Avoiding the spotlight: Oden just wants to fit in
The Buckeyes' 7-foot freshman is basically a big kid.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- The big teenager wouldn't get out of the car, even as his date pleaded with him.
His classmates at Lawrence North High School in Indianapolis were like peasants awaiting the arrival of royalty. Actually, they were going to crown Greg Oden: They had elected him king of the homecoming dance.
"He was mortified," recalled Steve Goeglein, the school principal.
Yet Oden hates to disappoint anyone, and his date and many others were counting on him.
So the junior walked into the dance as if he were going to the gallows. The quiet, earnest kid -- the one who craves a sense of normalcy and sometimes escapes by going to movies alone -- stood in front of gathered friends and classmates and allowed them to place a crown on his head.
Gaining attention
People don't blink much around Greg Oden, but they whisper a lot.
They ask to put their hands against his for comparison, and inquire about his shoe size (18). Most of the time, they stare, as if hypnotized by his immense size: 7 feet and 280 pounds.
"I just want to be a regular person," Oden said. "It's hard to be 7-foot and be around. I just can't go any place and do regular things like other people. I try to be discreet when I go places and do regular things."
The Ohio State freshman basketball player has always left strangers gawking, whether as a 6-4 sixth-grader, a 6-8 eighth-grader or a high-school junior at his current height.
When Oden first played organized basketball, in the fourth grade, he was the only black player on his Amateur Athletic Union team, the Terre Haute Stars. They played games in small Indiana towns, and strangers stared.
"People thought he was older because he was so tall," said Jimmy Smith, the team's coach. "People kind of thought he was a freak."
Size is always tethered to expectations of dominance, which is why David's slaying of Goliath remains a cliched metaphor for a sports upset.
So Oden, 18 looking like 40, arrived in Columbus heralded as the best big man in college basketball in decades, and people who have never met him are certain he will leave Ohio State after this season to turn pro. After all, he was projected to be the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft last spring as a high school senior.
"Just because he's tall, people think he should be about basketball, basketball, basketball," said Oden's mother, Zoe.
Oden does love the game, so much that he returned two games earlier than expected from the surgery on his right wrist six months ago.
He made a triumphant return to Indianapolis Dec. 16, when the Buckeyes played Cincinnati for the first time in 44 years, winning 72-50.
Indianapolis is where Oden was twice named the national high school player of the year, and where he and teammate Mike Conley Jr. led Lawrence North to a 103-7 record and Indiana state championships in the final three of their four seasons. Oden and Conley have played together since 2000 on AAU teams, in middle school, at Lawrence North, and now at OSU.
Appreciating the person
Indianapolis is also where those who know Oden best appreciate him for who he is, not what he does.
"I don't think of him as an athlete first; he's Greg," said Grant Nesbit, the Lawrence North athletic director.
Oden towered above everyone else, but his smile, humble nature, impeccable manners and witty sense of humor mixed easily with the school's diverse student body.
"His personality, not his play, filled our gym," said Jack Keefer, Lawrence North's coach since 1975. "He's not just a jock's jock. He's a person who plays basketball. He's got other interests in life."
Those interests -- school, cartoons, movies, dancing, walks in the park, going to the zoo -- aren't why thousands of fans stood in Value City Arena to stare at Oden during warm-ups before his Dec. 2 debut against Valparaiso.
They aren't why a grown man once took off his shoe in a restaurant, approached Oden and asked him to sign it.
"He doesn't want to be a superstar," Oden's mother said. "He wants to be normal like everyone else. He doesn't want to be thought of as a freak. If it were up to Greg, he'd be somewhere in the corner, quiet, hiding. He doesn't really like to stand out."
Yet he's always going to stand out, and carry the expectations of others.
Keeping perspective
Pandemonium reigned in Conseco Fieldhouse. Moments earlier, Lawrence North had won its third consecutive Indiana state title.
As players, coaches, cheerleaders and fans jumped with excitement, Oden walked over to a woman near the court.
"How's Esther?" he asked her.
Two years earlier, Esther had been born prematurely, weighing 1 pound, 4 ounces, to the relative of Lawrence North assistant coach Jim Etherington.
"He had met Rachel, my sister-in-law, once or twice," Etherington said. "He knew she was family. He remembered her name at a time when a lot of people wanted a piece of him. He has a personal touch. He has a sweet, genuine attentiveness to him."
Putting others first
When Oden made his recruiting visit to OSU, he kept holding the doors open to let coaches and others pass through first.
Friends chuckle about how often he thanks them for mundane matters, and he says "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," as if he's in the military. Oden began a recent news conference by apologizing for being late, which nearly caused reporters accustomed to waiting to drop their pens.
"I really care what people think of me," Oden said. "It's just how I was raised."
He was born in Buffalo. His parents, Zoe and Greg Sr., divorced after 10 years of marriage, when Oden was 9. Soon after, Zoe moved Oden and his younger brother, Anthony, to Terre Haute, where her relatives lived.
There, Oden found basketball and support from the family of his AAU coach.
