Published: May 17, 2008 02:02 am            

COLUMN: Lewin a feel-good story in rough times

MORGANTOWN — Too often these days college athletics stands for all that is wrong in a world gone haywire — greed-driven coaches, late-night bar brawls, recruiting scandals, one-and-done professionals, academic cheating.

There is almost not a day that goes by where the newspapers, radio talk shows or 24-hour cable networks aren’t talking of a rape accusation, a stolen TV or a coach breaking recruiting rules.

It has reached the point that all too often it is the scum that has risen to the top of the pond of moral values that college athletics was born to represent.

That is why today, as West Virginia University holds its spring graduation, Brian Lewin stands taller than even his 6-foot, 11-inch frame, for Lewin will be bestowed today with a degree a decade after his final basketball game as WVU’s starting center.

He does so because of basketball and willingly so acknowledges.

“Basketball saved my life,” said the man who played center on the 1997-98 team that made it to the Sweet 16 via an upset of Bob Huggins’ University of Cincinnati Bearcats.

Lewin’s story is a compelling one, one that proves that it often isn’t the kid who makes the environment bad but the other way around and that young people can be saved from wasting their lives on drugs and crime if only they are given a chance.

Lewin’s story begin in Jamaica, where he was born in 1975 to a family that moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1980 when he was five.

“Even though my parents both worked hard to provide for my three brothers, one sister and me, they had low-paying jobs with no benefits and very little chance for advancement,” he recalled recently.

He found himself adrift on the mean streets of Brooklyn, his life spinning out of control in the wrong direction.

At the age of 9 the influences of the ’hood were beginning to take control of him.

“There were things I wanted that I couldn’t have,” he said. “I could figure out only one way to get them, by shoplifting. So, at the age of 9, I went into a store and stole some jeans and hoodies. Once I did it and got away with it, it was an easy life to continue.”

A young man’s head is too often turned by bling and fancy cars, by $150 athletic shoes and a pretty girl on the arm of a gangster.

“The older guys sold drugs. They were our role models. We wanted to be like they were,” Lewin recalled. “As a result, they took advantage of us and we became drug dealers, too.”

School? That was suckers. You sold drugs, you had running around money.

“I was kicked out of high school. Most of the time I didn’t show up. When I did show up, I got into trouble,” Lewin said.

He bounced from one school to another, going nowhere.

On a day in May he attended the graduation of his brother from his first high school.

He’d grown 6 or 7 inches since he last had attended that school and the basketball coach took note of it. He spoke to Lewin, convinced him to come back to school and play basketball, something he had done only on the playground, never in an organized setting.

“I had grown about 6 or 7 inches in those two years. Fortunately, the basketball coach saw me,” Lewin said.

“As a result, I re-entered my original high school for my senior year and became a part of the varsity basketball team. It was the first time I played regulation basketball.

“My entire world changed. All of a sudden I was around different people, people who were talking about going to college. It wasn’t long before my extra-curricular activities changed.”

Put bluntly, Lewin said simply:

“Basketball saved my life.”

He had something positive to focus upon, something that drained his energy to the point that when his friends called for him to run at night he was too worn down to join them. He began watching basketball on television and, most important, he because concentrating on academics, not thinking of a college degree but only of staying eligible.

As he played the sport, he realized that basketball was doing something for him that he’d never experienced before.

“Basketball gave me life options. For the first time I saw I had an opportunity to go to college, something I’d never thought about before in my life. I was a little more popular for positive reasons and I enjoyed that. I had a sense of pride because I was getting positive reinforcement from others. I was doing the right thing for the first time. I knew if I attended college I could get into a more positive environment because I’d never been out of New York,” he said.

He attended junior college in Texas, as far away from the streets of Brooklyn as he could get, to become academically eligible, then came to WVU. He was raw, but big and strong and in his senior year averaged 7.6 points and 7.6 rebounds a game, highlighted by a 16-rebound, 7-point performance in an upset of a Connecticut team that included Richard Hamilton, Khalid El-Amin and 7-foot center Jake Voskuhl.

While he wasn’t quite at NBA standards, he was ready to let basketball take him around the year, playing in nine countries internationally, including two years in Poland, two in China and a stay in Bahrain, an island in the Persian Gulf.

An easy-going, affable person, Lewin still was lacking one thing — a college diploma.

Last May he decided he’d take advantage of WVU’s post-athletic career scholarship program, returned to the school and is now ready to receive his degree, looking forward to going after his master’s degree in special education.

“I am proud of who I am and the person I have become,” he said.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.

        

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