HOMEGAME

IT’S 5,800 MILES FROM LAGOS, NIGERIA, TO THE QUEEN CITY. The path top college football prospect Prince Sammons took to get here was way longer, and anything but safe.

By ADAM FLANGO

Illustration By DIEGO PATIÑO

E

8 0 FEBRUARY 2016

N igeria is a nation defined as much by its strength and opportunity as it is marred

by past scars and present dangers. It’s not just complex; it is a Sudoku on top of a Rubik’s Cube trapped inside of a Möbius Strip. It is at once oil-rich and food-poor, deeply religious yet beset by a culture of corruption. Lurking beneath its scars, though, is unmatched potential.

The city of Lagos is the commercial hub of Africa’s most populous and wealthiest nation. Despite the country’s rapid growth, the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics estimates that 69 percent of Nigerians, or roughly 112 million people, live in poverty. Nowhere is this disparity more evident than in the slum of Ajegunle, which sits in the southern reaches of Lagos against inlets carved by the Gulf of Guinea.

Ajegunle is where Calista and Michael Ofoka raised their family. Calista was a tall, slender woman who tended her own chicken coop. Michael was an engineer who worked with electric generators. They were Igbos, one of the three prominent tribes of Nigeria, born in a village named Umuzor in Imo State, over 300 miles to the east of Lagos. In the family were four boys—Ike-chukwu, Chukuma, Chinonso, and Chris-topher—and one girl, Ogechukwu, all of whom lived in a single room within a larger compound on Muyibi Street. There was a bed for mom and dad, a couch against the wall (until the termites claimed it), sacks that served as closets, and enough room on the floor for the children to sleep on mats.

When Michael’s mother Mary heard that Calista was pregnant again, she prayed for a girl to level the playing field. Mary was old and sick when she traveled to Ajegunle for the baby’s birth; one family member estimated her to be 112 years old. As a last request, she made Calista promise that if

she did have a girl, the child would be named Princess. But on August 15, 1996, a fifth boy was added to the family. Doing her best to keep her promise, Calista named the baby Prince. Mary placed her hands on his head and blessed the child.

“She said if it is God willing that I came out,” Prince says, then “I’m going to make a good impact on people’s life.”

IT’S A WARM, STICKY EVENING IN LATE AUGUST, THE FIRST WEEK-

end of high school football in Ohio, and tiny Greeneview High School is looking for re-venge. It seems like every one of the town’s 2,000 residents has filled the bleachers at Don Nock Field, hoping their Greeneview Rams can avenge the team’s loss to Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy in the 2014 regional playoffs.

At halftime, Greeneview’s country-bred rushing attack has given the team a 28–12 lead. Greeneview sprints to the locker room. CHCA plods, but Prince Sammons stays behind. He stands above every person on the field and in the stands, an imposing figure measuring 6-foot-7 and weighing 270 pounds. He is the reigning Ohio Division V Defensive Player of the Year, a first-team All-State lineman with scholarship offers from Alabama, Texas, Oregon, Ohio State, and 26 other schools. But tonight his defense hasn’t been able to stop the Rams. With the marching band prepping for their routine, Prince genuflects at midfield, helmet at his side. He thanks God for good health, then asks for the strength that was in-stilled in David before he conquered Goliath. After a quick sign of the cross and point-to-the-sky, he jogs to the locker room.

Inside the cinder block closet, the air is redolent with eau de jock sweat mixed with Axe body spray and banana peels. The cramped space can’t even hold CHCA’s entire team, so the freshmen wait outside.

Prince sits on the edge of a wooden bench, fists clenched, smoldering. The first word peo-ple use to describe him is either shy or quiet, but right now he is angry. Losing is unaccept-able. He paces the room, commanding the at-tention of doe-eyed underclassmen who sud-denly seem afraid that chewing their snacks or sipping Powerade will make noise.

“If you don’t want to play, get out,” he says as he paces. His voice is thunderous in the si-lent chamber. “Are you scared?” he asks, get-ting a few muttered nos in return, eyes still fixed on the cement floor. “Because I’m not.”

The majority of the teenagers gaping at him come from comfortable white households that can afford the school’s $15,150 tuition. They’ve only heard pieces of Prince’s story, the few parts he’s been willing to share. If they knew the entire story, they would begin to understand why he is not afraid.

WHEN PRINCE TALKS ABOUT NIGERIA, HIS ACCENTED V O I C E I S

soft and gentle. He speaks in stories and parables, complete with character voices, im-pressive comedic timing, and panache. He remembers the poverty he was born into, but breezes past it, preferring to focus on the good times instead. The underlying constant to anything in his life, good or bad, is his faith. Prince says he was 7 when he gave his life to Christ at the urging of his mother, an urge not all of his siblings would heed. She was “not going to force the whole army to fight the war,” he says. “She’s going to say the war is out there. If you want to go, you’re free to go. If you don’t want, you can stay back.”

On his face, stuck between his eyebrows just like Harry Potter, is a vertical scar maybe

THE RECRUIT “He’s a deep thinker,” a tutor says of Prince Sammons. “He thinks past what he sees.” Right: At home in Clarksville with Betsy and Brandon Sammons, and sib-lings (left to right) Sophia, Adyline, and Micah.

PH

OTO

GR

AP

H C

OU

RTE

SY K

AR

EN P

ECK

FEBRUARY 2016 8 1

an inch long. Political upheaval was common during the late ’90s and early 2000s in Nigeria as the country attempted to transition into a functioning democracy; violence in Lagos was widespread. During a particularly dangerous outburst, his mother sliced his forehead, leaving a mark by which she could identify him if something unforeseen happened.

Prince preferred his time in the rural village of Umuzor to the teeming streets of Lagos. He would save up the money for a bus ticket, then light out for his grandparents’ small farm, where he would haul firewood and pick corn, yams, cassava, and peppers. He would also take on jobs, then find a way to help his family out without his proud mother noticing. When his mother opened a stand selling pineapple, watermelons, oranges, and roasted corn, it was Prince who lugged the inventory. “I did a lot of hard work for her. A lot,” Prince says. “That’s how you survive. You don’t just sit down and expect money to fall from heaven to your pockets.”

When he wasn’t working, he was playing and watching soccer, cheering on African star Didier Drogba and his London-based club Chelsea. Around the age of 12, he began playing on the Nigerian equivalent of a travel team, a self-described “super skinny and super tall” striker scoring goals against grown men. Following one of his tournaments, a devastating loss that left him in tears, a stranger asked if he had ever thought of playing basketball. “I wasn’t thinking of playing it at all,” Prince says.

Four weeks later, in lieu of attending school, he walked five miles up the road to the National Stadium in Surulere, a once-great palace of sport that had sat abandoned for 10 years. From afar, he watched as a group of boys and girls played a sport that was completely foreign to him. Standing on the sidelines, he managed to catch the eye of a basketball coach named Charles Ibeziako.

AT THE TURN OF THE 21ST CEN-

tury, the NBA’s infatuation with drafting high school players peaked, and teenaged athletes became prized commodities. Teams fetishized untapped potential, scouring the globe for foreign-born athletes with ideal physical dimensions who could be molded into basketball players. For his 2010 book Play Their Hearts Out, Pulitzer Prize–win-ning writer George Dohrmann spent eight years embedded in the world of amateur basketball in the United States. “Everyone was looking for an African to bring over,” Dohrmann says. High school and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) coaches arranged the acquisition of teenagers through for-eign scouts and coaches. “It was my under-standing that there absolutely was money changing hands,” Dohrmann says. “At the very least, there was the promise of money.”

