The ball pops loose just outside the three-point line, and Penn guard Jerome Allen collects it while streaking toward his team’s basket. Behind him, a good 10 feet behind him, Colgate freshman Adonal Foyle reacts, giving chase.
He is 6 feet 10 inches, a mesmerizing sight, a work-in-progress who less than five years ago did not even know the game of basketball existed. But now his long strides are gobbling up the floor of Madison Square Garden, a legendary playpen, and he is closing on a good team’s finest player, a player sure to be taken in the next NBA draft.
Foyle catches Allen, and when Allen goes up, he goes up with him, smothering the ball, knocking Allen to the floor, picking up a foul but preventing a basket with an awe-inspiring display of athleticism. “Already you can see he’s going to be a star,” his coach, Jack Bruen, says afterward.
“I can’t say I know the game yet,” says Foyle. “But I’m learning, and I’m learning fast.”
– – –
It is the fall of 1990, and Adonal Foyle is on his way to his first day of high school on the Caribbean’s Union Island, population 2,000. He has just moved here from neighboring Canouan, population 800, where he had grown up with a grandmother and a great-aunt and without telephones, electricity, running water or schools that went beyond the eighth grade.
That is why he has moved, and now he is quietly walking up the steps of his new school. Then, suddenly, there is a boy at his side, a boy who reaches no higher than his waist, and he is excitedly saying, “You have to play basketball.”
“What?” says Foyle, who is 6-4.
“You have to play basketball,” repeats the boy.
“Why?”
“Look at how tall you are. You have to get on our team.”
“This guy’s carrying on like a lunatic,” Foyle remembers now. “So I ignore him and go off to class.”
But later, during recess and with his curiosity piqued, he wanders down to the school’s court, where a game is in progress. “So,” he says, clearly relishing this story, “I look at this stupid game. I’m not interested. First, I know I’m going to be bad, eh? The first time you always embarrass yourself, so I want none of that.
“But they pull me onto the court, put me there like a lunatic standing up, and tell me, `Grab the ball when it goes off the ring, and block shots when people come in, and give me the ball so I can make layups at the other end of the court.’ So I did this for a while, and I feel like an idiot.
“Then I was curious, you know, wanting to see what making a basket feels like. So I grab a rebound, and start running to the other end of the court. I forgot to dribble, so everybody stands still. I’m like, `What did I do?’
” `You didn’t dribble, you idiot.’
“So I wormed my way off the court, and disappeared for a long time from the court.”
– – –
It is July of 1991, and Jay and Joan Mandle are attending a club tournament on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Both are Colgate professors, he in economics, she in sociology, and they are researching a book on basketball as a form of popular culture on the islands.
Men dominate the game down there, and so Jay is surprised when he spots a young face among them. “How old do you think that person is?” he asks his wife.
“I don’t know. Twenty-six, 27?” she says.
“He,” she says now, “was 16, which was very unusual.”
He was Adonal Foyle, who after his initial embarrassment had learned the game at night so no one would see his mistakes. He had, in the months that had passed, developed into a performer good enough to be at this tourney, where his innate athleticism is so evident the Mandles later approach him. “Did you ever think of using your athleticism to get an education in the United States?” they ask.
“I thought they were crazy, quite frankly,” Foyle remembers. “It was kinda weird. I was playing this game for six, seven months, now they were going to take me to the United States and I was going to use that to get the education I’d always wanted? It was like, `Give me a break. Are you pulling my leg? I’m not having any of this. Tell me the truth.’
” `We’re serious.’
“I’m like, `Oh, God. I’m going. I’m definitely going. But first you have to ask my mom.’ “
So they flew to Union Island, where Patricia Foyle gave her blessing, and that September Adonal Foyle was a sophomore at Cardinal O’Hara High in Philadelphia. (The Mandles had just left teaching jobs in that city.) The next year Foyle moved to Hamilton, N.Y., where Colgate is situated, and as a senior at Hamilton High averaged 36.2 points and 20.6 rebounds.
He was now a recruit coveted by all, yet he had developed more than just his basketball skills. He had studied long hours with the Mandles, had been exposed to opera and theater and other forms of culture while living with the Mandles, and so that side of him would now have to be satisfied as well. (He graduated from high school as president of the National Honor Society.)
The Mandles, so familiar with academics, helped him narrow his choices, and eventually he was left to decide among Duke, Syracuse and Colgate. (Kentucky, for one example, never got in the door, says John Mandle, “because we didn’t think the school was good enough.”) Finally, and to the surprise of many, Adonal Foyle picked tiny Colgate of the Patriot League.
“I think,” says John Mandle, “he saw the academic program at Colgate as a challenge. I think he was measuring himself to see whether in this realm he had gotten to the level where he could achieve.”
“Plus,” says Foyle, “I felt comfortable there. Everything came to seem unstable to me, just moving all my life. I just wanted to stay around people I knew for a change.”
But what about basketball?
“Basketball,” he says, “is very important to me. I care about basketball a lot. I’d like to go to the highest levels I can in basketball. But it’s absolutely too risky to ship all the cargo in one boat, and say that basketball is the only thing in your life.”
– – –
The Colgate bus is caught in yet another Manhattan traffic jam, which leaves Adonal Foyle time to gaze out on sights far removed from the islands that spawned him. Back on Canouan, he thought he would grow up to be a fisherman, or maybe, if he were lucky, work the tourist trade over on Union Island. But now, this night, he will be going to Radio City Music Hall, and out there in front of him is a horizon that is so suddenly endless.
Adonal Foyle often thinks of this miraculous change while sitting alone at night in his room, and there, to himself, he always says, “Help me understand this. Somebody help me.”
“It amazes me sometimes, quite frankly,” he is saying now, his eyes still taking in the scene around him. “It is so hard to grasp what has happened in the last four years. Everything I ever wanted in my life and never thought would come true, most of it has come true. I have the opportunity to get a great education, and hopefully be a great basketball player someday.
“There are just so many things to explain, you keep scratching your head. I persuaded my parent to let me go to a different land, the United States, where I didn’t know anybody but a couple I just met, and it worked. It worked!
“It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it?”
