Little (Known) Big Man : College basketball: Canonchet Neves is a 6-foot-9 freshman at the University of Detroit. He is also an American Indian.

“I’ve always been a little bit taller than all the guys around here,” said 18-year-old Canonchet Neves, his palms resting comfortably on the ceiling of the Elbert Country Store on this late August day.

The 6-9 Neves, the only American Indian signed to play major college basketball this year, towers in the snack-food aisle. Surrounded by Zingers, Ho-Hos and Ding-Dongs, he settles instead for an orange juice from the cooler. Small-town Colorado’s schoolboy sensation, touted by some as college basketball’s sleeper recruit of the year, is in training.

There aren’t many big names in Elbert, a ranching and farming community on the plains southeast of Denver. But everybody knows Canonchet Neves (Ka- non -chet Neh- vis). He grew up here, playing peewee basketball and studying at the K-12 schoolhouse. His family moved away four years ago, to a farm near Dolores, but the tallest kid in the county is back in the old hometown, taking a last look around.

Tonight, Canonchet will say goodby to his mother, Deanna, pick up boyhood buddy Greg Ardrey, and head east. They will split up in Detroit, where Greg will continue on to Rochester, N.Y. His skinny Indian friend will remain in the Motor City, to begin a career as the inner-city University of Detroit’s most unlikely hoops prospect.

Neves was one of Colorado’s dominant prep players last season, leading his team at Montezuma-Cortez to its first winning season in years. But playing in the outback of the Four Corners region--where four-hour bus trips are commonplace and the nearest competitor’s gym is 43 miles down the highway--he went mostly unnoticed.

“He’s considered to be a bit of an unknown commodity,” said Bob Gibbons, who runs a college scouting service from his home in North Carolina. “To be totally honest with you, the first time I heard of him was when I read the press release that they’d signed the kid.”

Being a mystery is nothing new to Neves. The press clippings saved by Deanna are mostly box scores.

Named the Southwestern League’s most valuable player, Neves traveled to Ft. Collins for an all-star game in June. Pitted against city kids who had honed their skills against much sharper competition, he played less than half the game and emerged the co-leader in points and rebounds.

Yet, his signing with Detroit two months earlier hadn’t even made the Denver papers.

Playing in virtual limbo, Neves was never invited to any of the posh summer camps at which prep stars bump bodies for the benefit of college scouts.

“I wasn’t even expecting to go Division I,” he said. “I wasn’t even really trying.”

By last spring, he had made up his mind to sign with Central Arizona, a junior college in Coolidge, south of Phoenix. Then he ran into Bob Arkfeld, the new athletic director at Montezuma-Cortez.

Arkfeld had been in town only long enough to see the last five games of Neves’ senior season. But he was convinced that the kid, who seemed to score at will, despite being double- and triple-teamed, was about to make a major mistake. They had a three-hour talk in his office one day.

“The main message was, ‘You owe it to yourself to give it a shot,’ ” Arkfeld said.

The new athletic director did more than talk a good game. A former assistant baseball coach at the University of Arizona, he knew the Wildcat basketball staff, including Ricky Byrdsong, Lute Olson’s assistant who had just been named head coach at Detroit. Though it was late in the season, he started mailing out videotapes of Neves in action. The reaction was immediate.

Arizona was impressed but Olson had long since awarded all of his scholarships. Tony McAndrews, an Arizona assistant, told Arkfeld that he had sat in his office and watched the tape of Neves over and over. It was hard to believe that the hot-shooting prospect, so agile for a big man, hadn’t been signed already.

Brigham Young Coach Roger Reid also took a long look at Neves, and chose to woo him with a package deal: Nevis could spend two years at Utah Valley Community College in Provo and then move up to BYU. Such a bargain, especially for the coach at Utah Valley, Reid’s brother Duke.

Byrdsong was a different story. The young coach was rebuilding Detroit’s once-proud program. Byrdsong had scholarships to award and having witnessed the blossoming of unheralded guard Steve Kerr at Arizona, he knew that little-known players can be pleasant surprises.

“He looked good enough on the film that it was worth at least flying him out,” Byrdsong said.

