Jamaal Tinsley

[Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

Here are excerpts from a Kansas City Star article on Jamaal Tinsley
Date: 02/20/01

http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/printer.pat,sports/3775259e.220,.html

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"Do you feel lucky?"

Iowa State's Jamaal Tinsley might just be the most dominant college
basketball player in America. His numbers might not show that, although
he does lead No. 6 Iowa State in scoring, assists, steals and free
throws. But Tinsley's brilliance is about more than numbers. It's about
will and presence. With him on the floor, Iowa State is 54-8 is the last
two seasons. The Cyclones were 27-33 the two years before him.

With Tinsley, Iowa State has never lost to Kansas.

With Tinsley, Iowa State has never lost in Ames.

Here's the kicker: Before Tinsley showed up, the Cyclones had lost eight
straight times to top-25 teams. Since he showed up? They have played 13
ranked teams, and have beaten 11 of them.

"He makes us feel invincible out there," Iowa State senior Paul Shirley
says. "With him on the floor, we feel like we should beat anybody."

This is how people always talk about Tinsley. Forget his game. They talk
about his confidence. His nerve. His assurance. He's just 22 years old,
but he seems many years older, and that takes us back to his story, the
one he's told a million times, the one about gangs and playground
basketball and a father who died and getting shot at and what it feels
like in a jail cell and that moment when you realize that life goes by.

"Do you feel lucky?" they ask him.

"Man," he says, "you make your own luck."

Sure, he brings the playground with him out there on the court. That's
part of the reason they love him in Ames. He shows his heart out there.
It's a funny romance, this affair between the people of Iowa and Jamaal
Tinsley. Iowa State is this kind of place: Before Saturday's game
against Kansas, when the public-address announcer called out the
Jayhawks' starters, the fans clapped in a detached way. Like they didn't
care. Except for two Kansas starters.

Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison.

Booed the heck out of them.

See, they're from Iowa.

Jamaal Tinsley is not from Iowa. He's from a place that could not be
further from Iowa. Tinsley is Brooklyn playgrounds, chain nets, cracked
concrete. His father died when Tinsley was 9; his stepfather died that
same year. Gangs recruited him, and he stopped going to high school one
day because he did not see the point in it. He smoked pot and played
basketball and let life drift away.

"Did you see people get shot?" he is asked by reporters who could not
imagine such a thing.

"Yeah," he says.

"Drug dealers?"

"Yeah," he says.

"Were you ever shot at?"

"Yeah," he says.

Tinsley's mother left him in jail when the police charged him with armed
robbery. The charges were later dropped, but Leatrice Smith says those
three days in jail were what inspired Jamaal to turn his life around.
Jamaal shrugs. He doesn't see his life as some senseless movie where the
hero is scared straight by a few days behind bars. It wasn't simple like
that.

"It was a lot of things, man," he says. "I saw a lot of my friends going
nowhere, and I didn't want to be like that. I had a plan."

A coach hooked him up with a junior college in California, a place that
would give him a chance even without a single high school credit. Then,
coach Larry Eustachy brought him to Iowa State. In Tinsley's first
practice -- and this story has also been told and retold -- Eustachy ran
him to exhaustion, and Tinsley muttered, plenty loud enough for the
coach to hear: "I didn't sign a track scholarship."

"It wasn't easy for Jamaal at first," Eustachy says. "But he kept
working at it. I give him a lot of credit for that. He just kept on
working. He's really turned himself into a special kind of player."

Tinsley has grown to love Ames in a way he never expected. They cheer so
loudly for him, and treat him so well, and it's safe, and it's quiet,
and well, it has grown on him. Last season, when his teammate Marcus
Fizer declared early for the NBA draft, everyone figured Tinsley would
also go. He did not. He figured his game wasn't quite ready. He figured
that he would show people that Iowa State could win without Fizer. And,
more than anything, well, as he says: "College is kind of fun, man."

He has grown to love Ames, and they have grown to love him too. He
brings a little of the playground out on the court, and the fans respond
in Iowa just as they did in Harlem. On Saturday, against Kansas, Tinsley
saw freshman Jake Sullivan all alone. So Tinsley took the ball behind
his back, looked one way and flung the ball over his head the other way.
Sullivan swished the shot.

One longtime Iowa reporter says he never heard it so loud at Hilton
Coliseum.

Tinsley says this Iowa State team is better than last year's Cyclones
team that reached the Elite Eight and pushed eventual national champion
Michigan State to the brink. He says these Cyclones are better because
they are more of a team. Last year's team was pretty much all Marcus
Fizer, all the time.

"With this team," Tinsley says, "on any given night, anybody can be the
star."

Iowa State does have five players averaging in double figures in
scoring, nine players averaging 10 minutes or more per game and seven
players who have led the team in scoring in a game this season. It is
some kind of team.

And Tinsley is the man who brings some order to the madness. Against
Kansas, he had an overwhelming performance, though he missed 12 of 13
shots. That's the kind of player this guy is. Even with all the misses,
he had 11 points, 11 assists, four rebounds and six steals. He almost
single-handedly fouled out both Kirk Hinrich and Jeff Boschee, and he
absolutely terrorized the Kansas offense with his quick hands and his
overwhelming intensity.

Iowa State had 13 steals in the game, which is more than any team has
had against Kansas this season. Tinsley was involved in almost every one
of them. He talks and struts and bangs bodies and slaps at the ball, and
when he's locked in, he's certainly the most intimidating defender in
America.

"When we see him turn it up like that, it gets all of us pumped up,"
teammate Kantrail Horton says. "He's our emotion out there. He doesn't
always play hard, you know. Sometimes, we say `Jamaal, pick it up.' But
sometimes, you can just see it in his eyes that he's going to take over
the game. And that's when we turn it up too."

Eustachy doesn't call Tinsley that cliche, "coach on the floor." See,
Tinsley's bigger than that. He's this team's heartbeat.

"Jamaal has taught us more than coach Eustachy or anyone else," Sullivan
says.

Last week, Tinsley went back to New York to spend time with his
grandmother, who is in a coma and near death. When he returned to Iowa,
he did not want to answer all the same questions. But he did. Reporters
gathered around him for an hour, and longer, and he told everyone again
about his days on the playground, how he felt lost, how he found
himself.

"That's all in the past," he kept saying, but the questions kept coming,
because people are fascinated by his past, fascinated by his days on the
playground, fascinated by how a young man can put his life back
together.

And it is a good story. Thing is, like he says, it's the past, man. And
Jamaal Tinsley is fascinated by his future.

"The story," he says, "is only starting."

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