New Middle Man : Master’s Okenwa Redefines Center Play in NAIA

The NAIA District 3 tournament game between The Master’s and Bethany College of Northern California was midway through the first half and the fans packing the middle-of-nowhere gymnasium on the where-the-heck-are-we campus in a remote part of Santa Clarita seemed to be yearning for something.

Sleep comes to mind.

Not since Joe Louis’ body was displayed--two days after his death--in the boxing ring of the metal-roofed sports pavilion at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas more than a decade ago had a sports venue filled with people been so subdued. It was so quiet you could hear interest rates drop.

And then, from The Master’s bench where he had been sitting for a few moments, resting and sucking great lungfuls of air, came Emeka Okenwa, and the place erupted. A wall of deafening noise swept from one end of the court to the other as the giant Nigerian center rumbled across the floor, muscles bulging in places where most people don’t even have places, and thick, knotted calves and thighs and deltoids big enough to land a Cessna on.

Bethany was about to start playing like plain old Beth .

Within 30 seconds of his arrival on the court, Okenwa made the game his own, dominating anything he felt like dominating. On offense he simply bulled his 235 pounds into prime position under the basket, set his feet hard and waited for the ball. When he got it, a swift move to the basket resulted in a dunk or layup. On defense, he planted himself in front of the basket and absolutely dared anyone to even knock on the door to his domain.

And at either end of the court, when a shot clanged off the rim, Okenwa’s body seemed to tremble with excitement at the prospect of what was about to happen. And then, as a bunch of boyish-looking young men named Tim and Toby and Kirk and Mathew gazed at him with a coyote-in-a-legtrap look, Okenwa would simply launch himself skyward after the ball.

You half-expected a PA announcement: Ladies and gentlemen, Emeka has left the building.

But he had not, soaring only high enough to leave all others back on earth, gasping, as his head came startling close to the rim and he slammed the basketball into one hand with the other, a thunderous crack echoing through the gym as he began his descent toward the floor.

His quick dominance of the game forced Bethany Coach John Block, a former NBA player, to call a hasty timeout and gather his troops around him.

“Does somebody,” he barked, “want to guard that man?” There was no immediate response. His players looked up or down or this way or that way or any way that wouldn’t bring their eyes into contact with this fuming, insane-at-the-moment coach.

Does anybody want to guard that man?

Well, gee, coach, sure we do, Block’s Bethany Bruins seemed to be thinking. We also want to play in the NBA All-Star game next year, but neither of those two things is very likely.

“They did a great job getting the ball to (Okenwa),” Block said, grudgingly, after the game earlier this week. “. . . He is awfully strong.”

Playing only 12 minutes in the first half of that game, Okenwa scored six points and had five rebounds.

It was just a warm-up.

In the second half he took complete control. He scored nearly at will, had breathtaking flurries of those blast-off, head-in-the-net rebounds and repeatedly broke down the Bethany defense with his presence in the middle.

Bethany, however, was persistent. Its dogged play, combined with some ragged play by Okenwa’s teammates, forced the game into two overtime sessions, both of which were also dominated by Okenwa.

When the roar finally subsided inside the gym, The Master’s had come away with a 65-61 victory and will face Westmont in a second-round game tonight at Whittier College.

Okenwa? He finished the game against Bethany with . . . well, let’s allow The Master’s PA announcer to handle the stats:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Domino’s Pizza player of the game tonight is Emeka Okenwa,” the voice boomed.

“The final statistics for the game show Emeka with 455 points and 65,000 rebounds.”

Okenwa actually had 25 points and 14 rebounds.

But the announcement made everyone laugh.

Well, almost everyone.

In the visitors’ locker room sat slender Mathew Blakley, a sad look in his eye and some nasty red welts on his shoulders. He tried to stop Okenwa for a while, and didn’t do real well. Okenwa whipped him like an angry jockey astride a slow horse, muscling past him at will.

“We wanted to deny him the good position underneath, but it was impossible,” Blakley said.

Later, a rail-thin Kirk Noonan assumed the unenviable task, and it might as well have been Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise down in the low post with the 6-foot-8 Okenwa.

“You just can’t move the guy out,” Noonan said. “I mean you can’t move him. And then he has all those spin moves to the basket. He really overpowered us.”

