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Luol Deng's part of righteousness

Discussion in 'NBA Dish' started by joeson332, Feb 27, 2015.

  1. joeson332

    joeson332 Member

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    Just a very good read here from Michael Wallace of ESPN.com. Describes Luol Deng's personal life, that health scare in the playoffs 2 years ago, the whole Hawks racist owner incident and his transition with Miami. A very good read i'm sure you'd appreciate.


    MIAMI -- On good days, the worst hurled at Luol Deng in grade school were the racist slurs a Sudanese refugee child was far too young to comprehend yet never quite able to forget.



    Samara, meaning black.



    Hunga bunga, mockery for ape.



    Shakshuka, epithet from a cheap north African meal.



    On bad days, those classroom slurs escalated to slinging fists in the schoolyard.



    "It was just constant," Deng, a Miami Heat forward, says 25 years later. "I had this one teacher, and as I got older and translated things he used to say, it was racist and hatred stuff he was saying toward me and my brother. A lot of times, we fought because of that stuff."



    Yet this was the better life.



    This was the safe haven -- the relative oasis -- during the early 1990s in Alexandria, Egypt, where Deng and eight siblings fled without their parents to escape a decades-long civil war in their native Sudan between the Muslim north and Christian south. Luol's father, Aldo Deng, was a Sudanese government official who, according to British media reports, was jailed in 1989 during a violent coup by Muslim rebels who imposed Sharia law.



    Released after three months, Aldo and his wife Martha put their children on a plane to sneak to Egypt under the care of the eldest siblings, who would work and live as refugees. Luol's memory is sketchy from those moments at age 4, but he's heard stories of everyone "waking up at night and leaving all of our belongings behind to get onto a plane, hoping and praying they wouldn't figure out who our father was."



    Aldo and Martha then escaped to Europe seeking asylum -- a search that ultimately separated the Deng family for five years, connected only by the struggle they endured a continent apart.



    So considering what he has survived from birth to the security, wealth and status of being a two-time NBA All-Star with more than a decade of league service, it's easy to pardon Deng for the polite scoff when asked: What did it take to forgive Atlanta Hawks GM Danny Ferry and move on?

    http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/page/blackhistoryNBA1/luol-deng-path-righteousness
     
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