The wall in his home teases so many stories, exhibiting pictures that demand more details.

Smush Parker is celebrating with Kobe Bryant and fist-bumping Jack Nicholson. He’s posing with Dwyane Wade and smiling with Scottie Pippen. He’s standing beside Shaquille O’Neal and speaking with Pat Riley.He’s holding off Allen Iverson and blowing by LeBron James.

“When you’re young and playing basketball, you never think it’s gonna end,” Parker said.

On a Thursday night in early April, Parker, 41, stands inside the Baruch College gymnasium in Manhattan, wearing a black-and-white referee shirt. He picks up a clear plastic bag and reads the label.

“Bloomberg?” Parker yells. “Is Bloomberg here?”

It is. The Lakers’ former starting point guard hands out the reversible corporate league jerseys. The opponent (the accounting firm RSM) receives a bag, too.

Parker blows his whistle, then prepares to throw the tip.

“Everybody in the books?” Parker says. “Let’s go. Five white, five blue. Let’s get a ball.”

Parker has spent more than four years officiating in this recreational league, where he began crafting his post-playing career and dreaming of another improbable odyssey to the NBA.

There are no fans, no benches, no coaches. The clock always runs. Scattered pieces of loose-leaf paper stand in for a scorebook. Parker is part-referee, part-gym teacher, raising his voice and repeating commands to young professionals who personify amateur hour.

On multiple occasions, Parker asks the teams waiting for the nightcap to quit dribbling balls on the side. He asks bench players to stop crowding the scorer’s table. He does a double-take when one player runs onto the floor to make a substitution, while play is ongoing. Another league allows it, the man claims.

Parker shakes his head, then waves him back to the sideline.

“You might ask: Why am I officiating corporate league games?” Parker said. “It helps me stay sharp and fit and engaged. It’s to help you develop your skills and sharpen your mechanics. Just seeing plays, working on your angles, on your positioning on a basketball court. You have to approach the game like you would at a high level.

“It’s my full-time profession, and I’m trying to grow at it. This league helped me develop to where I’m at. It’s a stepping stone to get where I want to go. Once I started this, I was all-in. You have to be if you want to go where I want to go.”

A handful of players act like it’s a Game 7. Others walk up and down the court like they’re killing time until the markets reopen.

“I had to give serious thought to what’s next. What am I gonna do with the next 40 years of my life? … I couldn’t see myself doing anything outside of basketball — fortunately and unfortunately.”

Smush Parker

On one possession, a behind-the-back pass is deflected and finds an unintended teammate, who also attempts a behind-the-back pass, which lands out of bounds.

“That’s Phil Jackson offense right there,” Parker cracks. “That’s the triangle.”

A player with the build and athleticism of a mini-fridge complains he was elbowed. Parker says he’ll watch for it. A more skilled teammate barks at Parker like Draymond Green.

“Come on, dog, you gotta get down the floor,” he yells. “That’s not your call.”

Parker softly responds: “Just play the game.”

Parker grins, places the whistle back in his mouth and runs down the floor.

“I smile because on the inside I know that used to be dumb me,” Parker said. “It’s karma. Everything I gave the refs I’m getting back triple-fold now. I’ve had to learn a lot of patience over the years.”

Toward the tail end of the doubleheader, a player on the sideline asks his teammates if they recognize the referee. He’s pretty sure it’s Parker, he tells them. Blank faces stare back. Parker, you know, he played for the Lakers. He played with Kobe! The blank faces brighten, then appear mystified, struggling to calculate the route which led the NBA alum here.

Parker calls a foul. He moves toward the scorer’s table — “15, blocking” — and provides a close-up.

“I knew it was you,” the fan tells him. “I used to watch you back in the day. These guys don’t know. But I was watching. I know who you are.”

Parker smiles, heading back down the court:

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He’d come early, so Carmine Recreational Center in Greenwich Village would be his. The 13-year-old practiced his shot as long as he was allowed, before ceding the floor to a summer youth league game. Afterwards, Parker reclaimed the court, before getting booted by another game. And so the dance continued.

“One day a ref didn’t show up, and the organizer of the league asked if I wanted to ref the 7-8 year-olds?” Parker said. “He gave me $15 a game. That was good money.”

Now, Parker — the undrafted streetball standout who became a starter for the NBA’s premier franchise — is attempting to become the fourth former NBA player to become a referee in the league. The NBA employs fewer than 80 full-time officials.

“I would have done the impossible twice,” Parker said of a potential return to the league. “I don’t think there’s ever been a journey like mine. Not to say anyone else’s is not as difficult, but I definitely did not have an easy path to the NBA. Making it back as a referee might be even harder.”

Parker has received guidance from current and former NBA referees — including Haywoode Workman and Leon Wood, forefathers to Parker’s quest — and spent last season working in the NBA Replay Center in Secaucus — “I’d have like five different screens to watch the game. If there’s a close 3, I’d pull up the play to see if a toe was on the line.” — but the distance from Baruch’s gym on 25^th and Lexington to Madison Square Garden is measured in light years.

“I thought playing in the NBA was gonna help me politically, but it hasn’t,” Parker said. “Even though I’ve been in the NBA office, I’ve been to the NBPA (players’ union) office, they know what I want to do, they know what my goal is. It hasn’t worked in my favor, but I don’t want to be favored. I want to earn it. I have my work cut out for me and that’s alright.

“I thought the doors would be a little more open than they have been, but playing in the NBA, I didn’t have any doors opened for me, either. I had to kick them in.”