"He'd stay at our house sometimes, and I always knew when Greg had been here," Smith recalled. "The basement would be cleaned up and taken care of."
In the sixth grade, Oden met Mike Conley Sr., coach of his son's AAU team and the 1992 Olympic gold medalist in the triple jump.
"I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said a dentist," Conley Sr. recalled. "That's not a typical response from a 12-year-old kid."
Family ties
Oden's father, a plumbing and heating contractor in Buffalo, maintains an amicable relationship with Zoe, a single mother, and her sons, and helps support them financially. Still, Oden has benefited from other father figures in his life, notably Conley, his AAU coach through high school.
"He took from them a sense of family, a sense that he's unique, caring, supportive and nice," Zoe Oden said. "He might have taken, too, that with all the fame, he's just a normal person."
Oden's desire to blend in bloomed daily after the family moved to Indianapolis when he was in the eighth grade. At Lawrence North, he once gave away an MVP trophy to a teammate he thought was more deserving. He often said Conley was the team's best player and should have shared Oden's honor of being named Mr. Basketball in Indiana last year.
"Greg is always conscious of his surroundings," said J.R. Shelt, a former Lawrence North assistant. "It's almost like he doesn't want to make a mistake."
One mistake he sometimes made was not being selfish with the basketball. Keefer once threatened to bench Oden if he didn't shoot at least 15 times in a game.
"He tries to divert things away from himself," Conley Sr. said. "Greg always just wanted to be part of something successful, regardless of what it is. He didn't necessarily need to be the centerpiece of it."
Out of the spotlight
Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, ESPN, MTV, the Discovery Channel and even Maxim magazine requested interviews with Oden when he was still in high school, yet he was content to spend summer days working for a lawn-care business owned by Lawrence North assistant coach Ralph Scott.
"He had a real particular way of doing things," Scott said. "A typical kid would basically trim the yard and not worry about it. He'd do the extra-special job. He'd say, 'I need to go around back and get that spot I missed by the fence.' "
Nobody's expectations for Oden are higher than his own, and they don't all have to do with basketball.
"He's just a little different," Scott said.
Once, after the Lawrence North team finished a pre-game recital of the Lord's Prayer, Shelt noticed tears in Oden's eyes. Asked if everything was OK, he explained that he was thinking about having watched the movie "The Passion of the Christ."
That was on his mind, moments before tip-off.
Different.
"People don't like great players to be good people, too," OSU coach Thad Matta said. "They don't expect it."
Unexpected sight
OSU guard Jamar Butler encountered an unexpected sight when the elevator door opened.
There in the hallway was Oden, clad in pajamas, running through the dormitory, soaking walk-on player Mark Titus with a little plastic squirt gun.
"I don't know how it fit into his hand," Butler recalled.
Oden had a simple explanation for his actions: He was Agent 007, James Bond.
"He's like a big kid," Butler said. "He's always joking around, having fun. If you're having a bad day, he'll put a smile on your face."
Oden enjoys putting a book bag on his back and strolling across Ohio State's campus like the other 50,000 students, just as he found comfort at Lawrence North, hanging out, talking about life with secretaries and custodians.
"This is the one place he felt like just a kid," Nesbit said. "At school, he could be normal."
Yet even in the classroom, his approach is more thorough than most students, as Etherington discovered while teaching his geography class.
"He wasn't one to just memorize facts," he said. "He put concepts together. He wanted to see the big picture."
His mother always did. Zoe Oden, who works as a rehabilitation technician in the physical therapy department of an Indianapolis hospital, has stressed education throughout her sons' lives.
"I want him to be a good student and know he has a direction to go, because basketball is not always going to be there," she said.
Smith remembers more than just basketball about coaching Oden's first AAU team.
"I always knew when report cards came out," he said. "He always made sure to show me his report card. He was so proud."
Pride in his play
Oden, who as a senior won Indiana's Arthur L. Trester Mental Attitude Award, for academic and athletic excellence, always took pride in basketball, too. He put in extra practice at 6 a.m. with Scott nearly every school day.
"Just because you're 7 foot doesn't mean you can play the game," Scott said. "You've got to work hard at it, and he worked hard."
Those basketball skills always prompt strangers to suspiciously ask Conley Sr. how Oden does in school. He tells them Oden has been an honor-roll student for as long as he's known him.
"They all say, 'Really?' " Conley said. "Why is that?"
Probably for the same stereotypical reasons that those who don't know Oden assume he'll leave Ohio State after one season.
They don't know how he said throughout high school that he intended to go to college, how he peppered Matta with questions about the OSU business school on his recruiting visit, how he's acknowledged a good sense of being challenged by his classes this year, and how he wants to be an accountant.
"If he leaves early, it'll crush him, because he wants to go to college," Keefer said.
The NBA riches will probably, and understandably, be too difficult for Oden to turn down in the spring, and his time at Ohio State might be brief.
Of course, that's expected, but one certainty about Greg Oden is that he doesn't define himself by anyone's expectations except his own. And those are higher than he is tall.