[Chron]Olajuwon, city a match made in hoops heaven

Olajuwon, city a match made in hoops heaven

Before there was a monument outside the Toyota Center, before a Hall of Fame career, before two championships, before Phi Slama Jama, there was a skinny 17-year-old kid sitting on a gym floor one hot afternoon in Lagos, Nigeria.

As the coach spoke, he listened to the instructions, but his eyes and his mind wandered. His gaze kept rising toward the rim.

When the talk ended and his teammates began to stand slowly, stretching their legs and their arms before the start of practice, he rose like a shot. Gathering the leather basketball into both hands, he went up, up, up.

Bam!

“My first dunk ever,” said Hakeem Olajuwon. “Oh, I remember, because the coach had been trying for weeks to get me to dunk the ball. I had never seen anyone do it. I didn’t really think it was possible, the coordination of the jump and holding the ball.

“Then everything he was trying to tell me came together in that one moment. Everyone was shocked. The coach said, 'Do it again.’ So I did. And I did it again and again and again. I guess it changed my life.”

Dreams have to start somewhere.

For the third of six children to Salaam and Abike Olajuwon, who brokered cement deals in their neighborhood and at the Lagos docks, sports were simply an outlet, a way to blow off steam and expend the youthful energy that is the same anywhere in the world.

There was never a goal, a grand vision laid out that would take him from the dusty soccer fields of Africa’s second-largest city to a hallowed ranking among the greats in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. It was a serendipitous journey, maybe touched by fate, often guided by one helping hand or another, that brought him to his destiny, a home and a seat at the head of the table in the pantheon of Houston sports legends.

“You couldn’t plan all of this,” said Olajuwon, now 45.

Team handball seven to a side, played on a court roughly 70 meters by 40 meters was his first love, the place where he developed the spins, the head-fakes, the jukes, the angles, the footwork, the speed, the athleticism that would eventually become his calling card in America’s game.
Introduction to basketball

Finally, at 17 and sprouting, Olajuwon gave in to the cajoling from friends, the begging from coaches, and agreed to give basketball a try with the Lagos state team.

“The first day the coach did something impressive that I couldn’t believe,” he said. “He told his assistant coach to handle practice at the other end of the court and brought just one point guard and himself to the other end, just to show me and teach me the fundamentals of the game.

“On this first day, he personally showed me where I would fit into the game of basketball. He stressed my role as the center. He told me not to let anyone score. He gave me the picture. It is a picture I carried with me my whole career. He let me know from day one, center is the most important position in basketball.”

It was only a matter of several weeks before the lanky, explosive Olajuwon was a member of the Lagos team in national and continental tournaments and caught the eye of Christopher Pond, an American and opposing head coach for the Central African Republic.

“He hadn’t seen me there the year before,” Olajuwon said. “I was only doing two things, blocking shots and dunking. I was going after every shot on defense and a guard was setting me up to finish on offense. I did not do the jump shot or any of that.”

Pond befriended the bundle of raw, crackling energy and told him he should not waste his time attending a university in Nigeria. He should go to the United States.

“I knew I would have to work one day,” Olajuwon said. “But at that time, I was a sportsman. It was considered wasting your time. When I was playing basketball, I had to keep it from my parents. My playing was underground, away from home.

“Then my parents started hearing things from their friends and neighbors. They said I was supposed to be going to school. They weren’t interested in me playing anything. They wanted me in the books. That is until Christopher Pond showed them another way.”

So, barely three months after playing basketball for the first time, Olajuwon boarded a plane to a place he had never been and a culture he had never experienced, bound for a city to which, over several decades, he became inextricably linked.

“Houston,” he said. “It was the perfect match.”

Apocryphal stories have said the plane that carried Olajuwon to a new world landed on a cold day in New York City and the young African, accustomed to a hot climate, canceled his first scheduled visit to St. John’s University and boarded a plane for sultry Houston.

“I had a list with the names of other colleges,” Olajuwon said. “But Christopher Pond told me Houston was where I belonged.”

It is true that he arrived at Intercontinental Airport and there was no representative from the school to meet him. It is true that a still-doubting Guy V. Lewis told him to take a taxi to campus. It is true that his Nigerian accent caused him to mispronounce the name and asked the cabdriver to take him to the “University of Austin.”
Shoes and more shoes

His correct destination at last settled, Olajuwon, wearing a white dashiki, white pants and polished dress shoes, walked into the basketball office to meet Lewis.

“He smiled,” Olajuwon remembered. “He was happy to see that I was a real 7-footer.”

It was September 1980 and the members of the Cougars, including Clyde Drexler, Michael Young, Rob William and Larry Micheaux, were holding informal workouts. Lewis asked Olajuwon if he’d like to get in a pickup game with them.

“You must remember, I was coming into the unknown,” he said. “All I knew is I could play in Nigeria. I was dominating. But I did not know if I could play in America.”

The trainer took Olajuwon to the locker room and gave him a T-shirt and shorts.

“Then he asked about basketball shoes and what size I wore,” Olajuwon said. “I told him 14 was my usual size. I was shocked that he produced a brand new pair. It wasn’t something you could find in Nigeria.

“I squeezed them on and they were tight. I was going to take off a pair of socks and he said, 'No, let’s try 15.’ More new shoes. Still tight. He got 16s. I could not believe all of these brand new shoes. I put them on and they fit. For the first time ever, I would play basketball without pain in my feet. It was always a distraction when I was running and jumping. But this was comfortable. I thought, 'Oh, man! They’re in trouble out there on the court.’ “

They only played one pickup game.

