Henefeld a Real Steal for Huskies

When it was over, they chanted: “Nadav! Nadav! Nadav!”

But the scene was not Hartford Civic Center or Gampel Pavilion or Connecticut Field House or any other place the Connecticut Huskies have played this season.

It was Woodbury, Conn., in the locker room of Nonnewaug High School’s boys basketball team. And Nonnewaug had just defeated neighboring Gilbert School after making eight steals in the fourth quarter of a game in January.

“They do that in practice too,” said Nonnewaug Coach Darryl Morhardt. “Anytime somebody makes a steal, they all yell ‘Nadav!’ ”

On the nation’s Hot Team of the 1989-90 season, Nadav Henefeld is searing. He is a 6-foot-7 1/2, 219-pound, nearly-22-year-old freshman forward from Israel. Second in the nation in steals, with a school-record 115 in 28 games. Among Connecticut’s top three in scoring, rebounding, assists, field-goal shooting, three-point shooting, free-throw shooting and blocked shots. Smart. Handsome. In serious demand.

“He’s a legend here,” said Steve Pikiell, a junior guard for the Huskies. “I’m serious.

“Everybody wants to know where Nadav (pronounced nah-DUV) is. Everyone wants to know what he’s doing. Everyone wants to know what he’s doing after games. You go to parties, and everyone’s like, ‘Where’s Nadav? Where’s Nadav?’ People have been waiting for a winner here, and he’s stepped in and become everyone’s hero.”

The Huskies never have finished higher than third in the Big East Conference. They have not finished higher than seventh since 1981-82. They were the only Big East team that did not participate in an NCAA tournament during the 1980s.

With the Hartford Whalers as virtually the only other winter sports diversion in the state, the Huskies are subjected to almost microscopic scrutiny from about 30 Connecticut media outlets.

“This place,” said the Bristol-raised Pikiell, “it’s kind of crazy.”

And right now it’s crazy for Nadav, who has been named Big East rookie of the week three times and became the first freshman to win the conference’s player-of-the-week award.

Henefeld grew up in Ramat-Hasharon, not far from Tel Aviv. He said he began dreaming about playing college basketball in the United States when he was about 16. But like all Israelis, he went from high school to the military for three years of active duty. Not that this interfered with his basketball, you understand.

“I wasn’t in the army like a regular soldier,” he said. “I had the basic training and that was it. The rest of my service in the army, I played more basketball than army. My service was as a sportsman, not as a regular soldier.”

He played for the Israeli national team, and began to acquire a reputation as one of his nation’s best players. At about this time last year, with the end of his military-service commitment in sight, he wrote to about 20 U.S. colleges -- and received practically no response.

Meanwhile, he was challenging Israel’s club-basketball system in court. Israeli players are assigned to clubs based on where they grew up. Henefeld didn’t want to play for the club that owned his rights, but the courts ruled against him.

That’s where Marv Kessler and Schmuel Zisman stepped in. Zisman was the lawyer who represented Henefeld. He also happened to have played in Israel for Kessler, a former head coach at Adelphi who now is a scout for the Portland Trail Blazers. Kessler saw Henefeld play in Israel and was convinced he could be a Division I player.

So when Zisman told Kessler that Henefeld wanted to come to the United States, Kessler told one of his friends -- St. John’s Coach Lou Carnesecca. At Kessler’s behest, Carnesecca invited Henefeld for a visit. At St. John’s expense, Henefeld arrived in mid-April. He liked everything about the school except its lack of dormitories.

He ended up visiting Connecticut on the day he was scheduled to go home.

“He was leaving for Israel at 9 p.m.,” Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun said. “We had (assistant) Dave Leitao drive down, pick him up at 5:30 in the morning, and he spent that day here at UConn.”

It was a fine spring day, and Connecticut’s bucolic campus was more in line with Henefeld’s idea of what an American college should look like. Rolling, wooded hills instead of a concrete jungle. Dormitories instead of apartments. Yes, Henefeld decided during his hours in Storrs, this was the place.

Calhoun cemented the deal--and satisfied his own questions about Henefeld--by making a six-day trip to Israel in July for the Maccabiah Games.

