With a Little Time on His Hands, Douglas Gives a Little Back

When the teachers and staff members at Abram Simon Elementary School in Southeast Washington told their students that the man who would help provide Christmas--NBA veteran Sherman Douglas--was just like them, from a similar D.C. neighborhood just around the way, the kids didn’t believe it.

“They don’t believe a successful pro could come from this kind of environment,” Ed Epps, the former all-Met basketball player who directs the school’s athletic programs, said. “You know how desperate these kids are to hear, ‘I grew up just like you, I didn’t have a silver spoon in my mouth either.’ Those little kids who were too young to know that he played at Spingarn High School in Northeast after attending Hines Junior High in Southeast and they have a hard time believing he grew up like them, this is a very big deal to them for him to be here.”

In the tiny gymnasium inside Simon last week, Douglas did more than just let students see him. He helped some of the school’s poorest youngsters have the kind of Christmas they otherwise could only dream of. When Mimi Kirstein, one of the members of the Washington Hebrew Congregation who volunteers at Simon, called Douglas to talk about some kind of holiday presentation, Douglas sai1680613376”Can I provide gifts? What kind of help do you need?”

And in one week’s time, school program assistant Monique Rouse, Nikki Mock (another volunteer from Washington Hebrew Congregation), Kirstein, Epps and other school staffers and volunteers had planned a Christmas celebration. They invited boys basketball coach Mike Hibbs, who brought three of his players from Potomac, Md., to conduct a mini-clinic. Douglas purchased 120 regulation basketballs, plus stocking stuffers as gifts for the kids. You think a basketball wrapped in Christmas paper isn’t a big deal? It’s almost unthinkably important in an environment where one mother, in order to meet Kirstein after school, had to take three buses from her job at D.C. General Hospital while pushing a double-stroller.

Douglas knows all this. He wasn’t the poorest kid on the block, but he didn’t have that much to spare either. He knows, even if only from the neighbors and friends, what a sparse Christmas feels like. An 11-year-old fifth-grader named Derrick Peterson looked admiringly at Douglas and said, “This is the most exciting, best gift I could have for Christmas.”

The sports world has been a little short on heartwarming stories lately, but this is one. It’s a story of how sports can be used to accomplish something beautiful that otherwise almost certainly wouldn’t be done. Kirstein and Mock go to Simon regularly to read to students and help however they can. On Thanksgiving, with Rouse helping to identify the people most in need, they provided the resources for approximately 60 families to have a Thanksgiving Day dinner. For Christmas, they w1701995808looking to provide similar holiday assistance and were hoping a professional athlete would lend support. They’re lucky Douglas, their neighbor in Potomac, has not a pretentious bone in his bod2032934912and more time than he’d like.

Douglas, not surprisingly, downplayed what he was doing. “I’ve got so much time on my hands,” he said, referring to the NBA lockout. “I’m already sitting at home thinking, ‘How can I be more productive?’ One of the things about the lockout is that I can spend more time than usual this time of year with my 4-year-old daughter. It’s the first time I can see her in her school (Christmas) play. It means I could be here, too. And that means a lot to me to be able to do this.”

Douglas isn’t a first-tier star in the NBA, but he’s a primary hero in the streets of Washington because, as Epps said, “He’s regular people, he doesn’t try to big-time anybody, he remembers where he came from, and he’s accomplished a whole, whole lot.” And he gives. He was beloved when he left Spingarn for Syracuse; NBA stops in Miami, Boston, Milwaukee and New Jersey these last nine years haven’t diminished the admiration. Because Douglas hasn’t diminished the time he spends giving of himself around here.

“I grew up in this environment,” he told the gymnasium full of kids, suddenly quiet. “I really wasn’t that good a basketball player at first. I practiced to get better. That’s what I did when I was your age. It’s just like doing your homework. You want to be a good jump shooter, you practice, right? You want to be better in math or English or science, you study. . . . My high school coach told me after my first year at Syracuse when I was homesick, ‘Sherman, there’s nothing on the street corner for you.’ I’m proof that whatever you want to do in life, you can do, no matter your background or financial difficulties, no matter who you are or what people think of you.”

Neville Waters of the D.C. Sports Commission, who as Santa Claus helped distribute Douglas’ gifts, said, “Your heart goes out to them because as Mimi said, ‘That, in many cases, may be the only gift that kid will see this Christmas.’ And I couldn’t help but be affected by their faces beaming and smiling. Man, you can’t replace that feeling in those kids.”

Douglas knows that, too, which is why he participated in the first place. That’s why his summer camp, in Northeast Washington, is free of charge. That’s why his camp is part basketball, but part math and English tutoring, plus drug awareness instruction. The bigger the stars become, the more necessary it is for kids like these to know they can actually touch someone like Douglas.

It hasn’t been a good autumn for NBA players in general. But Sherman Douglas is one of the reasons we all have to be careful about generalizing. There’s never been anything selfish or greedy or presumptous about him. I’ve known him for 14 years and never seen him with an entourage, never seen him be anything but accommodating to a fault.

Nobody asked him about the NBA lockout, and indeed it wasn’t the time or place. Everybody at Simon knows that sports helps children realize hope for something as basic as a Merry Christmas. But Douglas, the staff at Simon elementary, the volunteers from Hebrew Congregation and most of all the appreciative kids gathered along the sidelines in the school gym also understood that throwing a ball in a hoop was the least of anybody’s concerns on a day filled with so much that was good.