Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
“I don’t want to be one of those two-year players, in and out of the league. I want to make an impact for five or 10 years.”
The “I” in that statement is Saint Louis University sophomore guard Tommie Liddell, and the “league” he’s referring to is the NBA. It’s presumptuous talk for a kid who’s played just one year of college ball, but if you measure his chances of a future at the professional level by his ability to bring a once-dormant—and aging—Billiken fanbase out of its polite stupor, you might think twice about blowing it off as premature bluster.
Last season, the East St. Louis graduate—along with fellow freshman recruit Kevin Lisch, of Belleville—put some pep back into the step of Billiken faithful, who’d become accustomed to seeing the game of basketball played with more labor than joy. Not since the one and only year Larry Hughes wore the Bills’ blue-and-whites had Savvis Center been so charged with roundball energy. Suddenly, dunks were back. Jumpshots rained down. Fans leaped to their feet without the prompting of the video board.
So, yeah, if you take that turn of events into consideration, talk of the NBA isn’t far-fetched. It might even be prophecy. But if you look beyond the jersey, beyond the cheering and pumped-up talk and on-court successes, you start to see Liddell’s part in a completely different game, one that won’t be decided with points or rebounds. It’s the game of overcoming odds—and he plays it like a pro.
When Liddell was 12, he shot hoops at the basketball court near the “little projects,” the Samuel Gompers Homes, on Sixth Street in East St. Louis, where he lived with his mother. One morning he and his friends heard shots, looked toward the fence around the court and saw a man lying on the ground, bullet holes in his head and chest.
Quiet, watchful and matter-of-fact, Liddell didn’t let the sight stop him from playing, on that court or any other in East St. Louis. The image was locked in his mind, but basketball kept it from taking over. He drove the ball across the hot asphalt again and again, the pounding setting a rhythm for his life.
Raw talent saved him.
“East St. Louis is a rough place,” he says. “Things just sort of happen. You might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can basically just get shot over anything. But everybody in the city knew me—people were looking out for me. Usually your friends try to pull you down. Mine didn’t.”
He made the team at East St. Louis High School. “I was just playing game by game,” he says. “I wasn’t really looking at the future.” He kept hearing about the school’s recent hero, though: Darius Miles, who’d skipped college and gone straight to the NBA. Miles came home regularly, talking at his alma mater, daring the world to challenge his pride in East St. Louis. Liddell got to know him, forging a mentor-student relationship that would link the two in the minds of hometown prep sports enthusiasts. It would also create a basis for comparison to Miles that Liddell still hears today.
And then, in Liddell’s senior year, envelopes emblazoned with university crests started pouring in and the future got real. “I realized I could go to college,” he says, remembering how he sat down with his dad and decided on SLU because there he’d be close to home, playing in front of his family and friends.
That summer, talking to the coach of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Runnin’ Rebels, he wavered, and headlines in the July 10, 2004, Las Vegas Review-Journal gloated that UNLV had snagged Liddell without even trying. Tommie Liddell Sr. hurriedly told the press it was all a misunderstanding; his son was still going to SLU.
He hadn’t met the academic requirements, though—which meant a year of college prep. Sure that their boy was bound for glory, his parents gulped and sent him away to the famed Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Va., an institution known for its rather good basketball team. Grades, which Liddell had struggled with at East St. Louis, were a primary focus at the buttoned-down prep school. “We had to be in our rooms, with our doors open, and a monitor would constantly walk up and down our halls to make sure we were doing work,” he says. “Our daily routine was waking up before the sun was up—6, 6:15. Then breakfast. Formation at 7:15. Classes about 7:30. Lunch at 12. After practice, study hall. At 9:30, lights off.” Students couldn’t even have cell phones. “If they caught you with a cell phone, they’d send it back home,” he says, awed. Able to phone home just a couple of times a week, he called after every game and gave a minute-by-minute report.
As Liddell’s grades shot up, his play began to attract attention from some of the nation’s top schools. Once again, rumors spread that he was open to the possibility of reneging on his signed letter of intent. Once again, he chose SLU—but lead assistant coach Angres Thorpe knew that the chance Liddell could still fly the coop was real. Thorpe called Hargrave as often as he could, urging Liddell to keep pushing.
Liddell made the dean’s list.
