The next great point guard?

[Will Galen]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/sp...partner=EXCITE

In the Coney Island Footsteps of Marbury
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Published: February 9, 2007

Just minutes before the start of a game between the Brooklyn high school rivals Lincoln and Boys and Girls on Jan. 30, nearly 200 people were still waiting in the cold to experience the thrill of Coney Island’s latest attraction, Lance Stephenson.

Lance Stephenson, who had 30 points against Boys and Girls, draws inspiration from Lincoln’s own Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair. More Photos »

“If you don’t have a ticket, you may as well go home!” one of a dozen police officers guarding the door at Lincoln shouted. “There are no more seats available!”

Inside the tiny gymnasium, 400 others had already gathered to see Stephenson, a 6-foot-5½, 205-pound hoops prodigy who is seen as the next great New York City point guard, following in the stutter-steps of high school stars like Mark Jackson, Kenny Anderson and Lincoln’s own Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair.

Marbury and Telfair, Coney Island cousins, serve as inspiration to Stephenson, a 16-year-old sophomore who lives 15 blocks from the Surfside Gardens housing project where Marbury and Telfair were raised.

“I talk to them a lot,” Stephenson said. “They always tell me to keep focused and to keep my grades up.”

Stephenson recently received a progress report from Marbury.

“I think he’ll have the opportunity to be in that elite class of New York City point guard legends,” said Marbury, whose Knicks play Telfair’s Boston Celtics four times a year. “I think he just has to continue to do what he’s been doing. He’s dominating right now, and he needs to make sure he goes to college with the mind-set of dominating there. As far as the N.B.A. is concerned, it’s just timing.”

Tom Konchalski, the longtime high school basketball recruiting expert who is based in New York, said Stephenson’s fellow Coney Islanders were giving him the kind of valuable advice he needed to stay grounded — and become successful.

“Lance has a chance to be a special player, to be the next great one,” Konchalski said. “And while he has the talent to be great, in order to get there, he must learn how to deflect all the special attention that surrounds him and to keep the number of voices inside his head to a minimum.”

“There are so many minefields on the way to someone’s destiny,” Konchalski added. “Especially in New York.”

Stephenson, who has been told by his doctor that he should reach a height of 6-9, has a basketball reputation growing as fast as his body. During the summer of 2005, he was showcased at the ABCD Camp in Hackensack, N.J., as one of the nation’s top young players, and he has since become a hot commodity on the city’s A.A.U. circuit. He is already considered basketball royalty at the famed Rucker Park in Harlem, where his nickname is Sir Lance a Lot.

Stephenson made headlines in September 2005, with an 11th-hour decision to leave Bishop Loughlin High School and enroll at Lincoln. The decision left some to assume that he may have been influenced by Lincoln Coach Dwayne Morton, who also coaches the Juice All-Stars, an A.A.U. team that Stephenson joined after playing for the New York Panthers. The Panthers, another A.A.U. team, have close ties to Bishop Loughlin. In discussing the last-minute leap to Lincoln, Lance Stephenson Sr. said that his son merely had a change of heart.

“Coming to Lincoln was Lance’s call, no one else’s,” he said. “This is what he wants to do with his life, and he’s going for it.”

Against an undefeated Boys and Girls team that was in first place in the Public Schools Athletic League’s AA Division and had defeated Lincoln in December by a point, Stephenson showed why people were willing to stand in long lines on a frigid winter evening to watch him play. He displayed a vast arsenal of jaw-dropping aerial moves and eye-opening ground attacks en route to 30 points, 12 rebounds and 8 assists.

“I was just in a zone out there,” Stephenson told a large group of reporters who surrounded him after the game. “I think I did a lot today.”

When the dust cleared, Lincoln (19-5, 13-1), the defending P.S.A.L. city champion and winner of four of the past five city title games, had won easily, 90-74, serving notice that it was still the team to beat in New York. Stephenson, who was averaging 26 points, 12 rebounds and 8 assists going into last night’s game against Grady, continued to convince college coaches that he is capable of lifting a team on his muscular shoulders and carrying it to a Final Four.

“I’m thinking about a lot of big-time colleges right now,” Stephenson said. “But before that, I want to win a state championship here at Lincoln.”

Glenn Braica, the top assistant to St. John’s Coach Norm Roberts, was sitting in the crowd that evening. Though N.C.A.A. coaches are not permitted to discuss high school players unless they have signed a national letter of intent to play at a particular university, Braica’s body language said all that was needed to know about his, or anyone else’s, interest in Stephenson.

