While Team USA goes for the gold in the Beijing Olympics, we’re digging into the Dime archives for a closer look at the players who will make it happen. For the duration of the Games, we’ll be re-running some of our best Dime Magazine feature stories on DimeMag.com.

Reprinted from Dime #25, Aug. 2006

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in Carmelo Anthony’s case it says much, much more.

We begin our cover shoot with Carmelo at photographer Jonathan Mannion’s studio on the east side of Manhattan. ’Melo arrives with one of his boys and a hulking bodyguard, and after a quick facial hair shape-up, he’s ready to go. Carmelo is low-key but personable and totally cooperative with everything we want to do. When we start to document his tattoos, it quickly becomes evident that since we last shot Carmelo for the cover of Dime, right after his rookie season, he has taken his ink game to a different plane. Alongside the Chinese characters and ink from his youth lives visible evidence of a new Carmelo.

“Loyalty” and “Honesty” scale the backs of his arms in large script where there was no ink before. Across his stomach, large, gothic-style letters spell out “Me Against the World.” On the inside of his right bicep is stenciled simply, “WHO CAN I TRUST.” And on the left bicep, the same plain text reads, “WHEN THE GRASS IS CUT THE SNAKES WILL SHOW.” The ink leaves little to interpretation — Carmelo Anthony has a giant chip on his shoulder.

“I got them all around the same time, after I went through all that off-court shit,” ’Melo would say when asked about the tats. “When you’re in the position I am, sometimes it’s tough to see who’s really with you. It takes going through stuff like that to know who your real friends are. Now I know.”

The ’Melo standing in front of us on this day isn’t the baby-faced, killing ’em softly, everything-seems-to-come-easy college freshman who buried team after team with smile-laden daggers in the 2003 NCAA Tournament. That was a lifetime ago. This ’Melo is an older, wiser, harder Carmelo; a man who despite living the privileged life of a professional athlete, understands that to get what he really wants out of this game and this life, he has to go and get it himself, by himself. It’s a realization that has made Carmelo obsessive; the pursuit of his goals has manifested itself in almost every facet of his being, from his persona on the court, to the way he approaches his offseason training, to the way he attacks the business side of the game, to his choice of tattoos. He has elevated his game, on and off the court, to another level – his on-court strides earning him a reported five-year, $80 million contract extension from the Denver Nuggets right before this issue went to press.

The off-court drama he refers to for the most part has been well documented, so we won’t rehash it here. But add those events to the soap opera-ish 2004 Olympic team and this past season, where ’Melo was one of the lone stable forces on a Nuggets team that made the playoffs despite being racked by injury, sniping and caustic in-fighting. Then you can start to understand why he has hardened as quickly as he has.

But in all honesty, maybe it has all been a good thing for Carmelo Anthony. Between his second and third seasons in the League, he dedicated himself to an intense summer training regimen that reaped tangible benefits from the opening night of this past season. The 2005-06 ’Melo had more bounce to his game than the Carmelo Anthony we had become accustomed to watching. And while the old ’Melo was more than a handful for opposing teams to deal with on a nightly basis, this one was a terror. Obsessive summer training yielded a faster, sleeker Carmelo that put together what was easily the best season of his young career.

Carmelo’s career-high of 26.5 points per game (including a career-high 45 against Philly in December) and All-NBA Third Team honors were only part of the story last season. ‘Melo flaunted improved mobility and with more efficient ways of racking up points came an augmented killer instinct that saw Anthony become one of the most clutch players in the League. With seconds on the clock and the game on the line, you could argue there’s no one who you’d rather see with the ball in his hands. According to the stat-tracking website 82games.com, ’Melo buried 11 game-winning shots this season, the most in the NBA by far. He put the Nuggets on his back in the stacked Western Conference and landed them a playoff berth and a first-round date with the Los Angeles Clippers. Denver went out, four games to one, with Carmelo struggling mightily from the floor. But the mere taste of success was enough to propel Carmelo into this summer’s offseason work.

