Citizen Akoy

by Steve Marantz

  Central had arrived in late afternoon and had a walk-through at the arena to prepare for the 9 p.m. tip-off. Dinner, arranged by CHSF, was at a local country club. Unfortunately a chicken dish did not agree with Hollins and would come back, and up, to haunt him. When they returned to the arena, a game was in progress, and they were besieged for autographs. “First time I ever had that happen,” recalled Tre’Shawn Thurman. “These kids came up to us, and I’m like, ‘I’m in high school like you.’ It was crazy. It felt like a college game.”

  During warm-ups Central finally got a look at an Oak Hill roster laden with talent destined for D-1 and beyond. Oak Hill featured 6-foot-6 Troy Williams (Indiana, Memphis Grizzlies), 6-foot-5 Sindarius Thornwell (South Carolina), 6-foot-1 Ike Iroegbu (Washington State), 6-foot-1 Nate Britt (North Carolina), 6-foot-5 R. J. Curington (DePaul), 5-foot-11 Terrence Phillips (Missouri), and 6-foot-8 Rokas Gustys (Hofstra). Though Oak Hill’s 24-4 record had it ranked in the middle of most of the Top 25 polls, it was every bit as formidable as Long Beach Poly and Whitney Young, and it represented Central’s last chance to beat a favored opponent. “There was a huge buzz,” recalled Jay Landstrom. “I had never been to a big heavyweight fight in Las Vegas, but that’s what it felt like.”

  Central senior Henry Hawbaker, a pal of Akoy’s, got to the arena with classmates just before tip-off and could not find seats in the student section. “We had to sit in the Oak Hill section,” Hawbaker recalled. “And then it hit me: how the heck does a high school in Virginia have a fan base that can travel to Nebraska? That got us really pumped.” Tim Shipman was among a contingent of Central faculty members at the arena. “When Central got introduced, there was a noticeable anti-Central sentiment,” Shipman recalled. “Those were the folks from out that way. A lot of people were just tired of Central being dominant.”

  In Hoosiers before the final game Hackman exhorts his players: “Five players on the floor function as one single unit. Team. Team. Team. No one player on the floor more important than the other.” Behrens gave a talk with more specifics before the Oak Hill tip-off: “Share the ball, take good shots, get Akoy some touches. Transitional defense, get back, contain the ball, no dribble penetration, no easy baskets. Rebound on the defensive end.”

  The scoring opened with a slam-dunk by Akoy. Central sprinted to a 13–3 lead and led 17–14 after a quarter. The lead seesawed, with Oak Hill’s biggest lead at 28–23 and Central ahead at the half, 33–32. Akoy had 10 points, while Hollins and K. J. Scott both had 8. Hollins’s floor game was as fierce as usual, and it caught up to him in the locker room. “He puked for two minutes straight—everything he ate,” recalled Jay Landstrom. “You could hear him in the stall.”

  Central came out strong in the third quarter, led by Akoy’s three blocks, and harassed Oak Hill into 7 turnovers and 2-of-12 shooting. Then something unexpected and wonderful happened. “Akoy missed a dunk and put his jersey over his head at half court,” Shipman recalled. “After that everybody started rooting for Central.”

  Behrens sensed the crowd shift too. “People from the middle of the state, from Grand Island, cheered for us,” he recalled. “The script was flipped.” Hawbaker, seated with Oak Hill fans, saw the change. “There were these Grand Island guys in leather jackets and trucker caps,” he recalled. “They stood up and gave Akoy and Tra-Deon and K. J. a round of applause for representing the state. It was a great Nebraska moment.”

  Central led, 43–36, after three quarters. Oak Hill closed to within 49–47, but Thurman played through a sprained ankle to hit a couple of buckets, and Hollins and Hollins-Johnson nailed down the win with free throws. Final: Central 70, Oak Hill 63. Akoy led scorers with 20 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. The postgame locker room, Behrens recalled, was one of the most jubilant he’d ever seen. Afterward Central players, coaches, and family members lingered at the arena with fans and spectators and basked in their Hoosiers moment. “This was different than a regular-season win,” Hollins told the media. “It was like we won state.”

  The World-Herald’s Stu Pospisil wrote, “Omaha Central gave the state a signature win for the ages. What else compares to the Eagles beating Oak Hill Academy, maybe the most recognizable name in high school basketball? Absolutely nothing.” The Oak Hill victory brought pure joy to players and coaches. “It gave us a chance to win a game people didn’t think we could win,” Behrens recalled. “It was good mentally to win and feel that exhilaration.”