Ibeziako is the founder of Raptors Bas-ketball Academy (no affiliation with Toron-to’s NBA team), a program aimed at better-ing the future of Nigerian youths through a sport that has long been a distant second to soccer. He started the academy in Lagos in 2001 and used relationships with coaches and scouts to help kids find scholarships to American schools. Ibeziako says he funds the academy out of his own pocket.

“Helllllll no, nobody’s getting paid,” says Ibeziako. “No one has ever, ever, ever sent a dime to Coach Charlie.” If he received money for sending a player to America, he adds, that would be illegal.

When Prince first showed up to one of Coach Charlie’s practices, he wore what he called his Christmas shoes, which wouldn’t exactly get confused with Jordans. He began dribbling the ball with two hands, launch-ing it high above his head. Kids were point-ing and laughing. But Ibeziako encouraged him and eventually things turned around. He learned the basics—how to lock your wrist when you dribble, proper form for shooting—and started to enjoy the game. It brought out a different side of him, though. The quiet, God-fearing young man who preferred picking vegetables in the village incited fear in opponents.

“I used to be scared of him with all my life,” says Yusuf Muhammed, who played for Raptors when Prince joined in 2010. “He’s a very, very aggressive player. He likes to win all the time.” He remembers a scrim-mage where Prince began trash talking a player after

PH

OTO

GR

AP

H B

Y A

AR

ON

M.

CO

NW

AY

• C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 3 6

H O M E G A M EC O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 8 1

being fouled. “My coach was telling him to shut up and play,” says Muhammed. The argument ended with the coach punching Prince. “He’s really, really stubborn,” he says with a chuckle.

In less than a year, Prince became a prized prospect, traveling to camps around Nigeria and receiving word from scouts that there was potential for scholarships to pri-vate schools in America. “We Africans, we see America like heaven,” says Muhammed.

Alexander Ujoh has coached through-out Nigeria since 1994 and has been send-ing kids to the United States since 2001. He has worked with Ibeziako for years and met Prince when he was at Raptors Bas-ketball Academy. Ujoh says that sending a young Nigerian basketball player to the U.S. is a fairly straightforward process, but one that is risky for an American coach. Typically, it works like this: either a coach visits Nigeria or connects with a scout who has. The coach or scout identifies players with potential and the interested school drafts the paperwork necessary to bring the player over. Often, schools will off er players scholarships without seeing any video, placing their trust in the word of Nigerian-based scouts and coaches who may embellish a player’s reputation. “If I die today,” Ujoh says, “I won’t go to heaven or hell with an opportunity in my pocket.”

At a basketball camp in 2011 in Warri, a city 275 miles away from Lagos, Prince was discovered by one of these scouts. His name was Godwin Owinje, a former player at Georgetown University, who runs the subscription-based scouting service RadarHoops International. During a pri-vate workout, Prince dunked for the fi rst time. “I was thinking he was going to give me my scholarship right away,” he recalls. Instead, he left his contact information and waited, heeding his mother’s words: Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

Three weeks later, while Prince was sleeping at home in Ajegunle, the phone rang. It was Owinje with good news: a school in Maryland was ready to off er him a scholarship. All Prince had to do was pass the entrance exam.

“The math was woooh, so hard for me,” he says. So he called in help. “Me and my brothers, we all put our heads together and just do it.” A month later, the results were in: Prince was headed to America.

AS PRINCE EXPLAINS IT, THE SURNAME Ofoka means “bad luck.” Leaving Nige-ria wasn’t going to be easy, and his fam-ily didn’t want to take any chances. So shortly before he received his paperwork, he changed his last name from Ofoka to Mi-cheal, a version of his father’s fi rst name.

On June 29, 2011, his I-20, a document that allows a foreign student to apply for a visa and enter the U.S., was issued by Gle-nelg Country School, a small private in-stitution outside of Baltimore. According to the document, the school would cover tuition and student fees each year, $24,160 per academic term, so long as Prince ar-rived no later than August 30. In less than two months, he had to get a passport, visa, and plane ticket to the United States with what little money he had saved up. “That’s when it kind of hit me so hard,” he says. He dropped out of school and worked a string of unsavory jobs for a boss who kept telling him he could do better.

One day, Prince was helping his moth-er sell fruit while the song “Nnem Oma” played. The gospel tune has island rhythms and a title that means “the good mother” in Igbo. Your mom will always be your mom, no matter what, goes one line. “The song says clap your hands for your mom, because she’s a good mom,” Prince explains.

A man drove up and placed an order: three watermelons, four pineapples, three papayas. Prince collected the 500 naira and delivered the produce. Inside the car, he recognized the woman on the passenger side—it was his old boss. Then the man handed Prince an envelope.

“You know when you go to the bank to withdraw money, new money, how it looks like?” says Prince. “That’s how the money looked like in the envelope.” The crisp new bills were enough to pay government fees

and maybe buy a plane ticket. The envelope came with a note. “I hope this money that I’m going to give to you is going to suit you well,” Prince recites from memory. “Make better use of it. Don’t spend it uselessly.”

Prince and his mother danced with joy as the music played in the background.

Calista Ofoka was not one to contain her excitement. This was her fi rst child to make his way to America and she wanted the whole family to know. Shortly after Prince’s birthday in August, she attended a family gathering with her oldest son Ike-chukwu, where they celebrated Prince’s good fortune. When she returned, though, she wasn’t feeling well. She got sick to her stomach, but her sons didn’t think much of it and Prince had his embassy interview to worry about anyway. He made arrange-ments to stay at the home of a pastor during his trip and then boarded a bus for a 10-hour ride to Abuja.

THE EMBASSY MEETING IS PERHAPS the most nerve-wracking moment for children hoping to come to America. Yusuf Muhammed, Prince’s old teammate, had been rejected at his fi rst interview (“I think because of my name,” he says), and he knew others who had discovered that their paper-work was fake and they’d been scammed.

Prince traveled more than 450 miles to Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, and by the time he arrived at the United States Embassy, he was confi dent and hopeful. He was the only one he saw without a parent. God is going to send me through, he thought. He’s my dad, he’s my mom.

But very quickly the weight of the mo-ment overcame him. He became nervous and started to sweat. He stepped up to the table to be interviewed along with another hopeful boy, handed his information to the offi cer, and began to cry. “My eyes were su-per red. I didn’t want her to see my face, so I just keep my head down like this,” Prince says, burying his head in his arm. The boy next to him laughed. The offi cer examined his I-20 and passport, asked how old he was, and left with his materials. When she returned, she handed him a paper instruct-ing him to come back in two days to pick up his visa.

“I didn’t even wait for her to say Come back here I made a mistake. I just kept run-

1 36 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

H O M E G A M E

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J O N A T H A N W I L L I S

ning,” he says. He ran down the steps and knelt down in public. “I raised my hands up and said, ‘God, you have done it again.’ ”

During the two-day waiting period, Prince received word that he needed to return home quickly. His mother was sick and wanted to see him. After picking up his visa, he took an overnight bus back to Lagos, arriving before dawn. He made his way to the family compound and found his mother lying on the bed. Prince began sing-ing to her, just like he had when they were dancing by the fruit stand. She remained still. He climbed into the bed. Holding his mother’s head in his lap, he stroked her hair and softly sang to her—Your mom will al-ways be your mom, no matter what—until he fell asleep.

When he woke up, his mother felt cold. Prince tried waking her with cold water, but she didn’t move. He was 15 years old and didn’t understand what was happening. Then an older relative took Prince aside and told him his mother was dead.

“It was like a nightmare to me,” Prince remembers. “I was about to burn my visa.” Weeping, he asked God, “Why this just happen right now that something good is about to happen in our life?”

