The Comeback Kid
St. John’s forward Rob Thomas scored his first college basket last week. It came nearly 5,000 miles away, in an empty gymnasium during a Red Storm loss at a tournament in Hawaii.
John Dunn for The New York Times
Published Dec. 25, 2007
Rob Thomas with Coach Norm Roberts at practice. Returning from a severe knee injury, Thomas played his first game last week.
The remote setting proved a fitting backdrop. His 12-foot jumper came after a long, lonely journey just to reach the court. Thomas overcame a childhood of poverty in Brooklyn, confronted illiteracy at 17 and endured a knee injury so severe that the St. John’s trainer, Ron Linfonte, considered it the worst he had seen in his 27 years at the university.
And although the 6-foot-6, 238-pound Thomas has settled in at St. John’s, having earned a 2.7 grade-point average as of mid-December, he says there is still a long way before his story has a happy ending.
“That will happen when I graduate,” he said with a smile.
To overcome severe dyslexia that has him reading at a junior-high level, Thomas receives 12 hours of individualized tutoring every week and sees two specialists.
The right knee injury, sustained in a pickup game in the spring, has left Thomas, a redshirt freshman, and the St. John’s staff uncertain if he will return to the level that made him one of the country’s elite high school basketball recruits. But what is certain is that on a fateful day in 2004, Rob Thomas made a decision that changed his life.
He wrote a note to his English teacher at prep school, asking for help to learn how to read and write. He was found to have dyslexia soon after. Since then he has traveled a long, difficult path from cautionary tale to college student.
“With the road I was on, I would be on the streets, in jail or in the graveyard,” Thomas said. “Thank God they took the note seriously.”
Thomas made it to 17 with minimal reading ability, mostly because of a childhood spent with little supervision and a New York City school system willing to pass him along. Memories of his youth in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn include boiling water for heat at his family’s rat-infested apartment and living in the subways to avoid being taken away by social services. He sold drugs for cash, attended school sporadically and had severe dyslexia that went undiagnosed.
After attending St. Thomas More, a Connecticut prep school, for a year, Thomas in 2004 chose South Kent, a strong academic school also in Connecticut, despite offers from unaccredited prep schools that told him he could overhaul his transcript with minimal academic work.
His first week at South Kent, Thomas pleaded in a note to his English teacher, Don Mousted, “I cannot read or write,” and “please don’t turn your back on me.”
“I really think that it was a combination of maturity and him being afraid,” said Raphael Chillious, the South Kent basketball coach. “Sometimes those two things help people to make a great decision for their life. That was a huge turning point in his life.”
Things were never easy for Thomas. He was sent home from South Kent once for misbehaving and missed most of his final basketball season with an ankle injury. But the administration at South Kent found specialists to deal with Thomas’s dyslexia and nurtured him along in a family atmosphere. He made rapid improvements, and was able to graduate in two years.
“The longer he’s been gone, the more I marvel at what he did,” said Andy Vadnais, the South Kent headmaster. “There aren’t a lot of kids that I’ve come across that would take on that challenge and do it in a predominantly white world. His drive is amazing.”
The transition to St. John’s has had similar bumps. Twice a day, Thomas still goes through phonics cards to help reaffirm the basics of the English language. Using a technique knowthe Orton-Gillingham, Thomas will say “A,” make the sound of the letter, then say the word “apple”n as out loud. As he does that, he traces the letter on a mat to reinforce the learning through touch.
The remote setting proved a fitting backdrop. His 12-foot jumper came after a long, lonely journey just to reach the court. Thomas overcame a childhood of poverty in Brooklyn, confronted illiteracy at 17 and endured a knee injury so severe that the St. John’s trainer, Ron Linfonte, considered it the worst he had seen in his 27 years at the university.
And although the 6-foot-6, 238-pound Thomas has settled in at St. John’s, having earned a 2.7 grade-point average as of mid-December, he says there is still a long way before his story has a happy ending.
“That will happen when I graduate,” he said with a smile.
To overcome severe dyslexia that has him reading at a junior-high level, Thomas receives 12 hours of individualized tutoring every week and sees two specialists.
The right knee injury, sustained in a pickup game in the spring, has left Thomas, a redshirt freshman, and the St. John’s staff uncertain if he will return to the level that made him one of the country’s elite high school basketball recruits. But what is certain is that on a fateful day in 2004, Rob Thomas made a decision that changed his life.