After a long stretch on the bench because of early foul trouble and a short-temperedness with teammates who were not passing him the ball when and where he wanted it, Stephenson returned with 4 minutes 11 seconds remaining before halftime. Braica’s eyebrows shot north when Stephenson burst between two defenders in the lane and leaped high for an alley-oop pass, laying the ball softly into the net.

Stephenson raced back on defense, soared above the pack to corral a rebound, wheeled into open space, sidestepped an opponent at midcourt with a crossover dribble that energized the crowd and, through a maze of scrambling defenders around the foul line, threaded a perfect pass to a teammate streaking down the lane that resulted in another basket. Braica gently nodded in approval.

With 2:57 left in a game that had already been decided, Stephenson gave Braica and the rest of the crowd a mighty display of his speed and strength, racing ahead of the field for a dunk that seemed to bruise not just the egos of the powerful Boys and Girls team, but the rim itself.

Two days later, against South Shore High, Stephenson had 29 points, 12 rebounds and 6 assists in leading the Railsplitters to a 76-53 victory. Last night, he had a triple-double (30 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists) in a 91-63 rout at Grady. “This is a parent’s dream come true,” Stephenson Sr. said of his son’s emergence. “What Lance is doing out there is the product of 100 percent hard work.”

Each morning before school, father and son partake in what the elder Stephenson, a 38-year-old construction worker and former basketball player at California-Santa Barbara, jokingly calls “the Coney Island workout.”

Their regimen begins with 100 push-ups and is followed by five trips up and down the 15 flights of stairs of their apartment complex at West 28th Street and Mermaid Avenue.

After the stairs, father and son start jogging the beach, mile after sandy mile. “I’m trying to get Lance down to running a six-minute mile,” his father said. “He runs a seven-minute mile right now, but he’s getting there.”

Morton, a former Long Island University star who played at Lincoln in the mid-1980s, said that before “getting there,” Stephenson still had some considerable work to do.

“He has to learn how to play defense, and to stay in control on the basketball court,” Morton said. “When I watch Lance, as skilled and strong as he already is, I sometimes forget that he’s only a sophomore, that he’s just a 16-year-old kid.”

After the game against Boys and Girls, Stephenson discussed his on-court demeanor, which can dampen easily if a teammate fails to deliver the ball to him in a timely manner.

“I know I yell too much out there, but my teammates know I don’t really mean it,” he said. “We have a whole team of talented players here, and I would never disrespect any of them. It’s just another one of those areas where I need to improve.”

Morton said that Stephenson, whose height, weight and athletic ability make him nearly impossible to defend as a point guard at the high school level, would continue to play that position.

“At 6-9, with his skills, he would be most effective and, really, unstoppable as a point guard,” Morton said. “If you double-team him, he hits the open man. If he’s not double-teamed, he can take you outside or drive right by you, and he’s strong enough to take you down low if he has to.”

Shades of Magic Johnson, perhaps?

“Lance’s potential is there, and it’s unbelievable, but let’s not call him the greatest this or the greatest that, at least not yet,” Morton said.
------

Anyone remember where Tinsley went to school?

[Dr. Goldfoot]

Re: The next great point guard?

Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn.

[PacersFan83]

Re: The next great point guard?

6'5" 1/2, 205 as a 16 year old? Sounds pretty built. The next LeBron perhaps?

[Cherokee]

Re: The next great point guard?

I thought I read somewhere where Tinsley did not play high school ball. Is that true?

[Evan_The_Dude]

Re: The next great point guard?

I remember reading that he didn't graduate high school, but I'm not sure if he ever played high school ball. I don't think he did.

[able]

Re: The next great point guard?

http://www.brooklynusa.org/espn1.htm

BREAKING AWAY
HE COULD HAVE BEEN A LEGEND - BUT IOWA STATE'S JAMAAL TINSLEY WANTED SOMETHING MORE

P.S. 305 The court is empty. There are no colorful markings on the blacktop, no signs dedicated to the legends-Starbury, Booger, SkiptomyLou-who balled here. "The Cage," as the locals call it, is easy to miss. It's just a lonely schoolyard across the street from a block of brownstones, a full court maybe 60 feet long in the heart of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Soon, school will let out and kids will flood the spot. Later, when night falls, and older crew will gather to play, drink beer and recast the neighborhood's oral history-the ballhandling tricks, the crossovers, the no-look passes. Undoubtedly, a verbal squab will ensue about some unforgettable move signed in fractured memories...

Moves like the one former 305 resident Jamaal Tinsley pulled off against Shammond Williams at harlem's Rucker Park, bouncing the ball through William's legs with his left hand, bringing it back with his right and nailing a three as Williams fell out of bounds. Yet, for all the stories of broken ankles and coins snatched from the tops of backboards, tragedy remains the prerequisite for the inner-city immortality. Jamaal Tinsley isn't just the exception to the rule, but the rule itself, twisted and contorted into an undeniable truth of his own making.