It has been the same old story for many of The Master’s opponents recently. In piling up a 19-9 record, The Master’s, a tiny Christian school with an enrollment of 770 students playing in the NAIA tournament for the fourth consecutive season, overcame a rough start to the season and has won seven games in a row and 13 of its last 14.

Okenwa is averaging 17 points and 10 rebounds, and guard Andy Thompson is second on the team with 13 points per game. Others, such as 6-foot-6 forward Rogerio Soares of Brazil and 6-7 Rusty Clark of Gillespie, Ill., have played well, also.

It has been a remarkable recovery for a team that saw one of its best players nearly die on the court. Senior forward Phil Sanson dove for a loose ball in a game against Dominican College on Jan. 9 in San Rafael and slammed into the courtside bleachers. The impact shattered his larynx.

Unable to breathe, he nearly died before reaching the hospital. Today, Sanson breathes through a hole in his trachea and speaks in a whisper.

A full recovery, according to Dr. Herbert Dedo, who performed emergency surgery on Sanson at the UC San Francisco Medical Center, is likely. Meantime, Sanson sits on the bench at Master’s games, a silent spirit lifting his teammates.

“Instead of splitting us apart, it brought us together,” said Coach Mel Hankinson, in his fifth season at the school. “Phil has united us. His accident has given us an emotional and mental edge. We’re not playing just for ourselves anymore. We’re playing for Phil, too. We’re playing for a higher purpose than just winning some basketball games.

“Dr. Dedo told us that if we hadn’t gotten Phil to a hospital so quickly, if another two minutes had gone by, he would have died. We would have lost him.

“We all think about that all the time.”

Senior guard David Humphreys, who leads the team in assists with an average of nearly six a game and is a player even more likely to dive into the seats than was Sanson, said the accident changed the team.

“I was right there, maybe five feet away from him,” Humphreys said. “The memory of him standing up, turning around and looking at me with a horrible look on his face and whispering, ‘I can’t breathe,’ will stay with me forever.

“From that moment on, we all got together and decided to play this game a little differently. If Phil was willing to give up his body and nearly his life to get a loose basketball, then we decided we’d play a little harder, sacrifice a little more, too.”

An additional burden is the coach’s illness: Hankinson suffers from an intestinal disorder called diverticulitis and missed the first two months of the season. The two ingredients, along with the graduation of 10 of last season’s players, could well have sent the 1992-93 team down the road to, well, heck.

“Adversity affects individuals differently and it affects groups differently,” Hankinson said. “With this group, it just sent them on a mission.”

Yet, without the addition of Okenwa, it might well have been a fruitless mission.

He came to The Master’s by way of Southern Illinois University, recruited out of Owerri, Nigeria, where he graduated from high school in 1987 at the age of 16 and took the Scholastic Aptitude Test with hopes of attending college in the United States.

Two years later, in 1989, he did. Recruited by Coach Rich Herrin, he showed up in Carbondale, Ill., in August and was promptly whacked over the head by the NCAA, which ruled that his collegiate eligibility period--an athlete is allowed four years of eligibility within a five-year span--had begun the day he took the SAT test in Nigeria, thus leaving Okenwa only two years of Division I eligibility.

The NAIA has no such rule, granting eight semesters of athletic eligibility with no time restraints.

“He got a raw deal from the NCAA,” Herrin said. “We wrote letters and appealed, but they wouldn’t give him a break. When he left us last year, he was just starting to get a feel for the whole game. His talent was enormous. If he keeps learning, this young man could play in the NBA one day.”

Hankinson heard of Okenwa’s plight, and promptly offered a solution.

“I had never heard of The Master’s,” Okenwa said. “But Mel Hankinson sold me. I liked his personality so much and decided that I would keep playing basketball. Southern Illinois offered me a full scholarship for two more years, even without playing basketball, and really, I only wanted the education.

“But I like basketball so much.”

Today, his teammates, coaches and fans at The Master’s like Okenwa so much.

“He is just a dominant player,” Hankinson said. “He could easily average 30 or more points a game, but we function on a team system, not a star system, so he doesn’t get the chance. Inside, he just overwhelms people.”

Humphreys takes it a notch further.

“Emeka is a beast,” he said. “He can control both ends of the court any time he wants to. In the past month or so, in crunch time, we just get him the ball and let him work.

“He’s one of those Everyone jump on my back and I’ll carry you kind of guys.”