Long Road Winds Up in Irvine : Well-Traveled Stewart at Home With Anteaters

Trouble tends to sprout in the neighborhood where Keith Stewart grew up on the east side of Milwaukee. But as a youngster, Stewart’s ability on the basketball court set him apart; plus he had a horde of brothers and sisters intent on keeping the baby of the family in line.

Stewart says he was not even the best basketball player among Estella Stewart’s 10 children. But he was the one who became one of Milwaukee’s best-known players and earned a scholarship to Purdue before coming home to Marquette after his freshman year. It was the beginning of a winding road for the talented guard, a two-time transfer whose latest stop has brought him to UC Irvine, where he has helped the Anteaters break an 11-game losing streak with back-to-back victories in the two games since he became a starter.

He comes by his ability naturally, he says. “If you saw my brothers, you’d know where I get it from,” said Stewart, whose well-muscled legs give him elevation on a quick-release jump shot that can be accurate from well beyond the three-point line. “All the guys in my family play. A couple of my sisters play too. I come from a family of natural shooters.”

Stewart sharpened his God-given skills on the courts near his family’s home in Milwaukee, at a place the local players know as the Natatorium, for reasons that are unclear.

“Right around the corner,” Stewart said. “It’s a legendary place. We had a summer-league team, and our place was one of the most feared. We had a lot of gangsters up there, but we had a bunch of ballplayers too. If you come to the Natatorium trying to act tough, you suffer the consequences. You come with just basketball on your mind, and everything would be fine.”

Estella Stewart says she watched as what was once a peaceful neighborhood get meaner. There was the usual violence associated with gangs and drugs. More recently, there was the discovery of the horrors confessed to by Jeffrey Dahmer, who lived two blocks from one of Stewart’s brothers.

By the time Stewart was ready for high school and most of her other children were grown, Stewart’s mother was on good enough footing from her job as a cable television sales representative to send him to private Messmer High School.

“Things were getting rough in the city schools,” she said. “I put him there to help keep him out of trouble.”

At Messmer, Stewart and his teammates won two State championships, and his renown grew.

“I’m the youngest, and I would say I had a lot more opportunity,” Stewart said. “Times were harder for my brothers and sisters. They made things easier for me. Times are always hard in a large family, especially being raised by a single person. Everybody’s trying to grow up.

“Tough times come, good times come. People make mistakes. My family made sure I didn’t make those same mistakes. I say I had seven fathers and about four mothers. It’s tough to totally do wrong when you’ve got advice coming from so many different people.”

His mother’s advice has always been the same: Stay in school.

“I honestly feel without her I wouldn’t even be in college,” Stewart said. “I probably would have quit a long time ago. It’s been tempting a few times.

“She and I have been round and round. Basketball means basically nothing to her. She’s happy that I’m happy playing and it’s provided a good education for me. Education is the most important. She won’t be satisfied until I get my degree on the mantel to go with my sisters’ and brothers’. “

Stewart was in Irvine this September, working to become the fifth child in his family to put a diploma on the mantel, when he got a call with the news that the violence had hit home.

His brother Calvin, 23, was shot and killed in an incident Stewart says stemmed from “a love triangle.”

“I knew he’d had a fight about a week before it happened,” said Stewart, who had been worried about his brother. “Next thing I know, I get the call he was shot. I really don’t know the whole story. I kind of shied away from it.

“It’s been the most difficult thing for me. I’ve had a lot of terrible times because of that. I fought through it, I’m still fighting through it. I guess he’s in a better place.”

Stewart went home for the funeral and stayed about a week. He still talks to his mother almost every night.

“I know he’s still depressed,” she said. “I’m still not me, either. He was pretty close to his brother. That was a real blow.”

She had planned to visit, but then had to use the money she had saved for the trip to replace the engine in her car. Stewart would like to visit, too, but there is no way to get away during the season.

“The toughest thing for me is I haven’t been home since,” he said. “I haven’t seen my family. If I could go home tomorrow, I would.”

Stewart has been at Irvine a little more than a year, and it has not been an easy one. Still struggling with grief over his brother’s death, he missed three games he had expected to play in--one because of an NCAA suspension stemming from violations at Marquette that Stewart and the school refuse to elaborate on, and two more because he had not completed academic work necessary for eligibility.

“When the NCAA said he had to miss one game, he said, ‘Oh, I might as well quit school, everybody’s trying to mess me up,’ ” Estella Stewart said. “I told him, ‘Only you can mess you up if you quit school. Basketball’s not your whole life. You can’t count on it.’ You don’t know how big my phone bills are trying to encourage him and keep him in school.”