“I don’t remember who I blocked first,” Olajuwon said laughing. “I was reading and anticipating all of the shots. Guys were expecting to get layups. You do not just get a layup. No, no. You have to deserve it.”

They took him off the court and checked him into hotel until they could get him enrolled in school. He was red-shirted his first year, attending classes while getting his basketball competition in intramural games.
‘Man, I was at home’

He joined the UH team for the 1981-82 season, bouncing off the bench as a brief role player, all arms and legs and unbridled enthusiasm, collecting blocked shots, slam dunks and personal fouls with little regard for the subtleties of the game.

“I just wanted to dunk and dunk and dunk,” he said. “There I was at UH with a team where everyone could dunk and everyone wanted to dunk. Man, I was at home.”

His learning curve was astoundingly swift as Olajuwon became a key component on the team that reached the first of three consecutive NCAA Final Fours in 1982.

“Remember, there were no NBA games or American college games on TV in Africa back then,” he said. “I had never seen any of this. The only players’ names I knew before I came to the States were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, because they had made a visit to Africa for clinics. And, of course, there was Dr. J.

“So when we won some games in the Tournament and everybody began to celebrate and yell 'We’re going to the Final Four!’ I didn’t understand the significance. I didn’t know what we had done. Then we got to the arena the first day in New Orleans and I saw all those people and figured this must be big.”
Foundation at Fonde

While three straight Final Four trips (1982-84) were huge, the progress in Olajuwon’s own game was colossal. He developed timing to match his explosiveness. He combined a big man’s passion for defending the lane with the moves and quickness of a guard. He could make a block or a steal on defense at one end, run down the court and receive a pass to finish with a dunk at the other end. And he was learning to develop an outside shot.

“Those games in the summer at Fonde (Recreation Center), that is where the foundation became solid,” he said. “Those games were tests, struggles.”

Those games were rugged, unrelenting battles under the basket against Moses Malone, the reigning NBA Most Valuable Player. They were pushing, shoving, sweating, banging classrooms with the hard-knock professor Malone forcing Olajuwon to toil relentlessly to keep up, to survive and eventually exceed the mentor.

“Moses gave me nothing easy on the floor,” he said. “He made me earn everything, and it made me expand the limits of my game.”

Unable to simply overpower Malone’s brute strength, Olajuwon turned to the head-fakes, the change of direction, the footwork of his days on the soccer fields and the team handball courts.

“I had a different basis for sports than the American players,” he said. “Maybe it put me behind at the start of basketball, but I think it gave me a different view of the angles and the moves and the things I could do. I never thought, 'That’s not a basketball move.’ I just did it.”
A growth spurt of sorts

By the time the Rockets made him the No. 1 pick in the 1984 NBA Draft, passing up Michael Jordan, Olajuwon was being hailed as the forerunner for the next generation of NBA centers. But in truth, he did not permanently change the way the position is played. Simply because no one else who came after has been able play it like him.

“It was the next step in the story,” Olajuwon said. “How many players get to be the first pick in the draft and stay in the same city where they played in college? It meant that I would not have to move. Staying in Houston meant that I could stay in my comfort zone and grow.”

The growth in his game and his personality was remarkable. He went from being unrefined talent to unstoppable force, from combustible hothead to comfortable, confident, composed leader.

There were all the numbers and all the stats and all the records. He is the NBA’s all-time leader in blocked shots, was a 12-time NBA All-Star and a six-time All-NBA first-teamer. More than any of that was the unrelenting effort learned by the kid who was first turned loose on a basketball court and told to try to block every shot. So he did.

He helped the Rockets reach the NBA Finals in his second pro season in 1986 but struggled for nearly a decade to finally make a return appearance in 1994.

“It would have been nice to have kept our team from ‘86 together and won championships,” Olajuwon said. “But now that I look back, it was the struggle, the fight, all those years of trying to make the climb back up that finally made it all special when it came.

“I can still remember the final seconds running out in Game 7 against the (New York) Knicks. I was leaning on the scorer’s table and I took it all in. I looked at my teammates. I looked at the fans. I looked at the scene. This was why I played, why I worked, why I came to Houston.”

He was the MVP of the regular season, Defensive Player of the Year and MVP of the Finals, the only player ever to achieve that combination of awards.

A year later, he led the Rockets back at No. 6, the lowest-seeded playoff team to win a championship, and turned in the singular performance of his career. In Game 1 of the Western Conference finals in San Antonio, Olajuwon virtually embarrassed David Robinson with 41 points, 16 rebounds, four assists, three steals and two blocked shots on the night Robinson was given the MVP award.

“It was just a night,” he said shrugging, “when everything was in tune. It all came together, like it was meant to be.”
Wanted to be No. 33

The original decision to attend college in Houston came as the result of a coin flip. The Rockets won a coin flip to get the chance to select him with the No. 1 pick. Even his iconic jersey number now immortalized in a monument outside the Toyota Center came about because his first choice was already taken.

“I wanted 33 because it was the big man’s number,” he said. “It was Kareem’s number. But somebody else already had it, so I said, 'OK, 34.’ “

Earl Campbell, Nolan Ryan, Hakeem Olajuwon all No. 34s, the holy trinity of Houston sports stars.

“If you wrote this story in a book, nobody would ever believe it,” Olajuwon said. “To have been directed here from Nigeria, gone to college here, played my whole pro career here. Now to look back and have it all put together in the Hall of Fame, it is like I’m standing outside and looking at someone else’s life.”

Just like the 17-year-old sitting on a gym floor in Lagos, staring at the rim, pondering the possibilities.

“Look at the nickname,” he said. “It describes my relationship with the city, how I came to be here. It describes my life in Houston.

“Yes, a Dream.”

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/5984564.html