“For me, I’m from here,” he said. “I was born and raised around here. Just giving money isn’t always the answer. It’s about showing my face and being hands on with the kids. They look up to you. It’s important for them to see that someone from the inner city here can make it.
“I think when they see me – or someone like me – they see hope.”
Almost on cue, a little girl of no more than 6 or 7 came up and stood right at his elbow.
“Do you really play in the NBA?” she said with a mix of timidity and disbelief.
“I used to,” he said.
“And you’re really from here?” she added.
He nodded and she skittered off toward her waiting friends, her face beaming with delight.
The 36-year-old Cook — who, by the way, also has infused money into this gym, buying new glass backboards and the overhead score clock – is one of the most accomplished basketball players to come out of Dayton.
A McDonald’s All-American at Dunbar High, he led his Wolverine teams to the state semi-finals as a junior and the Division II state title as a senior in 2006.
He was part of Thad Matta’s heralded “Thad Five” recruiting class at Ohio State and after one season, jumped to the NBA as a first-round pick of the Philadelphia 76ers.
He promptly was traded to Miami and played six seasons with the Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets and Chicago Bulls, winning the NBA All Star three-point contest in 2009 and making the league’s championship series with the Thunder three years later.
After that came an eight-year overseas tour, playing everywhere from Ukraine and Iran to France, Germany, Portugal and Israel.
Now back in Dayton — where his daughter, Ja’Kyia, the oldest of his four kids ,just graduated from Ponitz High and is headed to Alabama A&M — he takes part once a week in the Dayton Scholars Literacy and Enrichment Program, a summertime effort that this year involves some 200 boys and girls at three sites, Corinthian Baptist, St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church and Zion Baptist.
In its sixth year, the program, according to program director Dione Benson and site coordinator and longtime Dayton Public Schools educator Mozelle Garcia, provides children from Pre-K through grade five with lessons in reading, math, writing, social-emotional learning and a recreation activity, which was what Cook was a part of.
“We just want to highlight the positives going on in our community.,” Benson said. “Not all kids get a chance to see positive things in our community, so to have Daequan come in shows them that.
“We have other people, too. A young lady does dance with them over at Zion Baptist on Tuesdays and Thursdays and two women are coming in to do quilting with the kids. They’ll all be able to do their own quilt piece and there’ll be a little history lesson, how quilting was used in slavery times as an educational tool and a way to freedom.”
Speaking from the heart
Cook wasn’t the only basketball personality taking part in the program the other day. While he added celebrity, Kalerrio Reaves ‚the Meadowdale High point guard last season who’s now headed to Clark State, added some heartfelt reality to the proceedings as he and his 6-foot-8 Cougars’ teammate, Lee Benson III, spoke to the 60 some youngsters in attendance and answered their questions.
“This was my first time ever speaking to a group like this,” Reaves later admitted. “I just let it flow from my heart and told them what I’ve been through and some of the stuff I’ve seen.”
“My mom had eight kids, so we weren’t getting new Air Jordans and stuff like that,” he told his attentive audience. “Some of my peers would crack on me for the stuff I had and I was always getting mad. And sometimes I’d walk out of class.”
He talked about learning to come to grips with who he was and explained how he had survived and prospered.
“Listen to what he’s saying,” the 77-year-old Garcia chimed in from her nearby seat. “This is important.”
He told how his mom practiced tough love — “She was my biggest hater,” he said — and how she’d tell him he wasn’t anything yet and how he’d worked to prove she was wrong.
He told them about his cousin from Trotwood, who he said he had 15 Division I football scholarship offers and how he lost everything when he committed “a gun robbery” and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“He’s a good guy, but you’ve got to surround yourself with good people and he didn’t,” Reaves said.
Garcia, in private summation later, added to Reaves’ thoughts:
“A lot of kids have this idea about a pro athlete and all they see is a million dollars, a car, a pretty girl and a big house. To them, it’s money…money…money…money!
“They don’t understand the other part. The hard work you need to do to even get there and then the way you’ve got conduct yourself to stay there. It’s about who you associate with.”
After teaching over 30 years in the Dayton Public Schools system, retiring, then returning as a sub and now – at the request of Corinthian Baptist pastor Reverend Dr. P.E. Henderson Jr. – serving as the director of an ambitious educational services program at the James. H. McGee Blvd. church and also assisting Benson, Garcia knows what she’s speaking about:
“When I taught at Roth (Middle School) so many of my seventh and eighth grade students were very talented.
“But I went to more funerals of young people than I ever should have and that bothered me. It really bothered me. They just don’t understand. They wanted to make a million dollars selling drugs. They don’t know the street can cost them their life.”
Be the best of the best
Though she didn’t speak of it Thursday, Benson knows this firsthand.
She comes from an accomplished family of educators and athletes that also has been marred by violence. Her dad Lee Sr. was a basketball star in high school and college and was a longtime DPS science teacher. He still helps in the Dayton Scholars program.
And she was an athlete and has three degrees herself – from Sinclair, Wilberforce and Wright State – and has done some teaching.
Her two oldest brothers – 6-foot-11 Lee Jr. and 6-foot-5 Ryan – were standout basketball talents who once drew a lot of Division I interest.
But as a teenager, Lee Jr. ended up sent to prison on drug and firearm charges — his story eventually being featured on HBO’s “Real Sports” – and Ryan twice was the victim of gun violence, the second shooting at an East Dayton housing project off Springfield Street in 1994 taking his life at age 18.
After the first shooting, Ryan and I sat together at UD Arena — he was in the midst of a beyond-belief season playing for Dunbar High just a few months after he escaped death — and he took me on a graphic tour of the pinkish, bubbly scars left from the nine times he’d been shot in the face, neck, side, lung, biceps, lower arm and hand.
Six bullets were still in his body, two of them in his head.
“They call me a walking miracle,” he said. “They thought my life was done.”
A year later, it was.
That’s why a program like the Dayton Scholars is so important to people like Dione Benson and Mozelle Garcia.
“This is where my passion lies,” said Benson, who taught physical education at Rivers Edge Montessori School last year. “This is what I want to focus on.”
In the short term, the Dayton Scholars program is geared to help kids be able to pass the state-imposed reading proficiency mandate that allows third graders to advance to the fourth grade. But in the long run, its aim is to help them survive, thrive and prosper in life.
“I know they think I’m firm, but they know I love them,” Garcia said softly, before telling the kids: “We just want you to be the best of the best.”
Lee Benson III said that was the point he tried to make when he spoke: “I was trying to tell them to walk around with their heads held high. That they should follow their dreams and not let anybody tell them they can’t do it.” To that point, Reaves called on several kids to stand up, hold the microphone and tell everyone what they wanted to be one day.
While there were many dreams of being a pro athlete, there also were kids who said they wanted to be an astronaut, a scientist, a hairdresser, a lawyer and a veterinarian.
Finally, one little boy stood and said:” I want to be a pro football player or a paleontologist.” “A paleontologist, what’s that?” someone asked.
Without hesitation, the boy explained: “A paleontologist is someone who studies dinosaur bones and fossils from the past and it helps tell us about living now.”
At her seat, you saw Mozelle Garcia — like that little girl earlier with Daequan Cook — her face beaming with delight.
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