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Kutoka Sports Illustrated.com
Hasheem The Dream
The odyssey of Hasheem Thabeet began in one of the most remote hoops hinterlands. Soon, perhaps, it will take the UConn 7-footer to an unimaginably big stage -- bigger even than the first round of the NBA draft.
Living up to a name that means "destroyer of evil" in Arabic, Thabeet is a record-breaking shot blocker.
Thabit Manka is up on the back step of his house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for good reason: If he posed on level ground with his eldest son, their height difference would be accentuated to the point of absurdity. Even like this, in the last photo they would ever take together, the top of Thabit's kufi only meets the giant boy's shoulders. It's April 2004, and the son, 17-year-old Hashim Thabit Manka, as his name was written then, is seven feet of limbs drowning in baggy jeans and a retro Philadelphia 76ers shirt, staring straight into the camera with only the faintest hint of a smile. The father's billowy kanzu and the gray edges of his facial hair give him a regal air at the age of 56; he is grinning, with his gaze fixed slightly off to the left.
Thabit was an architect, educated in England at the University of Bath and Oxford. He was a lover of soccer, world geography and English Scrabble, all of which he taught to Hashim. Thabit was also a diabetic, and when he fell ill in the days after the photo was taken, complications led him to be hospitalized and, in a week's time, took his life.
Hashim kept the picture in a scrapbook under his bed during his freshman year at Connecticut but has since returned it to his mother, Rukia, for safekeeping in Tanzania. He remembers his father now for his wisdom. Thabit had showed him maps of his travels through Africa, Europe and Australia, and said that their family identity -- being Tanzanian, Swahili-speaking, Muslim -- should never be a limitation. "You can live anywhere as long as you can get along with anybody," he told the boy. "You just have to adapt and overcome."
Four years ago Thabit couldn't have foreseen the odyssey in store for Hashim, who was in just his third year of organized basketball in soccer-mad Tanzania, which had never sent a soul to the NBA, much less the NCAA. Who could concoct a narrative that begins with a boy doing runway modeling in Dar es Salaam to earn money for his fatherless family, continues with him trying to get a basketball scholarship by e-mailing U.S. colleges he randomly Googled in an Internet café and ends with him in Storrs, Conn., as the starting center on a Top 5 team?
E-mail was not the solution; it wasn't until Hashim left Makongo High in Dar es Salaam to take a scholarship at Laiser Hill Academy in Nairobi, Kenya, that he was noticed by someone with international basketball connections. French businessman Oliver Noah, who organized the NOGA African All-Stars AAU team, saw Hashim play and offered to take him to the U.S., and, with Rukia's blessing, handled the paperwork for an I-20 visa.
Seven-foot-three Hasheem Thabeet -- the new, Americanized name on his passport -- arrived wide-eyed in Los Angeles in January 2005 and was placed at Stoneridge Prep, where neither the housing conditions (four players were packed into coach Ron Slater's home) nor the transcript situation (they designated him as an 11th-grader, rather than a 12th-) was ideal. By April he was on the move again, to Picayune, Miss., to live with a host family and attend a public high school. Transcript issues arose once again, prompting a move in June to Houston, where Mark McClanahan, a coach Thabeet had met at the Kingwood (AAU) Classic in Houston that spring, found him another host family and a spot as a senior on the Cypress Christian School team for the '05-06 season. By the following summer Thabeet was at UConn, where he is now a junior majoring in geography. The bedroom walls of his campus apartment are decorated with SpongeBob SquarePants dolls, and his dresser doubles as a trophy stand for being last season's Big East Defensive Player of the Year and NABC Defensive Player of the Year.
In Arabic, Hashim means "destroyer of evil," and the shot blocking that earned those awards (147 swats as a sophomore, breaking Alonzo Mourning's Big East single-season blocks record) is an instinctual talent. The crash course in post offense that Thabeet received at UConn has helped him grow from a comedic liability to someone who, says Huskies graduate assistant Justin Evanovich, "is conscious of his ability to dunk everything." Huskies coach Jim Calhoun laughs at his first memory of Thabeet ("He would get a rebound in Houston, throw it and then watch nine guys run") and beams with pride when he says that "no player I've ever had at UConn has improved to the level that Hasheem has improved."
Since his father's passing, all Thabeet has done is change cities five times, countries twice and his name once. He basically learned how to play offense from scratch while establishing himself as the nation's premier defensive game-changer. Thabeet has adapted, and he has overcome.
If Uconn, which finished 24-9 last season, were to win a national championship in April, it would be the first basketball team to visit the White House under Barack Obama, whose absentee father was an economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance -- only nine miles from the Nairobi school where Thabeet was discovered. The gravity of this African connection is not lost on Thabeet, but it wouldn't be his first presidential encounter, either.
On Sept. 21 he arrived at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York City wearing a Euro-cut suit, and he joined Tanzania's president, Jakaya Kikwete -- who was in town for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly -- in breaking Ramadan fast. This was their third meeting, and it came with a reminder from Kikwete "to keep representing the country well." At their first meeting, in Boston when Thabeet was a freshman, he showed up in a fitted New York Yankees hat, brown sweater and jeans. ("I wasn't grown up yet," he says sheepishly.) When a photo of him appeared on Michuzi, the highest-trafficked Tanzanian blog, he was lambasted by some Swahili-speaking commenters for being disrespectful and undeserving of such attention.
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