Even so, he and his staff couldn’t help wondering if the kid from nowhere was really 6-8, as Arkfeld said. Recruits are famous for fudging their vital stats, and they can usually get away with it on crudely produced high school highlight films.

“I told my guys, ‘When he gets here, don’t be surprised if he’s 6-3,’ ” Byrdsong said.

But Byrdsong liked what he saw, all 6-8 of Neves, and signed him on the spot when he visited Detroit last April. As if by way of thanks, Neves grew another inch by July.

Byrdsong, who believes he got the steal of the year, was so eager to complete the signing that he tracked down Canonchet’s father, Manny Neves, on a business trip in Oklahoma.

He was wise to move fast. Two weeks later, said Arkfeld, Big Ten powerhouse Iowa contacted him, only to learn it was too late.

So far, Neves has played only sparingly for the Titans, but Byrdsong has no regrets about signing him.

“What’s been missing in our program is a guy who can really shoot it,” he said. “That’s definitely one of Notch’s strong points. . . . We both know that he needs to add some strength, but you’d much rather have a shooter who needs to get strong instead of a strong guy you have to teach to shoot.”

Canonchet is named after the Narragansett tribe’s last war chief, who was killed by white settlers in 1676. But he has never lived on a reservation, and speaks nothing but English.

The Neves children--brothers Keith, Manny Jr. and Canonchet, and their older sister Alexcia--were taught a simple philosophy: “You have to go out and succeed and survive in today’s world.”

Manny, three-quarters Narragansett despite his Portuguese name, and Deanna, whose bloodline includes Ponca, Potawatomi and Chickasaw, as well as German and French, met while attending an Indian junior college in Bacone, Okla. As a young married couple, they lived in San Francisco, but Manny, who maintains navigational equipment for the Federal Aviation Administration, got transferred in 1973.

The family settled on a spread near Elbert, where Canonchet was raised like any other ranch kid. He reluctantly did chores, chopping wood and feeding the family’s horses, pigs and chickens. By the time he was 6, he was riding steers in kiddie rodeos.

And he played basketball.

“He would heap snow in front of the goal so he could dunk,” remembered Manny.

After dusk, he shot free throws by the yard light. He was 12 when he beat his big brother Keith, a future walk-on football player at Ft. Lewis College, in a game of one-on-one for the first time.

“That was one of his biggest moments,” Manny said.

His classmates never made much of Canonchet’s Indian name and features, according to Richard Riggenbach, his elementary school teacher. They just called him Nobs or Notch and let it go at that.

“He was as tall as me in fifth and sixth grade,” Riggenbach said.

Today, Canonchet is starting to get sensitive about the way people “really butcher” his Indian name but he shows little interest in his heritage.

“I’m glad I didn’t live on a reservation,” he said. “I got out, and I’m in the regular stream of society.”

In Elbert, Canonchet was the only Indian kid in his class. But when the family moved to Dolores during his freshman year, he went to school in nearby Cortez, a town bordered by the Navajo and Ute Mountain reservations. He was around other American Indians, other than his family, for the first time. Being new, he decided that the best course of action when asked about his distinctive name would be to say nothing.

“They really didn’t know what I was,” he said of the kids in his class. “I don’t look like a Navajo or a Ute--they’re mostly short and squat. But I have some color, some brown tones. I’d kinda keep ‘em guessing.”

Even so, Navajo and Ute basketball players wasted no time recruiting him to play in the fiercely competitive Indian tournaments that run year-round on the reservations. Canonchet got a taste of the Navajos’ run-and-gun game in Kayenta, a lonely trading center on the high desert of northern Arizona. In tiny Towaoc, just south of Cortez, he played with Mountain Utes.

There’s a joke on the reservation: If “white man’s disease” means the inability to jump, no matter how tall you are, then “Indian’s disease” means no height at all.

Canonchet suffered from neither affliction. An off-season high jumper, he has cleared seven feet in practice. And though he restricted his reservation ball to just a few tournaments--”I played because they asked me to”--his name traveled the Navajo grapevine. One autumn night in Shiprock, N.M., the tribe took him under its wing.