  For one magical night Central got to be Milan and David and all the underdogs of legend and myth. The experience proved to be as therapeutic and energizing as Behrens had hoped. Over the next four weeks Central fashioned one of the most dominant runs in Nebraska hoops history. It won two games left in the regular season by 31 points and 61 points. In the districts it dispatched Grand Island, 70–35, and then Omaha Burke, 66–51. On Tuesday before the state tournament Behrens kicked Akoy out of practice, the cause of which has been lost in time. What it meant was that Central was primed and ready. “As a coach I was wired and locked in,” Behrens recalled. “I probably kicked him out to send a message.”

  At state, Papillion–LaVista South was toppled, 61–41, and Omaha Benson went down, 80–50, in the semifinal. The final matched Central against Papillion–La Vista, to whom it had lost in January and for whom it nursed a bit of a grudge because its crowd had rushed the court. Behrens was superstitious enough to wear the same blue shirt and tie he had worn for his previous six finals, and before tip-off he indulged himself one more Gene Hackman moment, even though his team was favored: “Forget about legacies and history,” he told his players. “Think of this like a pickup game at the Y. Just do your thing.” To his seven seniors he said, “Play your best game in your last game.”

  At center court, as Akoy readied for tip-off, he slowed the moment and scanned the sold-out Devaney Center. He was on the verge of an unprecedented achievement in Nebraska high school basketball—his fourth Class A championship. Close by were his teammates and coaches, the guys he huddled with before each game, fists raised, and chanted, “One, Two, Three, Family.” He would miss this group, this band of brothers, though he would not miss being run like a dog and kicked out of practice by Behrens.

  Beyond was the student section, the kids who shared the classrooms and hallways of Nebraska’s oldest high school and who now were in full roar. There were his teachers, even the ones who didn’t like basketball but attended as a show of support, and there were the administrators, for whom he cheerfully served as “ambassador” of Central. His high school was special, he was sure of it, a downtown melting pot that had survived fickle economics and politics and endured wave upon wave of nostalgic alumni.

  There was Scott Hammer, svengali of his grassroots “select” teams, summer camps, air travel, and hotel rooms—his world apart from high school. There were Dave and Ann Sjulin, salt of the earth, who embraced him as a virtual son-in-law. Akoy’s gaze settled on their daughter, Lotte, and for maybe the millionth time he contemplated her fresh athletic beauty. He considered the Hammers and Sjulins his adoptive families, even though their pigmentations and backgrounds were as different from his as night and day. Thank heavens their refrigerators were as open and welcoming as they were.

  There were the media he had courted and cultivated to mutual satisfaction. And there, arrayed around the court, were the photographers to whom he would grant one last iconic image to remember him by.

  Then his eyes came upon the object of his deepest affection and concern: Adaw Makier, his mother. She had come to Lincoln in his honor, to watch a game she barely comprehended. He thought about the miracle of her presence at his final high school game. She had gotten out of Sudan with little more than the clothes on her back, fourteen years earlier, a refugee of a violent civil war that had killed hundreds of thousands. She had gotten him out too; he owed her his life. Then too he owed his father, Madut Agau, who was not among the familiar faces this day because he worked at a meat plant on weekends for time-and-a-half. His family ha
d limped ashore in Omaha, at the mercy of strangers, and had found both hardship and generosity. Each day was a lesson in a new culture and a reminder of the old. Now he felt responsible for his parents and five (soon to be six) younger siblings. This game was as much for them as for him; they were his duty, and they were his dilemma.

  Akoy Agau was about to jump tip-off to the Nebraska Class A basketball championship, another step in his remarkable journey out of Africa. Where it led he knew not, but on this day, in this moment, he would play the game he loved to fulfill a prophecy and make history.

  Behrens had exhorted the seniors, and they complied. Their last game, indeed, would be their best. Akoy had 6 blocks in the first quarter on the way to a 33–12 lead midway through the second quarter. Hollins clamped down on La Vista’s top scorer and held him to 7 points. The Eagles stole the ball, pounded the boards, and ran the floor. Behind-the-back passes led to alley-oop dunks. It was “the closest thing to the Harlem Globetrotters we’ll see in high school basketball,” wrote Dirk Chatelain of the World-Herald. Tempers flared after a frustrated defender upended Hollins, but no punches were thrown. With nearly three minutes left Behrens pulled his starters and let his reserves finish the 69–44 blowout. As the clock ran down, Hollins hectored Behrens on the bench, “You should have put me on varsity as a freshman.”

