Making Himself at Home : Felipe Lopez Already a Star For St. John’s

He is only 19, but already Felipe Lopez’s bony shoulders are carrying the combined hopes and dreams of his family, the Dominican Republic, the Big East Conference, St. John’s University and anyone else who can squeeze aboard. As it turns out, he doesn’t need a jump shot, he needs a truss.

Of course, don’t mention this to the wonderfully innocent Lopez, who doesn’t even notice the added weight. He’s playing the game he loves. He’s getting a free education. And as a bonus, nobody is aiming an Uzi his way, as in the South Bronx.

“I feel like I’m dreaming still,” said Lopez, whose voice is rich with a Spanish accent. “Definitely like a dream, and nothing is going to stop me from making it better and better.”

When he chose to stay in New York and sign with St. John’s, the city nearly fainted with happiness. At last, someone as good as Lopez--the national high school player of the year--wasn’t ditching the place for Georgia Tech or Arkansas or Kentucky or

North Carolina or wherever else a recruiting pipeline had been built by invaders.

The tabloids handled Lopez’s decision with typical reserve. “HOME BOY!” screamed the New York Daily News headline, in what would be the first of the paper’s nearly half-dozen pages devoted entirely to the 6-foot-5 guard and his momentous day.

Sports Illustrated later stuck him on the cover and anointed him savior of the Big East. Even the New Yorker, chronicler for the erudite and socially sophisticated, deemed the Dominican immigrant worthy of mention.

Later, ESPN was there to record Lopez’s debut at St. John’s Midnight Madness. What excitement. And there he is, ladies and gentlemen, Felipe Lopez . . . stretching .

Producers for “NBA Inside Stuff” stopped by campus. Eventually, so did just about every major newspaper, which explains Lopez’s Big East record for interview requests. They come to see if the teen-ager can match the legend.

And the first-half report: So far, so good.

Entering Tuesday night’s game against Seton Hall, Lopez was averaging 18.7 points and had yet to be held to single digits. He prays before every game. Opponents pray once it starts.

Seton Hall held him to 10 points in their first meeting, but then he scored 35 against Syracuse a few nights later, the second-highest total for a freshman in a Big East game. If his numbers hold up, he will end the season with the league’s freshman scoring record.

St. John’s isn’t doing as well. The Red Storm is 9-10 overall, 2-9 in the Big East and the loser of its last nine conference games. But don’t blame Lopez. Except for his struggles from the three-point line, Lopez has done everything you can expect from a freshman. Heck, from a senior.

Truth is, St. John’s is in transition. Then again, so is Lopez.

Five years ago, he couldn’t speak a word of English. He had never been on a plane. He had been airborne but only on a basketball court. He had this Statue-of-Liberty idea of New York, where all you needed was a visa and a safety deposit box.

“I was coming to the big city, the city that everyone talks about,” he said. “People make it sound like you find the money on the streets, that you just pick it up. I believed it.

“Every time somebody come over here and come back to the Dominican, they’ve got 100 gold chains, lots of money, clothes, cars . . . so, it was like, wow.

“You think just by going (to America), it’s going to be like that. But once you come over here, you understand. You realize and you feel like telling the Dominicans over there not to feel the hype that they feel. There’s a lot of them who spend their whole life hoping to come over here for that treasure that they think they will find. But that’s not what it is. A lot of people have to work real, real hard to get what they got.”

Lopez’s father, a construction worker, rarely had a day off. He would leave for days at a time if the job required it. The family needed the money, and, in the Dominican, family is everything.

Lopez’s mother, a teacher, ruled with love but also with a firm touch. She was not a woman to be crossed.

Together, they raised a daughter, Sayunara, and three sons, Anthony, Anderson and Felipe, the youngest of the four children.

There is only one playground in Santiago where you can play basketball. Baseball is the national obsession, but Lopez found himself intrigued by hoops. He would watch his brothers and sister play and then rush onto the court, grab the ball and dribble and kick it until someone shooed him away.

The playground was a meeting place, “like a social club,” he said. Old and young would mingle there. The air was sweet and fresh, the nights special.

“People over there are so friendly,” he said. “Everybody is on the lookout for each other, especially your neighbors. They become not only like your best friends, but like family. All my friends that I knew back then, I say now they’re my cousins. That’s the way we grew up.”

When they left in 1989, the Lopezes did so with heavy hearts. Home vs. Opportunity. Safety vs. Unknown.

They moved to the South Bronx, which is no social club. One day, Lopez was in a pickup game when suddenly he heard gunshots. Drug dealers had been seen near the court earlier in the day--nothing unusual about that, Lopez said--but this was different. There had been some sort of disagreement between a woman and one of the dealers. The woman brought back her boyfriend, who pulled out a gun and started firing.