Calista Ofoka’s death certificate states that she died of hypertension, with a sec-ondary cause being cardiac arrest, but Prince doesn’t believe it. He is convinced she was poisoned at the family gathering where she celebrated his great opportunity, an act of jealousy from one of her own. “Ev-eryone want to see you remember where you are,” he says. “No one wants to see you advance to the next level. Nobody wants to see you progress.”

AFTER HIS MOTHER’S DEATH, PRINCE’S plan to leave Nigeria began to crumble. By the time he had returned from Abuja, he had missed Glenelg Country School’s Au-gust 30th deadline. Kevin Quinlan, the bas-ketball coach at Glenelg, told him he would not be allowed to attend. “I felt awful for

him for the passing of his mother,” Quinlan says. “[But] in the end, I felt like there was only so much I could do.”

Devastated, with the money he received at the fruit stand now being used to pay for his mother’s burial, he began reaching out to anyone who would listen, trying to find a coach or school to facilitate a quick move to America. The two most connected people he knew, Ibeziako and Ujoh, his coaches at Raptors Basketball Academy, contacted a coach based in Wisconsin. On their recom-mendation, the Wisconsin coach agreed to pay for Prince’s flight and house him until he found a school to attend.

As quickly as his fortunes turned sour, Prince had found hope again. On Septem-ber 23, 2011, he snuck out of his compound, dressed as if he was just going to practice. There were no good-byes; he didn’t want anyone to know he was leaving Nigeria. “I was afraid,” he says. He did not want to fall victim to jealousy like he believes his mother did.

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J O N A T H A N W I L L I S1 38 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

Greater Cincinnati Chapter

Christ ChurchCathedralThe Diocese of Southern Ohio

Title Sponsor

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J O N A T H A N W I L L I S

He boarded the plane with a bag that stank to high heaven. “All my clothes were nasty,” Prince says, crinkling his nose. On a layover in Rome, a woman threw his bag away and replaced it with a rolling suit-case, two pairs of jeans, and one polo shirt. Thoughts of America swirled in his head: pretty girls, cool haircuts, white people—ideas he got from watching television shows like Kyle XY and Prison Break.

After he landed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, he was transported up I-90 to Madison, Wisconsin, where he re-members spending 107 days sleeping “with one eye open” on a couch in a two-bedroom apartment owned by the coach who paid for his ticket. He was constantly on edge, a 15-year-old kid with no school to attend, no friends to play with, no family to confi de in. His days were either spent in the gym, run-ning basketball drills for hours, or in front of the TV, head aching from the monoto-nous stream of noise. Prince felt like he was under remote control.

He had only two pairs of basketball shorts. He was constantly hungry, and re-sorted to picking pizza crust from the trash and eating handfuls of uncooked ramen noodles. A slice or two of bread was served for breakfast at 8 a.m. and he did not eat again until 6 in the evening. “They say this is the land of opportunity,” Prince thought. “But there is no food.” America turned out to be no better than Nigeria.

Prince had been swept up into the shady world of Amateur Athletic Union basket-ball. The AAU organization is structured like a traveling sports team: players of vary-ing skill levels under the age of 20 compete in local, regional, and—for the select few—national tournaments primarily during the high school off season.

AAU projects a positive image: It helps bring talented young prospects to the at-tention of college scouts. But it is rarely an altruistic endeavor. Shoe companies like Nike and Adidas sponsor top AAU teams and pay coaches as consultants for fi eld-

ing teams that compete on a national level. These types of deals have netted some AAU programs more than $100,000. Coaches also broker deals with agents, standing in as representatives for foreign players with pro potential who are unfamiliar with the system. If a player that they develop makes it to the pros, coaches have been known to receive a percentage of the contract. One percent of a future shoe deal may not sound like much, but if the player blossoms into a star, a single endorsement can easily top $100 million. The fl ipside (i.e., the dark side) to the AAU grind is that when play-ers don’t develop, especially those who abandoned a life in their home country for a chance in America, they are discarded and left to fend for themselves.

The coach in Wisconsin—whose name I agreed to leave out of the story at the re-quest of Prince’s adoptive parents—ran a training academy through which he at-tempted to steer Prince to AAU programs. The coach says that he has never received

Cincinnati’s TOP Dentists

ADVANCE DENTISTRYY O U R C O M F O R T I S O U R T O P P R I O R I T Y

FREE EXAM, X-RAYS& CONSULTATION

A $275 VALUE

“It is our mission to provide the highest level of care possible,backed by a gentle touch and the understanding that can only come from years of experience working with fearful patients. We provide our

patients with a comfortable dental experience, so they can enjoy a smile they never thought was possible”

– Dr. Sayre

All of your dental needs provided under one roof!35 Years of IV Sedation experience!

Evening and Saturday hours available! Take care of your smile and oral health at your convenience!

Call today!513-272-4444

#NoFearDentist

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M 1 39

H O M E G A M E

money when players from his program go to college and also denies that Prince was mistreated during his time in Madison. “Prince was treated like a king,” he says.

ON THE DAY PRINCE LEFT LAGOS, HIS father signed documents that granted custody to the coach in Wisconsin. Three months later, Michael Ofoka died. Like Prince’s mother, the death certificate cites hypertension and cardiac arrest. Prince was now orphaned and alone, living in a foreign country under the guardianship of some-one he says he was afraid of. He felt trapped. “I lost all my hope,” he says.

Prince communicated his fears to sev-eral adults back home, including his old coach Alexander Ujoh and Chibuzor Ofor-ka, a close cousin who became the fam-ily patriarch following his father’s death. Ujoh called the Wisconsin coach but was told that Prince was lying. Ujoh chalked it up to Prince simply having a difficult time adjusting to life in America. Oforka wasn’t so sure. “I was afraid Prince would fall into the wrong hands,” he says. “I was afraid that his mission to be in the United States may be cut short.”

After missing out on opportunities to at-tend high schools in other parts of the coun-try, Prince spoke with a man in Cincinnati in early January 2012 who showed interest in hosting him. Three days later, he was at a bus stop in Madison, all his possessions stuffed in a single Adidas duffel bag. He left his rolling suitcase behind at the coach’s home, ostensibly for his return, though, he says, “My intention was to never go back to Wisconsin.” At 2:20 a.m. on January 8, the Megabus pulled up and Prince piled in with-out any food for the nearly 12-hour trip.

Waiting at the corner of Fourth and Race streets were Brandon and Betsy Sammons. Brandon was 28 and Betsy was 26, and they already had three children below the age of 5. Earlier that week, they had received word through Cincinnati Hills Christian Acad-emy assistant basketball coach Ryan Krohn that a boy from Nigeria was trying to find a home so as to gain admittance to CHCA, where Brandon taught technology. Rumors had circulated at school about a prospec-tive student who was a basketball prodigy, but the couple was motivated by a desire to help a kid who had lost his parents. “What

stuck out to me was, he’s lost his mama, he’s lost his dad, he’s away from everything he’s ever known,” says Betsy. “How terrify-ing that must be.”

The Sammonses had stuck Prince’s passport photo on the fridge so they had an idea of what he looked like, even though they knew a towering Nigerian teenager would be pretty hard to miss. Still, they were surprised by the boy who stepped out of the bus after almost everyone else had exited: He wore black sweat pants with white stripes, a black puffer jacket with sleeves that reached just past his elbows, and a blue and gold Marquette beanie on his head. He looked scrawny.

“Are you Prince?” they asked. He nod-ded. “Are you hungry?” He nodded again.

They walked to Wendy’s and ordered him a handful of chicken sandwiches. Then they hopped in their black Ford Excursion, and Prince began to tell his story. How he barely made it to the country, how his mother died, how his father died. He could hardly make eye contact. It didn’t take long before he was crying.

