Rebounding Is His Life

For many college basketball players, going more than 600 days between games because of reconstructive knee surgery would be the most difficult challenge of a young life.

Not so for Leon Powe.

The star forward for California was a toddler when his father left for good, an elementary school student when a younger brother playing with matches burned down the family home, a teenager when he was put into foster care and a high school junior when his mother died of a heart ailment at 41.

An injured knee, even one that has been surgically repaired again and again, is no tragedy.

“I knew how to handle it, but it would be hard for anybody. You’ve just got to have willpower,” Powe said. “Sometimes, I couldn’t see no results, but you have to keep doing what you’re supposed to do.”

Powe was the Pacific 10 Conference freshman of the year two seasons ago, after becoming the first freshman to lead the league in rebounding. He did it despite playing on a knee that had never properly healed after surgery his junior year in high school.

“I had surgery, but it messed up again,” Powe said. “It was still messing up my first year in college.”

A decision was made to fix it, once and for all. So in April of his freshman year, Powe underwent a bone graft, followed in September by another reconstructive procedure.

“Just getting up from bed to get to the bathroom, I needed help,” he said. “That was really frustrating.”

Then, poised to return this season after a long rehabilitation, he sat out the first four games because of a stress fracture in his right foot.

Now he is back, and averaging 20.8 points and 9.4 rebounds as he and Cal (6-3) arrive to play USC today and UCLA on Saturday in the first week of conference play.

The time away, Cal Coach Ben Braun said, has made Powe’s game stronger, partly because he had to watch from the bench.

“He used to sit next to me and try to coach. He’s a lot better player,” Braun said jokingly.

Susceptible to double-teams in the post, the 6-foot-8, 240-pound Powe has tried to expand his game.

“He’s worked on his shooting range and his passing skills, and he can make guys around him better, something he didn’t do his first year,” Braun said.

Though Powe grew up next door to Berkeley in Oakland, you wouldn’t exactly say he was from the neighborhood.

“Yeah, it’s nearby, but kind of far away in a sense,” Powe said. “You have different groups of people. Most of the people who cause trouble in Oakland don’t want to come up here too much.

“It’s Cal Berkeley. It’s more civilized, but it’s crazy too.”

His youth was complicated by family strife -- a father who left, a mother who struggled, brothers and sisters who needed care.

Though they share the same name, Powe has no contact with his father, who lives in Mississippi.

“I choose not to, because a person is supposed to be there for their kids when they’re younger,” Powe said.

His mother, Connie Landry, had run-ins with the law and struggled with drugs before her death, only four days before her son led Oakland Tech into the state title game, the first of two in a row for Powe.

“I still can’t imagine my mom’s gone,” he said. “I wanted her to see me play at Cal. She missed a lot, but I feel like she’s looking down.... You ain’t never going to get over some things in life.”

He has not gotten over it, but he has gone on, much as he always has.

As a young boy, not yet a teenager, Powe often was required to care for his brothers and sisters.

“I think I was 11 1/2 , 12, and they were 2 to 4 or 5,” said Powe, whose mother eventually had six children. “I would just watch them till my mom came back from work, sometimes from [early] in the morning to 4 or 5. When Mom got home, that’s when I’d go play, when it was getting dark. I wasn’t hanging out with the right people.”

There were dozens of moves and little stability.

“The one before I went to a foster home when I was 13 or 14, that was like a drug area,” Powe said. “A lot of violence and guns. People just getting out of jail. You couldn’t go outside to play.

“When I had to watch my brothers and sisters, I would keep them in the house, or close to the door. People were selling drugs. You don’t know what people leave on the ground, and you know how kids are, they’ll pick up anything.”

The family would live in a motel for a month, two months at a time sometimes. And sometimes, until a room was ready, they stayed outside in a car.

Approaching adolescence, Powe was befriended by Bernard Ward, the older brother of a friend and now very much a father figure and a near-constant presence at Cal games.

Ward, who has worked as a counselor in the Alameda County probation department and is doing academic work in the field of psychology and sports, once had hoop dreams of his own.

“I played in junior college, and once upon a time I had UNLV looking at me, and Arizona,” Ward said. “I had a lot of other stuff going on. I made all the mistakes. You name it. I did it. Drugs? I did that too.

“What I want to do for the rest of my life is help other people. If he has success, beautiful. Hopefully he’ll take that success and help somebody else.”

Once a poor student, Powe got his grades up in high school with the tutoring help of Jonas Zuckerman, one of his former elementary school teachers. Powe credits Zuckerman with helping him turn his classroom work around and score well enough on aptitude tests to gain admission to Cal.

As the holidays arrived, with Cal on a break after a loss to DePaul in which Powe missed two late free throws, Powe was with the Ward family.

“We’re just happy he’s back on the court,” Ward said. “He’s focused on school, getting his timing right, getting the mental part of the game back, and just feeling it out right now.”

Powe said he is thinking about the season that is unfolding, not March and April when he will decide whether to return to Cal or test his NBA draft status.

“I’m not looking at that right now,” he said. “I’m trying to get my team over the hump.”