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Who is Nate Blue? It's an old story with new names: altruist or leech?Posted: Wednesday July 31, 2002 8:32 PM
LOS ANGELES -- The end of July evaluation period beckoned and the Long Island Panthers were tuckered out, but they had one last burst of excitement left. It happened Tuesday night during a quarterfinal game at the Double Pump/Best of the Summer Tournament at Loyola Marymount University, when rising junior guard Josh Wright hit a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to give the Panthers a one-point victory over the Nebraska Bison. The long and short of the ensuing celebration told a deeper story, however. Bouncing around the gym with the rest of the euphoric teenagers was Lamar Odom, the 6-foot-10 forward for the Los Angeles Clippers, whose fealty for his former AAU team has not subsided with fame, fortune and time. Also in the middle of the celebration was Gary Charles, the Panthers’ founder and coach who stands all of 5-foot-5 -- "Not an inch shorter," he warns with a smile -- and whose relationship with Odom came under unflattering scrutiny as Odom shuttled between four high schools and two colleges before kiting off to the NBA. Odom may have been the biggest name in the gym, but on this night he wasn’t the center of attention. That encomium belonged to Panthers forward Charlie Villanueva, a 6-10 Queens native going into his senior year at Blair Academy in Blairstown, N.J. In skills and style, Villanueva is remarkably similar to Odom, right down his shiny pate, and he is widely considered to be amongst the top players in his class. And just as Odom had Charles to watch over him, Villanueva also has a man in his life named Nate Blue, who’s not exactly a coach and not quite a family member, but who is active in the New York City basketball scene and has known Villanueva since he was 10. As they say in recruiting parlance, Blue is "the guy" to talk to about Villanueva. "Nate is like a brother to me," Villanueva says. "I trust him completely." It’s the same old story, raising the same old questions. If someone attaches himself to young basketball players, he must be looking for something, right? Money? Favors? A job? Is he an altruist or a leech? "It always amazes me when you’ve been with a kid all his life and then he gets to a certain level, people expect you to just go away," Charles, 41, said. "Why do we have to 'get something' out of it? You want to say I’m a pimp, that’s fine with me. But that means Mike Krzyzewski is a pimp and Roy Williams is a pimp. You think they’re out here recruiting my 12th man, or are they interested in signing the best players?" If Charles is trying to play some kind of angle, then he’s apparently not playing it very well. Fourteen years after he started the Panthers, and nine years after he hit the big-time with a young star named Billy Owens, Charles’ life has hardly changed. By day, he still works for the Bank of New York as a systems programmer. By night and by weekend, he still coaches the Panthers. The club has two teams -- one for players 16-and-under, one for 17-and-under. Adidas supplies Charles with sneakers, uniforms, duffel bags and an annual stipend that Charles says covers less than half of his travel budget. Players competing for the 16-and-under team are required to pay their own way, but the remainder of the older team’s expenses, according to Charles, come straight out of his own pocket. Charles doesn’t have the most impressive basketball credentials -- he played one year of varsity ball for Roosevelt High School and coached intramural basketball and football while he was an undergraduate at Cheyney (Pa.) State -- but many of New York’s top high school players have come through his program and gone on to play in Division I and the NBA. Odom, however, is the player who helped Charles make his mark, for better and for worse. Charles was implicated in a July, 1997, Sports Illustrated story about SAT fraud that led to an NCAA investigation of then-St. John’s forward (and former Long Island Panther) Zendon Hamilton and prompted UNLV to renege its scholarship offer to Odom. Charles also was responsible for briefly sending Odom to Redemption Christian Academy in upstate New York, a non-accredited prep school. Odom’s tenure at Redemption yielded no diploma, just more scandal. For the record, Charles said he has "no regrets" about the way he handled Odom, though he laments that "it can take you 10 years to create an image and one day to ruin it." As for Odom, his presence this week at the Panthers’ game spoke volumes about his feelings for Charles. "Gary was the one helping me when things weren’t going right," Odom said. "I’m someone who’s big on loyalty. He helped me get through some hard times, and I’m grateful for that." If time is the sternest of tests, then it must be said that Charles has passed it. "With all the kids I’ve coached, I could have easily gotten a college job if I wanted one," Charles says. "If I was looking for something like that, I would have taken it by now." It remains to be seen whether Blue will pass the same test. Asked whether he is interested in becoming a college coach, Blue replied, "Never never never. You don’t help kids when you’re a college basketball coach. All you can do is help kids in your university. My goal is to help everybody I can get an athletic scholarship." At 24, Blue, by his own admission, falls well short of Charles in terms of prominence on the national AAU circuit. Blue’s turf begins and ends in New York. He runs a local summer team called the Elmhurst Answers, and he operates a Web site called Real Scouts that chronicles some of the hoop happenings around the Big Apple. On July 31, the last day of the summer evaluation period for Division I coaches, Blue ran an NCAA-certified all-star game in Queens featuring high school and junior college players. Several dozen college coaches attended. Blue first met Villanueva, whose family hails from the Dominican Republic and who grew up in Queens, when Villanueva was 10. "It’s not like I was trying to recruit the kid," Blue said. "I had no idea he would grow so tall and be this good." After dropping out of Brooklyn’s Kinsborough Community College, Blue took a job as an administrative assistant with Verizon Wireless and became an assistant coach at Newtown High School in Elmhurst. Villanueva followed Blue to Newtown, but after Villanueva’s sophomore year, Blue says he convinced the player to leave Newtown and enroll at Blair Academy. "His grades weren’t good at all," Blue said. "The coach there [Patrick Torney] felt like Charlie shouldn’t worry about academics. He only cared about winning basketball games. I didn’t want Charlie to associate with people like that, so I took him out of school and sent him to Blair Academy." (Efforts to reach Torney were unsuccessful.) Villanueva is said to be close with both his parents, who are separated. Asked why it was his business -- and not Charlie’s parents -- to determine where the player should go to school, Blue replied, "He has a good family, but they can only do so much. A lot of people have solid families and still do crazy things. I’ve known him since he was young and I don’t want to see people steer him wrong. The reason he has a shot at going to the NBA is because of everything I did for him." With his size, agility and remarkable ball-handling skills, Villanueva is a virtual lock to play in the NBA someday soon, and he might have the chance to enter the draft straight out of high school. He currently lists Connecticut, Illinois, Seton Hall, Villanova and USC as his likely collegiate destinations, but added, "If I’m lottery, I’m definitely going [to the NBA]." Blue says he has no interest in directing Villanueva’s choice or directly benefiting from it, an assertion that at least one coach recruiting the player confirms. "If Nate is looking for money or a job, he certainly hasn’t indicated that to us," the coach said. "As far as I can tell, he’s just trying to help this kid out. Charlie obviously thinks highly of him." It is, indeed, an old story, and it will be a while before we’re able to sort out the altruists from the leaches. Watching the action from the sidelines at Loyola Marymount on Tuesday night, Odom couldn’t help but see a younger version of himself in Villanueva. "He has my height, and he likes to pass it like I did," Odom said. "I don’t know him as well as I’d like to, but I told him to take things slow, not to rush things. It’s better for people to know you than not to know you, but there are a lot of things that can trip you up along the way. Hopefully, he’ll be all right." |
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