| Dalembert's motto: Sam I can |
Sixers center has made huge strides since his soccer-playing days in Haiti
By DANA PENNETT O'NEIL
AS HE DID every day, Samuel Dalembert walked over to his friend's house after school, soccer ball tucked under his arm, bare feet flapping on the hot ground.
He went to the usual spot, ready for the 3 o'clock game of soccer; only on this particular day, no one was there.
"I thought, 'Where is everybody?' " Dalembert remembers.
This day, everyone was crowded around the television that one lucky Haitian boy owned. They were watching the NBA Finals, watching Michael Jordan going to work.
Jordan's dunks and acrobatics amazed the assembled kids.
Dalembert, the tallest of the bunch, brashly proclaimed he could do what Jordan was doing. The boy who never had played basketball insisted he could dunk.
"Of course I couldn't," he says. "I was terrible."
His friends kept saying he'd never get above the rim. Right then and there, Dalembert decided he would.
It became his life's mantra. The words "can't," "won't," "don't" and "no" formed the soundtrack for Dalembert's life.
And Dalembert, who embarks on his third NBA season when the Sixers open at Boston tomorrow night, simply chose not to listen.
"Sam always said, 'I'm going to prove it, prove it, prove it,' " says Cathy Spencer, a math teacher at St. Patrick's High School in Elizabeth, N.J., who took in Dalembert. "And he did. Through bad press, bad coaches, bad everything, he triumphed."
The mere fact that he has made it to the NBA says a great deal about Dalembert's perseverance and inner strength. But making it and succeeding are two different things. He had a solid season last year, turning a few doubters into believers and others into fans.
But now Dalembert sits at a crucial crossroad.
"He needs to prove that last year wasn't a fluke," says his agent, Mark Cornstein, who hastened to add that Dalembert also is in the final year of his contract. "Is this the year that he really shows he's on the verge of being one of the better centers in the league or is this the year that he turns out to just be another athletic big guy?"
The sports world is littered with people who have overcome great obstacles, achieved despite enormous odds.
What sets Dalembert apart is his genuineness. He is a gem of a man who will sit and talk for hours, expressing pure joy, utter amazement and serious insight during the conversation. He is prideful but somehow not arrogant, confident and yet not brash.
"He's lived such a full life for someone his age," Cornstein says. "We always bandy about the word perspective, but he has tremendous perspective."
By now, his early life in Haiti is well-documented, the years spent living in poverty with his grandmother, sleeping six to a room, going without shoes and often, without electricity and running water.
To outsiders, that is the saga.
To Dalembert, 23, that was the easy part.
"Looking back I see it was bad, but when you have nothing to compare it to, you don't know it's bad," he says. "When you're a kid, you think about playing, having fun, so to me it was fine."
The hard part came later, at age 13, when Dalembert had to leave his grandmother and the only home he ever knew.
His parents had left Haiti for Montreal when he was an infant to start a new life, with the intent to send for their child once they settled.
By the time his mother called for Dalembert, his parents were no longer together and more than 10 years had passed.
"The whole ride was sad for me," he says. "I was thinking of my grandmom. I didn't want to leave her, but I know for me to help her I have to leave the country.
"When we landed, I was happy to see my family, but I felt alone a little bit. I didn't feel like a family. It was all very strange for me."
He stayed just 2 years. By 15 he saw a future in basketball and knew that to pursue it he'd have to leave a country where hockey was king. He headed to New Jersey, moving in with an aunt and enrolling at St. Patrick's.
The situation at home, though, wasn't good. Dalembert was in danger of slipping through the cracks.
Enter Spencer, a woman who already had one French-speaking student living with her and her family. The other boy and Dalembert became close friends; consequently, Dalembert spent more and more time at Spencer's Freehold home.
Finally, one night after school she simply said, "Come home."