“I jumped over a fence and started running four blocks down to get to my house,” Lopez said. “I took the longest way to get to my house, and I didn’t stop running until I got there. After that, I just stopped going to that playground.”

Lopez joined an AAU team called the Gauchos. His talent was obvious, but his English was virtually nonexistent. Anthony would come to the games and serve as an interpreter. He swears that the first words Felipe learned in English were “zone offense” and “the press.”

Lopez learned fast. He treated English like basketball. “The more you practice, the better you get at it,” he said.

But he could do only so much by himself. It wasn’t until he was befriended by Maura Beattie, a teacher at Lopez’s Rice High, that his thirst for learning was satisfied. Beattie did what all good teachers do: She challenged him.

“She was like a second mother to me,” Lopez said.

By the end of his freshman season, there wasn’t a recruiter who didn’t know about Lopez. By his senior season, he was courted by every top 100 program in the country and reportedly by a pro team in Spain.

P.J. Carlesimo, then the coach at Seton Hall, conducted part of his home visit in Spanish. North Carolina’s Dean Smith came calling. So did Georgia Tech’s Bobby Cremins. And Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim. In fact, Lopez wouldn’t even consider taking a recruiting trip to a school unless a coach first visited the family in the South Bronx. Those were the rules, and you never break the rules in a Dominican family.

Lopez learned that lesson the hard way. One night, several years ago, he didn’t do the dishes after dinner. His father found out and wouldn’t let him play in an important out-of-town tournament game.

“I cried a little bit,” Lopez said. “But in a way, it made me a more responsible person.”

Lopez always has been a quick learner. UCLA assistant coach Mark Gottfried was in New York the time Lopez’s coach decided his star player wasn’t working hard enough. So he kept Lopez out of practice and benched him for half of the first period against George Washington High.

Then he went in.

“Oh, my goodness, he’s big time,” Gottfried said. “He had something like 48 points, 18 rebounds, 12 assists, four or five blocked shots and took three charges.”

Gottfried quit taking notes, leaned back in his bleacher seat and enjoyed the show.

“Not very many players come along like him,” Gottfried said. “Not only does he have great skills and a great work ethic, but he has an unbelievable personality. He’ll be on a lot of posters one day.”

Lopez visited UCLA, “but I felt that wasn’t the place for me.”

He visited Kansas, loved the coaches, players and campus, but then realized it was in Lawrence, where about the only place you hear his native language is in Spanish classes.

No hard feelings, Kansas Coach Coach Roy Williams said.

“An outstanding prospect and a really great young man,” Williams said. “It’s the combination of both that’s going to make him special. He has a great flair for the game, just like Michael Jordan had a flair for the game and Magic Johnson had a flair for the game.”

In the end, he chose St. John’s because it was close to home. Because more than one-tenth of the student body is Hispanic. Because of family. Always family.

His family is at every home game and his fans travel almost everywhere to see him play. At Providence, a large Dominican contingent assembled behind the St. John’s bench and started chanting his name. Lopez loved it.

“I’m smiling, I’m feeling good,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me because they’re my people.”

Thanks partly to Lopez, as well as Georgetown freshman Allen Iverson, the Big East has been re-energized. The league still plays too much Muscle Beach basketball (shove, push, pound, lift and tug while running half-court offenses), but Lopez and Iverson are speeding up the pace.

And argue all you want about who’s better, but nobody can come close to Lopez when it comes to court manners. In a home loss against Miami a few weeks ago, Lopez led St. John’s with 22 points and at least a half-dozen examples of sportsmanship.

When a Miami player was knocked to the ground, Lopez was there to help him up and pat him on the back. When a Miami player popped him on a screen, Lopez didn’t try to retaliate. When there was a questionable referee decision--like the crucial no-call on a last-minute jumper by Lopez--he said nothing. It is a quality not always seen in his American counterparts. “That Miami player . . . he fell, but we are all playing the same game, so I help him,” Lopez said. “The hitting? They consider it a little war because they don’t have the confidence in themselves. But the game isn’t about who is tougher on the court.”

As for the no-call, Lopez shrugged. “I would say, yes, it was a clean block because they didn’t call a foul.”

One day, when his career is complete and he has his college degree and maybe some NBA money stashed away, Lopez said he wants to return to the Dominican, to home. Unlike other athletes, he wants to be a role model. He wants to go back and build playgrounds and parks and businesses. He wants to make a difference.

“I have so many hopes, so many dreams,” he said.

At least one of them has come true. He is with his family, playing basketball and St. John’s is giving him a scholarship to do it. And while it might not be money in the streets, it’s close.