He wrote a note to his English teacher at prep school, asking for help to learn how to read and write. He was found to have dyslexia soon after. Since then he has traveled a long, difficult path from cautionary tale to college student.
“With the road I was on, I would be on the streets, in jail or in the graveyard,” Thomas said. “Thank God they took the note seriously.”
Thomas made it to 17 with minimal reading ability, mostly because of a childhood spent with little supervision and a New York City school system willing to pass him along. Memories of his youth in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn include boiling water for heat at his family’s rat-infested apartment and living in the subways to avoid being taken away by social services. He sold drugs for cash, attended school sporadically and had severe dyslexia that went undiagnosed.
After attending St. Thomas More, a Connecticut prep school, for a year, Thomas in 2004 chose South Kent, a strong academic school also in Connecticut, despite offers from unaccredited prep schools that told him he could overhaul his transcript with minimal academic work.
His first week at South Kent, Thomas pleaded in a note to his English teacher, Don Mousted, “I cannot read or write,” and “please don’t turn your back on me.”
“I really think that it was a combination of maturity and him being afraid,” said Raphael Chillious, the South Kent basketball coach. “Sometimes those two things help people to make a great decision for their life. That was a huge turning point in his life.”
Things were never easy for Thomas. He was sent home from South Kent once for misbehaving and missed most of his final basketball season with an ankle injury. But the administration at South Kent found specialists to deal with Thomas’s dyslexia and nurtured him along in a family atmosphere. He made rapid improvements, and was able to graduate in two years.
“The longer he’s been gone, the more I marvel at what he did,” said Andy Vadnais, the South Kent headmaster. “There aren’t a lot of kids that I’ve come across that would take on that challenge and do it in a predominantly white world. His drive is amazing.”
The transition to St. John’s has had similar bumps. Twice a day, Thomas still goes through phonics cards to help reaffirm the basics of the English language. Using a technique knowthe Orton-Gillingham, Thomas will say “A,” make the sound of the letter, then say the word “apple”n as out loud. As he does that, he traces the letter on a mat to reinforce the learning through touch.
It is a technique stressed at St. John’s by Dr. Francine Guastello, an associate professor of literacy who has worked with Thomas. When Thomas questions why he needs the repetition of the basics, Guastello puts it in basketball terms.
“You can’t just show up and play in a game,” she said. “These are the skills you didn’t get. You’ve got to go back and do it.”
Reginald Eze, an adjunct professor, had Thomas for an introductory physics class and summed up his experience with Thomas as “torturous but very rewarding.” Thomas would always sit in the back row, and Eze had to talk him into making a presentation in front of the class. Thomas agreed reluctantly; he would have preferred doing it one-on-one, but said he would not answer any questions.
“I hope I’m not messing up,” Thomas blurted a few minutes into his slide show on gas flaring.
“You’re doing fine,” Eze assured him.
When Thomas finished, he was so confident in his work that he answered two questions from the class.
“After that presentation, he started moving his chair to the middle and front and became more comfortable,” said Eze, who said Thomas received a B-plus in the class.
But Thomas still has a lot of work to do academically. Guastello said that Thomas tested at between a fifth- and sixth-grade reading level when he enrolled at St. John’s about a year ago. She said she had not tested him since and would imagine that he has improved by a grade level or two.
Because of his learning disabilities, Thomas has note takers in his classes, listens to audiotapes of the lectures over and over and receives extra time to take tests. Thomas recently stopped working with Guastello’s assistant, something Guastello attributed to a “false sense of accomplishment.” She says he still needs a lot more basic skills drilled into him.
“To put a college book in his hand, it’s still difficult for him,” she said. “His writing and his ideas are there, he just can’t express them well. His vocabulary is extremely limited.”
Thomas must choose a major soon and is likely to go with history.
When Thomas became eligible to practice Dec. 12, it was a mini-celebration at St. John’s. His best friend, the Red Storm freshman forward Sean Evans, had kept a countdown on the away message of his Instant Messenger that started with “46 days until Rob practices.” Even the former coach Lou Carnesecca peeked his head in to watch Thomas practice.
