Samuels has become a star but hasn't forgotten roots

Once a clumsy player, forward Samardo Samuels has filled out to be an imposing force for St. Benedict's in Newark, N.J. Kelly Kline

Stephen Johnston, a 6-foot-8, 37-year-old social worker who had captained four Jamaican National basketball teams, could not take his eyes off the bobble-headed beanpole.

It was July 2003, and Johnston was seeking a seamless career segue from player to teacher and developer. Having flown to Jamaica from New York to work a camp run by Jamaica Basketball Development, a group committed to developing the island nation's athletes, he had limited expectations. The camp's intent was to identify players with college scholarship potential, but Johnston would have been just as happy to simply teach fundamentals.

That all changed when he saw Samardo Samuels, a skinny, 13-year-old basketball tenderfoot working his way through drills at the G.C Foster College gym in Spanishtown, Jamaica. "Samardo was tall for his age," Johnston says. "He had good footwork, but he didn't dunk once. I thought his height could get a scholarship to college. I had seen bigger stiffs than him get college scholarships."

After a game that week, Johnston pulled Samuels aside and asked if he would like to come to the United States and pursue basketball. "I wasn't sure he understood, but he just had a one-word answer," says Johnston." He just said, "Yeah."

For the next 10 months, Johnston, who works for a non-profit social service group in Queens, N.Y., reached out to basketball contacts in the States. All he had to sell was a photo of Samuels standing next to him, proving that his boasts of a 6-8 product would not shrink into a 5-7 guard upon arrival. Still, no school bit. It took a chance encounter at work with Lawrence McGuggins, an acquaintance who remembered Johnston from his playing days, to find a match. He knew someone at Our Savior New American, a prep school in Centereach, N.Y., who was interested. "Think about that, I couldn't find anyone to take Samardo Samuels," Johnston says. "Now he walks in to gyms and he's Norm from Cheers."

Almost five years later, nearly everyone in Madison Square Garden knew Samuels' name at the Super Six, a premier event on the prep scene, last Sunday. Some in the front row, like UNC coach Roy Williams, had recruited him. Others like power broker William Wesley had promised to make him a star. Of the 3,000-plus in attendance, though, only Johnston and his friend, Karriem Memminger, had been fully involved with his pilgrimage from Jamaica to the basketball Mecca. Sitting among those in the crowd, Memminger and Johnston were preparing to watch Samuels, who had transferred to St. Benedict's (Newark, N.J.) after his freshman year, take on New York's Rice High in a battle of two nationally-ranked teams. "He's gone from playing on gravel, not paved playgrounds, to the Garden," said Johnston, who became Samuels' guardian when he came to New York in July 2004. "Almost brings a tear to my eye."

During the game, Samuels, who was benched the first quarter for being late to a practice earlier in the week, started slowly. Playing uninspired for more than a quarter, he was frustrated by the quicker guards from Rice, but finally came alive in the third after a thunderous, two-handed dunk. Finishing with 14 points and 13 rebounds, the Louisville-bound forward earned game MVP honors. "Even going through warm-ups I wanted to get that rim," Samuels said. "I got my energy after that dunk. I can still feel it."

To get a true sense of Samardo Samuels you have to go back to his roots. He recalls with ease the first time that his physical education teacher at Muscett High, Trilan Johnson, singled him out in 2001 at the age of 12, saying that his potential was best suited for basketball, not soccer. "I looked at him like he was crazy," says Samuels, who cut the bottom out of a crate to make his first basket in a friend's backyard when he took up the sport. "If I had a basketball I would play soccer with it. That day I played basketball with a soccer ball."

The funny thing about his Jamaican memories is that his peers used to laugh at him. All elbows and jawbone, he couldn't do a single pushup. The Muscett High team was in its first year, but Samuels' weakness was most noticeable. When they did pushups, teammates laughed, saying, "Look, man, he cannot even do one! He has no strength!" He wanted to quit, but his father, Rohan, who owns a taxi company on the island, lectured him on pride. His mother, Jacqueline, had already bought him a pair of sneakers. "I couldn't let her money go to waste," Samuels says.

So he worked. At night, in the privacy of his home, he would do pushups, first 10, then 20, all the way up to 70. Clumsy and uncoordinated, he could not catch the ball. The only thing rougher than his game was the court he played on. Unpaved and rocky, a special skill was needed to dribble the ball and have it bounce back to you. He and his teammates, dressed in their school socks and shoes, would run three miles twice a week to find a playable surface with a rim. In time, they captured the national Under 16 title. After which, the school soon invested in rims with backboards. One day after school, though, Johnson returned to find a rim on the ground. Samuels had been there. "It was a dunk contest with a $50 prize," says Samuels. "I wanted the money, but I landed on my butt. That hurt."

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