Post by wtm97 on Feb 24, 2013 13:52:19 GMT -5
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Ghetto survivor has lessons to pass on
Bill Reynolds
PROVIDENCE — I first met Rob Phelps in the winter of 1992.
He was a sophomore at Providence College, a kid from the Bed-ford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, then one of the worst ghettos in the country, one of those grim places where too many dreams go to die.
By the time he had arrived at PC, he had seen one of his best friends killed in a dispute over a hat, had seen 14-year-old kids walk down streets with automatic weapons under their coats. And he had come to realize that he was a success because he was still alive and too many of the kids he had grown up with weren’t.
“So this is a long way from home?” I asked him that day.
He was on his way to an ethics class that morning, on a sidewalk full of white kids, most of whom didn’t have to feel afraid when they went home on vacation.
“A long way,” he said.
All this came rushing back at me two weeks ago, when I bumped into Phelps at the PC-Notre Dame game at The Dunk. It was alumni weekend, and several of the past players were there, including Mar-Shon Brooks, now in his second year with the Brooklyn Nets.
Brooks was sitting courtside, and spent much of the afternoon fist-bumping old friends and posing for pictures, and good for him. He is young, and he’s in the NBA, and to the victor belongs the spoils, right?
But Brooks was not the only success story among the former PC players there. Nor was Dickey Simpkins, who was inducted into the school’s athletic Hall of Fame
that weekend.
So is Rob Phelps.
And what makes it even better is that his story now has little to do with basketball, and a lot to do with the lessons he learned from it.
For he arrived at PC with the stigma of being a “Prop 48,” which meant that he had not scored high enough on the college-admission SAT tests, thus could not even practice with the team his freshman year, never mind play.
“I couldn’t do the math on the test,” he said ruefully back then. “I had never seen it before.”
In many ways, he was an inner-city stereotype then — one of six kids, with a father that wasn’t in his life. But as he once said, it wasn’t that big a deal because none of his friends had fathers, either.
This was his world, so in the fall of his first year in Providence he would sometimes ask himself what he was doing at PC, as if he were some stranger in a strange land.
In retrospect, maybe he never had the college career he wanted to have, certainly not one that ever got him to the NBA, or one that will ever be immortalized in the rafters of The Dunk. But he had his moments here as a Friar, no question about that, one of his best being in 1994 in the semifinals of the Big East Tournament, at the time the Friars’ biggest win in seven years.
But the one thing he carried with him from his college experience, the one thing that lasted far longer than all the games and all the cheers, was the importance of getting a college degree.
“The older I got, the more I realized it,” he said.
He went on to play professional basketball overseas for 10 years, a journey that took him from Europe to Japan, a world way from the Brooklyn of his childhood.
When playing was over and he was looking for the next act, he knew he wanted to do something with kids. For he knew he had things to tell them, things about perseverance and overcoming your background, and how education is the passport to a better life.
But he really had no interest in coaching back then, as if basketball was something he wanted to move away from.
“My wife convinced me to do it,” Phelps said. “Now I’m addicted to it. I love being around the kids.”
He’s now both the coach and dean of Bedford Academy in Brooklyn, a school of roughly 350 kids, 95 percent of whom are black. And he knows he has many lessons to teach them, maybe the least of which are about basketball.
He is still very friendly with Simpkins, his old Friar teammate, and often speaks to Rick Barnes, his old coach. He has a great reverence for the school, and for the past six years he’s brought some of his students to PC every summer, for as he says, “I had a great four years here and want to show them my school.”
For he knows how far he’s come from the Brooklyn of his childhood, knows how far he’s come for the stigma of Prop 48, knows how far he’s come from the time he first came to PC and figured he was already a success because he was still alive.
And Rob Phelps knows he is one of PC’s success stories, even if he never made it to the NBA.
And he knows that he is a basketball success story, too, the kid who came from one of the worst ghettos in the country and survived a lot of odds, the kid who once used the game to get an education and now tries to tell other kids to do the same thing.
