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Great Story on Ater Majok
http://www.norwichbulletin.com/sports/x1...to-Huskies
Top 15 recruit who will be eligible to play next year. I think he will be another very special player for UCONN and the BE.
Quote:UConn Men's Basketball: Majok’s journey leads him to Huskies
Posted Jan 25, 2009 @ 12:00 AM
By MATT STOUT
mstout@norwichbulletin.com
(860) 425-4213
Ater Majok couldn’t stop smiling. Cameras and recorders surrounded him Wednesday night, and he answered everything with the corners of his mouth glued right below his ears.
He slipped in jokes. He told an anecdote or two. He spoke seriously of his academics, and even though the news wasn’t exactly what he was hoping for, he couldn’t find a truly negative thing to say.
“You can’t really stress about it,” he said, referring to the NCAA’s decision to grant him partial clearance to join the UConn men’s basketball team after an unexpectedly lengthy process. Majok, a 6-foot-10 forward, is enrolled at UConn and practicing with the Huskies, but he can’t suit up or travel with them until the completion of finals in the fall, which puts his debut some time in mid-December.
“You just have to smile,” he said, “and go ahead with it.”
It’s this positive attitude that has carried Ater Majok (pronounced Ah-TEAR Mah-JOOK) through the unimaginably difficult times in his life.
He left his home in Sudan at the age of five, forced out by the on-going political and religious conflicts that have plagued the country. Majok, now 21, spent the next eight years as a refugee in Cairo, Egypt. He was attacked, one time having his ear cut by a knife, and his father, upon returning to Sudan, was jailed several times.
Majok’s coach, Ed Smith, said there was a time recently when his family was met at its door by a group of people toting machine guns. Majok’s sister still lives in Cairo, and he has family in Sudan he hasn’t seen in years.
But at the age of 13, his family, thanks to aide from the United Nations, found asylum in Australia, where they still live. Majok, fluent in Dinka and Arabic, spoke little to no English. He found Smith and basketball three years later. Five years after that, he found himself in Hartford, smiling amongst a group of reporters, ready to take the next step in his life.
It’s a journey he talks about in broad terms, moving from one place to the next in conversation without much detail. Then he’ll smile — only because of where it’s finally taken him.
“He’s been through a lot,” Smith said. “But Ater will be the one to smile. He’s just happy where he is. But he won’t share, and there are a lot of things. His father was imprisoned for four years when he went back to the country. I didn’t know that for a while, and then it came out. He was said like, ‘Yeah, they locked my father up when he went back to (Sudan).’
“But I think from a positive standpoint, it makes a lot of things easier,” he continued. “When you’re waiting to see if you’re going to come to a new country, get out of a bad situation, waiting to be cleared academically pales in comparison. He has patience and resolve. There’s a strength about him.”
Unimaginable
When Majok was born on July 4, 1987, his country (located in northeast Africa on the southern border of Egypt) was already embroiled in the Second Sudanese Civil War, which lasted from 1983 through 2005 when a ceasefire was put in place.
The conflict claimed an estimated two million lives, and forced hundreds of thousands from its borders, more than 27,000 of whom — often referred to as the Lost Boys of Sudan — found refuge in the United States.
Majok, with his mother and three brothers, came to Egypt, where tens of thousands of other refugees have stayed. Reports of racial discrimination and police violence toward the Sudanese litter accounts there.
But reports alone can’t capture the magnitude of the situation.
“You couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to be six years old and separated from your father and sister and put into a refugee camp and not knowing if you’d ever go home again, not knowing if you’d be reunited with your family again, not knowing where you’d end up, not being safe, not having food,” said UConn assistant Andre LaFleur, who led the recruitment of Majok and has flown to Australia to meet with him and his family.
“There are so many things that we really don’t even think about.”
A new chapter
But Majok’s life changed when he came to Australia. And like today, academics preceded basketball.
“I was coaching his cousin and he told me (Majok) was coming and that he was a young kid and he was going to be tall,” said Smith, who in 1998 started his private program that has helped hundreds of refugees afford to play basketball. He currently has about 80 in the program.
“I came and I said, ‘I would like to get started with this young man quickly.’ But his parents said, ‘No basketball. We want him to get settled academically.’”
So as Majok grasped the language — he speaks fluent English now, with a hint of an Australian accent — he found other outlets, such as soccer (Africa’s most popular sport) and volleyball (the sport his mother played).
It wasn’t until he was 16 that he played organized basketball. Long and athletic — he actually stands 6 feet, 10 1/2 inches now, Smith said — the coach first tried molding Majok into a full-time post player. But girth and broad shoulders aren’t the forward’s strength, so Smith went back to square one.
“(Kevin) Durant was coming up at that period in time,” Smith said, referring to the former Texas All-American and current Oklahoma City Thunder star. “So I kind of started looking at different models like him and (Tracy) McGrady. I said, ‘This is a kid who can have that type of a game.’”
Majok’s focus turned to ball-handling, outside shooting and passing. A natural shot-blocker, Majok will “chase some of the shot-blocking records that have been established” at UConn, Smith said, and as one of the nation’s top recruits — Scout.com had him within the top 15 of this year’s class at one point — his talent is undeniable.
“He’s agile, he’s versatile,” said junior Hasheem Thabeet, a fellow African who played with Majok at times during the summer. “We worked out. I tried to talk to him about the coach, basketball, life. He’s a good kid, and I really believe he’ll contribute next year.”
Smith is even more confident in Majok’s abilities only because he’s never had a player who applies his work in practice to games as well as Majok.
“When he gets in the game, it’s like, ‘Boom!’” said Smith, who returned home to his wife and five children Friday after spending 88 days in the U.S. “He’s going to have a very good career at UConn.”
A student, then an athlete
Things won’t go so fast in Storrs, though. Majok will spend the remainder of this season as a practice player with a focus on adding 10-to-15 pounds of muscle to his 233-pound frame and adjusting to American basketball, though he’s had experience playing at the AAU level in Virginia.
“It will make me stronger, which I definitely need, and much more athletic,” said Majok, who attended the American International School in Sydney and hopes to study law. “Also, I’ll fit in a little easier in college life and everything around America because I haven’t been here that long.”
UConn coach Jim Calhoun feels he won’t have a hard time adjusting.
“He said to me, ‘How good were your seats at the inauguration?’” said Calhoun, who was in Washington last Tuesday to see President Barack Obama being sworn in. “I said, ‘Muhammad Ali and Magic (Johnson) and those guys were up there, but Mariah Carey was here.’”
Majok’s response: “That’s why you should have brought me.”
“It shows you at (21), they all kind of think the same whether they’re from the Sudan, Australia, Egypt and now, at the University of Connecticut,” Calhoun said. “I couldn’t be happier on a personal note for a kid who deserves (it) because of the SAT scores he achieved. ... It’s really a special (story).”
In a way, it’s just beginning.
“He has the ability to really do some special things, and now he has his opportunity,” LaFleur said. “But I can’t even begin to put his story into one article. That wouldn’t be doing it justice.”
Copyright 2009 GateHouse Media, Inc. Some Rights Reserved.
Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
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