Tamba Hali by David Seigerman

Author:David Seigerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

CHAPTER 6

A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

Learning to read would remove one of the major obstacles that kept Tamba from fitting in with his new middle-school classmates. He brought down other barriers with a different weapon: a ball.

Tamba didn’t play sports much during his childhood in Gbarnga. The opportunity didn’t exist, nor did the infrastructure. Maybe the kids would find an old, worn soccer ball to kick around from time to time; if a nice new ball somehow found its way into the village, only the adults would be allowed to use it. Often, the children had to fashion a ball by taping paper together or using a grapefruit.

There certainly weren’t organized leagues like the ones that exist in the United States.

“We didn’t have a team to play on,” Saah said. “If you wanted to join a team, you joined the rebel forces. That is your team. An AK-47 becomes your soccer ball.”

Tamba didn’t join any organized sports leagues when he first arrived in New Jersey. “More study, less play” was the tone set in Henry Hali’s household, but Tamba and his siblings managed to find time to play. Usually with a real soccer ball.

Big Tamba was pretty good at soccer. So was Saah, who would go on to play soccer at Caldwell College (now Caldwell University), an NCAA Division II program about twenty miles from home. They would take Tamba to Votee Park, just across Route 4 from Teaneck High School, to play in the neighborhood pickup soccer games.

From the start, Tamba showed athletic promise. And he flashed some soccer skills, too.

“I’ll tell you this,” Saah said. “He had very good foot skills. And he can dribble.”

But it was dribbling another kind of ball that Tamba was drawn to. He had become enamored with basketball.

In 1995, the basketball world was aquiver over Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA. The great Air Jordan had decided to come back to basketball, in the wake of a short-lived experiment in minor-league baseball. (Hey—even the greatest athletes need to find new ways to challenge themselves.) He left basketball abruptly in 1993 after leading the Chicago Bulls to three straight championships, and he would win another three in a row upon returning. The return of His Airness re-energized basketball fans across the country.

If there was one American athlete the children of Africa would have been aware of, even in the midst of a civil war, it was Michael Jordan. So many of the Liberian children who found themselves in the refugee camps of Sierra Leone and Guinea were clothed in donations sent from the States. Overwhelmingly, the most common jersey delivered through clothing drives at that time was the Chicago Bulls’ number 23.

“When Tamba got hooked on basketball, all the kids were into Michael Jordan,” Gail Dunn said.

Dreaming about becoming the next Michael Jordan might have been the first truly American thing Tamba had ever done. Finally, he had something in common with his classmates.

Fitting in had been a struggle for Tamba, more than it was for Saah.

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