Citizen Akoy

by Steve Marantz

  World Refugee Day in June 2006 launched ninemillion.org, a campaign by the UNHCR to provide education and recreation for an estimated nine million refugee children. Globally film festivals, photo exhibitions, food bazaars, fashion shows, concerts, and sports marked the day, with an emphasis on soccer in a nod to the World Cup tournament in Germany. In the Hindu Kush mountain range of Pakistan, 2.6 million Afghan refugees were treated to a show of Afghan fashions, as well as Afghan cuisine, music, dances, arts, and crafts. Lutheran Family Services set up a mock refugee camp on the University of Nebraska at Omaha campus to help visitors understand the hardships of refugee life. The theme of the day was “hope” because as UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said, “If there is one common trait among the tens of millions of refugees . . . it’s the fact that despite losing everything they never give up hope. Each refugee has a different story, but collectively theirs is a story about the triumph of hope over despair.”

  Meanwhile, Akoy was in the midst of an education odyssey, the details of which have blurred in memory. Liberty Elementary, All Saints Catholic, Belle Ryan Elementary, Beveridge Magnet Middle, and Norris Middle were schools on his journey, and there may have been one or two others. Academics were not a problem; his temper was. All Saints Catholic expelled him for putting a chokehold on another South Sudanese student who had taunted him as a homosexual. Another school disciplined him after he harangued a teacher. “Akoy was the tall kid,” Adaw said. “He was good at sports; other kids were jealous. They called him names. When he was upset, he would say what was in his heart; he would be honest. I would say to him, ‘Honesty is good, but this is what you did, this is what you know, and this is how you want to act.’”

  Adaw believed in Akoy’s basic goodness. He and Ty had joined Boy Scouts, which as far as she knew was a force for good. She remembered when seven-year-old Akoy had grabbed his agitated two-year-old brother Aguir around his head to thwart a tantrum. “What are you doing?” Adaw had asked. “I don’t want my brother to hit his head, so I grab him by the head and neck so he cannot get hurt,” Akoy replied. “Because the head is everything. If you want to have a good life you cannot have your brain messed up.”

  4

  Prophecy

  In the seventh grade Akoy grew to 6-foot-6 and began to dunk. He played for Unity Stars in the Kellom Youth League in north Omaha, and word soon spread to high school coaches and to the “grassroots” basketball community that operated apart from the schools. Grassroots basketball ran spring-summer schedules to develop and showcase talent for colleges and shoe-and-apparel companies in search of the next Michael Jordan. Purists—such as NBA superstar Kobe Bryant—scorned the grassroots game because it was said to ignore fundamentals and elevate individual over team. But even critics could not deny that it filled the months between school seasons and kept kids, organizers, and recruiters off the streets. For the most part the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) governed local, regional, and national competition. As grassroots ball expanded in the new millennium, so too did the summer leagues run by Omaha’s high school coaches, to compete for influence and control.

  Grassroots and high school coaches began to cruise South Twenty-Fourth Street hoping to catch sight of the young giant at the Mason court. If they timed it right, they might see one-on-one battles between Akoy and Ty Gatuoch, who now played for Gross Catholic High. They might even see Akoy go down against his shorter but stronger elder, which he did one afternoon. “I was backing him down and he just fell,” Ty recalled. “He broke his hand. I was devastated; I thought he would never play basketball again. He went to get a cast on his hand, and his mom told him he had to quit basketball. But a couple of days later he was back playing again with the cast. He had to hide so his mom wouldn’t see him.” Adaw likely did not notice because she was busy with her sixth child and fourth son, Akol, born in March 2008.

  In the summer of 2008, before Akoy entered eighth grade, Eric Behrens drove up South Twenty-Fourth past the Mason. Behrens was the coach of Omaha Central, which had won its third straight Class A championship in March. At thirty-three, Behrens didn’t look much older than the high school kids he coached, but he was the father of the daughter and son who rode with him toward the Habitat for Humanity ReStore across the street. As Behrens told it, the action on the Mason court was the furthest thing from his mind, further even than that. He swore that what happened next was random luck, a megabucks ticket. He caught sight of Akoy, all 6-foot 6-inches of him, on the court.

