Glenn Davis can see it all so clearly now. He looks back at hi troubled boyhood and sees purpose. He looks at his charmed baseball career and sees opportunity. He looks toward the future and sees hope. He looks at it all and sees the makings of a great book, maybe a movie.

"It would beat the heck out of 'Field of Dreams,' if you knew the whole story," he says, hoping he never has to tell the whole story again.

It is a disturbing one, a story of such heartache and personal horror that Davis felt compelled to tell it over and over until the hurting stopped and the telling started to hurt the people he finally was learning how to love. He told of an adolescence so filled with frustration that he would hold a gun to his head and consider the ultimate escape. He told of a home life so painful that he eventually did escape and went off to live with a new family. The story is out because he couldn't keep it in any longer. But the message has changed.

The boy from the broken home is building a house for the next kid who has nowhere to go. The young residents of the soon-to-be-completed Carpenter's Way Ranch in Columbus, Ga., will have a dad who lives at home and a mother who understands. The Glenn Davis dream, born of his nightmarish youth, financed by his athletic talent, fueled by his Christian faith, is about to make that a reality.

Somewhere, there's a 10-year-old with a ball and bat and no one to encourage him. Glenn Davis wants to be there. Somewhere, there's a tough kid with a knife in his hand and a chip on his shoulder. Davis wants to get there ahead of the police. Somewhere, there is another Glenn Davis, sitting in the dark and imagining what the world would be like without him.

"Since I was young, I've had a desire in my heart that cried out to kids in unfortunate circumstances," Davis said. "I always felt sad for them. That was deep within me. I always said if I could help them, I would. When I got married, my wife, Teresa, also wanted to see that dream realized."

Davis has spent $300,000 of his money and raised $125,000 to make that dream come true. The boys ranch will be complete this summer. He intends to build another for girls. If this is an obsession, it is a magnificent one.

It started out as a long-term project, one that didn't figure to be complete until after Davis completed his baseball career. But baseball's salary boom has had at least one very positive side effect.

"My first concern was taking care of my family," he said. "But pretty much every year I've been in the major leagues, I've had a good year. The money started getting good. Now, I've got enough for my family. There's nothing really that I want. It doesn't take a whole lot to please me. When my market value started going up, we started researching and putting together a foundation. We had planned to do it after my career was over, but when the money started going up, we said, 'Why not do it now?' "

The Baltimore Orioles just signed Davis to a one-year contract worth $3.275 million. He will be eligible for free agency in November unless the club signs him to a multi-year deal. Estimates on what that would take range upward from $20 million for five years. Why not, indeed.

* Davis didn't know what a happy home was until he moved in with his high school baseball coach. George and Norma Davis took him in after their son, Storm, had gone off to play professional baseball with the Orioles organization. The matching last names were just a coincidence. The rest, Glenn is convinced, was not.

Glenn's real father had been a 10-year minor-leaguer who walked out of the house for good when his son was 7. His mother wanted Glenn to be a preacher, not a power hitter, and did everything she could to discourage his interest in baseball.

He went to church and memorized his Bible verses, but when he wasn't reading about heaven, he was busy raising hell. It wasn't hard to find trouble on the redneck side of Jacksonville, Fla., especially if you were looking for it. Happiness was another story.

Davis has been unflinchingly honest about his troubled childhood. He told the whole story to Sports Illustrated a few years ago. The result was a gut-wrenching profile of teen anguish that Davis wishes never had been written.

"All through my teen-age years I constantly thought about committing suicide," he said in the 1986 article. "I would hold a knife to my stomach and think about stabbing myself, or sometimes I'd consider running out into the street in front of a car. Many nights I would sit in my room crying and ask God why he was letting these things happen to me. I felt like an ugly duckling, unloved and alone in the world."

To hear him tell it now, those who dredge up his past for dramatic effect have missed the point. This is not about anger or even regret. Catharsis? Maybe. Redemption? Certainly. But this is not an angry man.

"It's irrelevant," Davis said. "When I said those things, it was new to me. It was therapy. But when it started to portray my parents as evil monsters, I closed that chapter of the book. I realize now that I made a mistake.

"The thing that's important -- the thing that people should relate to -- is the reconciliation. That's the thing for a kid to learn -- that good things can happen with a little bit of conciliation, a little bit of forgiveness. My heart cries out for my mother more than ever. It's only been the last four or five years that I could say, 'Mom, I love you.' "

Now, he has kids of his own. Three of them. Now, he understands that being a parent is a lot more complicated than it might have seemed to a troubled adolescent. Now, he has accepted the faith that his mother could not drill into him with a belt or a Bible.

"All that is history," he said. "I've forgiven my parents. I love both my parents. I'm not dwelling on the things that happened. People want to get dramatic about it. Leave it as this: I had a rough childhood. There were a lot of difficulties. I'm older now. I realize now that a lot of those problems were 50-50. Some of them were provoked by my rebellion.

"When I left home, it was 'Nice knowing you, Mom, see you later, have a nice funeral.' I was never going back. But I was able to go back and say I was wrong. I had never told my mother I loved her. It was a big step for me to do that."

Davis wants to talk about healing now. He is not interested in dragging his family through an umpteenth retelling of the same sad story. He can go home again, though he has chosen not to make Jacksonville his home.