“Yeah, it was disappointing to lose 4-1, and it still hurts,” ’Melo says. “But you gotta know that you’ve taken steps forward individually and as a team and build off that. I came to the realization last summer that if you’re not in shape and you have to just rely on talent alone, you’re not gonna get it done. So I’m building off what I did last summer and taking it to the next level this summer.”

That “next level” has manifested itself in a new regimen that — on top of his usual basketball drilling and conditioning work — now includes a boxing workout designed to enhance his agility, coordination, explosiveness and endurance. The same hands that loft baby-soft jumpers now also spend hours peppering a heavy bag and splitting the air with combos. In fact, one of the reasons that Carmelo is in New York at the time of his Dime cover shoot is to meet with his new boxing coach at a gym in the Tribeca neighborhood to jump-start this phase of his training. So important to Carmelo is this new aspect of his summer regimen that he declined our requests to photograph the workout or to even send a spectator to the gym just to watch.

“Oh it’s definitely hard,” ’Melo says of his boxing workouts. “I’ve just started getting in the ring and shadow boxing with my coach. I haven’t done any real sparring yet because I’m still learning form and technique — in that sense it’s a lot different from street fighting. And there’s no one hitting you back.”

This summer, Carmelo was back in the gym and the weight room just days after his season ended. Compare that to the last time we shot him, two years ago, when he readily admitted that he was in the midst of taking a break. His plan then was not to touch a basketball for more than a month after the season came to a close.

“As he has gotten older he’s come to understand that in order to maintain his edge, he has to continuously to work harder to grow,” says ‘Melo’s personal trainer Idan Ravin, who counts Gilbert Arenas, Elton Brand and Chris Paul among his clients. “He understands that he has to maintain that edge. This is a league where there’s always a young guy ready to take your place. Once he realized that you can only go so far on talent alone, he became very serious. Working out became a 24-hour commitment, an all-consuming process.”

“That guy works out harder than anyone I know,” Chris Paul says. Paul spent the first part of June with Ravin and Carmelo, drilling with and against ’Melo intensely on a daily basis. “I mean we’d go head-to-head in drills or one-on-one and he just gets after it every time.

“And you look at what he’s added to his game and it’s unbelievable. People don’t realize how well he can handle the ball. He’s 6-9 and I’m 6-1 and it was like his handle was as good as mine.”

Says Ravin of ’Melo’s improved handle: “He’s worked a lot on his dribble efficiency, seeing angles and getting to the basket quicker and harder. He’s one of the fastest I’ve ever seen at taking something straight from a drill and incorporating it right into a game situation. That’s the sign of a great one.”

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Carmelo and LeBron. There was a time when neither Carmelo Anthony nor LeBron James was spoken or written about without the other’s name in tow. While Dwyane Wade will have his own place in the lore of the 2003 NBA Draft class, ’Bron and ’Melo were inextricably linked going into the draft, and to an extent, they always will be. They will always be compared to one another, their careers judged by success on and off the court.

“I think, by me and LeBron coming out [at the same time], it helped both of us,” Carmelo told us after his rookie year in Issue #16 of Dime. “Because every time you hear his name you hear my name, you hear my name you hear his name. It was good timing for both of us.”

In a separate interview around that same time, he said: “That comparison [to LeBron] is gonna be with me forever. And I’m OK with that now.”

By all accounts, Carmelo and LeBron are cool with one another, but over the last year or so, ’Melo has gone out of his way to be different; not just from LeBron, but from almost every other player in the NBA. His portfolio says as much. Brand Jordan is dropping his new signature shoe, the Melo M3, in November. Carmelo also has his own record label, Kross Over Entertainment, and an energy drink, “C1.5.” He is financing two documentaries currently in production — one about the plight of a destitute woman in South Africa, and another entitled “Prison Ball” that’s slated to be released around the ‘07 All-Star game in Las Vegas. Carmelo narrates “Prison Ball” and tells the story of four incarcerated men in Los Angeles as they prepare for an inter-prison tournament. And on top of that, Carmelo co-owns the Carmelo-Hemelgarn Indy car racing team.