When they arrived at their two-bed-room farmhouse in Morrow, they walked into the dining room. Prince noticed a sign hanging above the doorway and read the words aloud: HOME SWEET HOME.

“The tone of his voice, and the way he read it,” says Brandon, “I didn’t expect that. I don’t know that he knew at that moment that he didn’t need to worry about certain things anymore.”

BOTH BRANDON AND BETSY GREW UP in the kind of deeply Christian households where Come-to-Jesus moments were a real thing. As a couple they lived the sort of all-American life that Prince might have seen on TV. They had their first date at a family ice cream parlor, were married in Betsy’s front yard, and had their three children—Sophia, Micah, and Adyline; each with hair the color of sweet summer corn—be-fore they turned 30. At the time, Brandon worked as a high school teacher and Betsy was a stay-at-home mom, and the fam-ily attended Sunday services at LifePoint Vineyard Church, a nondenominational Christian church in Liberty Township. They readily admit that there were other families better equipped to bring in a child,

particularly one closer to the age of a little brother. But Brandon felt compelled to help from the moment he heard Prince’s story.

Still, he had his doubts about whether the family could handle it. So he texted Betsy, who read his mind. “My first thought was: Dang it. I thought it, she thought it, now we’ve got to do something about it,” Brandon says in his slight drawl.

So the couple stayed up all night, asking complicated questions. Would a psychi-cally wounded 15-year-old act out? How would he interact with their children? And how would they help a young black man ad-just to life in white rural southwest Ohio? In the end, they say their “calling” to help outweighed their fears.

Brandon and Betsy converted the loft space upstairs into a makeshift bedroom and offered Prince their bed. “That was my first time sleeping in a bed before,” Prince remembers. “Ever.” As happy as he was to have clothes (friends and family donated generously) and food, he was still cautious. “I was looking, investigating on my own self to see if this was real or not,” he says.

Betsy understood Prince’s hesitation. “For somebody to love me uncondition-ally, bring me into their home, treat me no differently than their biological children, that must be hard to believe sometimes,” she says.

During that first week in his new home, Prince took CHCA’s entrance exam. He hadn’t attended school for at least six months, so no one knew what to expect. “He flunked that thing with flying colors,” says Brandon. “He got as low as you could possibly get.”

Soon after, Joyce Smith, the interven-tion specialist at CHCA who had proc-tored the entrance exam, administered the Woodcock-Johnson test, which gauges the cognitive abilities of a student. The results showed that Prince had the education level of a fourth grader. A new hurdle had pre-sented itself: Would he even be able to at-tend school?

ROB HALL, PRINCIPAL AT CHCA’S MIDDLE school, convinced the board to provisionally admit Prince as an eighth grader. He would have one-on-one tutoring each morning for three hours in English and math, followed by regular class interaction for subjects

140 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M 14 1

like Christian studies, science, and social studies. With that in place, Prince had six months to advance four grade levels and be eligible for high school. The real trick would be finding a teacher who could relate to Prince and was up to the challenge.

Enter Carolyn Teague.Here’s what you need to know about

Teague. Her first job was in Chicago in the late 1960s at a time when the city was boiling with racial unrest. An African-American woman, she took a job creating a safe space for high school dropouts in a predominantly white neighborhood and stood up to bikers from the Hells Angels gang. Compared to that, teaching Prince would be easy.

It was clear to Teague, who had come out of retirement at age 68, that Prince was more capable than the test indicated. “His intelligence far surpassed that,” she says. “That was obvious to me the first day.”

The two began working five days a week. Teague served as a mentor, mother, and teacher. Her husband is a 6-foot-9 for-mer professional basketball player and her 6-foot-6 son played college football, so she understood the challenges Prince would face if he ever was eligible to play sports. She warned him about girls and tried to educate him on racial dynamics. “To be from Nigeria, to be that tall,” Teague says, “Prince was a novelty. There weren’t many black kids there.”

She also did not sugarcoat just how dif-ficult the academics would be.

“I didn’t know I could do it,” Prince says. “I had some doubts.”

Prince received a middle school crash course, using flash cards to learn multipli-cation tables and reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was never tardy and always handed assignments in on time, a personification of the model student. “I might have asked him a couple times, ‘You sure you’re 15?’ ” Teague says. “He’s a deep thinker. He thinks past what he sees.”

By August, CHCA deemed Prince capa-ble of attending classes at the high school.

As Prince was working to be eligible for school, Brandon and Betsy were fighting a tense custody battle. The coach in Wis-consin had alleged that they were manipu-lating Prince, but a judge dismissed that claim and ruled that the custody papers

signed by Prince’s father would not be rec-ognized by the state of Ohio. In July 2012, the Sammonses were granted custody of Prince; nine months later, the adoption was finalized.

SPRING IS A BUSY TIME FOR COLLEGE football recruiters. Beginning in April, they travel the country, visiting high schools and seeking out players with the most potential. During the spring of 2013, sev-eral coaches visited CHCA head football coach Eric Taylor to discuss potential fits. Coaches from UC, Bowling Green, Michi-gan—they all walked the halls, and each time they did, Taylor did his best to make sure a coach bumped into Prince.

Sure, he came to this country to play bas-ketball, but he had the frame to play offen-sive line and seemed athletic enough to be a force on defense. Even though they were told the kid did not play football and didn’t have any interest in the sport, a number of the visiting coaches told Taylor flat-out that if Prince was added to the football roster, they would offer him a scholarship on the spot. Taylor knew that if he could convince Prince to play, he would have his pick of colleges. Brandon, who was the CHCA wide receivers coach, knew it too. But it would take a hard sell to change Prince’s mind.

“I’ve never promised a kid that he would get a football scholarship before, especially someone that’s never played,” Taylor says. “But it was a safe bet.”

When Prince first stepped onto the field, he wore an extra-large helmet that had to be specially ordered. Coaches quickly real-ized the game would have to be simplified for him. “You’re talking about someone that knew noooothing about football,” says Tay-lor. “We had to start very basic.”

He had to be taught everything, from the language (What is a right tackle? A first down?) to rules and technique. He may not have had a clue what he was doing, but his athleticism and natural strength made him difficult to play against. Four weeks into Prince’s sophomore season, and roughly eight weeks after he first stepped onto a football field, Prince received a scholarship offer from UC. Since then, 29 other schools have made him offers. In a span of three days the summer before his junior year, he re-ceived offers from powerhouses Alabama,

Auburn, and Georgia. During his senior season, though, there

were still moments of confusion. Games when he was penalized for being an in-eligible receiver downfield on offense or flagged for unnecessary roughness on de-fense. But those moments were outshined by breathtaking plays that make it clear why Notre Dame sent him 117 pieces of re-cruiting mail in one day. There was the time he knocked the ball loose and sent the run-ning back airborne in a game in Breathitt County, Kentucky (“I see that kid coming, and I’m like, that’s my lunch.”). Or the time he tossed the quarterback to the ground in a playoff game against North Union and did his version of the famous Haka chant.

But one play stands out in particu-lar. It happened during the homecoming game against Summit Country Day. Tilt-a-whirls and other carnival rides whizzed in the parking lot and smoke from the grill next to the student section poured over the field. In the crowd, Prince’s cheering section wore their black T-shirts with his name on the front and a Bible verse on the back (Ga-latians 6:9). At halftime CHCA led 42–10, and Prince was crowned homecoming king, leading to a barrage of the same corny joke (“Do we have to call you King now?”).