  That was it. Akoy’s “Four” arrived with a flourish though with little suspense. His stat line of 8 points, 5 rebounds, and 8 blocked shots was modest compared to his past finals. Nor did his season averages of 12.8 points and 6.1 rebounds, along with 81 blocked shots, leap off the stat sheet. In Behrens’s system the only stat that mattered was Central’s record 75-point margin of victory for the three tournament games combined. Akoy mounted a ladder and cut down a net with a joyous flourish. As the team awaited the presentation ceremony, he heard his name called from Central’s student section near the team bench. The Central kids were stoked.

  “He looked over at us with a goofy grin,” recalled Henry Hawbaker. Akoy feigned a step toward the student section.

  “Come on over,” somebody yelled. Drama. Akoy could not resist. He made a move toward his schoolmates.

  “Run Akoy!” He got up to speed in a few strides. Hawbaker and senior Tyler Miles and a few others joined shoulders and braced. Then Akoy launched himself. “He was 230 pounds, and we caught him,” Hawbaker recalled. “Everyone in the student section went nuts.”

  A World-Herald photographer captured the image: Akoy in full roar with part of a net around his neck, held aloft by Hawbaker and Miles, in a sea of jubilant students. If some pictures are worth a thousand words, this one was worth a million. Its narrative, of acceptance and accomplishment, was Akoy’s journey from African refugee to American citizen.

  A short time later, when the trophy and medals were presented and his teammates danced and shouted, Akoy crouched down, pulled his shirt over his face, and cried. He later explained, “It was sad; it was happy; it was all the emotions mixed together.”

  The photo of Akoy held aloft by Hawbaker and Miles ran the next day above the caption: “Nebraska’s Head of State.”

  18

  Spring Prom

  Spring was a whirl for Akoy as Nebraska’s unelected head of state. Nebraska’s elected head of state, Gov. Dave Heineman, declared March 18, 2013, as Omaha Central Eagles Basketball Day. At the state capitol Heineman presented Behrens a plaque, with Akoy at his side and the team in front of a huge American flag. Heineman’s proclamation, in part, read, “The Omaha Central players and community are to be recognized for their outstanding achievements and accomplishments as they go on to even bigger and brighter futures.” As players and coaches walked through the capitol halls, senators and staff members congratulated them and asked for pictures.

  The next day Akoy flew to Haiti, with Lotte and Ann, on a “mission” to help an orphanage. He had volunteered when a berth came open on the trip organized by a teacher at Lotte’s school. Ann offered medical service, while Lotte, Akoy, and the others played games with the children and cleaned and painted the orphanage. An eighteen-year-old orphan was about to move out, Akoy recalled, and “we helped finish up a house for him.” At the end of their stay they left behind all clothes and shoes except what they wore, in what was a charitable gesture by the teenagers from west Omaha, whose closets overflowed, and something more by Akoy, whose closet did not.

  Back in Omaha Akoy appeared in a “Harlem Shake” video, produced by the World-Herald, with the ten boys and girls first-team All-State selections, which included Hollins, augmented by students, band members, cheerleaders, and mascots. In it Akoy wore his purple Central uniform and danced Gangnam Style, ever compatible with a camera lens. Then he returned to the state capitol and was introduced to the legislature as part of the Lincoln Journal Star Super-State team. As the newspaper reported, he “leaned over the balcony ledge to wave to senators and just generally hammed it up. . . . In the Rotunda, he stepped up to a podium in place for an upcoming press conference to ‘address’ the assembled group.” By the end of March Akoy was back on Twitter, which he had sacrificed for Lent—except now he posted less often and revealed less as he became more discreet about his public image, in accord with Pitino’s policy at Louisville.

  A certain type of stage and publicity, however, Akoy found irresistible. The Central spring prom loomed on the schedule. Akoy wanted to double date with Lotte and another couple, Henry Hawbaker and Lauren Wegner. But Akoy and Hawbaker had procrastinated, and time was short. They were halfway in the doghouse and needed a reprieve. “We need to do something big,” Akoy said.