Maybe the best kind of basketball success. breynold@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7340
Ghetto survivor has lessons to pass on
Bill Reynolds
PROVIDENCE — I first met Rob Phelps in the winter of 1992.
He was a sophomore at Providence College, a kid from the Bed-ford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, then one of the worst ghettos in the country, one of those grim places where too many dreams go to die.
By the time he had arrived at PC, he had seen one of his best friends killed in a dispute over a hat, had seen 14-year-old kids walk down streets with automatic weapons under their coats. And he had come to realize that he was a success because he was still alive and too many of the kids he had grown up with weren’t.
“So this is a long way from home?” I asked him that day.
He was on his way to an ethics class that morning, on a sidewalk full of white kids, most of whom didn’t have to feel afraid when they went home on vacation.
“A long way,” he said.
All this came rushing back at me two weeks ago, when I bumped into Phelps at the PC-Notre Dame game at The Dunk. It was alumni weekend, and several of the past players were there, including Mar-Shon Brooks, now in his second year with the Brooklyn Nets.
Brooks was sitting courtside, and spent much of the afternoon fist-bumping old friends and posing for pictures, and good for him. He is young, and he’s in the NBA, and to the victor belongs the spoils, right?
But Brooks was not the only success story among the former PC players there. Nor was Dickey Simpkins, who was inducted into the school’s athletic Hall of Fame
that weekend.
So is Rob Phelps.
And what makes it even better is that his story now has little to do with basketball, and a lot to do with the lessons he learned from it.
For he arrived at PC with the stigma of being a “Prop 48,” which meant that he had not scored high enough on the college-admission SAT tests, thus could not even practice with the team his freshman year, never mind play.
“I couldn’t do the math on the test,” he said ruefully back then. “I had never seen it before.”
In many ways, he was an inner-city stereotype then — one of six kids, with a father that wasn’t in his life. But as he once said, it wasn’t that big a deal because none of his friends had fathers, either.
This was his world, so in the fall of his first year in Providence he would sometimes ask himself what he was doing at PC, as if he were some stranger in a strange land.
In retrospect, maybe he never had the college career he wanted to have, certainly not one that ever got him to the NBA, or one that will ever be immortalized in the rafters of The Dunk. But he had his moments here as a Friar, no question about that, one of his best being in 1994 in the semifinals of the Big East Tournament, at the time the Friars’ biggest win in seven years.
But the one thing he carried with him from his college experience, the one thing that lasted far longer than all the games and all the cheers, was the importance of getting a college degree.
“The older I got, the more I realized it,” he said.
He went on to play professional basketball overseas for 10 years, a journey that took him from Europe to Japan, a world way from the Brooklyn of his childhood.
When playing was over and he was looking for the next act, he knew he wanted to do something with kids. For he knew he had things to tell them, things about perseverance and overcoming your background, and how education is the passport to a better life.
But he really had no interest in coaching back then, as if basketball was something he wanted to move away from.
“My wife convinced me to do it,” Phelps said. “Now I’m addicted to it. I love being around the kids.”
He’s now both the coach and dean of Bedford Academy in Brooklyn, a school of roughly 350 kids, 95 percent of whom are black. And he knows he has many lessons to teach them, maybe the least of which are about basketball.
He is still very friendly with Simpkins, his old Friar teammate, and often speaks to Rick Barnes, his old coach. He has a great reverence for the school, and for the past six years he’s brought some of his students to PC every summer, for as he says, “I had a great four years here and want to show them my school.”
For he knows how far he’s come from the Brooklyn of his childhood, knows how far he’s come for the stigma of Prop 48, knows how far he’s come from the time he first came to PC and figured he was already a success because he was still alive.
And Rob Phelps knows he is one of PC’s success stories, even if he never made it to the NBA.
And he knows that he is a basketball success story, too, the kid who came from one of the worst ghettos in the country and survived a lot of odds, the kid who once used the game to get an education and now tries to tell other kids to do the same thing.
Maybe the best kind of basketball success. breynold@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7340
