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At 11:20 p.m., five minutes after Duke had blown a 10-point second-half lead and lost to UNC, the Cameron Crazies filed out of the building. There were no visible tears or emotional wringing over the transgressions of the past 140 minutes; Instead, the dominant conversation was of which bar to now frequent.
--H. Williams Kellenberger, Rocky Mount Telegram
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Being Shav Randolph
Sunday, March 10, 2002
The News & Observer
By G.D. GEARINO, Staff Writer
RALEIGH - The basic facts of Shavlik Randolph's life are this: He's an 18-year-old senior at Broughton High School. He lives in a comfortable home with his parents and two siblings. He goes to church. He struggles a bit with his grades; chemistry and literature are particularly vexing. When he has a break in his routine, he likes to kill time at the mall with friends. He shares a bedroom with his little brother. He has pictures of sports stars taped to the wall above his bed.
And he plays basketball, with a devotion that borders on obsession.
Basketball has won him a full-ticket scholarship from Duke University, where he'll play for famously intense Mike Krzyzewski. It has shaped his days, his nights, his family, his world. It has made him into a local celebrity.
Imagine what it is like to be Shavlik Randolph: Strangers fawn over you. Coaches known for their ferocity sit in your living room and court you. Young women smile at you fetchingly. People stare when you walk into a restaurant, then huddle over their tables as they confirm that it's really you. Children ask you to sign scraps of paper.
His height, if nothing else, would draw attention. Shavlik is 6-feet-10. He is also preternaturally polite, nodding in agreement when anyone else talks and tacking a 'sir' or 'ma'am' onto the end of almost everything he says. There is also the occasional air of bewilderment about him, but there's little surprise in that. Shavlik is not only making the transition from childhood to adulthood -- as we all do -- but he has two more passages to make as well: the trip from anonymity to celebrity, and the trip from high school ambitions to lofty, possibly crushing, expectations.
Think of almost any university in the country with an ambitious basketball program, and Shavlik probably heard from it. On a light day, there would be dozens of letters, bundled and wrapped in rubber bands. On a normal day, the letters would be hauled into the house in boxes. Kim Randolph, Shavlik's mother, would pile the mail on the kitchen counter.
'In the beginning, I read all of them,' Shavlik says. 'Then I only read the handwritten letters. There would be some days when there would be ridiculous amounts.'
Coaches called and visited. Before he was even old enough to vote, Shavlik discovered that he could make a grown man become as giddy as a teenage girl simply by smiling and saying, 'Hiya, coach.'
How does any high schooler lead a normal life in the face of that kind of attention?
The answer is, he doesn't.
The prospect of a 'normal' life evaporated virtually at the moment he was born. He was 24 inches long, which made him the talk of the maternity ward at Rex Hospital. He also carried a remarkable basketball gene in his DNA.
The young basketball star's full name is Ronald Shavlik Randolph. The first two of his names are familiar to many Triangle old-timers, especially Wolfpack fans. His maternal grandfather, Ronnie Shavlik, was an All-America center at N.C. State University in the 1950s. In February 1983, before his grandson was born, Ronnie Shavlik was diagnosed with cancer and told he had months to live. His daughter Kim and her husband, Kenny Randolph, wanted him to have the chance to hold a grandchild in his arms before he died.
'Mr. Shavlik was like a father to me, who I respected and loved,' Kenny Randolph says. 'Kim and I tried to get pregnant, and God blessed us.'
Ronnie Shavlik died on June 27, 1983, and his grandson was born on Nov. 24. It was Thanksgiving Day, and his parents had the eerie feeling that Ronnie Shavlik's spirit was lingering in the room. (Two more children followed. A daughter, Senna, 16, also plays basketball at Broughton. The youngest, 12-year-old Dexter, is less avid about the sport.)
Neither Kim nor Kenny pushed Shavlik into basketball. His mother nudged him toward soccer, which Shavlik played in elementary school. By middle school, Shavlik had made his choice. He wanted to play basketball. Only basketball.
'This was totally on his own,' Kim Randolph says.
On his own, too, he developed an amazing work ethic -- one that from a distance can look like an obsession. After the regular team practice, he practices with his father. He practices on Saturdays. Sometimes he meets Jeff Ferrell, the Broughton coach, in the gym on Sunday mornings to practice before church. At home in the evenings, he eats dinner in the den while he watches -- do you really have to be told? -- basketball on television.
Shavlik explains this monomania in simple terms that reflect his firmly held Christian faith. 'My focus comes mostly from God,' he says. 'My biggest gift is my desire, my focus. I have two choices. I can be like any other normal kid, or I can separate myself. I just don't see why someone would attempt to do something and not want to be the best. I can't just sit and not try to be the best.'
There was an early payoff to this single-mindedness. During the summer after Shavlik's ninth-grade year, N.C. State coach Herb Sendek sought out Kenny Randolph to tell him he would reserve a scholarship for Shavlik three years hence.
