Cavs' Newble tries to rally players in support of Darfur

	After learning about the Darfur crisis, seven-year NBA veteran Ira Newble said, "I just felt like I had to do something." Andy Lyons/Getty Images
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Ira Newble stuffed his teammates' lockers. Then he worried the Cavs would think it was junk mail.

"They might've thrown it out. I had to tell them it was from me," the 6-foot-7 forward said of the little geography/history packet he printed a couple weeks ago.

It all started on a road trip, with a copy of USA Today and an article on the crisis in Darfur, the western region of Sudan where ethnic cleansing might not adequately describe the horror. Since early in 2003, the Sudanese military and its proxy militia, the Janjaweed, have been raping and dismembering and just plain slaughtering the land-tilling, non-Arab villagers. Newble read that some 500,000 Sudanese are dead and another 2.5 million are homeless, and he rubbed his eyes.

Then he logged a few hours on the Internet and found out that China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil, and that the proceeds from that fund weapons for the Janjaweed. He read that China has invested a billion dollars a year, for the last 10 years, in Sudan, and that just under 50 percent of Sudan's exports land on China's shores. Newble learned that every attempt the U.N. has made to send civilian-protecting peacekeepers into the region has been vetoed ... by the 2008 Summer Olympic-hosting Chinese.

"It really took me back. I just felt like I had to do something, like there had to be some way I could help," Newble said.

So he e-mailed Eric Reeves, an English professor at Smith College who's the preeminent expert in the U.S. on the situation in Sudan. The pair decided an open letter to China was the first thing Newble could do. The seven-year veteran of three NBA teams went to work drafting words his fellow athletes could sign on to: "We, as basketball players in the NBA and as potential athletes in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, cannot look on with indifference to the massive human suffering and destruction that continue in the Darfur region of Sudan."

The 32-year-old Miami of Ohio graduate printed out his letter and made little study sheets like the kind his teammates did or didn't read in high school.

"Pretty much most of them actually read it," Newble said, a sweet pride in his voice.

The Cavs know Newble's don't-leave-home-without-it accessory is a book. He rocketed through Bill Rhoden's $40 Million Slaves, and on a recent flight home from a playoff game in New Jersey, he was lugging Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope. But the last time Newble played any sort of politics was in eighth grade, when he was his class president. He doesn't proselytize and he sure as heck never wanted to be mouthing off on something one of his teammates might find offensive.

This one was different though. This crisis, this cause, "just spoke to me," Newble said. "It's such a tragic situation and the most alarming thing is that so many people don't know it's happening."

That's the response Newble got from most of his teammates. He got a lot of "Are you serious?" and a little "For real?" and most important, he said, "They took me seriously."