“This is a milestone, and it’s important,” Eric Rienecker, the director of academic support for athletes at St. John’s, said of Thomas’s returning to the court. “But he really does have a very long way to go.”
Although he is still far from basketball shape, Thomas scored 8 points in 13 minutes against Tulane on Saturday, a sign that he should be a solid contributor this year.
Thomas is still finding his game after he essentially injured 75 percent of his knee by tearing his anterior cruciate ligament, his lateral collateral ligament and his lateral meniscus.
Thomas, who sat out a year because the N.C.A.A. only partly approved his transcripts, spent hours with Pat Dixon, the Red Storm’s strength and conditioning coach. In the early stages of his rehabilitation, Thomas would watch old game tape of himself while walking on a treadmill to remind him of why he was working so hard to come back. “There have been plenty of times I wanted to quit,” Thomas said. “But I have people who love me here, a big St. John’s family. And I have loving people and caring people back home.”
Thomas, his family members and the staff members at St. John’s recognize that the road does not ease up. Classes only get harder. So do the demands on Thomas’s time, especially now that he will be playing.
But for Thomas, choosing the difficult path to get to college appears to be paying off.
“When you go the hard route, it’s much more rewarding when you get there,” St. John’s Coach Norm Roberts said, “because you did have to persevere and you did have to go through some hard times.”
Reginald Eze, an adjunct professor, had Thomas for an introductory physics class and summed up his experience with Thomas as “torturous but very rewarding.” Thomas would always sit in the back row, and Eze had to talk him into making a presentation in front of the class. Thomas agreed reluctantly; he would have preferred doing it one-on-one, but said he would not answer any questions.
“I hope I’m not messing up,” Thomas blurted a few minutes into his slide show on gas flaring.
“You’re doing fine,” Eze assured him.
When Thomas finished, he was so confident in his work that he answered two questions from the class.
“After that presentation, he started moving his chair to the middle and front and became more comfortable,” said Eze, who said Thomas received a B-plus in the class.
But Thomas still has a lot of work to do academically. Guastello said that Thomas tested at between a fifth- and sixth-grade reading level when he enrolled at St. John’s about a year ago. She said she had not tested him since and would imagine that he has improved by a grade level or two.
Because of his learning disabilities, Thomas has note takers in his classes, listens to audiotapes of the lectures over and over and receives extra time to take tests. Thomas recently stopped working with Guastello’s assistant, something Guastello attributed to a “false sense of accomplishment.” She says he still needs a lot more basic skills drilled into him.
“To put a college book in his hand, it’s still difficult for him,” she said. “His writing and his ideas are there, he just can’t express them well. His vocabulary is extremely limited.”
Thomas must choose a major soon and is likely to go with history.
When Thomas became eligible to practice Dec. 12, it was a mini-celebration at St. John’s. His best friend, the Red Storm freshman forward Sean Evans, had kept a countdown on the away message of his Instant Messenger that started with “46 days until Rob practices.” Even the former coach Lou Carnesecca peeked his head in to watch Thomas practice.
“This is a milestone, and it’s important,” Eric Rienecker, the director of academic support for athletes at St. John’s, said of Thomas’s returning to the court. “But he really does have a very long way to go.”
Although he is still far from basketball shape, Thomas scored 8 points in 13 minutes against Tulane on Saturday, a sign that he should be a solid contributor this year.
Thomas is still finding his game after he essentially injured 75 percent of his knee by tearing his anterior cruciate ligament, his lateral collateral ligament and his lateral meniscus.
Thomas, who sat out a year because the N.C.A.A. only partly approved his transcripts, spent hours with Pat Dixon, the Red Storm’s strength and conditioning coach. In the early stages of his rehabilitation, Thomas would watch old game tape of himself while walking on a treadmill to remind him of why he was working so hard to come back. “There have been plenty of times I wanted to quit,” Thomas said. “But I have people who love me here, a big St. John’s family. And I have loving people and caring people back home.”
Thomas, his family members and the staff members at St. John’s recognize that the road does not ease up. Classes only get harder. So do the demands on Thomas’s time, especially now that he will be playing.
But for Thomas, choosing the difficult path to get to college appears to be paying off.
“When you go the hard route, it’s much more rewarding when you get there,” St. John’s Coach Norm Roberts said, “because you did have to persevere and you did have to go through some hard times.”
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