  Behrens hung a U-turn, pulled into the Mason parking lot, and introduced himself to Akoy.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Where do you go to school?”

  “Beveridge last year. I’m transferring to Norris.”

  “We practice at Norris occasionally. If you see us you can hang out.”

  “Thanks.”

  Akoy arrived on the basketball scene at a watershed moment. South Sudanese refugees had excelled in high school cross-country, track, and soccer, and a few had played football and basketball since the late 1990s. The autumn of 2007 brought the emergence of Omaha’s first South Sudanese Division 1 (D-1) basketball prospect, Koang Doluony, a 6-foot-7, 180-pound forward for Bryan High. A strong summer showing on the AAU circuit had landed Doluony an offer from Indiana State, a D-1 school. Doluony had a stellar senior season at Bryan after he committed to Indiana State, earning second-team All-Metro and honorable mention All-State recognition. Ty knew Doluony through their participation with the same AAU team, Nebraska Bison. Akoy and Ty drew inspiration from Doluony’s success on the court, as well as his intelligence and character.

  From afar they admired a more luminous star. For the eighth World Refugee Day, in June 2008, the United Nations awarded the Humanitarian of the Year award to Luol Deng, a 6-foot-9 forward for the Chicago Bulls. Deng was born in 1985 into a Dinka family in Wau, Adaw’s hometown. He was four when his father, Aldo Deng, a government official, was briefly jailed. Upon his release Aldo Deng sent his nine children to Alexandria, Egypt, while he and his wife sought asylum in Europe. Deng and his siblings endured endemic racism in Egypt until they moved to London in 1994 to rejoin their parents after their father was granted asylum by the British government.

  At fourteen Deng went to the Blair Academy prep school in New Jersey, made his mark in basketball, and became the second-ranked prospect behind LeBron James in the class of 2003. Deng played one season at Duke before the Phoenix Suns took him seventh overall in the 2004 draft and traded him to the Bulls. At nineteen he became the second south Sudanese to play in the NBA—after the much beloved Manute Bol—averaged 11.7 points per game, and made the All-Rookie first team. He steadily improved over the next three seasons, and in his rise to stardom, Deng remembered his refugee past. The UN award was based on his contribution to the ninemillion.org campaign to bring education and sports to refugee children.

  In a public service announcement for the UN, Deng said, “After I heard the stories of ‘ninemillion’ helping refugees with education, sports and just a better life in general, that’s what I always wanted to do. You never know how much you can change someone’s life. Everybody can join in and make a difference. I guarantee you it’s the best feeling.”

  Deng’s fame alerted grassroots and high school coaches to a potential surge of South Sudanese talent. Akoy played for the eighth-grade team at Norris Middle School in 2008–9 and was “good but not dominant,” as Behrens recalls. “You could tell he had a good skill level,” Behrens said, though it was hard to be sure because, as he was a tall post player, his team had struggled to get the ball to him. He must have gotten it occasionally because in Ty’s recollection, Akoy had “a hundred dunks” for his eighth-grade team.

  Eighth graders must declare a high school in the spring. Coaches from four high schools—Central, South, Bryan, and Burke—had communicated their interest to Akoy. Adaw saw that Ty had transferred to Bryan as a junior and that Bryan had more South Sudanese than the ot
her schools. “You’re going to Bryan,” she told Akoy.

  Akoy was agreeable. He wanted to play alongside Ty for his friend’s last year of varsity ball. Ty looked forward to having Akoy as a teammate. As they talked it over, Akoy voiced an idea—a fantasy—that made his friend chuckle.

  “We can win state,” Ty said. “I want one so bad.”

  “I want more than one,” Akoy said.

  “Okay.”

  “I want four.”

  “You crazy.”

  In eighth grade Akoy joined Team Nebraska, a grassroots AAU team that had corralled some of the best South Sudanese players, including Ty. It was Ty who introduced Akoy to Scott Hammer, Team Nebraska’s coach. Hammer, married and father to one son, made his living as an insurance underwriter, but his passion and ambition were focused on his youth teams, ages 12–17. Akoy’s refugee background contrasted with Hammer’s upbringing on a farm in Wayne, Nebraska, yet the two bonded over basketball. Akoy found a mentor in Hammer, and Hammer found a talent to elevate the regional and national profile of Team Nebraska and, in the best possible scenario, attract a shoe-and-apparel company as a sponsor.