"What I have to deal with now is, my mother and father are alive and they read that stuff," he said. "The way they've made it sound, well, things weren't really that bad. It hurts me when I read it. There's going to be no more talking about it after this. When I talk about it, it will be one-on-one or with kids. I'll only talk about it if it can help someone at that time.

"A lot of good has come out of that. I'm thankful now that I went through it, because I can really relate to kids. They can't say, 'Ah, man, you don't know.' They are all eyes and ears. The big thing is, I've dealt with it."

* Storm Davis and Glenn Davis are not really related, at least not in any biological sense. Both have the same middle name (Earl). Both, at different times, lived in the same bedroom. Both played football and baseball at the same small private high school in Jacksonville. Both grew up to be millionaires in the macro-economic world of major-league baseball. They say they are brothers, but they are not. It is, to anyone who doesn't know the story, a little confusing.

This is the part that Glenn said would make a great movie.

"Two kids, one from each side of the tracks," he said. "They start out hating each other, and they end up being the best of friends and facing each other in the World Series."

That might take some doing, since they both play in the same league. But what has happened already is far more unlikely than the prospects of a World Series showdown.

"We started out as worst enemies our sophomore year in high school," Glenn said. "Storm's dad took an interest in me, but Storm, more so than any other kid in school, didn't want me there. I hated him. We were rivals.

"He was on his turf. He was Joe Stud quarterback, and all the girls liked him. I didn't like that a bit. I wanted to let him know you're not so bad after all."

Storm remembers the first time they met. He even remembers the date. It was Aug. 15, 1977, the first day of two-a-day football drills. Maybe you never forget a face mask when it's boring into your chest.

"When we were in high school, the guy who had the football took his life in his hands," Storm said. "[Glenn] scared kids to death. I think that's how he vented frustration. Kids would leave the field crying and never come back."

zTC Storm was fortunate to be on the same team, but he still learned firsthand how much anger was bottled up inside Glenn.

"On the football field, I wanted to rip his head off," Glenn said. "We weren't supposed to hit the quarterback in practice, but I would break through the line and throw him down. He'd fire the football in my face, and we'd be rolling around on the ground and they'd have to break us up."

Talk about your male bonding. The two went on to lead the University Christian High School baseball team to a pair of state titles. They also went on to become close friends, but even as their relationship grew, Storm was unaware what his teammate and friend was going through at home.

"He never told me about anything until after those articles came out," Storm said. "He would come to school. He was very quiet. I'm probably as guilty as anybody else, because we all picked on him. He was so quiet, and we had no idea what was going on. nicknamed him 'Milkman,' because no matter what pants he was wearing, he would wear white socks, like a milkman. He hated that.

"I think that's one of the reasons he avoids Jacksonville. I live there with my wife now. I'd love to have him come back so that I could walk through those last three years of high school with him."

* Glenn Davis doesn't have to walk through the last three years of high school to reconcile his youth. He is on a different walk now. He resisted his mother's attempts to make him a God-fearing teen-ager, but as a young adult -- just back from his second season of professional ball -- he knelt down on the front porch with Norma Davis and prayed for God to take control of his life.

Since then, Davis has tried to make his life count for more than just the 30 or so home runs he hits every year. In the same profession in which Rickey Henderson can turn his nose up at $3 million a year, Davis has turned his earning power into a children's crusade.

Storm Davis said: "When people say to me, 'Do you believe in God?', I say, 'Yes, because only God could do with a man's life what he did with Glenn Davis'.' When he became a Christian, it was like night and day. I became a Christian very early in my life. I was lucky to have parents that shielded me from the things that might hurt me. Glenn met all those things head-on.

"I'd read that stuff and go, 'Man, I went to high school with him and I never knew. I could have gone to school one day and somebody could have come up and said, 'Hey, Glenn shot himself last night.' It's a miracle of God that he is alive with us today. God had a plan for that man's life."

There are no scars, or at least none that are visible. Glenn Davis has made his peace with both God and the world. There is just the small matter of taking care of all those kids.

"A lot of people ask me about the spiritual aspect of my life," he said. "I know that there is a God. Too many things have happened in my life that there's no way it's been by coincidence. Someone has been pulling the strings.

"Too many things have happened in too many arenas. I didn't want to go to that school. My mom forced me to go. Then Storm's dad took an interest in me. Someday, I'm going to write a book about it."

* The book on Glenn Davis says that if you give him anything to hit, it will take awhile to find the ball. He is one of the most dangerous power hitters in the sport.

The Orioles acquired him from the Houston Astros on Jan. 10 for three of their best young players, no doubt hoping that the guy who hit 28 homers a year playing in the spacious Astrodome will turn the cozier Memorial Stadium into a launching pad.

Davis isn't making predictions, but he figures to benefit from the power that will be bunched around him in the Baltimore lineup. At the same time, his presence is expected to help Randy Milligan and Cal Ripken, who will bat in front of him.

There is no question that he'll help the team, but there is some question whether he'll be around more than a year. The Orioles have been reluctant to hand over the kind of money that is necessary to keep premier players from opting for free agency.

Although Davis doesn't appear to be motivated by the millions, it seems unlikely that he'll settle for much less than market value. After all, he's got kids to support, dozens of them.