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 Basketball a Means, Not the End for Duke's Sudan-Born Star
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After Long Journey, Deng Arrives
Basketball a Means, Not the End for Duke's Sudan-Born Star
By Barry Svrluga
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 1, 2004; Page D01
DURHAM, N.C. -- Luol Deng is a small forward: long, lithe, can shoot from the perimeter or take it to the basket off the dribble. But he's too unselfish for that, so maybe he's a point guard: sees the whole floor, passes with precision, leads the fast break. Yet he's also 6 feet 8, too tall for the point, so Deng is a power forward: can catch the ball in the post, can shoot a turnaround jumper, unparalleled offensive rebounding instincts.
All the labels are too simple, too constricting. Anyone who watches Deng, Duke's immensely talented freshman, understands that he is all of those things.
Anyone who talks to him knows all of them are secondary.
"He's so incredibly gifted with the game," said Joe Mantegna, Deng's coach at Blair Academy in New Jersey. "But he's not defined by the game."
Sunday afternoon, Deng provided the defining moments in Duke's NCAA tournament victory over Xavier, which sent the Blue Devils into a Final Four matchup Saturday against Connecticut in San Antonio. This weekend, Deng's development will continue on a stage unlike any he has seen to this point.
But Deng's development to reach this point is so radically different than that of any other player in San Antonio, comparing him to the other guards or forward, big men or shooters seems silly. He was born in Sudan. He fled the war-torn country when he was 5, taking with him only a few memories, simultaneously distant and seared in his brain. He lived, for a time, in Egypt. He left with his family -- three brothers, five sisters -- for London in 1993. At 14, he went to boarding school in the United States, to Blair.
"I don't know how you become who you are," Deng said. "But I know that it's important for me to remember where I'm from, even if I don't remember much about it."
Deng is frank about the country he refers to as his home, though he hasn't lived there since 1990. He knows that kids his age in Sudan aren't dribbling basketballs. Rather, they are sent to war. He knows that having the gift of basketball is secondary to the gift of being on the Duke campus, of his family's freedom, of his distance from genocide and abject poverty. He knows that -- some day -- he wants to give back to those people, forgotten by the rest of the world, but not by him.
"He has such a different perspective on life than not only most basketball players, but most of us who grew up as just typical American teenagers," Mantegna said. "There's just this maturity, a worldliness about him, even when he was 14. He's on a journey, and this is just one stage."
The journey, and his profound sense of it, give Deng an unmistakable air of purpose, of maturity. English is, in effect, his third language, after his tribal Dinka and Arabic, yet he speaks it flawlessly, smoothly, precisely.
He looks questioners in the eye. He provides thoughtful answers and analysis.
"I think we need to check his birth certificate," Duke point guard Chris Duhon joked. "I think we could find out he's not 18."
That combination of physical gifts and mental capacity created such a preseason excitement in Coach Mike Krzyzewski that he almost couldn't contain himself. From the opening of practice, Krzyzewski designed offensive plays for Deng, posting him up here and putting him on the perimeter there. Deng started from the first tip, scored 21 points and grabbed eight rebounds in the opener, followed with 20 points and 10 rebounds the next time out, and appeared to be rolling.
Yet now, Krzyzewski realizes, Deng was being bombarded with too much information. His natural instinct was, to a degree, stripped away.
"I was so excited to coach him that I gave him too many presents," Krzyzewski said. "He didn't know what to play with. . . .
"He cares so much that he's always ready to play, but sometimes, he tries to think or reason in a game, and you don't have time to do that. When he just let's loose, [he's better]. That's part of him just learning the game."
To help him learn, Krzyzewski stripped back what he expected of Deng, then slowly built it back up. He moved Deng to the perimeter more often, allowed him to create off the dribble. In the victory over Xavier, that's exactly what he did. And while he drew two and three defenders on his forays into the lane -- sometimes making poor decisions -- he made the key plays that won the game for Duke, laying in a finger-roll on the fast break and putting back an offensive rebound that had a degree of difficulty Greg Louganis rarely attempted.
"I think what happened is I just got familiar with the system," Deng said. "It was different than what I'm used to. But once I got used to it, got used to the players, I got really comfortable, and I was able to perform."
In the NCAA tournament, Deng leads Duke with 18 points per game on 56.8 percent shooting. He has added 6.3 rebounds and 3.0 assists. And at halftime of the victory over Xavier, Deng -- not Duhon, the unquestioned senior leader, nor J.J. Redick, the team's leading scorer -- admonished the Blue Devils for playing inside of themselves, for not performing freely and with purpose.
"I don't know if it was the appropriate time or not," Deng said. "It's something where my emotion just took over. It's not something I planned or anything. But it came out really powerfully, because I wanted it badly."
A freshman, to lead them?
"It's like you have a family meeting," Krzyzewski said, "and all of a sudden the youngest daughter says something, and [everyone thinks], 'Oh yeah.' . . .
"That's what Louie did. He felt it, and he said it. A lot of times, people hold back their feelings in what they say, and as a result, the group doesn't move forward. We moved forward. That's a huge thing for us."
As huge as it is, though, it is just basketball. Basketball, Deng understands, is not life. When he came to the United States, he used to stay up at night, and tell Mantegna of his thoughts of Sudan, of how he would one day return there, of how he would give back to people he did not know. Now, Deng says, he is not really sure what form that will take. But it affects him.
"It certainly puts a lot of pressure on Luol," Redick said. "The things that kid has dealt with in his life, most of us don't know. Civil war. Fleeing a country. It's amazing."
This weekend, Deng will be publicly acknowledged for whatever amazement he provides on the court. Inside, he knows there are far more amazing things he could do. He is 18, yet he is not.
"I'm a freshman," he said. "But I act as if I'm not a freshman."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Deng
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست