If you’ve always yearned to ask Tony journalist-type questions about himself but have been deprived of the experience, there is hope yet. But only if you have cable.

At fifteen, Tony has acquired all the media savvy you will ever see on channel thirty-four, or whatever channel ESPN is. Getting him to say something that hasn’t been used and overused by professional athletes since the dawn of time is like birthing a calf.

“On and off the court” is one of his faves, as in, “You have to have it together on and off the court” or “Be a leader on and off the court…don’t just be an athlete, be a student-athlete.”

The boy is a fortress. I can ask him question after question, only to be delivered answer after prepackaged, sports-clichéd answer. When I get up on a chair to gauge his height with a measuring tape, he slowly stands up for me, completely unfazed.

“Do you get this a lot?” I ask as I struggle to differentiate between centimeters and inches. He nods solemnly. When I ask if his height is ever a nuisance when he’s trying to dance with girls, he patiently explains to me that it’s not a problem as long as he ensures that he has sufficient space.

(For the record, Tony Wroten is not 6’5”. He’s actually really short — only 6’4” and change, with shoes on.)

I guess when you’re as hot a commodity as Tony is, you need to be able to talk without saying anything. And Tony has a whole team behind him to help him out.

“He’s coming from a very stable environment,” says Clark Francis. Tony’s family is pretty cozy with athletic stardom — Tony Wroten Sr., a.k.a. Big Tony, played tight end for the Huskies in the early 1980s. Tony’s mom Shirley, a Garfield alumna, was a track star through high school and college. Her older sister Joyce Walker became one of the first female Harlem Globetrotters, and is said to be one of the best female players ever to come out of Washington State. And, no big deal, Tony’s cousin is Nate Robinson.

“He’s got a lot of good things going for him,” adds Francis. To some extent, this includes media training.

“We don’t tell him what to say,” says Mrs. Wroten. “We just tell him, if a reporter comes, be prepared. And they’re gonna be looking at, you know, how you answer the question; are you cocky, are you bigheaded…you know, they’re gonna be looking at all that.

“And every time there’s something in the paper, something about an athlete that’s negative, I tell him, ‘See, here’s what makes the front page.’ You know, because we love to hear bad stuff; the media loves to portray negative stuff.”

His support system also comes in very handy when fending off moochers and baby-mama wannabes. “Tony doesn’t have a lot of friends,” Mrs. Wroten says thoughtfully, but she doesn’t mean it in a way that is supposed to make me feel awkward and sorry for him. Tony is protected on all sides by a tight-knit group of family and friends and professional basketball players, and it’s nigh on impossible to squeeze in without a full-body search and a deed to your firstborn child.

I ask Tony if he’s ever had someone try to infiltrate his circle. He nods. “Just because I’m good and they think, I’ma do this in the future and do that, people try to be my friends because they think, well, if I be his friend he’s gonna pay me back when he gets rich, stuff like that.

“People nowadays, people I haven’t seen in a long time, pop outta nowhere, and try to — go to a movie.”

I ask him how he deals with those people.

“I don’t really go like, ‘Oh, forget you.’ I’m not that type of person, the type of person who would say, ‘Oh he’s just here because of this and that.’ I just go like, ‘No, I can’t go out, I’m busy,’ stuff like that; I try to avoid them.”

He raises one brown hand and massages his face, looking drained.

“Like my sister’s old boyfriend, who I haven’t seen in years, tried to come in my life and — ‘Oh, I’ma work you out, oh, this and that, and we can go out all the time, do this…’” Tony shakes his head, half amused, half exasperated. “Man. I knew he was gonna come. People try to come in my life, just because of basketball. If I wasn’t a basketball player, these people would never came — nothing.”

Another thing about the Franklin game — everyone is there. Brandon Roy is there, as in 2002 Garfield alum Brandon Roy who plays for Portland. Of course, I don’t know this when I meet him, but that doesn’t detract a whole lot from Brandon Roy’s importance.

After I talk to Brandon Roy about Tony, I am trying to engineer my awkward departure when a member of his entourage yells something at me.

“That’s it?!?” I turn around, bewildered. A youngish, stocky black guy in a purple t-shirt and an ostentatious diamond thing is looking at me, looking offended in a semi-mocking kind of way. “Tony’s my brother,” he says. “I’ve known him since he was three; I pretty much raised him.”

“How do you know him?” I ask him cautiously.

The guy puffs out his chest a little, looking smug now that he’s caught me.

“I used to date his sister.”

Shirley Wroten insists that Tony is only a mama’s boy when he’s sick, but I don’t believe her. When she talks, he watches her with a trusting attentiveness; when she makes him laugh, he looks at her with a kind of amazement, awed that she’s able to do such a thing. He rolls his eyes and shifts uncomfortably at the appropriate moments like a practiced teenager, but it’s clear that this goliath of a fifteen-year-old still needs to be protected by his mommy. And as luck would have it, Mrs. Wroten is happy to oblige.

