Sesay’s journey to the NBA

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, November 8, 2003

SEATTLE – The thing he hated most was the flag.

The Confederate Flag. That symbol of the Old South. Plantations and slave owners. Night riders in white sheets. Beatings and killings.

And there was no escaping it.

Students displayed the flag in their dorm windows and on their trucks. During football games, they waved it to get the crowd fired up. Coaches bringing African-American recruits on campus had to be careful where they took them because of flag-waving students.

“I just didn’t like that,” Ansu Sesay said. “They need to get rid of it.”

All this was at the University of Mississippi where Sesay, now a member of the Seattle SuperSonics, was a student/athlete in the 1990s.

He spent four years at Ole Miss in the small town of Oxford, where William Faulkner lived and wrote novels that made him a giant of American literature. Where John Grisham went to law school. And where, in the 60s, riots occurred when a black man tried to enroll at the university.

We remember watching the riots on TV. And not understanding why people were afraid to go to school with a man just because of his skin color.

Things have changed since then.

African-Americans can enroll at Ole Miss without the help of the National Guard. They play prominent roles on the school’s athletic teams. An African-American coached the men’s basketball team during the 90s. And a young black man from Houston chose to enroll at Ole Miss despite the misgivings of his mother.

“My mom didn’t want me to go there because she knew the history,” Sesay said. “It took a visit from the coaches. If they could get my mom to say OK, then I’d go.”

Actually, it took more than that. It took a few words from head coach Rob Evans’ wife to convince Sesay’s mother that everything was going to be all right.

“I was on the phone with his mother and I said, ‘Ansu wants to come here so what’s the holdup?’ ” Evans recalled. “She said, ‘I’m the holdup.’ “

Evans’ wife overhead the conversation and got on the phone. “If it’s as bad as you heard it is, why would I let my son go to school here?” she said.

Moments later, Mrs. Evans hung up and said Ansu would be coming to Ole Miss.

So how’d you convince her? the coach asked. “One mom talking to another mom,” she said.

Ansu went, he starred and he conquered – capturing Southeastern Conference Player of the Year honors his senior year and making All-SEC First Team both his junior and senior seasons.

All in all, he called his time at Ole Miss “a great experience.”

“It let me know how some of the world was,” he said. “Everywhere in the country, it’s different. It’s not going to be the same. We want it to be the same, but it’s not going to be.”

And so he learned about the South, then and now. In his classes, he learned more about those turbulent times in the 60s when the racists tried, but failed, to bar James Meredith from becoming the first black to enroll at Ole Miss. He learned that while change has taken place, some old hard beliefs and traditions just won’t go away. And neither will prejudice.

He found it in Oxford, Mississippi, in the mid-to-late 90s. “You run into it a little bit wherever you go,” Sesay said, “but me being an athlete, I didn’t have to deal with a lot of it.”

He hung out mostly with other athletes. “I didn’t do too much, didn’t get around and meet a lot of people,” he said. “I just stayed in my little circle so I wouldn’t have to.”

He did bring up the flag issue with some students and was told it was part of their tradition. “I still didn’t understand,” he said. “That’s their heritage. I couldn’t sit there and argue with them about it. As long as I got along with everybody, I was fine.”

During his sophomore year, he almost quit school, not because of any racial incidents, but because he was homesick. “I couldn’t afford to go home (to see his parents),” he said. “But I stayed with it and everything worked out for the best.”

His coach was a big influence on keeping him in school. Rob Evans was like a father figure to him. “When something was wrong with me, it was like he already knew,” Sesay said. “He would pull me in and we would talk.

“He knew everything and I kind of told him everything, too. We were real honest with each other. That’s a great relationship, when you can be totally honest with your coaches and they’re totally honest with you.”

He and Evans, now the head coach at Arizona State, still talk frequently.

“Ansu needed to get away from home so he could grow up,” Evans said Thursday afternoon, shortly after he got off an airplane in Phoenix after attending the Pac-10 Media Day in Los Angeles.

Grow up he did, as a person and as a player.

“He was a quiet, unassuming guy,” said Dan O’Dowd, an assistant coach under Evans, then and now. “He was long and lean and not very strong and he got knocked around a lot his first year.”

By the time he left Ole Miss, Sesay had done a fair amount of knocking around himself. He became only the second player in school history to surpass 1,000 points, 600 rebounds and 200 assists in three years as a starter.

He was also popular with his teammates. “They loved him and he was friends with all of them – black and white, rich and poor,” O’Dowd said. “The first time he made the USA Basketball Team (that won the gold medal at the World University Games in 1997), every single player came by the office every day and asked about him.”

Sesay made himself a standout college player by “never taking a day off,” O’Dowd said.

He was also a very strong-willed guy, as he demonstrated after he left college. Not quite ready to make the jump to the NBA despite being drafted in the second round by the Dallas Mavericks in ‘98, he paid his dues with two years in the Continental Basketball Association and a season in the National Basketball Development League.

The Sonics signed him to a 10-day contract late in the 2001-02 season, then re-signed him for the remainder of the season. He was with them from the start last year, but missed the last 30 games with a lower back strain.

“It’s been a long road,” said his old high school coach in Houston, Gary Nichols. “He just kept persevering.”

A strong defender, Sesay needed to improve his shooting to earn more playing time with the Sonics (he averaged about 10 minutes a game last year) this season, and he did. “He knew he had to work on his shooting to get on the floor and he’s certainly done that,” coach Nate McMillan said. “It’s allowed me to give him some minutes at that position (small forward). I’m not just getting someone who can defend. Offensively, he’s making some things happen, too.”

When he finally reached the NBA and got his first paycheck, Sesay sat and stared at it.

“I had never seen anything like it,” he said, recalling that he had come from a family that wasn’t well off. “It was one of those things I was always waiting for.”

And he vows to keep working to hang onto his job.

“I love life in the NBA,” he said.

It’s been a long day’s journey into light.