While it's often possible to catch a street legend's act at Rucker on Brooklyn's Soul in the Hole, the story usually ends there, in the street. Just a few years ago, all indications were that Tinsley's story would end there too. By the time he was 19, he had bounced in and out of three high schools in two cities, been the target of gangland gunfire and spent a week in the Manhattan House of Detention, a.k.a. the Tombs. All told, Mel (as he's known to friends) attended less than two months of high school, never graduating. But he always kept the dream alive, ballin' late into the night at 305. And just when it appeared as if the street was his destiny, The Cage his symbolic prison, he found a way out.

Today, in the nation's heartland, he continues to feed the myth, append to the story line, cultivate the legend You can talk about The Helicopter, The Goat and Sweet Pea, but Mel-Mel the Abuser would prefer that when he is spoken of, it's not in the past tense. Although he has packed a considerable amount of living into his first 22 years, jamaal Tinsley's days are just beginning.

Five months after entering his first Division I season as an unknown point guard, the 6'3" Tinsley led Iowa State to within a game of the Final Four last March. In the hours leading up to the Cyclones' Sweet 16 matchup with UCLA, Mel roamed the Palace of Auburn Hills wearing a Brooklyn USA T-shirt, Brooklyn USA was his AAU team, the link from 305 to ISU, the only organized form of basketball he played before college. The T-shirt was Mel's way of keeping his three-year odyssey from street to stage in perspective. It was also a message to UCLA's Earl Watson and JaRon Rush, whose CMH 76ers squad had played Brooklyn USA several times. Mel wanted to remind them that they had never beaten him. And they weren't about to start now.

Tinsley's performance against the red-hot Bruins was perhaps his finest of the season-14 points, 11 assists and 9 rebounds in 35 minutes. But it was his ability to get into the lane against man or zone that caused the most damage in the Cyclones' 80-56 win. "He was as quick as any guard we faced all year," says UCLA coach, Steve Lavin. "He broke people down off the dribble and got to the point at will, and he brought a mental toughness, a supreme confidence in his ability." In short, playing the Bruins brought out the Brooklyn in Mel.

Tinsley's journey from one of Brooklyn's toughest hoods to the Elite Eight is as remarkable as any of his sugar-foot drives to the hole. His father died from the flu when Mel was 9 )his parents were divorced), and when his stepfather died later that year, Mel's mother, Leatrice Smith, was left to raise eight kids on her husband's pension. Cramped in a small two-story apartment, Tinsley began spending more time away from home and less in school. "Once I got to be 12, 13, I just did my own thing," he says. "I stayed with my friends. I'd check in with my mom to see how she was doing, come home and wash up."

One friend Mel stayed with was Antoine Toon, his "road dog," as Tinsley puts it. Close in age, Toon knew the score. He could see Mel had been frustrated living in such close quarters with so many people and so little to survive on. "If you go to school around here, everybody wants to have the best stuff," Toon says. "Mel couldn't really do that with a lot of kids in the house. He couldn't just get what he wanted, the newest sneakers, whatever."

Mel dropped out of his first high school, Prospect Heights, after just a couple of weeks, so his mother sent him to live with her sister in Cleveland. There he made the mistake of getting involved with a girl who had ties to a gang-a gang that approached him to join its ranks. Mel said he wasn't interested; they pressed the issue. His aunt tried to intervene; they told her they weren't backing off. Next thing he knew, Tinsley was getting shot at one night. And that's when he decided to drop out again.

Back in New York five months later, Tinsley enrolled at Tilden High with the help of Brooklyn USA director Thomas "Ziggy" Sicignano. Ziggy, who helped place former UNLV Rebel Kevin Simmons and former UNC Tar Heel Ed Cota at Tilden, tried to sell coach Rock Eisenberg on the idea that time spent working with Tinsley would pay off big. But Eisenberg never had a chance. Mel dropped out about six weeks later. "It was my fault for not preparing myself to go to school," he says now. "I was just hanging out, letting the streets catch me."

For the next couple of years, basketball became Tinsley's only occupation. He'd been a fixture at 305 from the age of 6, trailing his older brother Lamont to The Cage, playing against the big kids until 11 or 12 at night. He'd also been a regular at the local 12-and-under tournaments that included Stephon Marbury, Rafer Alston, Allen Griffin and Jaquay Walls. But by the time he was 17, Tinsley was out of school completely-sleeping all day, staying out all night, playing in AAU tourneys across the country.