Parker was certified for his referee stripes by completing a written exam and on-court test. He attends multiple referee camps each year, studying techniques and positioning, practicing mechanics — “It’s like the difference between ballet and hip hop. Ballet is very structured. It’s the same as a referee,” he says — and verbal commands, memorizing the rule differences at every level.

“I now know I knew nothing about the game of basketball,” Parker said. “I just knew how to play it.”

Parker displays undeniable passion and curiosity about a profession he’d long despised. He officiates games in high school, AAU, junior college, New York streetball leagues and The Basketball League (semi-pro). This summer, he plans to attend college referee camps, hoping to elevate to Division II or III in the fall.

He chases a career where he’ll be unnoticed at best, where he’ll be insulted and berated when he’s right, where he’ll be the easiest target with a whistle.

“People know who I am, so they’ll make it personal,” Parker said. “When you hear, ‘Ref,’ you can tune it out, but they’re yelling my name: ‘Yo, Smush, what are you calling out there? That was terrible. That’s why you sucked as a Laker.’”

The Cage kept calling.

Parker first attended games at the famed West 4^th Street court in a stroller. He awoke as early as 5 a.m. on Saturdays, taking the train from Flatbush to watch his father, William II — a longtime Amtrak employee — play there. His mother, who gave William III a nickname that never faded, died of AIDS when Parker was 9.

“I was born with a basketball in my hands,” Parker said. “My mom played. My dad played. I was always around the game. There was never a time in my life where I wanted to do anything but basketball.”

At 14, he was spotted playing at The Cage by renowned street agent/scout Rodney Parker, who touted Smush as the “next Jordan” in a Sports Illustrated article, and steered the young star to powerhouse Newtown High School in Queens. Heading into Parker’s senior year, he still hadn’t appeared in a game due to academic issues, building his reputation as one of New York’s best guards in AAU and on the city’s blacktops.

Parker was synonymous with The Cage, known to fans as “The Grim Reaper.” He returns in the summer, officiating games on Sixth Avenue.

“I have to,” Parker said. “That’s home for me.”

Parker played half a season at the College of Southern Idaho. He then returned home to play one season at Fordham, ignored coach Bob Hill’s advice and declared for the 2002 NBA Draft. He wasn’t selected — accusing the former Spurs coach of sabotage — but later signed with the Cavaliers, for whom he played 66 games as a rookie. He spent the following season in Greece, and made brief stops in Phoenix and Detroit — Parker was on the court when the “Malice at the Palace” began — before signing with the Lakers.

The most accomplished coach in NBA history (Phil Jackson) was impressed by Parker, naming him a starter at the beginning of the 2005-06 season. He earned a place in Lakers lore for his game-saving steal on Steve Nash in the playoffs that season. In two years with the Lakers, Parker averaged 11.4 points and 3.3 assists while hitting nearly 37 percent of his 3-point attempts.

“I had a funny relationship with referees then,” Parker said. “I didn’t like them. I played better when I was angry, so I used them to motivate me.”

He split the 2007-08 season between the Heat and the Clippers, playing a total of 28 games. The Nuggets picked up Parker, but released him before he saw the floor, ending his NBA career in 2008. Work abroad remained available much longer, sending Parker to China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Croatia and Mongolia. The end could only be postponed for so long, though.

“When I was 35, I’m playing overseas and noticing my opportunities were slimming down because of my age,” Parker said. “I had to give serious thought to what’s next. What am I gonna do with the next 40 years of my life? I went down the line … and I couldn’t see myself doing anything outside of basketball — fortunately and unfortunately.”

Parker knows the first thought, what usually comes to mind when his name is uttered. Because he was a mortal who made the mistake of boxing a god.

It has been more than a decade since Parker labeled Bryant a bad teammate, describing the experience of playing with the legend as “overrated,” noting Bryant wouldn’t speak with him off the court until he had “more accolades” and how Parker eventually stopped passing to the future Hall of Famer. The Mamba’s venom left Parker with a permanent stain: Bryant said Parker “shouldn’t have been in the NBA, but [the Lakers] were too cheap to pay for a point guard.”

Parker later apologized, and reached out to Bryant on multiple occasions, but never spoke with him before a tragic helicopter crash claimed Bryant’s life in Jan. 2020.

“I brought it upon myself, and I take accountability for what I said,” Parker said. “I did get a chance to apologize for the things I said. I wish there was an opportunity to clear the air with some of the things Kobe put out there that tarnished my name, saying I was the worst player in the NBA. I tried for many years to rebrand myself because of it, and that’s what I’m doing now.”

The newly married man, recently settled in New Jersey, speaks of his playing career with pride. He was paid to play basketball for more than 15 years. He traveled the world. He did what almost every player at The Cage — at Rucker, at Dyckman, at Kingdome, at a court near you — dreams of before failing. Parker watches a new generation hunt similar success. He sees weekend warriors ache for small tastes of glory in empty gyms.

Parker won’t allow himself to enjoy the game like that again, fearful of injury disrupting his new career.

“I’m still connected to the game,” Parker said. “It puts me back on that hardwood. When I step out there, I can still feel the energy, like I’m warming up on a layup line. I’m still out there on that stage.”

Parker is upbeat and engaged throughout the dreary corporate league doubleheader. He is forced to cut both games short, via mercy rule. A third game was erased from the slate. He learns of this when the teams don’t show up.

Play finishes. The court empties. The ball is in Parker’s hands. He takes a 3-pointer, the only shot he’ll allow himself to take this evening. Nothing but net.

Less than 48 hours later, Parker is in Allentown, Pa., as one of three referees chosen to work the All-Star Game in The Basketball League.

He shares the news, beaming like a kid who brought home his first ‘A’:

“That is going on my résumé.”