Sealy Threads the Eye of NCAA Needle

You never know where a young man’s interests will lie. What he wants to do when he grows up. What bad habits he might pick up along the way. Who will influence him. What he will sew and what he will reap.

Anything could have happened to Malik Sealy. He could have gone wrong. His neighborhood in the Bronx wasn’t exactly paradise. His father drove a New York taxi. The old man had some hard bark on him. He fought in the Golden Gloves, won his division three times.

But there was another side. A kinder, gentler side. Sidney Sealy moonlighted as a bodyguard, a he-man’s job, but the man he protected was Malcolm X, the late civil rights leader. Malcolm’s cause moved Sidney deeply, as did his death. When his son was born 21 years ago, he named him Malik--pronounced Ma-leek--which is a Muslim name meaning “king.”

And then there was Ann Sealy, Malik’s mother. By day, she worked for CBS Records. By night, or on weekends, she sat at one of her four or five sewing machines, stitching material, straightening hems, copying patterns. When her three boys wandered into the room, she showed them how it was done.

By the time Malik was in fourth grade, he was making his own shirts. He liked his fifth-grade teacher so much, he designed her a dress.

Did kids give him a hard time about it? Sure they did. Kids are kids.

“Some of them said: ‘That’s a sissy thing to do,’ ” Malik recalls.

But most realized that Malik Sealy was not to be mocked. He was a multi-faceted guy. At St. Nicholas of Tolentine High, he was student body president. He was popular and forceful, and yet at the same time he was mild-mannered, almost meek. Classmates labeled him: “The Quiet Storm.”

Sealy also was captain of the basketball team, which won 30 of 31 games his senior year and the Class-A state championship. He hadn’t even taken up basketball until the eighth grade. Too busy sewing.

And when he went to St. John’s University in Queens, nothing really changed. Last summer, for instance, Sealy was working on his latest project. Other guys were pumping pedals on their exercise bikes. Sealy sat at his mother’s Singer.

“I started making myself a suede suit,” he said. “And I was three-quarters finished when basketball season came around.”

Now that the season is nearly over, Malik Sealy intends to get around to finishing that suit. St. John’s will play Duke today in the NCAA tournament’s Midwest Regional championship game, and the 6-foot-8 junior will do his best to see that the Redmen keep playing.

His coach, Lou Carnesecca, studies Sealy’s stoic expression and sometimes can’t even tell if his player enjoys playing. Sealy insists he loves it. And, as long as St. John’s has come this far, he wants to continue.

“It’s like cake,” Sealy said. “You have one slice, it tastes pretty good. Pretty soon, you have to have another.”

And if there is no future in basketball, if he can’t have his cake and eat it, Sealy can handle it.

“I’ll find a place in the fashion industry where I can fit in,” he said Saturday. “You see a lot of Big and Tall shops, but you don’t see many for men like me, Tall and Slim.”

Malik Sealy, a designer original. For a guy still known around campus as low-key, verging on pathologically shy, he sometimes seems anything but. Here at the regional, he is carrying around a camcorder everywhere he goes, filming teammates, cheerleaders, spectators, interviewers, everybody.

OK, so his personality has been slow taking hold. Casual followers of college basketball know little about Sealy, not even that he was voted 1987-88’s “Mr. Basketball” in New York state, or that he almost certainly will become the only player besides Chris Mullin to score 2,000 career points for St. John’s.

“I’ll tell you, I don’t really worry about the publicity,” Sealy said. “It’s easier for me this way to sneak up on people.”

He has goals. If the NBA ever calls, he will answer. He also wants to read up on Malcolm X, learn more about the man his father revered.

Meantime, he will help his college team any way he can. Teammate Billy Singleton wants one of those elegant neckties Malik sews. The university might even ask him to design new uniforms, as Bo Ellis did for Marquette’s championship team under Coach Al McGuire.

“Don’t you feel better when you wear something nobody else has?” Sealy asks. “I love it when people say, ‘Where’d you get that?’ and I say, ‘Made it myself.’ ”

Oh, and his coach, Carnesecca? Sealy loves the man. But the man wears sweaters on the sidelines. Some of them pretty. Some of them pretty ugly. Some of them beyond ugly.

“There’s this one with a fish design all over it,” Malik Sealy says. “Ugh. I just can’t stand it.”