Ziggy remembers having to track down Mel and wake him up one afternoon so they could drive to Philadelphia for a tourney. Mel perked up in time to put up a triple-doulbe as Brooklyn USA beat a team featuring Al Harrington. In the summer of 1997, a Ziggy squad that included Griffin, Walls and Cota won the Nike Invitational in Las Vegas, with Tinsley taking MVP honors. It didn't hurt that the rules banned any kind of zone, making it easier to spread the floor and the good word of Mel. "Whenever we needed a hoop, we'd clear it out," Ziggy says. "You know, give it to Mel and get out of the way."

Any other player would have turned that trip into a college scholarship-that is, anyone who wasn't a high school dropout. As soon as Mel was back toDo-or-Die Bed-Stuy, he was back on the street.

Tinsley spent the majority of his time hanging with about 30 other guys at The Cage. He didn't sling drugs like most of them, but it was becoming harder to resist the lure of fast money. "I was trying to live like the older guys," he says, "wanting what they got." The previous winter, he had been arrested for pickpocketing and sent to the Tombs. His mother was shocked. Dropping out of school was one thing, but this? This wasn't her Jamaal. Hoping to prove a point, Smith refused to post bail, leaving her son behind bars for nearly a week. "It was real hard," she says, but I knew I was doing the right thing". (The charges were eventually dropped.)

Mel downlplays the impact his stint in jail had on him. But as he continued to ball in street tourneys, playing with and against the likes of Booger Smith, a slicker-than-slick 5'8" point guard who could slip a pass through rush-hour traffic on Flatbush Avenue. Kicked out of Brooklyn's Westinghouse High in 1993 for throwing dice, he had achieved cultlike status on the playgrounds in and around New York City. Each time he had a chance to play college ball, though, he ended up back in the hood playing for cash. Mel could have easily followed his footsteps, making $150 to $200 a game. But Booger was quickly becoming an old-timer. And at age 19, Mel was starting to feel like one too.

PS 305 court is where the dream starts, where the love is fostered. So it only stands to reason that this was the place where, one day in late August '97, Tinsley would spot Ziggy and reach out. Friends of Mel had been bugging the coach to help Tinsley escape the hood and restart his b-ball career at a prep school. Ziggy's response was always the same. "I can't do anything for Mel. He's got to want it." Sure enough, when Tinsley approached him at the Cage, Sicignano balked, "Yeah, I can help you," Ziggy said. "But I'm not going to."

There was a pause, of course, but then the coach couldn't stand the silence. He had too much love for the kid-and the kid sounded serious. Forget prep school, Ziggy told Mel. It would take three years at that level before he could even think of college. Ziggy had another idea. He knew that the junior college system in California requires no high school diploma or GED for entry. So he called up a friend, UNLV coach Bill Bayno, who directed him to John Chambers, the head man at Mt. San Jacinto College, 50 miles west of Palm Springs.

Ziggy called Chambers, a 30-year mainstay of the juco ranks. Basketball wasn't the issue, he explained; Tinsley had NBA talent. What he lacked was experience. Mel didn't know to run hard in practice. He had never been to an organized practice. "You got to kick him in the rear end," Ziggy said. "You got to wake him up in the morning. He's not going to show up when the rooster crows. We don't have roosters in Bed-Stuy." Chambers listened. He'd heard from friends who had witnessed Tinsley' show in Vegas. Get him out here, Chambers told Sicignano. I'll take him sight unseen.

Ziggy booked Mel on a round-trip flight and kept the return ticked The neighborhood chipped in with phone cards and clothes. Nearly 20 of Mel's siblings and cousins were there for the big send-off when Ziggy arrived at the Smith home to take Tinsley to the airport. On crutches because of a sprained ankle, and with tears in his eyes, Tinsley said goodbye to his mom. She remembers thinking how scared he looked, that he wouldn't be in California for long. Ziggy sensed otherwise. Sell Mel's bed, he told her. Your son's not coming back.

This was Mel's shot, a chance few street legends get. You can't have any foolish pride, any Brooklyn pride, Ziggy warned Tinsley. These people on the other side of the country were going to help him. If he had a question in class, he had to ask. This wasn't a game. As Mel remembers: "It was like going into the army or something, packing my bags not knowing what to expect or how they would treat me. And when I went there, it was just like love-like I was back home."

Tinsley began the second half of his life in the Southern California desert. He spent his time at San Jac hanging out with Chambers' family and running through dozens of phone cards. He didn't return home that first year, not even for the holidays. "It was a struggle," Chambers says. "Where some guys had to study an hour, Mel had to study three."