  “Big,” Akoy decided, was televised coverage of their prom invitations. “Now, Akoy makes claims one wouldn’t find realistic all the time,” Hawbaker recalled. “I thought he was bullshitting me. How the heck was he going to make this happen?”

  It turned out that Akoy was friendly with Thor Tripp, a sportscaster for KETV 7, the ABC affiliate. “We had a pretty good relationship, to where he felt comfortable asking me,” Tripp recalled. “Normally a TV station wouldn’t do something like that, but we had done so much with him, and he was so well known locally, regardless of whether it was normal or not, it was good TV.”

  Tripp had been at the station for two years and had come to appreciate Akoy’s camera presence at live events. “If I was shooting, he would come to the camera and act like it was a mirror,” Tripp recalled. “Walking on the court he would chant something or have words for his teammates. He knew how to play to the camera.”

  With Tripp a go, Akoy and Hawbaker brainstormed a script. Lotte and Lauren played select softball; why not create a softball scene? So on an afternoon in early April they met Tripp at Elmwood Park, in athletic shorts and T-shirts, and found a dirt infield and backstop. Hawbaker had a bat, gloves, and softballs; Tripp had a camera; and Akoy had himself.

  First they scrawled “PROM?” in large capital letters with a question mark on the infield dirt. Akoy stood on the mound, Hawbaker in the batter’s box. Tripp, as the shooter, captured the action. Akoy lobbed an underhand pitch to Hawbaker, who swatted it to the outfield. Akoy turned, in mock disgust, and watched the flight.

  Next Tripp shot Akoy and Hawbaker in the infield as they walked toward the camera. “Now, we may not be as good at softball as you guys are,” said Hawbaker. “But the way we see it, you guys only have one option,” said Akoy. At that Akoy tossed the glove. It landed in the dirt, next to the bat, under the inscription of “PROM?”

  Separately Hawbaker said, “Lauren Wegner,” and Akoy said, “Charlotte Sjulin,” and in unison they said, “Will you go to prom with us?”

  Akoy looked at Hawbaker. “You think they’ll say yes?”

  “I hope they’ll say yes.”

  “Please say yes.”

  The scene ended with Akoy’s and Hawbaker’s hands cupped in mock prayer. The shoot took about forty-five minutes, which Tripp edited to a fifty-second segment and set to Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” It aired on a Sunday evening newsca
st, which Akoy and Lotte watched at her house and Hawbaker and Wegner watched at Wegner’s house. Both girls accepted the invitations, and Lotte posted to Akoy’s Twitter feed, “I guess @heyheyhawbaker and @ZerotheHeroAkoy did an alright job of asking @ralphlauren_w and me to prom!”

  Next morning the prom invite was the buzz at Central. “Talk about a good Monday,” Hawbaker recalled. “All the teachers saw it, and all the kids heard about it. Half of the school high-fived us, and the other half gave us shit.”

  Akoy’s celebrity elevated another level, to where autograph requests were commonplace. Early in April he attended the two-day FBLA convention in Omaha at the Ramada Inn on South Seventy-Second Street. When he entered the lobby, students crowded him. “A girl ran up to him like she had seen Michael Jackson,” recalled Denise Powers, faculty adviser. “She squealed, ‘O, my God, I can’t believe this; I have to get a picture with you; my boyfriend is going to die.’ It was like we had a movie star with us.”

  As always, with Akoy the question was not whether attention would go to his head but how. Powers found out the next evening when Akoy left the motel with a few friends to play video games. “The one rule is you have to be back at curfew,” Powers recalled. “That’s my responsibility and my liability. That night he was late and didn’t answer his phone. I kept asking Lotte, and she didn’t know; he didn’t answer her either. Her school didn’t have rooms at the hotel, so she went home.

  “I waited and waited, and finally he came back. I chewed him out; I was so worried something had happened to him. I talked to him about respect and follow-through. I told him I was hurt he didn’t communicate with me; every student knows how to pick up a phone. I was so worried I cried and said, ‘Don’t you ever do this again.’ He apologized for his behavior and gave me a hug and said it would never happen again.”

  To Akoy’s credit, Powers recalled, he participated in the next day’s events as though nothing had happened. At dinner, when Powers was late to the banquet room, Akoy gave up his seat so she could eat with her students. “He went to a random table and asked if he could sit with them,” Powers recalled. “He was caring.”