Nine minutes into the third quarter, with the game well in hand, Prince was still competing hard. He had been jawing with Summit’s best lineman all game, and the trash talk continued after they gained a big chunk of yards on a play in which Prince was held. Only this time, he flashed the kind of anger that his basketball teammates first noticed back in Nigeria. The next play, Prince lined up directly across from his loud-mouthed opponent. He stood almost half a foot taller and outweighed him by at least 50 pounds. It was not going to be a fair fight.

As soon as the ball was snapped, Prince exploded through the offensive lineman, sending him flailing backwards and land-ing flat on his back, his helmet a few yards behind him. The CHCA sideline erupted as Prince’s victim walked slowly back to the sideline.

On the bench, players and coaches had to know what the player said.

“He told me ‘Shut up, n-word,’” Prince said, censoring himself. “So I shut him up.”

J U N K I E ’ S B I G A D V E N T U R EC O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 8 7

Small, was captain of the Camargo. As fi rst mate, her grandfather was always the fi rst to land, often armed with a revolver, on is-lands where the stereotypes of the day cre-ated a fear of cannibals.

The Camargo is still revered on Deer Isle “as a beautiful lady with a wonder-ful life,” says Crouch. She was a seawor-thy beauty, with a clipper bow and sleek hull, a 60,000-gallon fuel tank, and two 800-horsepower Krupp diesel engines that could produce a cruising speed of 12 knots. In remote parts of the world, the crew would arrange to rendezvous with fuel tankers for refi lling. During World War II, she served as a transport ship in Pearl Har-bor, and afterward as a passenger ferry be-tween Malta and Sicily. She ran aground in 1955, capsized, and was refl oated, but was fi nally sold for scrap in 1966.

Clearly, the high point of the Camargo’s time on the high seas was the Fleischmann family’s round-the-world excursion. Not only because of the waters it plied, the islands it visited, and the exotic cultures its passengers and crew encountered, but because of who they passed a good deal of that information on to. While in the South Pacifi c, Fleischmann and his crew created maps, sounding charts, and descriptions of the local peoples and topography that would later be used by the U.S. military to advance against many of the Japanese-held islands during World War II. The historical record shows that the Navy requested the Camargoturn over its navigational aids following the voyage, but a more likely scenario is that Fleischmann planned to survey those wa-ters at the request of the Offi ce of Naval In-telligence. By the early 1930s, the U.S. and Japan were already vying for infl uence and strategic intelligence in what would become the Pacifi c Theater a decade later.

Between the world wars, U.S. mili-tary and political leaders often relied on

wealthy, patriotic travellers to spy for their country. FDR had cultivated a cote-rie of well-connected friends who acted as “gentleman amateur” snoops leading up to Pearl Harbor. They included the scions of some of America’s most prominent fami-lies, including Vincent Astor, Winthrop Aldrich, Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy’s son), and publisher Nelson Doubleday. Although Fleischmann was not part of FDR’s inner circle, General MacArthur set up his war-time base in Indonesia’s Humboldt Bay, waters first charted by the Camargo, and advanced toward the Philippines through New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, all places visited by the Fleischmanns. After Pearl Harbor, Julius Jr. joined the Navy as an attaché to European governments in exile, a position that reeks of intelligence service, and during the Cold War served as a front man for the CIA. Like many of the nation’s spook class, Julius Jr. was a Yale man, class of 1920—nicknamed “Junkie” by his class-mates, for reasons only they could explain.

JUNKIE NO DOUBT HAD HIS PERSONALreasons for visiting far-off exotic lands, not the least of which is that he could afford to. His grandfather, Charles Louis Fleis-chmann, had grown up in Eastern Europe and apprenticed to a distiller and yeast maker before emigrating to Cincinnati in the 1860s, where he was disappointed by the paltry quality of locally baked bread. Along with his brother Max and another business partner, Charles founded what became the Fleischmann Yeast Company in Riverside in 1868, manufacturing packaged yeast that was aff ordable and ready to use at a time when most bakers and housewives had to expose their dough long enough to capture airborne yeast. It was the Centen-nial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 that brought the tasty baked goods of Fleis-chmann’s Model Vienna Bakery to the at-tention of a national and international au-dience. Before the turn of the century, the company would sprout 14 manufacturing facilities and become the world’s leading producer of yeast, the second biggest pro-ducer of vinegar, and the distiller of Fleis-chmann’s gin.

Charles Fleischmann’s son, Julius, took over the family business at age 22 and invested in thoroughbred horses and

142 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

H O M E G A M E

FEBRUARY 3 IS NATIONAL SIGNING Day, the day when football recruits can sign their letter of intent and offi cially declare what school they will be attend-ing in the fall. Prince has his choices narrowed down to a few schools, some being traditional powers and others fi tting his goal of majoring in pre-med or business. “You don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket, because if something hits that basket, they all get cracked,” says Prince. “You have no egg left.” He is weighing certain factors—academics, weather, proximity to home, his new girlfriend—but there is one factor still lingering.

Last September, Brandon and Bet-sy made plans to adopt Prince’s two youngest brothers, Emmanuel and Izu-chukwu. It will be a much longer and more arduous process than Prince’s adoption; Nigeria is a notoriously dif-fi cult and expensive country to adopt from. Still, in less than four months, they exceeded their fund-raising goal of $40,000 and are hopeful that Em-manuel and Izuchukwu will arrive be-fore Prince decides which college he will attend. “I feel guilty a lot,” Prince says. “I have a room. I have a closet. I have a bathroom. They don’t even have a bed to sleep on.”

If they do make it over, they’ll have some adjusting to do, too. At a Labor Day picnic at the Sammons’s new home in Clarksville, Ohio—a week after CHCA lost that game to Greeneview High despite Prince’s forceful locker-room speech—after everyone had their share of hot dogs, baked beans, and pasta sal-ad, Prince surfaced on the back porch, wearing a white tank top and orange basketball shorts. There were at least 40 family members in attendance, more than he was comfortable with; uncles and cousins approached him to talk football, little ones nipped at his heels in hopes of earning a piggyback ride. He was still coming to realize that being part of a family means making life-altering decisions as a teenager without know-ing how they’ll turn out. And sometimes it means going with the flow. Prince scooped up his 5-year-old sister and wandered into the backyard.

would be resettled in Cincinnati. Roughly 8,000 miles away, the refugee resettlement team at Catholic Charities Southwestern Ohio (CCSWO) sprung into action. Case workers and managers called landlords to secure safe, affordable housing on a bus line. Volunteers gathered donated furni-ture to furnish the space. A French speaker accompanied the team to the airport. Ea-ger volunteers prepared a warm meal to be shared upon his arrival.

This same process is duplicated for ev-ery refugee who arrives in Cincinnati. Since 2009, CCSWO has resettled 1,195 people from countries all over the world, including Bhutan (which has sent the most people), Cuba, Rwanda, Iraq, and yes, Syria. Each time a new family arrives in the city, CC-SWO’s staff is there to greet them. An or-ganization known for food banks and mar-riage counseling is also Hamilton County’s lone resource for refugee resettlement.

On the surface, it may seem strange that the federal government’s point of contact on refugee relocation is a religious orga-nization. (You know, separation of church and state and all that.) In fact, they are an integral part of fi nding homes for displaced persons. There are nine agencies that the Department of Health and Human Services works with to resettle refugees, and fi ve of them have religious affi liations, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). USCCB is by far the larg-est group, responsible for fi nding homes for more than a quarter of the refugees enter-ing the country. The 10-member refugee resettlement team within CCSWO operates under the USCCB umbrella.

“Resettling refugees is not easy,” says Ted Bergh, chief executive offi cer at CC-SWO. “You need to really be dedicated, have dedicated people, and be willing to put up your own resources to do this.” That’s be-cause the process of resettlement is a long, complicated ordeal.