The adjustment on the court was equally difficult. Tinsley had a smooth handle and great vision, but his game was pure New York. Jut listen to Ziggy tell it: "You want to know what makes a New York City guard? A New York City guard dribbles down and sees two sever-footers standing under the basket. The guard is open from 10 feet, but the guard says to himself, 'Why should I shoot an open 10-foot jumper when I can try and dunk on the two seven-footers?' That's what makes New York City guards."

On the street, everything is to the basket. But in his first year out West, Tinsley learned that freelancing had a time and a place. Eventually, the New York City guard flourished. The Eagles went 62-13 in his two seasons, and Mel shared state Player of the Year honors as a sophomore. "A lot of people question his background and what kind of kid he is," Chambers says. "All he's done is win. And he's shown tremendous progress in the classroom."

Oh yea, the classroom. When Tinsley began entertaining D1 offers, schoolwork was one of his biggest considerations. His playmaking ability had attracted a handful of programs. UNLV wanted him, as did TCU. But Mel took just one visit, to Iowa State, where Cyclones coach Larry Eustachy was scouring the juco ranks for a point guard. Eustachy's approach impressed the maturing Tinsley. "I told them I needed a lot of help with school," Jamaal says. "They told me they'd give me all the help they could-that school was first. I'd never thought about it like that."

The population of Ames, Iowa, tops out around 50,000, more than half of which is the ISU community. The Cyclones' football stadium and basketball arena rise like ancient ruins amid miles and miles of endless horizon. During pregame intros, Iowa State fans clap for each opposing starter, and there's a public address announcement discouraging the use of profanity. With its landlocked acres of tilled land, the place couldn't be any farther from the Brooklyn playgrounds. Then again, like any Iowa farmer worth his seed, Tinsley knows how to transform a piece of level earth into something greater.

In time, Tinsley transformed the Clones, too. Eustachy's system emphasizes defense and rebounding. But on 0, he gives his players a lot of freedom-and it took a while for Tinsley and his teammates to jell last year. At first, Mel would see a play developing so fast that he'd snap a pass off an unsuspecting teammate's dome. Or he'd turn into Curly Neal, throwing the rock through an opponent's legs with his left hand, bringing it back with his right-just like he did to poor Shammad Williams at Rucker Park. Eustachy didn't mind the ball tricks as long as they resulted in baskets. But turnovers meant the Cyclones would run. And run. After a round of suicides during preseason conditioning, an out-of-breath Tinsley muttered in Eustachy's direction: "I didn't sign a f--ing track scholarship." The coach pretended not to hear. He was testing his new point man. "We had an over-under with him," Eustachy says. "But you could tell from the beginning he was going to hang in there."

Sure enough, all that running paid off once conference play began. With his Wilt-size mitts, Tinsley was delivering the pill where his teammates could score more efficiently than ever before. All-America Marcus Fizner had let the Big 12 in scoring as s sophomore, but when he did it again as s junior with Mel running the show, his field goal accuracy jumped from 45% to 58%. Forward Stevie Johnson's numbers jumped even more, from 48% as a junior to 66% as s senior. Out of nowhere, Iowa State shot to the top of the conference, winning both the regular-season and tourney titles before finally falling to Michigan State in the Elite eight.

Tinsley, the Big 12 Newcomer of the year, made progress off the court, too, finishing with a 2.13 GPA as a sociology major. Still, he surprised a lot of people by sticking around and passing a potential first-round contract. "I just knew I could get better," he says. Part of getting better means improving his line-drive frozen-rope jumper and figuring out who can finish his great feeds now that Fizer, Johnson and Michael Nurse are gone.

But count on Mel fulfilling the dream. He knows where he's been and what this one opportunity has given him. "He has real base despite coming up in a real difficult situation," Eustachy says. "My hat is off to him more than any other player I've had."

Back home in Bed-Stuy, there is a sense of anticipation. One of their own is about to go big-time. Friends imagine Tinsley playing at Madison Square Garden, being interviewed by Ahmad Rashad, moving his mom and little brother Mitchell-an eight-grader known as Baby Mel-out of Brooklyn. For now, the Abuser can wait. Last summer Tinsley stayed away from New York and 305 for all but two weeks. "I'm trying not to go back," he says. "Not yet. I'm going to go back when I'm right, when everything is taken care of, when my business is straight, when I've accomplished everything I've set out to do."

This isn't Brooklyn pride talking. This is what his AAU coach had in mind when he dropped him at the airport three years ago. "It took a lot of people to get Mel where he is," Ziggy says. "Most importantly, it took Mel."