  Through Team Nebraska Akoy experienced basketball for the first time on a national level. In the summer of 2009 Akoy played for Hammer’s team in Iowa, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and Nevada. To put down a record of his travels, he began to use his Facebook page. Akoy had opened an account on Facebook in 2007, in seventh grade, and had listed his birthday as November 28, 1992, instead of 1994, to skirt the minimum age requirement of thirteen. Akoy made an initial post in August 2007 and then let his page lie fallow until 2009, by which time Facebook had three hundred million active users (on its way to two billion by 2017). Social networks, in 2009, were reshaping the world. The appeal was irresistible: a platform to build social capital, to tell life stories, and to be nosey. Athletes and teams were swept up in the excitement and used the access and transparency of social media to get closer to their fans.

  But access and transparency were double-edged. The University of Texas booted a football player off its team for a racist post shortly after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. A Florida football player, who was white, was vilified after he joined a Facebook group called “Africa gives nothing to anyone—except AIDS.” A Wake Forest football player was expelled after he used Facebook to warn students that he planned to blow up the campus and had an “uzi locked and loaded” for those left standing.

  NFL teams began to troll social networks to gain insight into college prospects. At the University of Iowa an administrator began random checks on its athletes for social media violations that included nudity, sexual misconduct, underage alcohol consumption, use of illegal drugs, hazing and obscene gestures. Colleges began to lay down social network rules in their student-athlete handbooks. In September 2009 President Obama would talk to students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, and advise them to “be careful about what you post on Facebook. . . . Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.”

  In the summer of 2009 Akoy began to post on Facebook in fractured street dialect. “Just got back from Milwaukee and it’s 5:30 a.m. in da morning,” he wrote on July 14. The next day he added, “Back in Borin Ass Omaha Nebraska.” On July 20 he wrote, “Fuck I might not be fuckin goin to Las Vegas tomorrow.” Asked to explain, Akoy replied, “Cause my mom won’t let me go.” The next day he posted, “Im Goin 2 Vegas Im Goin 2 Vegas YEAAA.” The next post, from Las Vegas, was, “Well I’m in Vegas with a lot of sexy women down here. I’ma move down here 1 day. And I found out my coach was talking 2 doc sandler about me.” Kenneth “Doc” Sadler was the head coach at the University of Nebraska.

  In Omaha Akoy played in a league of high school kids at the University of Nebraska–Omaha field house. Among its coaches was Bryan High’s Tim Cannon. One afternoon after play had stopped, Cannon spoke to Akoy. “He made a comment that I wouldn’t play varsity—that I was only good enough to play freshman,” Akoy recalled. “I was a little offended.” Akoy stormed out of the field house just as Hammer, who had hoped to catch Akoy in action, arrived.

  “Let’s go,” Akoy said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I can’t play for this guy. I’m done.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not going to Bryan. Not going to happen.”

  That’s when Hammer realized, as he later put it, that Akoy had “some attitude and anger issues.” Now he had to help Akoy choose another high school. Adaw favored two Catholic high schools, Creighton Prep and Gross, because religion was important to her. Akoy was religious too, but Hammer had told him, “Sunday is for religion; the rest of the week is for other stuff.” There was South High, with its majority Latino student body. Several South Sudanese had played for South coach Bruce Chubick in a program that had had little success. Chubick had invited Akoy to his home, where he had met Chubick’s wife Dianne. Later Dianne Chubick told her husband, “He’s not coming to South. He doesn’t have the courage.” What she meant was that Akoy did not want to try to turn around her husband’s struggling program. If her opinion seemed ungenerous, it was more of a statement on the bitterness some high school coaches held toward Hammer. Chubick referred to Hammer as a “street agent.” “He’s not very well liked in the coaching community,” Chubick said. “Because of the shit he pulled with kids. He’s not the only one. But he’s probably the most notorious because where he pushed the kids, those schools had the most success. Maybe it’s sour grapes that he didn’t push any our way.”