The occasion was a visit by the barnstorming Denver Nuggets. The NBA team was touring the reservation in September of 1988 as part of its “Fast Break For Life” program, trying to serve up positive role models to reservation kids who face high unemployment rates and a pattern of alcohol abuse.

As part of their road show, the Nuggets wanted to stage a slam-dunk contest, pitting one of their players against a local big shot. Gene Taylor, an educational specialist with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Shiprock agency, was assigned to find the best dunker on the reservation.

“I looked around for a couple of weeks for a Navajo person who could dunk,” he said. “I would call people up and ask, ‘Say, have you got anybody up there who can dunk a basketball?’ They’d just start laughing.”

Taylor was beginning to get desperate. But he kept hearing stories about a big Indian from Cortez who not only could dunk, but could do it Michael Jordan style, taking off from behind the free-throw line and swooping to the hoop like a hawk divebombing a jackrabbit.

Taylor finally tracked Canonchet through Deanna. The proud mother, who has followed her son’s career since coaching his peewee team back in Elbert, readily agreed to make the drive south.

The atmosphere in the Shiprock gymnasium was electric that night. The Nuggets might not have realized it, but they were entering one of the hottest hoop enclaves outside the state of Indiana. They weren’t about to teach the Indians anything new about basketball.

Makeshift backboards dot the Navajo reservation. Kids can be seen shooting jump shots in the dust.

“Along with the woodpile and the sheep corral, there’s the basketball hoop,” said Tom Arviso, editor of the Navajo Times, the tribal paper in Window Rock that has run photo essays on the lengths to which its readers will go to start a game of one-on-one.

When time came for the dunkfest, the Nuggets appointed Todd Mitchell, the outstanding rookie from Purdue, their designated dunker. He was supposed to give Neves a moment in the sun, and then bury him, remembered Nugget publicist Bill Young.

“We didn’t want the contest to carry on all night,” he said.

The players were supposed to keep score in the time-honored H-O-R-S-E method. But there was a problem.

“Nobody could get a letter,” Young said. “Mitchell would perform a dunk; Neves would match it. It went and it went and it went.”

The players began to get into the spirit. During a break, Mitchell asked Neves what he wanted to do in the future. Canonchet replied that he wanted Mitchell’s job. Sh-boom!

The crowd began to hum, rooting for Neves.

Finally, Mitchell got an idea. He took a scorer’s table from the sidelines, dragged it out to the free-throw line, and performed a death-defying stunt, hurdling the table before skying for the dunk.

“Canonchet grabbed the ball and was going to do the same thing,” Young said. “But (Nugget General Manager) Pete Babcock said, ‘Wait a minute. We don’t want to be liable for the kid’s whole career.’ ”

The crowd, by now absorbed by the drama unfolding on the court, egged on Neves.

But, fearing injury, he finally decided against trying the maneuver.

The Navajos in the stands were disappointed that their honorary homeboy had backed down but at the end of the night, they lined up to ask for his autograph.

“That was weird,” said Canonchet, who nervously signed programs alongside Fat Lever and Alex English. “It was all right, I guess.”

Today Manny has turned Canonchet’s “I want your job!” challenge to Mitchell into a knee-slapper of a family anecdote. In the telling, he confuses the rookie from Purdue with veteran Alex English but the point still gets across.

“He’s rather mild-mannered, but he does speak his mind,” Manny said of his son. “He had two questions as a kid. The first was, ‘What make the raindrops round?’ The second question was, ‘How do you play professional ball without going to college?’ ”

Canonchet rolls his eyes when asked about the Mitchell incident.

“I was just kidding,” he said, clearly not eager to get bad-rapped as a big talker.

But Manny isn’t the only one who heard Notch Neves talking tough that night. Gene Taylor recalls asking Neves where he was going to college.

“He said, ‘Anywhere I wanna,’ ” Taylor said.

Such bravado was fine coming from the king of Shiprock. But Neves knew he would be in a different world in Detroit. The Titans play in the competitive Midwest Collegiate Conference, against some noted basketball schools--Evansville and Xavier, both of which qualified for last year’s NCAA tournament, and St. Louis, which advanced to the championship game of the National Invitation Tournament. In that company, in-your-face exploits against teams such as Blanding, Utah, don’t count for beans.