“I wanted that comfort zone,” he says now. “Looking at the crowd, knowing my family is supporting me every game—it gives me motivation. I was already gone for a year without my family seeing me play. Why would I want to go somewhere to play for four years when I could stay home?”
SLU wasn’t exactly home, though. It was a big campus, with lots of white kids, lots of landscaping and fountains and—what was really hard for Liddell to get used to—all sorts of friendly strangers greeting him by name, wishing him well. “Everybody just says hi to me,” he told assistant SLU athletic director Janet Oberle, disconcerted.
Liddell had known East St. Louis inside and out; he knew where to go, whom to talk to, whom to trust. He had to learn that all over again.
“He steps back,” observes Oberle, “takes a little bit to trust people, wants to see what’s going on and what your motivations are—but once he knows you’re on the same page, he’s a great kid, really likable, with subtlety.” When she asked how he felt about talking to the press, he told her, “Well, the ones that know something about you, I really like it, because then you are just talking to them.”
“He wants to know you’re invested,” says Oberle. “If he has to tell you the story, he doesn’t know if you deserve to hear it. It’s a bit more maturity than you see in most 19-year-olds. He’s a pretty keen observer of people and their motivation. You will not trick him easily. It’s a little bit of street smarts—don’t make a bad decision about who you trust.”
As Liddell studied his new world, Thorpe watched his quiet recruit like a hawk. “The adjustment from high school to college is a big one,” the assistant coach murmurs, “but he matured as the year went on, took more of a leadership role, set expectations for himself and the team, meshed really well with the guys.
“He’s more vocal than people give him credit for,” Thorpe adds, appreciating the easy wit he’s heard escape from Liddell as he runs down the floor, the way he can go into a huddle in a tight game and come out laughing. He seems shy, but he’s not, Thorpe says: “He’s just the way he is, calm and composed. It lets the other guys play at that calm level as well. It relieves the pressure for everybody.”
For all his NBA talk, Liddell is humble in assessing his first season in the college ranks. “I think people know me because I had a good season,” he says with a shrug, “but I think I could’ve had a much better season than I did. I could’ve been more aggressive, gotten more rebounds. I think I should’ve took more shots, but, being that I’m unselfish, I like to get my teammates involved. A lot of people say I pass too much, but, you know, it’s just part of my game.”
Liddell spent the summer after his freshman year playing with the Eastside Ballers of the Bonner League, a big plus for a player heading into a potentially defining year. Billikens coach Brad Soderberg worked with him on mechanics, too, honing a jump shot that some feel is the only question mark in an otherwise promising postcollege career. “Every day I’d sit in a chair under the goal, put the ball in my hand and work on my follow-through,” Liddell says, amused. “It worked.”
Instead of balling on the East Side courts he knew as a teen, he’s content to play summer leagues and pick-ups daily at SLU. “There’s always that one guy on the playground that thinks he has to prove something to somebody, to say I’m nothing,” he says. “So I stay away from them.”
On the flip side, his family’s still near, a short drive away or, on game days, right in the building.
“My family was at almost every game,” he says, “my dad, my cousins, my mom, sitting right by the bench.” He plays for their eyes, and he says his biggest hope is to make enough money so they can retire. “My mom’s been working ever since I was little,” he says. “Seeing her come home working late hours makes me want to make a way for her to not work at all.”
Another touchstone is the man who’s become his friend in addition to being his hero: Darius Miles, now a seventh-year NBA pro.
“I talk to him daily,” Liddell says. “He’s like a big brother to me. Every day he’s talking to me about basketball, about what I need to do, about how people in the league are stronger.” So what’s the most important thing he’s learned from Miles—technique? Strategy?
“Never forget where you come from.”
Others have questioned Liddell’s choice of role model: After going third in the 2000 NBA draft, Miles has bounced among three teams, failed to live up to some serious hype and developed, reportedly, one of the worst attitudes in a league already filled with prima donnas and thugs. But Liddell’s quick to defend his friend: “He doesn’t care what people say about him, and that’s one thing I really admire. There are certain things people don’t know. Unfortunately, he had reacted in bad ways to some situations, but you never really know until the whole story’s out.”
If Liddell is anything, he’s nonjudgmental. “His thoughts are his thoughts,” says Oberle. “He doesn’t speak for anybody but himself, and he expects you to be the same.”