During those first days and weeks, director of refugee resettlement Megan Zarnitz and her team follow a rigorous schedule focused on acclimating people as quickly and effi ciently as possible. “It’s a lot of juggling,” says Zarnitz, who resettled 65 immigrants during her fi rst month on the job. Within 24 hours, there is a home visit and a complete psycho-social assessment

Meet the city’s one-stop shop for refugee resettlement. — A D A M F L A N G O

R E A D Y O R N O T , H E R E T H E Y C O M E

AITING IN A REFUGEE CAMP IS A PAINFUL EXERCISE in monotony. Each day is the same: Wake up, wait in line for food, retreat back to your space, and re-peat. When Tresor Kalala arrived at a South Afri-can refugee camp in 2010, he had not seen his wife, or his two children, or his mother, or his three younger siblings in six years. They were waiting in Burundi after fl eeing their native Democratic Republic of Congo, hoping that Kalala could fi nd a safe place for them to live. Now in the camp, all he could do was wait. “It’s very hard to leave your en-tire family, your wife, your kids,” Kalala says. “It’s very, very hard. God gave me that patience to wait.”

In March 2012, his wait was over. He received word through his United Nations camp that he

WIL

LUST

RA

TIO

N B

Y P

HIL

HAC

KETT

W

H O W C A T H O L I C A R E W E ?

to learn more about each person. After a week, new arrivals enroll in Medic-aid, receive food stamps, and apply for Social Security. Ten days in adults are enrolled in English and employment classes at the CCSWO offices in Rose-lawn. By day 30, families undergo health screenings, children go to school, and young men register for the Selective Service. Squeezed in between all of that are a slew of cultural orientation classes teaching everything from understand-ing how to use indoor plumbing to when to call 911 and how to use the Metro website.

Upon arriving in the United States, each refugee receives at least $1,100 in federal assistance and a loan for their plane ticket. It’s up to Zarnitz and Co. to teach financial literacy. “The idea is that we have to help clients be really good stewards of that money,” says Zarnitz. And if all goes to plan, which of course isn’t always the case, refugees become self-sufficient within 90 days. But even after that, Zarnitz says there is fund-ing to help clients during their first five years in the country.

The arrival of immigrants is often viewed in economic terms, like how they affect the country’s job market. At CCSWO, they recognize the numer-ous benefits of immigrant workers, but their motivation is tied to their Catholic roots. “We do it not because it’s in style,” says Bergh, noting that the resettlement program has been operating since World War I. “We do it because our faith calls us to welcome the stranger.”

It was Tresor Kalala’s faith that helped him stay positive during his first two years in Cincinnati. He got a job working maintenance for the Sisters of Mercy while he waited, once again, for his family to join him. Then, just be-fore Christmas in 2014, after 10 years apart, Kalala’s wife and children arrived in Cincinnati. “We just talk all the night, just look each other in the eyes,” says Kalala. But his work is still not com-plete. Kalala hopes that, with the help of the CCSWO legal team, his mother will make it to Cincinnati. When that time comes, Zarnitz and her team will be ready for action.

What’s your per-sonal history with the church? Jesus wasn’t part of our life, Jesus was our life, and everything else was auxiliary to that. I was going to be a minister! But I walked away from all of it—God, every-

thing—for the better part of my 20s. I never stopped be-lieving in something greater, but I wanted nothing to do with it.

What prompted that break? I was deeply steeped in re-ligion, so I was hand-

ed a very specific version of God with all of the rules. And that stuff is stacked like a Jenga tower, and your relation-ship with this God is at the top. And the problem with a religion that is set up like that is when

Reba Riley was buried under bad church memories. So she dug herself out. — A M Y B R O W N L E E

S H A K E I T O F F

“FALLING.” THAT’S THE TITLE OF THE FIRST CHAPTER IN Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome, Reba Riley’s 2015 book about

what could be termed religion recovery, and unfortunately for her, it aptly sets the stage for an intense year of seeking and stumbling. At 29 she found herself confronting an integral part of her identity—her faith in the Pentecostal-leaning church of her childhood—while also suffering from a chronic illness that would descend without warning, leaving her exhausted and miserable. Rather than sink into hopelessness, Riley set out on a voyage: Visit 30 religious institutions before her 30th birthday, with the hope of finding peace in a new understanding of Christianity. The resulting memoir is one part quest narrative and one part confes-sional, and it paved the way for a very particular version of redemption.

you start messing with that stuff—you start going I’m not sure about this, I’m not sure about that—then it all falls down and you’re not allowed to have a relationship with God at all.

Are you still religious? Yes. I’m spiritual and I’m religious. The things that most interest me about religion are the things that you find in all traditions: You find silence, you find meditative practices, mindful-ness, the use of light and water. Being spiritual is [about] grappling with something bigger—it’s the urge to grapple.

What did you learn during that year? A huge lesson in my journey was step-ping back from judg-ing people who are judging me. I don’t begrudge anyone their certainties because we all have them in our differ-ent ways at different times. I hold my own conclusions with a very open hand and a very open heart. If there is going to be love and forgive-ness in the world, it has to start with me. P

HO

TOG

RA

PH

BY

JER

EMY

KR

AM

ER

KEEPING THE FAITH

A P R I L 2 0 1 6 61

SHE’S GOT SPIRIT “Real victories,” Riley writes in her memoir, “happen in weakness.”

P A G E 84

Pete Rose, Ray Fosse, and the home plate collision that blew up the 1970 All-Star Game. An oral history.

B Y A D A M F L A N G O

86 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3

The night before the 1970 MLB All-Star Game, Reds outfi elder Pete Rose called his friend, Cleveland Indians pitcher Sam McDowell, and asked if he’d like to go out to dinner. McDowell agreed and brought along his Indians teammate, a newly-married rookie catcher named Ray Fosse. The trio, their wives in tow, enjoyed an evening on the river at the Sycamore Shore and fi nished with a nightcap at Rose’s home in Oak Hills. Like any bright young rookie would, Fosse peppered Rose with questions about his teammate, the great Johnny Bench. It was a jovial fi rst encounter. The second would not go so well.

More televisions were tuned to the 1970 All-Star Game than any Mid-Summer Classic before or since. An estimated 60 million people gazed at the still-under-construction Riverfront Stadium, watching to see if the American League could overcome years of dominance by the National League. Even Richard Nixon—two years into his fi rst term as president, with the Vietnam War raging and deep unrest rumbling across the land—was in the stands that night.

The raucous, National League–inclined crowd of 51,838 roared each time one of their guys came to bat. Bench. Perez. Rose. Even for-mer Cincinnati Red Frank Robinson received a rousing ovation in his fi rst trip to the plate. True, it was an exhibition game, but to the players, teams, and more than 2 million fans who voted for the starters, it mat-tered. Former National League president Warren Giles, who had served as Cincinnati Reds president and retired before the 1970 season, used to treat the All-Star Game as his chance to assert the National League’s superiority. With a clenched fi rst, he was known to deliver impas-sioned pre-game pep talks that let players know just how much it all meant. “If you want to make this team next year,” Giles would say, “you better play hard tonight.” Pete Rose took it to heart.

SUPERIORIT Y COMPLEXBefore free agency and interleague play became commonplace, the All-Star Game and the World Series were the only meaningful times when players from both leagues could settle scores. Heading into the 1970 contest, the National League maintained an air of superiority justifi ed by a dominant stretch. American League manager Earl Weaver, whose Baltimore squad had fallen to New York’s “Miracle” Mets in the 1969 World Series, was so intent on ending the N.L. reign that he lobbied for a committee to evaluate players that might be exaggerating injuries. If any player attempted to use

an injury as an excuse to not play in the All-Star Game, Weaver believed they should be fi ned. That never happened, but as The New York Times noted afterwards, “The Americans had to feel a new sense of foreboding as they were confronted by the shape of things to come.”

