This is a great shot, isn’t it? That’s me, looking about as happy as I’ll ever get, at a University of Maryland basketball game two weeks ago, getting my picture taken with Ivis Rodriguez and Gregorio Vasquez. They are the parents of Greivis Vasquez, the star point guard for the University of Maryland Terrapins, known to their fans as the Terps. I’ve never actually met Greivis, which may be just as well, since I habitually refer to him as the son I never had. This could, conceivably, lead to an embarrassing moment for all concerned.
But I certainly am fond of that young man. Four years ago, Ras and I went up to a little gym in Towson, Maryland, to see a high school all-star game. There we first saw Greivis, recently recruited by Maryland, a gangly kid from Venezuela with black hair and a flattened nose who spoke hardly any English but carried himself with a certain cockiness and made a lot of shots from outside the 3-point arc. Ras and I looked at each other with a wild surmise. This kid could be good.
When fall came around, word was that on the first day of practice, Greivis appeared in the door of Coach Gary Williams’s office and saluted. “Reporting for duty, sir,” he is supposed to have said. Who knows if it’s true, but it sure sounds true. The Greivis we’ve come to know is as guileless as a puppy. Coach Williams, for whom sports adjectives like intense and focused don’t begin to tell the story, must have looked up from his desk in wonderment.
But the kid really was good. Admittedly, there were quirks in his game. He played sometimes with a certain irrational exuberance. He believed utterly that his next shot would go in, even if the bunch of shots he just took did not. So he took more. He believed that the fans—both his and his opponents’—were participants in the game. He played to them. He mugged, he returned their insults, he tugged on his jersey when he made a big shot and, later in his career, developed a special shimmy of the shoulders as he ran back on defense that would have driven you crazy if he were on the other team. Ah, but you smiled.
For awhile the Terps’ own fans divided into factions—those who loved him like the son they’d never had and those who thought his high spirits, his zest for taking chances—untimely shots from great distances, risky no-look passes that flew past his teammates’ ears—made him a detriment to the team. Meanwhile, he became—simply put—the beating heart of the Terps. He led them last year—his third—in scoring, rebounding, and assists. Learning as he went along, he became not just a showman but a leader. I must add, though, that the showman part is great fun.
Greivis is a heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. “First of all,” he’ll say, if the Terps have won, “I wanna thank God.” If they’ve lost, he’ll take the blame. He adores Gary Williams (here's a wonderful feature on the two of them), he adores Maryland, he praises and mentors his teammates and he never—I can attest to this, having sat by his folks and his friends during the last game of the season—forgets the people he loves. Not for a moment.
Long ago, in 1966, I got to love Maryland basketball in my first year at the school. The point guard back then was—yes, indeed—Gary Williams. Now he’s 65 years old and has coached a thousand college basketball games and I’m still watching him and his team. He and Greivis are part of a game that gets into people and becomes part of the happy saga of their lives. I’ve never been sure whether Williams knows this. But I think that, instinctively, Greivis does. He’s a senior now. In two days he’ll lead his teammates into the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament for the last time. As usual, Ras and I and our buddies Skelly and Curtis will be watching together. As I told Greivis’s folks, who came up from Caracas to watch him and who speak only Spanish, “Buena suerte, Terps!”
That’s Gary Williams in the middle photo and Greivis, of course, in the lower one. Squint and you can see me in the stands behind him, with my daughters Tory and Elizabeth to my right. Crazy old coot.
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