“I want to branch out and brand myself,” Carmelo says. “There aren’t many guys out there with their own IRL teams. It was just something that was different and that no one else was really doing. It’s an up-and-coming thing that I’m excited to be a part of.”

Is all this an effort by Carmelo to distance himself from LeBron? “That’s what I wanted,” he says. “When I found myself getting used to it, I realized I had to separate myself from LeBron.”

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There’s something about Carmelo Anthony that seems to connect with people. Maybe it’s because of the way he plays — fearless, smooth in spurts, but smash-mouth when it’s called for. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t look like he’s been hewn from stone; he has to work hard at staying in shape. He’s not seven feet tall and he’s not a genetic anomaly like LeBron James; ‘Melo has a tinge of every man to him. Maybe it’s the fact he isn’t perfect, that he’s fallible, and he has endured the slings and arrows because he does come across as a normal human. Someone spits in your girl’s face, like what purportedly happened when Carmelo popped that dude in the bar in 2004? Can’t we all see ourselves reacting like that?

When we interviewed the design team behind ’Melo’s new shoe, they told us that they were moving away from the “.5” series that Carmelo’s past Jordan shoes had been a part of (retro Jordan designs mixed with some original ‘Melo heritage). Instead they were moving towards creating his own true signature series because of his play on the court this past season and how well his product has sold in the past. And according to NBA.com, Carmelo ranked eighth in the NBA this season in jersey sales.

Our own forums on DimeMag.com are filled with love for Carmelo from our readers. Whenever we ask our readers who they’d like to see on the next cover of the magazine, we always receive a ton of Carmelo votes. When we asked our audience which players running in the League today are going to the Hall of Fame, many readers put down ‘Melo as a lock to make it when it’s all said and done. And during the regular season, when we dropped our list of players who should make up the next Olympic squad — and left Carmelo off the list — it generated an unbelievable response from our readers.

One forum post hit us with this: “WTF NO ‘MELO? I don’t get why my man can’t get love. All he does is win and put up numbers. Sounds like you guys have bought into the media stuff about him. Since he has been in the league he has taken a back seat to LeBron, who has yet to make the playoffs. Now he has to sit back while Chris Bosh, who hasn’t made the playoffs either, gets all this love … All ‘Melo did was win an NCAA title as a freshman, make the playoffs every year in the toughest conference and up his numbers without all the hype.”

And we saw ’Melo’s appeal first-hand when we moved our photo shoot for this issue from the studio to the sidewalks of Mahattan’s Lower East Side. Within minutes, it looked like a full-on block party had broken out. The street flooded with men, women and children gathered around Carmelo, snapping pics of him with their digital cameras while he was being shot for Dime. Construction workers on their way home from work yelled to ‘Melo from the back of their truck while kids gathered for a closer looks. Men and women hung out of apartment windows, and one woman made a point of letting Carmelo know that she thought he was one “big ol’ adorable bundle of joy.” Carmelo responded to each and every one in kind with a smile and a reply. On his way out, he stopped to sign autographs for fans and posed for more pictures before hopping in his car to race back to his hotel to catch Game Five of the Pistons/Cavs series. As the door shuts, his bodyguard looks back and tells Carmelo, “Damn ‘Melo, you just made those kids’ year … that’s all they’re gonna talk about for like, the next four months.”

The car pulls up to Carmelo’s hotel and he and his crew jump out to catch the game. ‘Melo says there will be no NYC nightlife after the game ends; he has a workout scheduled for early in the morning.

“I have to be ready to work,” ’Melo says. “I’ve learned that you only see results over time. I need to attack every one of those workouts with a swagger, with a definite chip on my shoulder.”