CLYDE WRIGHT, losing pitcher, California Angels: When the National League played the American League, the American League wanted to kick their butt and the National League wanted to kick our butt. That’s all there was to it. It wasn’t going to no party. We were going to a baseball game to win.

C L A U D E O S T E E N , winning pitcher, Los Angeles Dodgers: I always try to put down any talk about players not caring. All the guys in the National League, all the teams that I was on, they wanted to win and carried a lot of pride in that clubhouse. I’ve never experienced one that didn’t. [1]

P E T E R O S E , outfi elder, Cincinnati Reds: It’s not one of those deals where some players say, Ahhh, I’d rather have the days off . That wasn’t the way it was with us. We wanted to make the All-Star team. The [game] in Cincinnati meant a lot more to me be-cause I was born there.

BROOKS ROBINSON, third baseman, Baltimore Ori-oles: The American League, I know we got beat up. I played in a lot of losing All-Star Games. I think I played in 15, won two or three, and tied one. [2] I went to every game thinking that I was going to be the best player in the game. I loved playing in it.

FRANK ROBINSON, fi rst baseman, formerly with the Cincinnati Reds, then playing for the Baltimore Orioles: The idea of coming back to the city and playing in a meaningful game—I know it was an exhibition game, but it meant something back in those days. [3]

C LY D E W R I G H T: When I looked around the room in the American League, I thought, Well, jeez, there’s going to be a lot of these guys in the Hall of Fame. And then when you looked over in the National League, you said, “Damn, there’s going to be more of them in the Hall of Fame. And I get to pitch against them?” [4]

TONY PEREZ, third baseman, Cincinnati Reds: I re-member we played like it was the World

[1] Osteen: “I went to Reading High

School. My father moved from Ten-

nessee up to Read-ing and he worked

at the General Elec-tric jet engine plant in Lockland. I spent my last three years

of high school there and got involved

with the baseball program and loved every minute of it.

I was a big Reds fan and knew all about

them.”

[2] Brooks Robin-son was an All-Star

in 15 seasons, but competed in 18 All-

Star Games. From 1960 to 1962, MLB

held two All-Star Games each year.

His fi nal record was 2-15-1.

[3] Frank Robinson was signed by the Reds in 1953 and

played 10 seasons for the team before being traded to the

Baltimore Orioles in 1966. He is the only

player in baseball history to be named

Most Valuable Player in both the American and Na-

tional Leagues.

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3 87

P A G E 87

Series. We were hot, and we played like it was the last game we were going to play.

JOE TORRE, catcher, St. Louis Cardinals: I always felt that when players went to the All-Star Game, they had fun. They talked among themselves. But when they went out and played, they only knew one way to play and that was to win. It was evidenced by Pete in 1970 trying to score the winning run.

THAT FATEFUL INNINGRay Fosse scored the fi rst run of the game and drove in the second run, while Brooks Robin-son added two insurance runs with a two-out triple in the top of the eighth inning. Heading into the ninth inning, the A.L. held a 4–1 lead and seemed poised to end their disappointing run. But as radio play-by-play announcer Jim Simpson said in the bottom of the ninth, “This ball game was cruising strictly in the pitcher’s hip pocket for a long while. It’s now broken open.” A leadoff home run from San Francsico

Giants catcher Dick Dietz and a two-run single by Dietz’s teammate, Wil-lie McCovey, put the N.L. within one. Roberto Clemente, playing despite a sore neck, pinch-hit for Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson and knocked a sacrifi ce fl y that allowed Joe Morgan (then still with the Houston Astros) to score, sending the game into extra innings. “Once you go into extra innings,” said Sandy Koufax in his role as a radio color commentator for NBC, “well, the home team has got a great advantage.”

SAM McDOWELL , pitcher, Cleveland Indians, on the mound for the American League from the fourth to the sixth inning: I had struck out so many players that they initially told me when I came off the mound to go ahead and shower so I could get out of the way of the other guys coming in after the game. [Then] they said hold off on that, stay in uniform, because my name was up for MVP of the game. Lo and behold, the game was tied and went on. Everything changed after I came out of the game. [5]

AMOS OTIS, center fi elder, Kansas City Royals: I came in the game around the seventh inning as a replacement in center fi eld. We were win-ning at that time. Then that fateful inning rolled around.

C LY D E W R I G H T: It was just like any normal inning. You don’t pitch to the names on the back of the uniform, • C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 1 4

[4] Including man-agers, the American League lineup boasted nine future Hall-of-Famers while the National League had a whop-ping 12 future Hall-of-Famers.

[5] Starter Jim Palmer and Sam McDowell combined to throw six score-less innings to begin the game for the American League.

LEAGUES COLLIDE Pete Rose barreling into Ray Fosse in the

12th inning. That blurry white sphere

(upper right) is the ball.

PH

OTO

GR

AP

HS

BY

© B

ETTM

AN

N/C

OR

BIS

1 14 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M J U LY 2 0 1 5

B O O M !C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 8 7

you pitch to home plate and your catcher, where [he] sets up. You check the run-ners on base and hold them close, but I can’t worry about them two guys on base. The thing I have to take care of is get that sucker out that’s got that 34-inch bat up there.

AMOS OTIS: Pete Rose led off, somehow got to second base, then Jim Hickman [with the Chicago Cubs] hit one to center fi eld. [6]

P E T E R O S E : He hit a base hit, a one-hopper, and I had to score.

C LY D E W R I G H T: I don’t know [what pitch I threw]. Whatever one it was, I wish I would’ve thrown something different.

CLAUDE OSTEEN: I remember Hickman getting the hit and we were all anticipating Rose scoring.

BILL HALLER , third base umpire that night: I had a great angle on that play. I can still see Rose going from second to third and rounding third. I’m watching him running to home plate and Fosse is waiting for the ball. [I knew] we were going to have a collision.

CLYDE WRIGHT: Rose, he can move around the bases pretty good. If we had a shot at him, it was going to be bang-bang. It had to be a perfect throw.

BILL HALLER : Amos was a pretty damn good player. He was a very, very, very, very, very good defensive player. [7]

A M O S O T I S : As Pete rounded third base, I charged and scooped the ball up real quick and made a real good throw. It was up the line maybe a foot and a half. If the throw would have been dead-on accurate, he would’ve been out.

C LY D E W R I G H T: If it was a perfect throw, he might have. But there was a lot of dif-ference between where he threw it and a perfect throw.

“ONE HELL OF A COLLISION”Jim Simpson’s voice rose in excitement as Hickman made contact, wavering just slightly from the wry, professional demeanor he car-ried throughout the game. “Up the middle, Rose is on his way around, picked up by Otis, Otis coming to the plate…” As Rose rounded third, third base coach and Cubs manager Leo Durocher, hardly able to contain himself, trailed behind him. In front of the plate stood Fosse, dripping with sweat due to the heat emanating from the newly installed emerald green AstroTurf—“just as if someone had turned a hose on him,” said Simpson.

SA M M c D O W E L L : When the throw came in it was to [Ray’s] right side. It forced him into a position where he was semi-block-ing the plate.

AMOS OTIS: I think Pete thought he was go-ing to score easy and [then] realized the throw was on the way and that it was go-ing to be close.

P E T E R O S E : I actually started to slide head-fi rst, but he had the plate blocked. I was saying, “Well if I slide now, I’m probably going to break both of my collarbones.”

BILL HALLER : Before the collision happened, I could see it happening because of where the ball was and the type of runner that Rose was and the type of player that Fosse was. Neither one was going to give in.