  “They hate me,” was how Hammer characterized his relationship with Omaha’s high school coaches. “They hate me because what I do makes them look bad. They want to control their kids at school, but they don’t put in the time that I do. They’re educators and teachers. I’m a mentor. “When you’re in the car for six hours with kids, you build relationships. They’re going to trust you more.”

  Hammer had a collegial relationship with at least one high school coach, Eric Behrens, at Central. They had met as students at Wayne State College in the mid-1990s. Hammer already had sent Behrens numerous starters and several All-Metro players, Deverell Biggs the most recent. His players had helped Behrens win three straight state titles. Now Akoy sought Hammer’s advice.

  “Where should I go?”

  “Take basketball out of the equation,” Hammer said. “Where are your friends going to high school?”

  “Most of them are going to Central.”

  “Well then you should go to Central. Those are four years of your life, and you want good memories.”

  One of Akoy’s new friends at Team Nebraska was Biggs, who would be a senior at Central. Talented and temperamental, Biggs was someone with whom Akoy could identify and look up to. Biggs had urged Akoy to go to Central, and now Hammer did as well. Central was convenient, about ten blocks from the Mason.

  “Okay then. Central,” Akoy said. Hammer delivered the news to Behrens. “Until we get the paperwork, I’m out of this,” Behrens said. “We didn’t have this conversation.”

  Akoy posted about his decision early in August: “G0in 2 bed g0in 2 da tac building t0m0rr0w m0rnin 2 g0 transver.” The TAC building was the administrative center where Akoy requested his transfer to Central. The next day, with the transfer approved, he wrote, “i am a superstar . . . the spotlight iz shining on me . . . and i am good en0ugh . . . but she still d0ent love me.”

  When word reached Tim Cannon, he called Behrens and protested. Behrens thought it ironic because Cannon was perceived to have recruited Doluony away from Burke High. Cannon went to the Mason, found Akoy in the parking lot, and urged him to reconsider, but Akoy’s mind was made up. “Hammer’s influence was pretty clear,” Cannon recalled. “He saw that Central didn’t have a big guy, whereas we did.”

  Akoy called Behrens and asked what he should expect and how to prepare. In August, before school started, Behrens worked out Akoy at the Central gym. Behrens fed the
ball to Akoy at the top of the key, where he faced up for fifteen-foot jumpers. He faked a shot, put it on the floor, dribbled twice, and exploded to the rim for a layup. Behrens went one-on-one with Akoy and observed him handle the ball, shoot, and attack the rim off the dribble. “He showed me a skill level I didn’t know he had,” Behrens recalled. “Right away I knew he was good. But I still didn’t know how he would perform in a varsity game.”

  Akoy’s confidence was not an issue—at least not outwardly. Before the start of school Akoy ran into Herb Welling, who had just quit as a volunteer assistant to Behrens. Welling was a grassroots “hoops whisperer,” with a national reputation for innovative ideas about offense and with close connections to top college coaches and to the famed Five-Star Basketball Camp. He had been mentored by grassroots pioneer Rick Henkel in the early 1990s and in turn had mentored Hammer. Welling had decided to leave Central, where he had worked as a security guard, after the district had cracked down on his overtime submissions. A week earlier he had worked out Akoy at Hammer’s request.

  Akoy buttonholed Welling in the area outside Central’s west entrance, which faced Joslyn Art Museum.

  “I heard you’re leaving,” Akoy said. Welling nodded.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re going to win four.”

  “Four?”

  “Straight.”

  Fantasy had become prophecy. It seemed far-fetched yet oddly plausible too. Central’s assistant principal at the time, Edward Bennett, greeted ninth graders at the west steps on the first day of school. He saw Akoy walk up the steps and remarked to another staff member, “I think I just watched four state titles walk into the building.”

  Apparently Behrens had forgotten to alert school officials of Akoy’s decision. When the athletic director, Darin Williams, saw Akoy enter the building, he rushed to his office and called district headquarters. “He told them we had not recruited Akoy away from another school at the last minute and that we were surprised to see him,” Bennett recalled. “He wanted to make sure we were not accused of anything untoward.”