A Different Brand of Superstars

On the same day the story broke that Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez had used performance-enhancing steroids, a group of high-school basketball players in Illinois showed us what it really means to be a superstar.

Unfortunately, A-Rod was the one grabbing all the headlines.

He is, after all, the guy with the 10-year, $252 million contract. He's the youngest player ever to hit 500 home runs, too.

He's also, it turns out, a guy who injected steroids for three years, lied about it for eight, and then lied about knowing just what kind of steroids he used. He also lied when he accused Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts of stalking him and trying to break into his home.

Last week, Rodriguez started rolling out his "my bad" tour of shoulder shrugs. He called Roberts to apologize. Then he starred in a news conference that banned follow-up questions and offered little information beyond his admitting that, after all his denying, he actually did inject forbidden steroids on his way to becoming a record-breaking multimillionaire.

He also vowed to educate America's young people, blaming his earlier drug use on the ignorance of youth — at age 25, 26 and 27.

"You know, I guess when you're young and stupid, you're young and stupid," he said, "and I'm very guilty for both of those."

Which brings me to the younger high-school players in DeKalb, Ill.

We are indebted to Art Kabelowsky, a sports editor with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for telling their story.

On the evening of Feb. 7, only hours after the A-Rod story was posted on Sports Illustrated's Web site, the collective shoulders of the Milwaukee Madison High School Knights were hunched in grief. Their senior captain, Johntell Franklin, had just lost his 39-year-old mother to cancer. She had started hemorrhaging that morning, while her 18-year-old was taking his ACT exam for college. By late afternoon, nothing could save her.

No one expected Franklin to play in the game that night against the DeKalb High School Barbs, including his coach, Aaron Womack Jr., who had rushed to the hospital.

The coach offered to call off the game.

"No," Franklin told him, "tell the guys to go out and do their best."

The DeKalb coaches knew what had happened and offered to cancel the game.

Womack said his guys wanted to play.

Early in the second quarter, Franklin shocked everyone by walking into the gym. Players, cheerleaders and friends from the stands surrounded the 6-foot-2-inch forward.

The game was close, and Franklin wanted to play. Womack told him to suit up, knowing the referees would have to call a technical foul against the coach for failing to list Franklin in the lineup.

The other team's coaches called a timeout and tried for seven minutes to talk the refs out of the foul, but they wouldn't budge. So DeKalb coach Dave Rohlman came up with a compromise.

"I gathered my kids and said, 'Who wants to take these free throws?'"

The team's senior captain, Darius McNeal, raised his hand.

Rohlman said he made it clear what had to happen: "You realize you're going to miss, right?"

McNeal nodded. He stood at the free-throw line, dribbled the ball a couple of times, and looked up at the net. Then he bounced the ball and let it roll to the end line. Twice.

"I did it for the guy who lost his mom," McNeal said later. "It was the right thing to do."

Kabelowsky reported that after the second "shot," everyone in the gym, including the Madison players, stood and applauded.

Carlitha Franklin's son went on to score 10 points.

"She would have wanted me to play," Franklin said. "She was always proud of me playing basketball."

His team won, and then both teams went out for pizza.

So much for the stupidity of youth.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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