“It’s gonna be a big shock, that’s for sure,” he said before leaving. “But I think I can adjust.”

And he is adjusting, getting some playing time here, some there.

With his rail-thin legs and relatively slight physique--at 6-9, he weighs only 200 pounds--Neves isn’t destined to be a force under the basket. But that shouldn’t hurt him at Detroit. Byrdsong’s quick-out system has more in common with the Navajos’ run-and-gun offense than it does with the set offenses of most college programs.

Already, Neves’ name has made him stand out from the crowd.

“We’ve been joking around, saying that nobody can say our basketball team isn’t an equal-opportunity employer,” said Byrdsong, who is black. “You know, I might be the only guy coming to town with an Indian kid.”

He probably will be, said Pete Homer Jr., president of the National Indian Athletic Assn. in Albuquerque and a former scholarship player at Arizona State. Homer said he is unaware of any other American Indians playing major college ball.

“We would have heard about that,” he said.

A spokesman for the NCAA said his organization has no way of telling how many Indians have played Division I ball over the years. Nobody has bothered to keep track. The only thing certain is that there haven’t been many.

A circus atmosphere has surrounded some Indian players. Donn Holston, a 6-5 Yurok who played at Idaho State, used to wear his hair in a towering Mohawk and encourage fans to scream for the scalps of opponents. He also scored enough points between 1983 and 1987 to become that school’s third-leading scorer.

“In Division I, I never even saw another Indian,” said Holston.

Abe Lemons, the coach at Oklahoma City University, is part Cherokee and used to actively recruit Indian players for his teams in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He wound up taking a team with three American Indians to the NIT in 1959.

Lemons recalled the day reporters asked Clemson Coach Press Maravich why Lemons always had so many Indians on his teams. Maravich replied that OCU taught basket weaving as a required course and all the white kids flunked out.

Holston and Lemons are showmen of the highest order, but for sheer celebrity among reservation fans, they can’t compare to Ray and Willard Tsingine, the remarkable Navajo brother act from the ‘70s.

Indians would pack gyms across the Big Sky Conference when the Tsingines played at Northern Arizona, said the Indian Athletic Assn.’s Homer. They brought an elbows-up style of reservation ball with them to Flagstaff and were regularly thrown out of games. But they knew how to score and put the school in the record books as the only Division I team ever to start two Indian brothers.

“I really thought that Ray would have made a tremendous professional ballplayer,” Homer said. “If he would have worked on it, lifted weights and that sort of thing, he could have made the pros. But he never zeroed in on it.”

Today Ray works for the tribe in Ft. Defiance, Ariz., and Willard is a construction worker near Flagstaff.

Manny Neves has been conducting his own informal search for Indian players for years.

“We sit and watch college basketball on the weekends,” he said. “We always look, but we never noticed anybody.”

Canonchet Neves, a solid B student in high school, plans to become a corporate attorney.

The projected law degree is partly a hedge against the long odds of a pro career. With his skinny build, Neves figures he won’t have much chance of making the NBA.

Only two Indian players ever have, according to Pete Homer. Elmer Blackbird played for the Minneapolis Lakers in the ‘40s, he said, and Gary Michael Gray, a 6-1 Delaware from Lemon’s Oklahoma City program, played for the old Cincinnati Royals in the 1967-68 season.

An NBA spokesman confirmed Gray’s brief stint in the league. But if Blackbird ever played for the Lakers, his effort have been lost to history. Neither the NBA nor its players’ association has any record of him.

Although Neves’ college scholarship may not lead to a pro contract, it will help on a practical level by getting him out of Cortez, a picture-postcard hamlet that nonetheless is no place for a teen-ager. There are two radio stations there, and one movie theater.

For fun, Canonchet says, “You either go home or cruise the strip”--in this case, Main Street, home of the Burger Boy drive-in.

“It wasn’t so bad there,” said Canonchet of the town of 8,000, whose residents chipped in to pay his way to summer track meets. “But I’m ready to break out. There’s just nothing there, especially for me.”

