At Michigan, His Artistry Doesn’t End on the Court

As he was touring the Louvre last summer, or pausing on his morning strolls of the boulevards of Paris to inspect the canvases of the various street artists, Rumeal Robinson thought a lot about how art imitates life, and the way life imitates art.

He thought about the gallery he intends to open someday, the one that will enable him to exhibit the works of undiscovered geniuses such as himself. He made a mental memo that when the barnstorming University of Michigan basketball team returned from its European junket, he must submerge back into that makeshift studio in the basement of his Ann Arbor apartment building to complete that portrait of one of his professors that he had been putting off.

Renoir, meet Rumeal.

Already this young man has mastered the art of survival. He was homeless, abandoned by both parents as a child in Jamaica, then adopted by the parents of an American boy he barely knew. He also had a learning disability, and was forced to miss his freshman year of college basketball because his Scholastic Aptitude Test threw words at him that were beyond his scholastic aptitude.

“Words like regatta. What did somebody like myself know what regatta meant?” Robinson remembered. “You’re not going to see any regattas in Boston or the Bronx, the places where I spent most of my time. It’s just like black history. I’m sure you wouldn’t have known a lot about black history, if somebody had asked you about that on some test. You’re not taught black history.”

Rather than pout, Robinson took advantage of his year of Proposition 48-enforced idleness. He embraced collegiate life. He took art and psychology courses. He played basketball in an intramural league with pre-med and pre-law yuppies who convinced themselves that they could match jumpers with the Parade All-American from Patrick Ewing’s high school in Cambridge, Mass., which amused Rumeal to no end.

No one or nothing could keep this kid down. Athletically, he has risen to great heights, playing the playmaker’s role for the Michigan team that will engage Seton Hall here tonight for college basketball’s national championship, earning acclaim as the best junior guard in the land. Academically? Rumeal Robinson, product of Cambridge, Class of Prop. 48, will receive his degree in December from a university that fancies itself “the Harvard of the Midwest.”

“Masterpiece Theatre” was rarely so compelling.

As an adolescent he whiled away balmy tropical days diving into the deep blue sea for lobsters. Often, little Rumeal reclined on the hot sand of Negril Beach until sundown, in no particular hurry to get home because nobody in particular was expecting him there. His father, Rupert, he never knew. His mother, Virus, took off for the mainland without him. A grandmother and some cousins looked after him, provided a bed, until he was 6, when Virus sent word from her new home near Boston, wanting there to be a mother-and-child reunion.

It lasted two years. Then, again, she was gone. A foster family took Rumeal in. His mother reappeared. Back he moved with her. Just as abruptly, she split. Managing to scrape up enough money for fare to Jamaica, Rumeal returned to the island, in search of his father. When he got there, an aunt told him Rupert Robinson was dead.

Finally, when he was 13, Rumeal was playing flag football with another boy named Donald Ford, who heard of his predicament. Louis Ford, a Boston letter-carrier, and his wife, Helen, listened to their son’s story, then asked his friend if he cared to move in with the Fords and their other four children. Rumeal did.

Helen Ford wept four years later when her latest arrival announced that he had chosen Michigan, so far away, over Villanova, which wasn’t that long a drive from their Massachusetts home. She feared she might never again see Rumeal play the game he had come to play so well. When Michigan made it to this year’s Final Four, the Fords could afford to send only Helen and one of the children to Seattle. They came to the game.

After a Boston newspaper account chronicled the family’s situation, a donor sprang for another ticket. Louis Ford hopped on a jet Saturday, flew cross-country, and arrived at Seattle’s Kingdome with eight minutes remaining in Michigan’s game against Illinois. Not until he reached the team’s hotel afterward did Rumeal realize his foster father had, for the first time, seen him play a college game.

Everything he has endured, Robinson said here Sunday, has “taught me to be a stronger person. I’m not going to dwell on the past. It was very sad to be so young and all alone, without a real home. A lot of older people came along to help me. The bad times? I honestly believe there aren’t really any bad times. There are just some times that are better than other times.”

Few times have been better than the one he is having now.

Robinson described it, as any person of his background might, as something on the order of receiving a new bicycle as a gift. At night, you want to ride it, but you can’t, so you lay in bed and think about it, he said. Next morning, you can’t wait to get back on. He thinks of the national tournament this way.

From the end of last season, when Robinson threw 29 points, six assists and five rebounds at North Carolina in a losing cause in the West Regional in this very town, to the start of this season, when Rumeal outplayed Oklahoma’s much-publicized Mookie Blaylock head to head, everything has been going his way. Even the ouster of the man who recruited him, Bill Frieder, never swayed him, although they were so close that Robinson was the first player Frieder phoned after accepting the Arizona State job.

Although generally a sweetheart, Robinson sometimes can be cocky, almost overbearing, about his own abilities. He resents, for example, being compared to Gary Grant, the former Michigan guard now with the Clippers, even saying when he was younger: “I am the type of player who can do anything, like no one you’ve ever seen in the Midwest. I played in the shadow of Gary Grant for one year, but I have the ability to pass and shoot.”

Comparisons of any kind disturb Robinson.

“Nobody ever compared Julius Erving or Magic Johnson to anyone,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “The only guy they ever compared me to was a guard in New York City who never played in college. He was shot eight times by the police--in the wrong place at the wrong time--and never played again. His name was Jimmy something.”

There is something about his manner, or maybe the listener’s knowledge of his upbringing, that makes Robinson’s words seem more fiercely independent than boastful. As when someone Sunday asked him which guards gave him trouble in the tough Big Ten Conference this season. Said Robinson: “I don’t feel anybody did. The only thing that ever bothered me from playing my game is Rumeal Robinson. Me.”

Until you understand somebody, you shouldn’t judge him. That is Robinson’s advice. That is what unnerved him about those SAT questions, that they never take into account the cultural differences of a kid from Jamaica versus a kid from Seattle versus a kid from New York who, in Robinson’s own words, rarely runs with the sort of friends who rush home to pick up a book, or even to eat supper at the same time as the rest of the family.

“We were the first guinea pigs of that test,” Robinson said, speaking also on behalf of teammate Terry Mills, with whom he roomed while Prop. 48 denied them freshman eligibility. “Nobody gave us a legitimate chance, from first grade on. Nobody said, ‘There’s going to be a test. If you fail it, you’re out.’ ” He was considered intelligent enough to be accepted into college, but he was prejudged incapable of juggling schoolwork and basketball simultaneously.

Rumeal used the free time to refine his art. He specialized in flowers, Georgia O’Keeffe style, and landscapes. He worked in everything from oil to chalk. He studied everything from animators to amateurs to the masters.

“It was amazing to see how well they drew in Paris. They have so much to draw in that city, the old architecture, the charm. The location is important. I could see myself doing a landscape of Detroit, but nobody would probably like it for 50 years.

“Most artists aren’t widely known until after their deaths. They should be known now,” he said.

Rumeal Robinson, himself a real piece of work, hopes his personal handiwork will direct Michigan to the national championship. If successful, perhaps he will go out and paint the town. If not, well, you know how these artists love to suffer. Maybe he will cut off an ear.