Together with the four games he missed at the start of the season because of transfer regulations, Stewart did not play until the eighth game of the season.

It was in that game, a victory over Lafayette, that his father, Richard Taylor of Los Angeles, saw his son play in person for the first time. His parents have been estranged since he was a baby, and his mother said she did not allow the children’s father to visit.

Although Stewart had talked to his father on the phone, they had not seen each other since he was 4 months old.

“I heard he could play real good, but I didn’t know he could play as good as he does,” said Taylor, who has seen all but one home game Keith has played. “He seems to love the game quite a lot, and I enjoy just seeing him play.”

Keith, who sees his father regularly now, can usually pick him out in the crowd.

“He never sits down,” Keith said. “I see him up there all the time in the stands. I guess he was real excited the first time he saw me. He had seen me on television at Purdue, but now he gets the full blast.”

Stewart went to Purdue after high school, and although he started 14 games at point guard as a freshman on a 15-16 team, he said there was conflict on the team.

“He was not very happy,” Purdue Coach Gene Keady said. “He was really immature and couldn’t adjust. You name it, going to class, being on top of his self-discipline.

“He had great talent, was quick and could pressure the ball. We knew after playing a couple of years he’d be good.”

But when Stewart broached the topic of transferring, Keady went along.

“I encouraged it,” he said.

After Kevin O’Neill, a former Arizona assistant, took over at Marquette, Stewart decided to go home and play for him. Stewart liked O’Neill as an assistant, but the two soon clashed.

Officially, Stewart was kicked off the team last winter after O’Neill said the player fell asleep during a film session, and called it the last straw in a series of incidents. Stewart denies falling asleep, and in the ongoing feud between O’Neill and the Stewart family, the Stewarts have said there are improprieties in the Marquette program.

“The only thing I want to say is I don’t comment on other people’s programs or players,” O’Neill said when asked about Stewart. “I think Keith’s a good kid, a talented player and I’m glad he’s doing well.”

After a brief period when he thought he would transfer to a small college in Texas, Stewart made a connection with former Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan on the advice of Utah Coach Rick Majerus, who is a former Marquette coach and had known Stewart since the player was about 12.

“When he got kicked off the team, he really needed a place to go,” Majerus said. “I really like Bill Mulligan, he’s one of my best friends, and I knew he was really good with guys who had bounced around or were headstrong. I think Keith’s a good player, a good kid, a good student.”

But before Stewart became eligible after transferring, Mulligan retired and was replaced by Rod Baker.

“That was a tough time,” Stewart said. “I thought, ‘Man, am I a bad seed or what?’ I didn’t know how to handle it. Another coaching change. I had just been through a coaching change that shocked my whole world. Fortunately, it turned out for the better. I feel lucky.”

Baker didn’t break up his starting five when Stewart became eligible, but after 12 games as a reserve, Stewart became a starter. Baker, concerned about some of Stewart’s ill-timed turnovers, moved him from point guard to shooting guard. All told, Stewart has scored in double figures in eight of 14 games, with a career-high of 19 against Cal State Long Beach. He made seven of eight shots in that game, and didn’t miss in three three-point attempts.

“It’s like I sat out, in my mind, two years,” Stewart said, adding that he is still adjusting. After leaving Purdue, he sat out a season as required by transfer rules, then appeared in five games at Marquette, starting two. “I played a few games at Marquette, but I didn’t get a chance to break the ice.”

Because of NCAA rules that allow a player only five years to complete his eligibility, next season will be his last.

“Irvine’s home for me,” he said. “I don’t plan on making any more stops. I’m pretty close to my degree and everything. I feel like if I could have kept all the credits I lost (in transferring), I’d be finished with school.”

His mother misses him, but she wonders if Milwaukee is the place for her sons.

“I don’t want him to come back,” she said. “The gangs here are out of control and the police seem to not know what to do. I’m so disgusted with this place.”

Halfway across the country, her youngest son plays and studies in Irvine, a place many people would consider. . . .

“Conservative?” Keith Stewart offered. “Comes a time you get tired of all that crazy stuff (in Milwaukee). I know I do, and I don’t want that for my family. Sometimes I sit around and think what I can do to get my whole family out here away from that.

“You never know. I’ve got five brothers left, all in Milwaukee. It’s crazy there. You can be an innocent bystander there, it doesn’t matter. A young black male is like an endangered species back there. It’s wild. If I had the resources, I’d do it.”