The Fighter

It's not that uncommon for sports players to have devastating injuries. It's not unusual for athletes to have dealt with family tragedies, either. And, unfortunately, there are plenty of examples of sports figures who have survived being shot.

It's a lot less common for all three of those circumstances to happen to one person.

Those experiences themselves aren't what make Rakeem Wilson special, though.

"It's like somebody just put you into a hole with a whole bunch of ants and they're just biting," Wilson says, trying to reason with a 22-year-life that has been riddled with unforeseen incidents and interruptions. "It's tough, and I don't know how I did it."

After leading New Hanover High School, in Wilmington, N.C., to a 4A basketball state championship in his junior year, Wilson appeared destined for the highest level of college athletics. Basketball seemed to be his way out of the ant-infested hole that his life had perpetually become a part of.

Things don't always work out the way they're supposed to, though. The head coach at New Hanover resigned following the state title. An alumnus took over the program that had an 83-10 record under the previous coach. Wilson says the replacement, who resigned after that initial season, didn't have his new players' best interests at heart.

He and then-teammate Ty Walker, now a senior center for Wake Forest, received invitations to the 2008 McDonald's All-American game, but neither were permitted to participate. "I don't think he did one piece of paperwork," Wilson says of the replacement coach. "He never signed papers for me and Ty. We were one of the top 150, and he never signed over the papers. They told us we could have played in it, but he basically left us on our own."

Wilson admits to being mostly naïve of the recruiting process, and says that the new coach didn't sit down with him to discuss his options, or to give him much guidance at all.

"If I would've known what I had to do to get there, I could have," Wilson says emphatically. "But I didn't know anything; I didn't have anybody to sit down and talk to me that this is what you have to do."

Wilson says he maintained about a C average in school, because he thought that was good enough for most colleges. It wasn't, and since there was hardly any communication from his school to collegiate scouts, a McDonald's All-American invitee slipped through the cracks. Wilson eventually accepted a walk-on role at Louisburg College, a North Carolina junior college.

In Wilmington, Cape Fear Community College (CFCC) coach Ryan Mantlo was well aware of the speedy guard throughout his high school career. "When we initially started our recruiting of Rakeem, we thought he was going to make the grades, so we backed off and really didn't recruit him at all his senior year," he says. "Next thing I knew, he was at Louisburg and I'm like, 'What in the world happened?'

"There was no communication, to us at least, that he needed [junior college]."

At Louisburg, Wilson found himself in a bad case of déjà vu. The coach that he had been in contact with had left. He would have to try out for the team and earn a spot on the roster. "It was a wreck," he says.

Wilson, however, worked through tryouts and vaulted his way up to the starting point guard. But a few days before Louisburg's first official scrimmage game, a freak accident threatened his playing career.

As Wilson was pushing a door open to leave his dormitory one morning, someone called his name. He remembers turning around and the heavy door rushing towards him. It struck Wilson on the left side of his face.

"I couldn't do nothing. My eyes got watery," he admits.

The doctors at the hospital told him that he had fractured his left orbital bone. An orbit is the socket in which an eyeball rests in. When the orbit experiences trauma, pressure builds suddenly, resulting in a kind of blowout fracture.

Wilson needed surgery to have a metal plate inserted just beneath his eye. "I think it's because the muscles and vessels, they weren't coming together like they supposed to," he says. "I couldn't lift nothing over 10 pounds."

The plate was later removed, and doctors told him to wait six weeks before he could play again. Until then, no physical strain. Six weeks passed, but they determined that he needed another six months off. "I thought I'd be back playing again at the end of the year," he says.

When that timetable passed, he was still unable to get medical clearance. He called his grandparents to tell them he would come home and continue his education at CFCC. "I could just go home and be with my family," he explains. "The only reason I'm up there is because of basketball."

Then he gets quiet again. "I never thought it would be like this," he says, barely audible, staring down at the floor.

Wilson started to play basketball again in Wilmington, but he restricted himself to only playing lackadaisically and alone. He went to the local YMCA after about a year and a half removed from competitive play. Friends and local athletes in the gym recognized the former high school star and asked him to participate in pickup games. He declined, for a bigger reason than just the wariness caused by the eye injury.