I ask to schedule an interview at their house one evening after dinner. I play the whole thing out in my head: We’ll all sit in their cozily furnished living room beside the roaring fire (for some reason, the Wrotens seem to live in the Gryffindor common room). Tony’s little sister Tionna will play happily on the floor as we talk, and Mr. and Mrs. Wroten will hold hands and smile at each other knowingly as they chuckle affectionately about their son. Later, the house-elves will bring us refreshments, and Tony will teach me how to play Madden.

Mrs. Wroten tells me, however, that it “won’t work” for me to come to their house. Instead, we meet at her workplace in the Central District. The building is nice; the lobby has big windows and an attractive patterned carpet, but I can’t help but feel disappointed that we’re conducting this interview in a smallish, fluorescent-lit conference room and not in Tony Wroten’s Natural Habitat. A little ways into our talk, we hit upon this subject, and Mrs. Wroten speaks as though she is trying to explain herself to me.

“When people ask to come to my house,” she says, “I’m really reluctant; I say it’s not that I don’t want you there, it’s just that right now it’s private because I know pretty soon it’s not gonna be.” She gestures earnestly as she talks, like she really wants me to understand. “Even reporters — I have not allowed any reporters to come to our house yet. Because it could really — it’s starting, it’s already starting at a small pace, and I can just imagine…”

She trails off, and suddenly I feel very dumb. I’m mad at myself for any disappointment or irritation I felt over my lost fantasy of butterbeer and video games. I realize how the Wrotens must feel about all the media attention, how it must feel like everyone who has ever breathed the phrase “high school basketball” seems to be constantly swarming around them, pressing in against the walls of their home like so many rankings-fueled zombies.

But when your son is a fifteen-year-old phenom — a prodigy, a Tony Wroten — everything comes surging in, too fast, too soon. Tony can’t help that he was born into a kind of genetic elite. “He just wants to play,” she says, “and he’s just very competitive, and he loves the game of basketball. And he was born with talent. Some talent, you can work on and get it; Tony was just born with it.” But his parents clearly want to keep him playing — the fear that he’ll get hurt seems ever-present. “Tony wanted to play football — see, we won’t let him play football.” Mrs. Wroten sits wearily back in her chair in a way that tells me this has been the subject of many a debate. “Now, the coach wanted him, but I’m sorry. The fact that Tony could have a future in basketball — we’re not willing to chance that.”

Tony doesn’t worry about getting hurt, she says (if he can’t play basketball, he plans to own an NBA team, create video games, or become a lawyer). But his parents are painfully aware of that risk. “He got hurt up at the Rotary one time, he did something to his knee. Thank God, he didn’t tear anything — but the fact that he couldn’t practice…” She sighs. “Ohh, it drove me crazy. So we went to physical therapy. It would drive him crazy if he couldn’t play.”

After his knees, the next thing on the agenda is protecting Tony’s right to be fifteen. Mrs. Wroten has that special brand of mother’s intuition that tells you who’s real and who’s trying to benefit from your son’s basketball talent. “We’ve had people come and try to train him” — insert air quotes — “‘for free.’” And Oak Hill Academy — Virginia’s big factory basketball high school, which has turned out tons of Division I and NBA players, including Carmelo Anthony — has extended a welcoming and very persistent hand, but Mrs. Wroten isn’t having it. “Oak Hill may need Tony, but Tony does not need Oak Hill. And the only time Tony’s leaving me is to go to college.”

Mrs. Wroten knows that, for many things, Tony just isn’t ready. “Once he got to high school, Tony stepped right into the fire and just started playing, so I feel like, when he’s on that court, his childhood’s over. But once he comes off of that court, he’s still that kid, and I allow him to still be that kid.”

This doesn’t mean she lets him sit out when they go out to eat — “Oh I don’t care,” she says. “When we go out, I make him go. I don’t know why he doesn’t like to.

“One thing I know that I guess it could be is that Tony doesn’t like to be around crowds. Other than that court, playing basketball, Tony does not like to be around crowds.” Now, I don’t know a whole lot about basketball, but I’m pretty sure that world-famous multimillionaire NBA players get mobbed every time they step off the court or onto a sidewalk or into a grocery store or bowling alley. The career path Tony is currently on does not seem fully conducive to a fear of crowds.

But it’s other things that Tony’s parents know he needs to be protected from — the girls, the dangerous lifestyle that so often comes with young fame. “You know, I don’t expect him to do things that sixteen– or seventeen-year-olds do; he doesn’t go to parties, no, I don’t allow him to date. Now — ” she smirks a little— “he could be texting somebody, but there’s no girlfriend.

“He knows that school functions, he can go to. But anything outside of school functions, he doesn’t ask to go, because he knows. And he’s had girls like him — there was one particular girl at Garfield, I won’t say her name, that really liked him. But Tony’s not ready. And I think she found that out, that he’s a fifteen-year-old, you know — he’d rather text you than talk to you on the phone. He’s not about trying to have a conversation; about trying to go to the movies and date. He’s not ready for that.” Mrs. Wroten lets out a laugh, shakes her head. “And his mom is not either.”