Maurice Cheeks is really cool!!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/sports/basketball/11BERK.html


A Star-Spangled Savior Is Showered With Praise
By IRA BERKOW


VEN Billy Cunningham's mother wrote to Maurice Cheeks, expressing her admiration for rescuing 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert from the most profound embarrassment before the Portland Trail Blazers-Dallas Mavericks N.B.A. playoff game on April 25. Helen Cunningham, the mother of the former N.B.A. star forward and coach of the 1983 champion Philadelphia 76ers, is one of the more than 1,700 people who in the last two weeks sent e-mail messages or wrote letters of appreciation to Cheeks, the Trail Blazers' reserved but effective coach.

Letters are still arriving.

But on that night, as Natalie stood near halfcourt before more than 20,000 fans in the Rose Garden in Portland and in front of national television cameras, the words to the national anthem stuck in her throat. Cheeks made the extraordinary gesture of suddenly appearing like a dream at her side and slipping a paternal arm around her shoulder while he began a duet. He then raised his right hand, as though conducting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and urged the crowd to join in, which it did, vigorously, out of relief and a shared sense of humanity.

Cheeks's moment of chivalry, replayed numerous times on television news and sports shows, touched the heart of some Americans in a most welcome and unexpected way. Ministers have written that Cheeks demonstrated the embodiment of the Good Samaritan, and spoke of him in their sermons. Coaches expressed sentiments that it was the kind of message in sports they hope to convey ?as opposed to the anger and rage and self-promotion that is so prevalent.

Many have asked for tapes of the incident. Parents and teachers felt compelled to write. Billy Cunningham, having tuned in to the game at his home in a Philadelphia suburb, saw Natalie, an eighth grader, suddenly grow paralyzed with fear. Like virtually everyone else watching, he desperately hoped that she would quickly recover.

"What Maurice did," Cunningham said, "brought tears to my eyes. I was so proud of him. But that was typical Maurice, to spontaneously do the right thing at the right time and generally without any fanfare. And so smart."

? Cunningham was the coach of the 76ers when Cheeks joined the team in 1978 as a relatively unheralded rookie out of unheralded West Texas State. The lean, 6-foot-1 Cheeks quickly earned a starting job as point guard ?and quiet leader ?on a team with standout veterans like Julius Erving, Bobby Jones and Doug Collins.

"Shortly after Maurice rescued that girl," said Cunningham, who coached Cheeks for seven seasons, "my mother called me. She said, `I'm writing Maurice a letter. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.' I called Maurice and told him to be expecting a letter from my mother. He laughed, and promised to write her back."

Cheeks, reached recently by telephone, said of that moment with Natalie Gilbert: "I never thought about doing it before I did it. I just saw a little girl in trouble and I went to help her. I'm a father. I have two kids myself. I'd have wanted someone to help them if they could."

About the warm and voluminous response to Cheeks, Cunningham said, "Maurice deserves the recognition." It is true. While Cheeks was honored as a player ?his 15-year N.B.A. career was highlighted when he led the 76ers to an N.B.A. championship in 1983, and five times he was named to the N.B.A.'s all-defensive teams ?he never called attention to himself. He preferred to go about his business as a reserved, but fiercely competitive, professional. When Cheeks was traded to the Knicks in 1990, near the end of his career, I wrote that his game had class, but it was more like the shine of velvet than the glitter of gold.

Cheeks was named coach of the Trail Blazers before the 2001-2 season, after seven years as an assistant coach with Philadelphia. He inherited a team that seemed the polar opposite of him: Several of his players have had recent problems regarding drug possession, domestic violence, speeding and other violations. They have also scuffled among themselves in practice.

Oddly enough, the players on the court responded to Cheeks as a coach. "He has the unusual ability to be friendly with the players, but also to discipline them in such a way that he doesn't lose them," said Jason Quick, who covers the Trail Blazers for The Oregonian.

"When some of the guys got into some of those off-the-court problems this season," Cheeks said, "I told them: `You're grown men. You have to be in control, and be accountable.' "

But it shook him. "I'm the coach," he added. "A team is supposed to reflect the coach."

? But no one thought the players' poor behavior in any way reflected Cheeks. How they responded in the playoffs did. In Portland's recent opening playoff series against Dallas, the Trail Blazers fell behind by three games to none in the four-of-seven-game series. "A team has to win four games to win the series," Cheeks told his team. "And Dallas hasn't done that."

Portland won the next three games before losing Game 7.

"To have his team hang in like that was amazing," Cunningham said. "I've never heard of another team in the history of the N.B.A. that had more turmoil."

What he did with his team pales in regard to the heartstrings with his deliverance of young Natalie Gilbert. And were it not for another woman, Cheeks might never have been in a position to help, or, as he said, sing in public for the first time.

When Cheeks was a freshman at West Texas State in Canyon, Tex., a long, long way from the Robert Taylor housing projects on the South Side of Chicago where he was raised, he called his mother. He told her he was lonely and unhappy and wanted to come home.

"I had a scholarship there, one of the few colleges to offer me one," Cheeks said, "and my mother tried to reason with me to stay. I said, `No, I'm leaving.' "

"She said, `Maurice, you quit school and you better not come home,' " he recalled with a chuckle. "I stayed in school. I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't."