"I would go in the gym and just dribble and it just felt like the ball had dust on it, like sliding out of my hand," he says. Wilson didn't want the people that knew him for his lethal cross-over dribble and fearless driving and finishing abilities to see him unable to do any of those.

He kept coming back, though, hoping to shake off the rust. "I just kept going to the Y early in the morning by myself," he says. Wilson still wanted to play, but he didn't think he was good enough anymore.

Mantlo holds some workouts for his players at the YMCA, and one day when he was there checking on his team, he noticed Wilson was back. "I invited him to play with our guys down here at the (CFCC) gym instead of having to go down to the Y and he always said, 'OK, I'll be there,' and he would never show up. I always took it as he's just not serious about it," he says. "I didn't really understand the whole thing about he was just a little bit scared. As he grew warmer to me and trusted me a little bit, he was able to communicate that with me."

Where Wilson comes from, being scared is not an option. At least, it's not something you admit to.

Wilson says he showed up initially, but then shied away from coming back after that. "The first year I came back, (Mantlo) talked to me and told me to come out and play with a few of the guys. And the first time I came down, we all sat down in the locker room and we all shared our personalities," he says, glancing away. It seemed like a good thing, but Wilson wasn't acting like it.

"I don't think I even came back to the basketball court after that."

Recovering physically and mentally from a traumatic injury is difficult—sometimes too difficult. But, Wilson had been through worse.

As a high school sophomore, he should have been primarily focused on his blossoming basketball career. Instead, he was getting phone calls from his younger siblings complaining of hunger. That's because his mother, LaChrystal Wilson, died of cancer in 2006.

Rakeem Wilson, at the age of 17, had to explain to his two brothers and sister that their mother would not be coming home from the hospital.

"My mom left me as a child," Wilson says. "I wasn't fully developed as a grown man, yet. It's tough trying to grow up on your own." Then he paused and sniffled.

He looked down. There was a long pause. His best friend passed away, but because he thinks about her all the time, that wasn't something that happened years ago. Her death happens over and over again.

Wilson gathered his emotions. "I have no one to share my feelings with," he says, admitting to having trust issues. "You know that one little thing that you keep to yourself, but you could tell one person? I don't have anyone to talk to. I keep everything inside… and I don't think I'll ever feel that again."

The loss accelerated his maturation and made him more family-oriented. He has a son named Zyeon now, and he's more enthusiastic when talking about him. In fact, most of the underside of his left forearm is covered by his son's name and birth date. Zyeon's mother, Fatima Sidbury, became pregnant as a junior in high school. The parents are still together—a luxury Wilson never had.

If anyone can fill the emotional void in his life, it'd be Sidbury. But Wilson is reluctant to have much dependence on anyone. The last time he did that, she left him forever.

"The further along we go on, I believe she probably could fill that spot," he says. "It probably could take her a little while."

They've been together for about ten years.

Basketball is just a game, right? It's played for enjoyment. It's played for competition. It's played for an escape from reality, sometimes.

A successful player's guarantee of ample playing time doesn't translate to a guarantee of anything off the court. Wilson was always a star athlete, but his life outside of 32-minute high school games couldn't be solved with a three-pointer.

When Wilson got shot in the leg at a 2008 New Year's party, the shooter didn't take his life, but basketball was temporarily taken away. To him, those are one in the same.

When asked where he got shot, Wilson rolled up his right, jeans pant leg. He looked for a scar around his knee, but nothing was there. His demeanor was surprisingly casual.

"Oh, it must be my left leg," he said, pulling up his other pant leg. "Yeah," he muttered after he saw the slightly discolored, about six-inch scar.

Wilson and a group of friends had walked to the party in downtown Wilmington. When he got there, he had a bad feeling about it.

"By the time we got to the party, there was a whole bunch of altercations," Wilson remembers. "People fighting and all that. We was basically at the wrong place at the wrong time."