Neves’ college career will get close attention. Homer, who still displays a deft shooting touch in senior tourneys, will be watching.

So will the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, says tribal historian Ella Sekatau, Canonchet’s third cousin. His exploits will be detailed in the newsletter and at tribal meetings, she said. After all, he’s the great grandson of Pine Tree, noted healer and medicine man.

So far, Canonchet has resisted being cast as the Great Red Hope. He doesn’t even think of himself as an Indian, he said, though he does mark “Native American” on school surveys.

His parents also take pains not to make too much of his lone-wolf status. He wasn’t raised in the traditional Indian ways, they note.

Still, as Deanna Neves sits on a bench in the Elbert school gym, watching her son run through his last workout, she doesn’t sound like someone who has forgotten the past.

“As a child, I would think about Jim Thorpe, and Indian athletes who had really accomplished something in the past,” she said.

Canonchet, she notes proudly, is related to Allison (Tarzan) Brown, one of the more colorful, if little known, American Indian athletes.

Brown, a two-time winner of the Boston Marathon who never believed in training for something as natural as distance running, traveled to Berlin in 1936 as a member of the same U.S. Olympic team that featured Jesse Owens.

But he did most of his preparation for the marathon in the beer gardens and after brawling with a gang of Hitler’s blackshirts, spent the two nights before the race in jail.

He still managed to lead the marathon through 13 miles but was disqualified after falling with a cramp at the 18-mile mark and being helped up by a well-meaning spectator.

“I think he was Canonchet’s grandmother’s cousin,” said Deanna Neves of the family hero, who lived on the Narragansett reservation until his death in a car accident in 1975.

The late-summer heat is stifling in the auditorium, which is empty, save for Canonchet and an awestruck group of grade schoolers playing a disjointed game of three-on-three while trying not to stare at the giant looming in the far court.

Canonchet’s mother watches him work on dunks: first, a reverse; then, a pirouette; finally, the coup de grace, a Jordanesque maneuver in which he hovers above the rim, gracefully twisting, a 200-pound hummingbird.

“There are a lot of good Indian athletes who just don’t think they can do anything,” said Deanna Neves, catching an errant rebound and tossing it back onto the court. “It would really be nice to see more Indians, instead of always being the underdog, accomplish something with their lives.”

Despite Neves’ efforts to be just another tall teen-ager in Air Jordans, that doesn’t seem likely. Just when he’s about to blend in, something happens, and he’s an Indian again.

There was the night in Shiprock, where the Navajos so spontaneously accepted him as one of their own. And, of course, his first name, which will always be a clean giveaway. He admits he’s beginning to like the ring of it.

“If the media stuff kicks in, I don’t want them calling me Notch,” he said, sounding for a moment like the cocksure kid who served notice on Todd Mitchell.

Last May he received another reminder when he became the first recipient of the Claudie Hatch Award, a trophy given to the Montezuma-Cortez basketball team’s most accurate shooter.

The award is named after an all-state athlete who led the school to the 1962 state championship. Claudie Hatch was also the first member of the Ute Mountain tribe to graduate from college.

A shooter with a feathery touch, he died in a car accident shortly after completing his studies at University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo.

Canonchet, who knows next to nothing about the player whose name is engraved on his trophy, prefers not to dwell on the irony. It’s now been several months since he left home. The rolling hills of Elbert and the mesas near Cortez are part of his past. His dorm room in Detroit is the real world.

But the unspoken connection between Neves and Hatch, two Indian players who bucked the odds, has not escaped the attention of one observer back in the tribal village of Towaoc.

Sarah Hatch Wells, the sister who reared Claudie, still lives there, working as a coordinator for the tribe. She used to watch her brother play all the time, she said. She doesn’t go to the games at the high school anymore, so she’s never met Canonchet or seen him play. But she knows he’s competing on a big college team, a chance her brother never got.

Claudie is a distant memory in Towaoc now, even to his sister, who has to struggle to remember which year he died. But when Canonchet was given Claudie’s memorial award last spring, it brought her a quiet feeling of satisfaction.

“Yes,” she says, “I thought that was really nice.”