At the time, Shavlik had yet to start a game for Broughton High School.
Celebrity in the making
There is a hidden benefit to Shavlik's compulsive focus on basketball. It forms a cocoon, which shields him from the ancillary weirdness that comes with being a celebrity in the making.
The more time he spends on basketball, the less time Shavlik has to ponder the ways in which his life is unlike anyone else's. He doesn't have a driver's license. He doesn't have a girlfriend. He has never had a summer job.
When he goes to the mall to hang around, 'some people come up to me and want to talk to me, do stuff. People I don't even know,' Shavlik says. 'That can be a little irritating.'
Then there's the student who attends Broughton games wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, 'Shav is my daddy.' The other students who nudge one another and whisper as he walks down the hall. The N.C. State student who has become a one-woman fan club.
The fan, a young woman from Raleigh named Kim Wu, shows up at virtually every game, and occasionally sends Shavlik drawings of him that she has made. Once she followed the team bus back to the high school after a road game and serenaded Shavlik in the parking lot.
'I'm always trying to find ways to thank him for everything he does for me,' Wu says. 'Having him in my life has made it so much better.'
Like Shavlik, Wu -- a 19-year-old freshman -- doesn't drive. A friend takes her to the games, where she sometimes is awarded a brief conversation with Shavlik. If she's slightly obsessive in her determination to see him at every opportunity, there's a reason, Wu says. Once Shavlik goes to Duke, where tickets are famously difficult to obtain, 'I'll never get the chance to see him play again in person. This is my last chance,' she says. 'It makes me really sad.'
Shavlik and his parents are all quick to point out that girls do not figure into his life at this point. They are 'out of his comfort level,' Kim Randolph says. (So are cars, but for a different reason: Shavlik doesn't fit in them. Hence the lack of interest in a license.)
The wisdom in this course of action can be found in what Kim Randolph delicately refers to as 'the Shelden Williams incident.'
Williams is another Duke recruit, the only member of Duke's storied recruiting class ranked higher than Shavlik among the country's top prospects. After a tournament in Ohio in January, Williams and two teammates were named in a rape complaint filed by a Columbus woman. Williams spent several days dealing with the accusation before the woman decided she did not wish to press charges.
For Kim Randolph, this was a cautionary tale that she thought she needed to repeat to Shavlik.
'She'll try to lecture me about stuff and I tell her, 'You don't have to worry about me.' I really don't put myself in that situation,' Shavlik says. 'I don't think I have to worry about that.'
Good thing. He has other things to fret over.
The pressure is on
First and foremost is making the jump from high-school basketball to the pressure cooker of big-time college hoops.
At Broughton, Shavlik's size alone would make him a standout. That he also is an accomplished shooter and ball-handler makes him a national star. Last week, Shavlik was named to the McDonald's All-American High School Basketball Team, a collection of national all-stars that will play in Madison Square Garden on April 4. It's an honor he shares with dozens of recognizable names -- Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Patrick Ewing, Grant Hill, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan among them.
An impressive number of McDonald's All-Americans became college stars, and half went on to play in the NBA. If Shavlik's career at Duke turns out to be merely solid but unspectacular, he almost surely will be labeled an underachiever.
Shavlik expresses confidence (and proves that he has nailed the post-game sound bite): 'I know Duke has high expectations, but my expectations for myself are higher than [Duke's coaches] can imagine.'
Already, before he has played a single college game, Shavlik has gotten a taste of the fickle spotlight. As a junior, he was widely regarded as the top college prospect in the class of 2002. When he hurt his foot last spring, which hampered his play in a special tournament game, Internet chat sites were suddenly filled with declarations that Shavlik was overrated.
His mother can't bear to hear people talk that way. That's why she won't go to his games. 'I know how much of an expectation other people have for him,' she says. 'I just can't stand it.'
The Internet also taught that his every utterance is now considered part of the public domain. After he'd decided to attend Duke -- but before he'd announced it -- the news appeared on a Web site. Shavlik had to scramble to call the coaches from the four other finalist schools so they could hear it from him first.
Kenny Randolph says the family eventually figured out that a fellow Broughton student overheard Shavlik make a reference to attending Duke and leaked the news.
There was at least one benefit. The endless telephone calls from recruiting analysts and Web operators -- all seeking the first hint of Shavlik's decision -- finally ended. Now, Shavlik gets a different kind of feedback from strangers. 'I'll hear people saying, 'You should have gone to UNC, man,' ' he says.
For all his newfound awareness that he is a public figure at 18, Shavlik won't give up one thing: his fart machine.
When Shavlik and his buddy William Kane find themselves in a crowded place -- at the mall or in the hallway at school -- William will hide the device in his clothes and Shavlik will take the remote control. When William has maneuvered his way into a crowd, Shavlik will hit the button on the remote control.
It's an acceptable division of joke labor for both boys. 'You can't embarrass William,' Shavlik says.
And for a moment, no one is paying attention to him.
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