Learning to Fly Under Father’s Wing : North Hollywood’s Talented Transfer Harvey Soars in Class, on Court After Moving Back in With Parents

It was the green Michigan State jacket that first caught the eye of North Hollywood basketball Coach Steve Miller on a cool day last February.

Miller was sitting in the school’s physical education office when a boy wearing the jacket came asking for a gym locker. Miller’s interest was piqued immediately.

“Are you from Michigan?,” Miller began probing. “Did you play ball there? Do you want to play any ball in the future?”

Yeah, yeah, and I don’t know were the responses Miller received from DeShawn Harvey that day.

Nearly a year later, Harvey is averaging 15.4 points a game for North Hollywood, second on the team only to sophomore center Damon Ollie (15.7).

North Hollywood (15-1), which will resume Valley Pac-8 Conference play today against Grant as The Times’ top-ranked team in the region, was stacked in the talent and depth departments well before Harvey showed up.

Four starters returned this season for the Huskies, who lost to Fremont in the City Section 3-A Division championship game last year. Moreover, Miller knew he had an ace in the hole with the 6-foot-5, 205-pound Ollie coming to North Hollywood from junior high.

Harvey, however, was an unexpected gift straight from the heavens.

“He just flocked out of nowhere,” Miller said. “What can I say? He just dropped out of the sky.”

So have his perimeter bombs. Harvey, a 6-foot senior guard, has made a team-high 23 of 66 three-point shots.

The past year has been one of Harvey’s personal bests. He has forged new friendships with his teammates--Robert Hill and Jamaal Johnson in particular--and his grades never have been better. His smile and frequent laughs are a tribute to the good times.

But there were times when grins and giggles were few and far between.

Months after DeShawn was born, an uncle on his mother’s side of the family accidentally shot and killed Harvey’s father, L. C. Washington. Photographs and his mother’s memories are all that Harvey has to remember his father by.

DeShawn, however, has not been without a dominant male role model. DeShawn’s mother Karen married Robert Harvey about four years after her first husband’s death, and Harvey adopted DeShawn when DeShawn was 10 years old.

For DeShawn, Robert Harvey has been a father and much, much more.

“I have a great deal of respect for my father because he’s instilled values in me,” DeShawn said. “If not for him, I don’t know what I’d be doing, because I used to be easily steered away. But he taught me to be my own leader.”

DeShawn, who celebrated his 19th birthday last week, has been able to avoid trouble when he has had his father near him. It is the time apart when problems find DeShawn.

After a nine-year stay in Warren, Ohio, DeShawn and his family moved to California where they lived in Hawthorne until DeShawn was 14. It was then that his parents separated and DeShawn fled to Pontiac, Mich., to live with his biological father’s parents.

“I didn’t really like the atmosphere of the gangs and stuff like that,” Harvey said of Hawthorne. “My parents separated and instead of me picking one or the other to live with, I moved in with my grandparents.”

Harvey’s parents reconciled a year later, but he stayed in Michigan where he was playing basketball for Pontiac Central High.

His freshman year, he was promoted from the junior varsity to the varsity for the playoffs. Harvey started at point guard his sophomore season and helped the team win a city championship.

It was about this time that the thousands of miles between DeShawn and his parents began to take a toll.

He fathered a daughter, LeShawnda, in his sophomore year.

“It’s just a situation that happened. . . . me being young and doing stupid things at the wrong time,” Harvey said. “It happened and it’s nothing that I regret, (but) I’d never do it again. It taught me a lesson.”

Harvey dreams of one day obtaining custody of LeShawnda, who lives with her mother in Warren.

“It really taught me a lot, like about responsibility and things like that,” he said. “When I was in Michigan, I kept her for like four months. I potty-trained her all by myself.”

Harvey subsequently failed several classes and became academically ineligible to play his junior year. The situation worsened.

“My junior year I really got the big head. I’m not going to lie,” Harvey said. “I started thinking that I was all of that and I really wasn’t nothing. The main thing is I didn’t have any guidance.”

His family showed up for a visit for Christmas, 1990. Robert’s fatherly instincts took over.

“Me and my father had a long talk about what I was doing and what I should be doing,” Harvey said. “He told me to come out here, get my grades together, and go back and play my senior year there. That was my plan.”

Even after Harvey watched the highly regarded Huskies in action last season, his plan was still the same. “I went to one game,” DeShawn said. “I saw them play Fremont last year and they didn’t look too good to me. So, I knew for sure that I was going home.”

But Miller made sure that Harvey stayed, quickly arranging to meet with Harvey’s parents. “I knew we had something special,” Miller said.

Miller’s visit to the Harvey residence in North Hollywood lasted about two hours. By the time Miller left, DeShawn was ready to become a Husky.

“He stresses education and that’s why I stayed here instead of going back there,” Harvey said. “The thing I like about him the most is the discipline that he gives us.”

Harvey seems to thrive in a disciplined environment--on the court and at home. His father, whom he considers his best friend, knows the secret.

“With him, you have to lead by example,” Robert Harvey said. “I have to be his example, and that’s why I’m going to school.”

Harvey, 38, who recently was laid off from his job as a toolmaker, is seldom short on words when it comes to giving moral and ethical advice to DeShawn and his friends, who call him “Preacher.”

“I always teach him that people make mistakes, but the failure to go back and correct it is the worst thing,” Robert Harvey said.

Harvey has played a big part in turning his son’s life around in the past year. But it is a job that requires constant attention.

Harvey did not accumulate many school credits during his final year in Pontiac. In order to graduate on time, he has been taking night classes at Valley College in addition to his workload at North Hollywood.

His first night class a year ago was Spanish. The language was difficult for him and he struggled in the class. Toward the end of the semester, Harvey went to his father to tell him that he was ready to give up. Again, the Preacher was there with words of wisdom.

“I told him, ‘All the things that you’ve seen happened to me in my life and I never quit. And now you’re going to walk up to me right now at the end (and) tell me you quit,’ ” Harvey said.

“I said, ‘Go ahead. You start quitting now and you’ll do that the rest of your life. Me and you must be two different people.’ ”

Harvey stuck with the class and earned a passing grade.

“Without my father, I couldn’t have done it,” he said.

School and basketball take up most of Harvey’s time. He sometimes needs a push from his father to get through the tough schedule.

“I hate to go to Valley College at night after coming home from basketball practice,” Harvey said. “I’ll be in the room sleeping, and he’ll come in there and wake me up and say, ‘It’s time to go to school.’

“And I’m like, ‘I just left school and basketball practice.’ But when I finally get those credits and they send them home, I’m like, ‘Thanks, Dad, I love you.’ ”