Washingtonpost.com
March 20, 2008 Thursday 12:00 AM EST
One Final March for Campbell
BYLINE: Mike Wise
SECTION: OPINION
HIGHLIGHT: A confession of sorts: About two weeks ago, when George Mason was reeling and it was time to stop believin’, I had planned to drive out to Fairfax and see Folarin Campbell before his team was eliminated in its conference tournament. Before his last game, I wanted to ask the senior guard if he felt like a disposable hero, what it felt like to have one month of his life in 2006 — one perfect shot he made two years ago — define the rest of his basketball existence.
A confession of sorts: About two weeks ago, when George Mason was reeling and it was time to stop believin’, I had planned to drive out to Fairfax and see Folarin Campbell before his team was eliminated in its conference tournament. Before his last game, I wanted to ask the senior guard if he felt like a disposable hero, what it felt like to have one month of his life in 2006 — one perfect shot he made two years ago — define the rest of his basketball existence.
The sequence still is vivid, a step-back, fadeaway jumper along the right baseline over the outstretched fingertips of Connecticut’s Rudy Gay, who that June would be a first-round NBA draft choice. In the waning moments of overtime at Verizon Center, in a region final in which George Mason was supposed to finally morph into a pumpkin, that high-arcing rainbow swished through.
Down went U-Conn. and all the power and prestige it stood for in major college basketball. To the Final Four strode a smiling, laughing lot of kids no big school seemed to want, the first program of its kind to advance that far since Pennsylvania and Indiana State joined the party in 1979.
“I’ve never actually put the game on to watch the shot myself, but I’ve seen it on TV,” Campbell said Tuesday afternoon. “I mean, that’s probably the best shot I’ve shot.”
He rocked back in his seat at Patriot Center, rubbed his goatee and smiled.
“It was a great shot,” he added. “But, you know, I think I can make some more big ones this week. I hope to.”
This is where the “Whatever Happened to Folarin Campbell?” story forks, where he and his teammates refused to let old memories get in the way of new frontiers.
With stingy defense and clutch shots from Campbell and Will Thomas, his rubber-band-man senior sidekick in the post, the Patriots won the Colonial Athletic Association tournament to secure an automatic bid to the real step show. In the process, they rebooted Mason Nation. Tonight, they face a group of brutish, three-point bombers from Notre Dame in Denver. Undersize in March as usual, their No. 12 seeding indicative of what kind of shot Mason is supposed to have of upsetting a member of the Big East elite, they’re back, with much of their senior floor leader’s tale still to tell.
Campbell never disappeared. He studied hard to ensure his communications degree this May, continued dating his high school sweetheart from Silver Spring, lost a heartbreaking CAA final to Virginia Commonwealth a year ago — a crushing loss that made him realize how much he missed the tournament — and earlier this year emerged from the other side of a family situation that almost undermined his senior season.
The situation slobbers, is cuddly and has a name: Cade, as in Folarin Cade Campbell. He is the large-and-in-charge, 24-pound, 8-month-old son belonging to Campbell and Sherryta Stokes, a Manhattan College volleyball player who managed to honor her scholarship last August despite giving birth July 16. Cade “just happened, but we’re glad he did,” Campbell said, while acknowledging how much the child, whom Sherryta’s parents care for while their daughter is away at college, came to dominate his life.
“He was just so tired driving back and forth,” Stokes said by telephone yesterday. “He kept saying, ‘I want to see my boy, I want to spend time with him.’ But he wasn’t playing very well. I told him he’s not going to remember everything at this age, so you need to handle your business right now. It was hard, because I know how much he wanted to see him.”
Campbell added: “My focus was more on him than basketball, which was fine. But I just wasn’t concentratin’. Beginning of the season, I would drive home after practice. I finally sat down and talked with her parents and my parents. And they just kind of told me: ‘Focus on the game, focus on this season. We’re going to take care of him and he’ll be fine.’
“When I heard that, I was able to stay after practice and get some more shots up and do more things here. And I just started playing well. Now I’m able to balance seeing him and playing basketball.”
He said an early-season meeting with Coach Jim Larranaga also was pivotal. A heart-to-heart at the airport with Larranaga after a 73-55 loss to Kent State in early December changed Mason’s fortunes. Campbell told his coach he felt more comfortable as the team’s point guard, which he played his sophomore year. The most multidimensional player in school history at 6 feet 4 and 205 pounds, Campbell had played every position but center for the Patriots. But he wanted to run the offense again before his career at Mason ran out on him.
Larranaga listened.
“I told him I trusted him,” he said. “And I understood. And I talked to my staff. Next day I called him in and said: ‘Hey, you’re at the point. It’s your ball. Run the team.’ “
The offense gradually slowed down at the request of a grounded and centered senior, who understood the pace and cadence needed for Mason to thrive — the extra half-second for a shooter to curl off a screen, the patience to re-post Thomas so he could get closer to the goal and back his man down.
“After Kent State, I felt in control,” he said. “If we were down, I would stay calm instead of just rushing things.”
The Patriots began to pile up victories before a late swoon hurt any at-large chances they had and forced Mason to win the conference tournament to get in. It was then that the old Campbell fully emerged, knocking down big three-pointers, going hard to his right, crossing-up defenders, winning the tournament MVP, delivering that same pretty step-back jumper — circa Larry Bird 1986 or Folarin Campbell 2006.
“It was almost like a Michael Jordan-type thing, where he hit a shot and his career took off,” said Thomas, his roommate for four years. He added he had seen a different side to the eternally upbeat and smiling Campbell as recently as last week.
“Winning the CAA championship, seeing him on the bench crying, that was new,” Thomas said. “I didn’t see nobody else cry except for him. I guess it was all that joy of winning the championship. I [hadn't] seen him in cry the last four years about anything. He’s always upbeat, but not so much that he’ll cry.”
Campbell explained how euphoric he felt winning the title, a first in his Mason career. “I mean, if you told me I would have two trips to the NCAA tournament in four years, a CAA title and a Final Four — and now there’s more to come? Man.”
He said he never lamented not playing in a power conference for an elite program, especially after a summer run at an open gym with Maryland and Georgetown players, post Final Four. James Gist and Jessie Sapp congratulated him and told Campbell, “Y’all made it; we can’t believe it.”
“Of course when I was younger I wanted to go to the big-time schools,” he said. “As I got older, you realize you want to go somewhere where you can play and contribute right away.”
It was nearing 2 p.m. Tuesday in Fairfax, behind Patriot Center after practice. The team charter bus, Scenic America No. 571, was being loaded with uniforms and basketballs and suitcases packed for a full weekend in Denver. Campbell wore green Mason sweats, Bose headphones and a 76ers baseball hat backward. He slapped high-fives with a few dozen students and teachers who had come to see the Patriots on another March journey.
“We know it can be done because we’ve done it before,” he said.
As he climbed aboard, it almost seemed cliche to ask anything else about the shot over Rudy Gay or Mason’s past. He and the Patriots indeed have a present, a huge game tonight, and they will be led onto the court by their senior with the same sophomore smile, whose first name in Nigerian means “walk with glory.”
Neither he nor his team’s story could be discarded like old newspapers after all. Folarin Campbell and George Mason went about their journey, finding their path back to the tournament two long years after their majestic run. It turns out we were the ones stuck in the past.
LOAD-DATE: March 21, 2008
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[JR: So what if the timing was wrong, it seems to have worked out well. Some will say the is "scandalous". I'd say MYOB! When one makes choices in life, you have to stand up for the results, This couple has. So I'm proud of my fellow alum. Not that my opinion has any import.]
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Stokes, Sherryta (MC????)
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