"I said, 'Let me make you something good to eat, what do you want?' " Spencer says. "He kept saying, 'Big city.' I couldn't figure out what big city was so I just went to the store and decided to make something. I made baked ziti. I put it in front of him and he smiled and said, 'Big city, big city.' I hit the nail on the head."
That was 8 years ago. Today, when Dalembert needs a break, he goes to Freehold, to the home of his "American mom."
"She treated us like her kids and she had two of her own," he says. "We had Christmas presents, birthday presents. Everything they had, we had and she barely made it."
Determined to make it to college as a basketball player, Dalembert recognized he first needed to work on his English. He spent his entire first summer in New Jersey in a classroom, quizzed rigorously on the language so that when he enrolled at St. Pat's he could at least get by.
On the court he set a record for blocked shots despite just a year-and-a-half in uniform and, together with his 6-11 frame, put up respectable enough numbers to catch the attention of Seton Hall.
The Hall loved his potential. Former assistant coach Fred Hill, now a Villanova assistant, remembers a photo of Dalembert taken his freshman year. In it his arms are outstretched, a ball in either hand.
"I don't remember what his wingspan was, but it was stupid," Hill says. "He could jump and if you put him in a race with college-level guards, he'd win."
For 1 year there everything was perfect. Still raw offensively, Dalembert made his mark as a defensive specialist. He blocked 107 shots as a freshman as the Pirates made a surprise run to the Sweet 16.
The next season Seton Hall landed a much-lauded recruiting class, including Roman Catholic product Eddie Griffin, and were favored to do even more.
Instead it went disastrously bad. Seton Hall imploded with a 16-15 record and lost in the first round of the NIT.
"That year was an aberration," Hill says. "It is what it was, not any one person's fault. People said Sam was a big bust. He wasn't the year before when he was a freshman on a Sweet 16 team with just 3 years of basketball under his belt. As a player you get judged by team success or lack thereof, and in Sam's case that was unfair."
Disenchanted, Dalembert made what many considered a foolish decision, opting to enter the NBA draft. His numbers weren't NBA caliber. He averaged just 8.3 points and 5.7 rebounds in his second season at Seton Hall.
Dalembert had no delusions about his ability. He knew he wasn't ready for the NBA, but he needed the NBA.
"His grandmother had had a stroke earlier in the year and the family didn't really have the means to provide the medication for her," Cornstein says. "He thought this was the only way he could make sure she would survive. It was never a case of him thinking, 'I'm ready for the NBA now, I don't need further development.' It was 100 percent purely a matter of survival for his grandmother."
The Sixers took Dalembert with their 26th pick, a move widely criticized by the experts.
"I've been in America 7 years now and everybody has something to say about other people," Dalembert says. "This is what this guy is; this is what that guy is. I know I didn't have the experience, but what people didn't know about me, I have the heart. I'll work hard. I'll push myself and I'll stay loyal. People just didn't want to give me that chance. They judged me."
Fortunately for Dalembert, he landed with Larry Brown, a coach who loves working with young players.
"The beauty of Larry Brown, you find it 3 to 5 years later," Cornstein says. "You start seeing the rewards down the road. Every player wants to play and it's very hard to find patient 19- and 20-years-olds, so when you go through the process it's painful and disappointing. But there's no greater teacher in basketball, and Sammy really needed that."
It has, of course, taken time. Saddled with inexperience as a rookie and a knee injury as a second-year player, Dalembert didn't really see the fruits of his labor until last season. He turned in a solid season, averaging 8.0 points and 7.6 rebounds and finished sixth in the league in blocked shots.
Instead of a bust and a bad draft pick, people began to refer to Dalembert as the Sixers' "upstart" and "surprise."
"All my life people tell me, 'You have great talent, great potential,' and you get tired of hearing it," Dalembert says. "Now I just want to be able to prove it to myself. No more potential. I'm there.
"I want people to say, 'Wow. He can really be something big.' The door has been closed for me for a while, but now I see a small light. I'm ready to open it wide."
Used courtesy of: Philadelphia Daily News |
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