But there were complications. When Henefeld visited in April, he took the SAT but failed to attain the score required for eligibility as a freshman. Connecticut appealed to the NCAA to give him another chance in the fall because Henefeld didn’t have a chance to prepare while in the army. The NCAA granted it, but in order the get the results back quickly enough to play this season, Henefeld had to fly to Raleigh, N.C. at his own expense in mid-October to take the test. He missed the first two weeks of practice while awaiting the score, which was a passing one.

Meanwhile, the NCAA received a mysterious letter, written in Hebrew, that claimed Henefeld had been paid to play in some games in Israel. Investigations by NCAA and Connecticut officials showed otherwise. His first formal workout with the Huskies came on Nov. 1 -- in an exhibition game against Marathon Oil.

Henefeld and the Huskies have been rolling since. They have set single-season school records for overall victories (24), Big East victories (11) and have attained their highest ranking.

Point guard Tate George, their only senior, has become a consistent all-around player. Sophomore off-guard Chris Smith has blossomed into one of the nation’s best back-court prospects. Junior guard John Gwynn has found happiness as a reserve, averaging 10.5 points in 17.2 minutes per game. Rod Sellers, the 6-9 starting center, has become a scoring threat inside.

Freshman swingman-baseball pitcher Scott Burrell spurned a huge contract offer from the Seattle Mariners, who made him their No. 1 draft choice last year, to become the third consecutive Connecticut high-school basketball player of the year to stay at home. Junior forwards Lyman DePriest and Murray Williams, and 7-1 sophomore center Dan Cyrulik have become fine role players.

That’s where Henefeld’s special mix of basketball skills, on-and off-court experiences, and personability come in. Like a mason using mortar to construct a path, Calhoun has used Henefeld to magically bond the Huskies, creating a yellow brick road.

“Nadav has been the stabilizer,” said Calhoun, who came to Connecticut after 14 years at Northeastern, where he took a Division II program and built it into a perennial NCAA tournament participant that produced players such as Boston Celtics guard Reggie Lewis. “I think his age makes a difference, but he’s a mature guy and he probably was mature at 18. The fact that he took on the Israeli club system a little bit helped. So, some of the things we see are chronological, but others are personality traits that make him somewhat unique.

“If he was a kid with any kind of a sense of arrogance, I think it would be entirely different. He guards (his teammates’) notoriety and their successes like he would an egg. He makes sure that does not crack.”

Henefeld seems to be even more captivating than those Big East imports who were all the rage for excellent teams last season -- Georgetown’s Dikembe Mutombo and Seton Hall’s Andrew Gaze.

Said George: “Everyone kind of calls me The Governor because after four years I know a lot of people. After one year he knows the whole state, so we’re trying to figure out what to call him.”

Perhaps it’s just the hurricane of attention that constantly swirls around the only show in a town smaller than Washington or New York, but perhaps it is the tremendous sense of pride Henefeld seems to inspire in his homeland and among Jews in the United States.

He did nothing to hurt this in November, when, with the NCAA’s and Connecticut’s permission, he went home to play an Israeli national-team game against France. He flew to Tel Aviv on Nov. 18, played on Nov. 22 (scoring 23 points in an Israel victory), left two hours after the game and rejoined the Huskies 26 hours later -- in Anchorage for the Great Alaska Shootout, where in three games he totaled 29 points, 15 rebounds and 13 steals.

The Israeli flag has been waved in the crowd at many Connecticut home games, media outlets in Israel phone the school’s sports-information office after every game and Jewish publications from all over the United States have written stories on Henefeld. Like everything else, he has taken it in stride.

“I’m very happy that I can make people feel good about themselves or about me playing well here, and I really appreciate it,” he said.

He would rather be just one of the guys. One of his early highlights was being chewed out for the first time by Calhoun, who can be wonderfully acerbic but was understandably gentle with Henefeld at first.

Henefeld also wants to be viewed as a student, not as a basketball mercenary -- what some accused Gaze of being last year when, after helping lead Seton Hall to the Final Four, he promptly bolted for home.

“The reasons I’m here are many,” Henefeld said. “To play basketball, of course, but also to get an education and see another place and experience another culture. I think that other than an education, you can get so many things from seeing another place and living in another culture and meeting some new people. I think it helps you as a person. So it’s not just the sport.”

This was the approach preached to him by Moti Daniel, an Israeli who played for George Washington from 1985 to 1987 and with whom Henefeld is friendly.