisted that the teams let him travel by bus when possible (he made several trips by plane while with the 76ers). Nor, he said, does he typically feel anxious while he is playing, only beforehand and at odd moments he cannot always predict.

He is not cured, he said, but rather "very aware of my triggers."

The biggest of these is his obsessive-compulsive tendency, which strikes when he feels things are spinning out of control.

"Being disorganized makes me really anxious," he said.

His house was so clean, so devoid of mess or clutter, that it was as if no one lived there at all -- let alone a 22-year-old with a wife and two small children, ages 2 and 6 months. The three of them were upstairs somewhere, White said, and certainly no noise gave them away; the only sign of children was a pair of tiny sneakers by the door and a plastic basketball hoop that came up to about White's waist in the living room.

White's own possessions are in strict order. His clothes are organized by "brands and color schemes, the way they would in the store," he said.

His extensive DVD selection is alphabetized, according to a system he devised to deal with the vexing question of movies beginning with "The." Under his scheme, "The Goonies" goes with the T's, because "The" is integral to the title; "The Great Debaters," about a college debate team, goes with the G's, because "The" is ancillary (it makes sense to him).

Unlike many professional sports players consumed to the point of tunnel vision about their sports, White has a constellation of nonsports interests. There is the clothing line he and his wife, a former model, are planning to set up. There is his Twitter account, in which he provides words of inspiration and random musings to more than 445,000 followers and responds to abuse with the hashtag, #BeWell. There is his charitable foundation, Anxious Minds, and the new Royce White Mental Health Institute that just broke ground in Houston. There is his record label, which has signed one band so far. (He writes music as a hobby, he said.)

He also watches as many as three movies a day in his house's specially designed cinema, which is decorated with old movie posters, and he has written five screenplays throughout the years in his spare time. At least one of them is a complex thriller, and White described the plot in vivid detail before saying that he was not yet ready for it to be made public.

White said of many athletes: "They have to eat, breathe and sleep the sport, and a lot of times that leaves them ill-prepared for life outside the sport. I aspire to do other things, and I have my own dreams aside from sports as well as within sports."

As a child in Minnesota, he said, he played basketball alone and imagined he was someone else -- "I would be Michael Jordan and pass it to myself, and then I would be Scottie Pippen," he said. But he concluded that he could never be as good as they are.

"I never wanted to be the greatest basketball player in the world," he said. Still, he was named Minnesota's Mr. Basketball in 2009 as a high school player. And when he played for Iowa State during the 2011-2012 season, White led the team in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocked shots. He was named the Big 12 newcomer of the year.

White says it is important to remember that most people never make it to the NBA, and the ones who do are likely to play there only for five or six years.

"You look at all the people who make it to the NBA and become great players, and then look at all the people who failed and what happened to them -- they get on drugs, they go to jail, they die," he said. "I'm talking about the seventh-grade kid, that's all he aspired to, and when he didn't make the seventh-grade traveling team because it was too competitive, he joined the local gang."

White parted company with his old agent, Andrew Vye of ASM Sports, some months ago (reached by phone, Vye refused with some vehemence to talk about his former client). He has a new agent, George Bass of AAI Sports, and says he is ready to get back in the game.

"I'm a free agent, I'm here, I'm ready to play, and I want to play," he said. "I have a lot to offer a team. I'm 22; I've never been injured; I still haven't gotten a chance to prove what I can do on the court."