A slam-dunk

Growing by leaps and bounds, Ewing makes it to the Hall of Fame

Richard Burton was there when Patrick Ewing first bounced a basketball as a teenager in Cambridge and he will be there when Ewing is inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield today.

Burton was the first person to recruit Ewing to play basketball, though only for a pickup game.

"A bunch of us Jamaicans used to hang out at Hoyt Field and we would see Patrick riding his bike all over the place," Burton recalled this week. "One day, we wanted to play a full-court game, and we were short one player. I saw him on his bike and asked him if he wanted to play. I told him, 'Listen, buddy, whenever you get the ball, get it to me and I'll do the rest.' He kind of liked it, and we started teaching him the rules and regulations, the basics of how to play. He just grew a little faster than all of us."

Ewing, who moved to Cambridge from Kingston, Jamaica, as a 13-year-old, used to watch the action at Hoyt Field from his family's River Street back porch. As Ewing became accepted by the other youngsters, he started joining in regularly.

"The first time I tried to play, I was terrible," Ewing said. "But I liked it."

Ewing enjoyed basketball enough to work through the gawky stage of his youth, growing to nearly 7 feet tall in high school and, eventually, to experience a long career in which he won two Olympic gold medals but no NBA titles. He was a member of the original Dream Team in 1992, was named to the NBA's 50th Anniversary All-Time Team, and was an 11-time All-Star.

"It's definitely disappointing," Ewing said. "Everywhere I've been, I've won, from grade school to high school to college - everywhere except the NBA. I wish I could have won, but I still feel I had a great career."

Though Ewing spent his formative years in Cambridge, his time there was brief, and his identity was formed as he performed in the uniforms of rivals of Boston-area teams, from Georgetown University to the New York Knicks. Ewing, 46, now an assistant coach with the Orlando Magic, represented the Boston area as an athlete only at the amateur and high school levels.

But Ewing's journey to riches and fame started on The Coast, the area around River Street, a Jamaican enclave that has provided a safe haven for immigrant families for decades.

In fact, while racial chaos reigned in Boston during school busing, Ewing was growing up in a stable environment, guided by family and friends, in an idyllic urban sanctuary.

"In the summertime, we would go to the park about 10 or 11 in the morning and stay there until 9:30 or 10 at night," said Burton, now a programmer at a Boston company. "We just were hanging out for the fun of it. We had our bikes, we had basketball and football. We would go to Central Square and Harvard Square. There was a pizza shop and sometimes our mothers would give us money and we would go for pizza, then go back to the park and hang out.

"Patrick's mother [Dorothy] would come out on the porch and say, 'You need to get inside now, it's getting dark.' After a while, she let him stay out later."

'Greatest coach'

Dorothy Ewing worked in the kitchen at Massachusetts General Hospital, saving enough money to move her children from Kingston.

"She was probably Patrick's greatest coach," said Florida Atlantic University coach Mike Jarvis, who guided Ewing at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. "She instilled in Patrick a work ethic, a sense of team, a competitive spirit, an attitude of being very positive, a never-give-up attitude. With discipline and love she basically, more than anybody else, put Patrick in a position to be successful.

"Patrick's mother was a strong person of faith and her belief in God and doing the right thing, working hard, and loving your neighbor as yourself, all that was instilled in Patrick, so those values of faith transcended the sport.

"And Patrick took his God-given gifts and worked every day harder than any player I've seen. I never had to yell or raise my voice about him working hard enough. There were times when I told him to slow down a bit. But he only knew one way, to give everything you have every second you are on the court. He was the ultimate team player, he was all about winning. He never cared about points or said, 'How many touches am I going to get?' "

A series of coaches worked with Ewing - Steve Jenkins, Tim Mahoney, and Jarvis at school, and Leo Papile with the Boston Amateur Basketball Club. Jarvis emphasized defense, inspired by the success of Bill Russell with the Celtics; John Thompson, once Russell's backup, continued the theme at Georgetown.

But Ewing was going to be among the centers revolutionizing the role of the big man. Both Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon, who will also be inducted into the Hall of Fame today, grew up playing soccer in their native lands. They were agile, mobile, and coordinated enough to become effective, short-range shooters, if they worked at it.

And Ewing did work at it.

"He went from having limited offensive skills in high school to being able to knock it down from either side of the lane," Papile said. "He did it the old-fashioned way; he spent thousands of hours working on that.

"Personality-wise, he's the same guy he was then. He's gregarious, a first-class teammate who always cared about his teammates, a we guy rather than a me guy. He still has that big, huge smile he had as a kid."

Leader by example

The enduring image of Ewing is his very genuine grin, an expression shaped by those long summer days at Hoyt Field and in discovering the world.

"Cambridge was a melting pot," Ewing said. "There were Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Barbadians, Haitians, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese. We had a great community, a great tradition at Rindge Tech.

"But it was definitely hostile every time we went outside the city."

"It was the time of forced busing," Jarvis said. "We dealt with a lot of racism outside of Cambridge, which was a pretty homogeneous, integrated, cosmopolitan community. We had to change a lot of flat tires, replace broken windows, take guys to hospitals, there was glass in kids' eyes, there were a lot of racial comments and gestures.

"We dealt with it because we had to, but it was also a means of motivation."

Crossing the Charles River added a wariness to anyone coming from The Coast.

"[Ewing] embraced it and took on a leadership role in terms of the team," Jarvis said of the difficulties of playing away from home. "His intensity level and focus between the lines was incredible. He led by example."

By the time Ewing was a ninth-grader, he had grown to 6-9. The next year, Ewing joined a high school varsity team that would go 77-1, losing only to Wilbur Cross High School on a snowy night in New Haven. Ewing was subpar because of an illness.

But Ewing's basketball horizons were expanding beyond New England. Basketball was breaking out of its shell at the professional level, though spotlights were not yet shining on the youngsters. Ewing was 15 when he had his first exposure on the national scene, joining the BABC for a trip to Philadelphia, the first time Papile saw him "go down swinging and get off the canvas and fight back."

In 1979 in Boston, Ewing led the BABC to victory over the Soviet Union at Don Bosco High in a tournament watched much more intently by scouts than the media or public. At that point, it was clear Ewing was headed for a bigger stage.

But, though Ewing lived a short distance from Boston Garden, and his coaches were guided by the spirit of Russell, he would not have a chance to become a Celtic. After four years at Georgetown, he became the top pick in the NBA draft, spending the next 16 years with the Knicks.

"I spoke to him once a long time ago and told him that someday, if he realized his God-given talents and continued to do what he was doing, he would be in the Hall of Fame," Jarvis said. "I can't think of anybody who worked harder their whole lifetime than he did. He makes all of us proud, what he's done, wherever he's been."

Frank Dell'Apa can be reached at f_dellapa@globe.com.