CLAUDE OSTEEN: I mean, it’s a snap judgment decision you have to make when you’ve got a big catcher standing there. Instinct takes over. You think: Well, the only way I’m going to be safe is if I can knock the ball out of his hands.

B R O O K S R O B I N S O N : I’ve seen a lot of catch-ers get hurt in situations like that when you’re standing on top of the plate. I guess Rose really didn’t have any place to go, so he ran over him.

S A M M c D O W E L L : I think Pete could’ve slid without any problem, without hurting Ray or anybody else. As you know, Pete never did that. He loved that headfirst dive and in order to do that headfi rst dive you put your shoulder down. He was go-ing to go into anything that was there on the plate—the leg, the arm, anything that was there.

P E T E R O S E : The advantage I had there—and it’s a big advantage when you are running the bases—was that he was reaching out to get the ball. If he had had the ball, he’d have knocked me into the middle of next week. But you can’t concentrate on two things.

FRANK ROBINSON: Anytime you step between the white lines you should play to win. But there is a point to where you draw the line in an All-Star Game, OK? I just think that it could have been avoided.

A M O S O T I S : The collision happened at the same time the ball got there. It was one hell of a collision.

THE IMPACTOver the years, Rose has contended he had no choice in the matter. “My father was at that game,” he told ESPN in 1985. “If I’d have slid like a little sissy or something, he’d have waited outside and kicked the hell out of me after the ball game.” Instead Rose, the son of a semi-pro football star, hammered Fosse like a linebacker, sending the rookie somersaulting backwards. Rose immediately turned to Fosse—who was doubled over and clearly in pain—and asked if he was all right. But the deed was done.

P E T E R O S E : I remember the collision like it was yesterday. If you look at the replay, I actually started to slide headfi rst, but he had the plate blocked. So I went over him and tagged the plate with my right hand.

CLYDE WRIGHT: When Rose hit Fosse I heard the pop. That had to hurt pretty good. What did it sound like? A limb breaking.

Pete Rose, Ray Fosse, and the home plate collision that blew up the 1970 All-Star Game. An oral history.

B Y A D A M F L A N G O

P A G E 84

[6] Joe Torre and Roberto Clemente actually led off the bottom of the 12th inning, each grounding out. Rose singled and was moved to second on another

single by Billy Grabarkewitz. [7] Otis would go on to win his fi rst of three Gold Gloves in 1971.

J U LY 2 0 1 5 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E .C O M 1 1 5

Not a big limb—a branch, that would be more like it. Just a crack, and that was it.

B I L L H A L L E R : Oh, you knew he was hurt. It was like a boxer that got hit in the jaw and he’s down on his knees and he’s try-ing to get up.

JOE TORRE: It was a clean hit. Pete didn’t go in spikes fi rst, he basically bowled him over. Being a catcher myself, I sort of knew the drill. You try to defend your territory. And whether you had the ball or not you’d try to keep the run from scoring. As it turns out, it was devastating, and that’s the sad part about it.

B R O O K S R O B I N S O N : You don’t want to kill or maim anyone. You just do what you can do. Offhand, I don’t remember any player that I can name that said, “That’s crazy that he would do that.” I think everyone realized that’s just the way Pete Rose played.

C LY D E W R I G H T: A lot people thought it was dirty, right? But the thing about it is, that’s the way Rose plays and everyone knows that’s the way he plays. It didn’t bother me at all. The only one it hurt was Fosse. I don’t even know if Fosse thought it was a dirty play or not. I never asked him. To me, no. It was just the normal way that Pete Rose played: All-out.

A M O S O T I S : If that was me coming around third base and I was in the same situa-tion that Pete was, nine times out of 10 I probably would’ve ran into the guy. Of course at that time I only weighed 150 pounds, so he probably would’ve knocked me backwards.

F R A N K R O B I N S O N : Listen, I played hard. I played tough. I did what I could do to help my team win, short of hurting someone intentionally. I’ll tell you one thing—I would have never gone into home plate like that. No.

PETE ROSE: I’d do the same thing tomorrow if I had to. I was within the rules. I wasn’t dirty. I was probably the most aggressive guy ever, but I wasn’t dirty. I never pur-posely tried to hurt anybody. The only thing I did on purpose was try to score.

SAM McDOWELL : I know he didn’t intention-ally try and injure Ray. But that destroyed Ray’s career.

“JUST PART OF THE GAME”Hickman’s hit and Rose’s run won the game for the National League, 5–4. Fosse played through the injury until September, when a broken fi nger sidelined him for the remainder of the season. He wouldn’t discover the extent of his injury until spring training the follow-ing year. He made one more appearance in the All-Star Game, in 1971, but it would be his last. He retired in 1980 at the age of 33, and is now a broadcaster for the Oakland Athlet-ics. Ray Fosse declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.

SAM McDOWELL : When I saw it on the television in the clubhouse, I came running down to the dugout. I saw Ray in the dugout and I tried to comfort him [and] fi nd out exactly how bad it was. They rushed him to the hospital and had some X-rays or whatever, and I think they just told him it was a bad bruise or sprain. It wasn’t until winter that they saw he had a broken collarbone. [He] went through a whole year of playing not knowing it was broken. That was the old dynamic of baseball—you played no mat-ter how hurt you were.

AMOS OTIS: I was a little bit upset and felt bad. For a long time, I thought it was my fault. If I’d have made a perfect throw, it never would have happened.

PETE ROSE: [The collision] hurt my knee, but I’ve had a lot of impacts like that. It don’t hurt as bad as you might think when it happens because you won the game. And that meant more to me than anybody else on the fi eld that night because it was in Cincinnati. [8]

CLAUDE OSTEEN: It was kind of a mixed emo-tions thing. You’re happy over the win because that was the ultimate thing that you’re there for. At the same time, you felt bad about Fosse and you hoped he wasn’t hurt too badly.

BROOKS ROBINSON: After that hit he took from

Pete, he was just never the same player in any way—throwing, hitting, or catching. I remember he had some power but that just about ended it for him. [9]

SAM McDOWELL: He was a free swinger and had a quick bat prior to the injury. After that, he pulled his shoulder in and you could ac-tually see it almost every time he swung—he was cringing. He had trouble throwing the ball back to me on the mound a lot of times. He changed everything that he was doing, which ruined his career.

B I L L H A L L E R : He was touted to be the best catcher in the American League after he played a few years. He never did reach that plateau.

AMOS OTIS: The fi rst trip back into Cleveland when I saw Ray, we got to talking and I was telling him how I felt and he told me it wasn’t my fault. It was baseball, things happened. That eased my mind. I’m still sorry that he got hurt because I could tell he wasn’t the same player.

P E T E R O S E : I got bad mail from American League fans, but so what? We’re playing the game to win the game. Anybody that don’t agree with what I did in that game is a loser. That’s the way I look at it. If I’m a National League fan, I want a player that had the opportunity to do that to do the same thing—win the game, within the rules.

SA M M c D O W E L L : For months after the colli-sion reporters from all over continually wanted to interview Ray and Pete. I was physically next to Ray in the locker room where they were trying to get him to say that Pete did it intentionally to hurt him, just to start a controversy. Ray wouldn’t do it. I have not talked to Ray in 20 years, so I have no idea what his thoughts are now. But I knew way back when that it was just part of the game.

[8] Though he was expected to be out for a few games, Fosse played in Cleveland’s fi rst game after

the All-Star break. Rose missed the fi rst three games due to his left knee injury. [9] In the months before the All-Star game in 1970, during his rookie season,

Fosse hit 16 home runs. He would go on to hit just 49 homers over the fi nal eight years of his career.