Liddell is majoring in criminal justice. “Where I’m from, people really don’t know their rights,” he explains. “I figure if I can learn and then spread it around, that’ll be a good thing.” He worked over the summer in the local American Civil Liberties Union office, interning for former Billiken center Redditt Hudson, who was a police officer before becoming an outspoken civil-rights advocate.
“He’s passionate,” Liddell says of Hudson. “He wants to help people in whatever form he can.” Watching him, Liddell rethought a few assumptions about the world: “It made me realize different things that citizens don’t know about their rights, and following a police lieutenant around gave me a better feel for why police do the things they do. People think the police are their enemies, but when they ride around, they have to be aware of the situation. They have to worry about their safety, too.”
It’d be too easy to frame Liddell’s choices from here as simple: Aim solely for the NBA or continue to hit the books, with a couple of former ballplayers as mentors. After all, no kid in his position, with his talent, would be able to block out all the NBA possibilities.
“You can’t tell me the NBA doesn’t recognize a player of his athletic abilities,” says SLU broadcaster and local hoops junkie Frank Cusumano. “Let’s face it: The triple-double [at least 10 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists in one game] is unattainable for 99 percent of the players in the country, but every time he puts on high-tops he’s got a shot.”
But Cusumano’s also quick to note that Liddell’s off-court demeanor changed equally dramatically through his freshman campaign, a “night-and-day” change in attitude and confidence.
“I think I’m more outspoken,” concedes Liddell. “I used to be real quiet, just walk around campus and not talk to nobody. Now I like to have my opinion heard.”
Thorpe sees the change as a natural progression: “There are different goals he wants to reach. Off the floor, he’s become much more of a communicator. He’s gotten to a certain comfort level, to express himself the same way he does at home. He’s understanding how he has to conduct himself; he’s obviously in the public eye, and he has the maturity to understand that now. In the last year, he’s allowed more people to get into his inner circle.”
Hudson laughs off the suggestion that Liddell is getting ahead of himself by declaring his desire for a pro career.
“For every young man, being brash is a requisite,” he says. “You’ve gotta have some of that, even if you don’t express it outwardly—you’ve gotta have that sense that ‘Hey, I can go up against anybody.’ I’d tease him that I was going to come down and show him how to play the game. He didn’t seem worried!”
Though Hudson shielded Liddell from some of the more controversial aspects of his work as the racial-justice manager of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, he exposed him to as much as he could. “We had a lot of discussions centered around individual rights—the importance of asserting those rights, really standing up for them,” says Hudson. “I wanted him to see the importance of giving back, too. Tommie’s an exceptionally talented player, and that will allow him to go back to his own community and really communicate to the young men there what is important for them to understand. We need young people to come back and talk truth. That’s what resonates.
“One of the reasons he wound up with me over the summer in some cases is that we paralleled each other,” Hudson adds. “I’m from University City. To come to a predominantly white Jesuit university—I had not experienced an environment like that at any time in my life. I didn’t feel connected to anything. I knew I was a player for the team, but beyond that I was a visitor. That feeling is inescapable, I think. The sense of being on an island where you are observed and monitored and engaged is never completely gone for any inner-city athlete. Different players handle it different ways.”
Hudson sees Liddell as strikingly insightful, a kid with far more potential—even off the basketball court—than anyone realizes. “A lot of times,” he says, “that gets lost in the narrative, particularly for an inner-city black athlete.” Still, Hudson worries about the pressures on the young athlete, from grades and on-court expectations to “all the things that life is going to throw at you anyway.” Young African-American men in inner cities run a daily gauntlet of challenges. “By the time these young men make it to campus, it’s like they have won marathon after marathon, and now they have to be fresh for yet another challenge.”
So what keeps Liddell going? “I think he’s hanging onto the same thing that so many young men hang onto, and that is the strength, the inner strength, that they developed while running all those marathons,” Hudson says. “You get to be pretty strong; you get to be pretty durable; and you get to be pretty recyclable. You have this innate sense that you can go on no matter what.”
Asked what his childhood gave him—besides the comfort of family—Liddell answers: “Heart. Growing up in the inner city, there’s a lot of negativity around you. People make you tough. And then, when you go out into the real world, you don’t have anything to be scared of.”