He wasn't there long before he heard a shotgun fire from someone leaning out of a passing car. Chaos ensued. Wilson took off running, trying to get away.

When he thought he had run far enough, he stopped to catch his breath. Blood dripping down his left leg caught his eye. "I didn't even feel it until I stopped," he says. The person who fired into the crowd didn't intend to shoot Wilson, but pellets from the spray of the shotgun hit the 18 year old and a couple other people at the scene.

He went to the hospital where the pellets were "popped out." As he explains, his tone remains nonchalant. "They never knew who it was," he continues.

Would he like to know? "I don't care," he says. "It was a while ago."

Wilson admits he took the incident personally. "I was just wondering, 'Why me; is this a sign?'" he says. "It must be a sign of who the people I'm with."

He changes the subject to talk more voluntarily about basketball. The 5-foot-9-inch point guard talks about missing the next two games after the shooting. One of them was at a cross-town rival's sold-out gym, he says with a hint of lingering animosity.

Two games succumbed to the sidelines—two games without an escape.

It's a feeling Wilson was all too familiar with. He was watching athletes play at the YMCA, while being reduced to a spectator. They ran at full speed, jumped with ferocity and drove to the basket with reckless abandonment. All things he used to be able to do.

An athlete's greatest fear is not being good enough. Once a decorated high school player, Wilson now felt like a pariah on the court.

"I felt like if I ever went out there, I'd embarrass myself," he says. So, Wilson was faced with a choice.

"In the spring, he showed up in my office and said, 'Coach, I want to play basketball,'" Mantlo says. He started playing in five-on-five games at the YMCA, and began living up to his promises to attend open gyms at CFCC.

"He got out there the first time and was OK," Mantlo says. "He was a little rusty with our guys, but you could see every time he stepped out on the floor, he became more confident and became the Rakeem Wilson that won a state title."

Wilson never officially got medical clearance to play basketball again. When he looks far to his left, he gets double vision, and when he moves his left eye from right to left, the eyeball slightly "slides up."

But, if he could make at least some degree of a successful comeback, Mantlo had just been given the best player he hardly had to recruit. "It was awesome," Mantlo says with a smile. "It was a blessing in disguise that he got hurt kind of for us, and I think for him too. I think he's in a great situation now."

Just like he had done at Louisburg, Wilson went from obscurity on the depth chart to starter by the end of the preseason. Although his basketball life was returning to form, his persistent off-the-court issues were not resolved.

He missed six games because of two family-related problems, and CFCC lost four of those. His father, who is currently incarcerated, fell ill in what was initially feared to be life threatening. Later, one of his cousins was stabbed and killed.

Wilson took being shot as a sign that he was allowing himself to be caught up with the wrong crowd, but he says this is different. "My family comes first, no matter what now," Wilson says. His natural, reserved nature turns brazen. "My mom was all I had; she was my whole family. So, whatever has to do with my family, I'm going to be there."

That can be cause for concern with Mantlo. "It's hard because he deals with a lot of that stuff," Mantlo says. "He deals with… whoever it is. He deals with that. And that's kind of scary. But, Rakeem is solid is in beliefs and he stands for what he believes."

On the court, the 2010-11 season was a success for Wilson and CFCC. The team won the Region X regular season championship and finished eighth overall in the NJCAA national tournament. He led the team in assists (3.5 per game), steals (2.4) and free throw percentage (76.1), finished third in points (8.7) and was sixth on the team in rebounds (3.4). The average height of the players that collected more rebounds than him was 6-foot-7-inches—10 inches taller than Wilson.

To Mantlo, there were many other aspects of his game that helped CFCC finish with a 26-9 record. "He just makes so many small plays that don't even show up in the box score," he says. "The poor kid has been through so much turmoil, but I think, honestly, that's what makes him so special.

"I think that's what makes him so strong. He wills teams to victories, because he's faced so much adversity that stuff on the basketball court is nothing."

The court offers an escape from sadistic doors, personal tragedy and violent neighborhoods. The ants can't find him there.

by Tyler Heffernan Slam Magazine