On the ball

BC's Rice takes basketball - and fatherhood - seriously

Tyrese Rice trudged up the dozen steps to Voute Hall, 10 minutes early for The Games of Life, UN551.01. Baggy blue jeans hung off his waist, nearly concealing a pair of red leather Nikes. He was topped by a gray hoodie and a straight-brimmed Cleveland Indians hat. Rice walked in and plopped down on a wood-framed couch on the right side of the dorm lounge-turned-classroom.

Rice fiddled with his cell phone and listened to the lecture, which was on games and gender identity. The professor explained that men who grow up without fathers are most likely to commit violence, to feel as if they must prove their manhood. And then he craned his neck and looked at Rice.

"Rese," the professor said. "What are your thoughts on this?"

Silence.

Rice could have told him that he belied that notion, that his mother gave him basketball, his grandfather gave him discipline, and his father left him and gave him almost nothing. Tyrese sometimes reminds Allison Rice, his mother, of Wayne Jefferson when he plays basketball. That is all.

Rice could have told the professor that he is a father now, and that giving Ashawn, his 2-year-old son, what his own father never gave him has driven him to become Boston College's leader as he enters his senior season, an all-ACC point guard (last season), perhaps an All-American point guard (this season), and one of the nation's most insatiable scorers, a player who hung 46 points on North Carolina in March last year.

Instead, Rice shook his head. "No thoughts," he said.

"No stance?"

"No stance at all."

Rice expresses himself wildly on the basketball court. He points to family members in the crowd. He hollers plays and encourages teammates. He chats with opponents. As a freshman, he would yell at Craig Smith and Jared Dudley, upperclassmen who represented the program.

"I know when people are playing hard," Rice said. "I know when they're focusing in. If I felt like they're not doing so, then I'm going to speak on it."

A natural shooter

Away from the sport, Rice shares little. When his brother Tony asked him this offseason about returning to BC or going pro, he mumbled an answer and the topic didn't bubble up again. So his classmates did not learn his thoughts on growing up fatherless.

Allison Rice met Wayne Jefferson in Salisbury, N.C., where Allison grew up and Jefferson played basketball at Livingstone College. Allison played, too, for North Carolina A&T, for three seasons. Tyrese was born in May 1987, before her senior year. Allison's basketball career ended, and, for a time, so did her relationship with Jefferson, who left her alone.

Allison raised Tyrese with his aunt and his grandmother in Salisbury. Everyone played basketball; Tyrese keeps a news clipping detailing the time his grandmother scored 72 points in one high school game. "She started it all," he said.

From the time he was 2, his family placed toys in Tyrese's crib. They would hear him crying from the other room, and when they walked in, all the toys were inside or around a trash can. The boy, they realized, was shooting hoops. In time, he would join the rest of the family, playing on a dirt driveway behind the house.

"Everything was a bucket," said Angel Rice, Tyrese's aunt. "The trash, the sink. He threw things all over the house, spilled food, broke things. His grandmother said, 'Just let him go.' Tyrese was pretty much given free rein."

The family moved to Richmond, Va., after Tyrese turned 10. He enrolled in AAU programs, kept improving. Rice was "a leader," said Rashad Lewis, one of Rice's closest friends from Richmond. "Never a follower."

Richmond annually ranked among the most crime-ridden cities in America, but his family never worried about Rice straying toward trouble.

Rice spent each free moment shooting, running, or lifting weights.

"Growing up where I grew up at, it just made me tougher," said Rice. "It gave me a different mind-set. It was like, no such thing as being soft where I grew up. If they saw a weakness on you, then you could get picked on every day.

"It just made me tough and gave me a different outlook when I step on the basketball court. Because I just think, 'There's no way this guy has more heart than me.' It just made me a lot tougher mentally."

Mother is his guide

In Rice's early teens, he was gaining notice and was on the cusp of earning attention from college coaches. It was then that Jefferson attempted to enter Rice's life. He had been in touch with Allison, but Rice wanted no part of him.

"He's not a bad person," Allison said. "He just made some bad choices after Tyrese was born."

Jefferson follows Rice's career and speaks regularly with Allison about him. Rice rejects any overtures to see or talk with him.

"I tried to keep the line of communication open as much as I could," Allison said. "Tyrese was a young teenager. There was only so much I could do. I do know his dad kept up with him.

"I think so much time has gone by. I'm always hopeful that they will come back together and have some sort of relationship.

"I tell his father, 'It took you 12, 15 years to decide you want to be a part of his life. It may take Tyrese the same amount of time to decide he wants to be a part of yours.' Maybe when Tyrese is a little older.

"I don't want to say he's bitter. Tyrese is the type of kid that is faithful and loyal to people that have been faithful and loyal to him through the years."

And no one means more to Rice than his mother.

"She put the ball in my hand," Rice said. "She showed me everything."

As a freshman at BC, Rice struggled going to the basket, unable to glide by defenders with ease as he did in high school. Allison asked him, "Why you don't shoot floaters no more?"

"That's a good question," Rice thought.

He hadn't needed his floater since middle school; at L.C. Bird High, he could simply slither all the way to the hoop and lay the ball in. Rice started lofting shots over big men rather than trying to drive around them. It forced big defenders to rush at him, often opening a passing lane. The floater became, and remains, one of his most potent weapons.

"Made the game a lot easier," Rice said. "She definitely expanded my game with her just asking that one question."

Son becomes father

He leaned on his mother for something else prior to that season, when he discovered he would become a father. The mother's family, at first, blamed Rice for being reckless, Allison said. Angel wondered to herself, "Will he be willing to accept some of his things being cut in half?"

Ashawn was born in January 2006, in the middle of Rice's freshman season. At 19, Rice became a father.

"It took me a while to make that adjustment," he said.

Ashawn sometimes clung closer to Allison than Rice when he visited Richmond. Rice drifted toward his friends during visits home for a few months. He slept late.

"You have a new focus," Allison told him. "You have to have a new mind-set. You have to look at basketball and school as something different.

"Don't look at it and become bitter. Look at it as a situation where you can step up your game and set that example."

Rice learned. He and Ashawn's mother are not together, but they maintain a cordial relationship. Ashawn lives with his mother and often spends weekends with Allison. Rice visits when he can. He traveled to Richmond a few weeks ago; Ashawn ran into his arms and yelled, "Dada!"

Rice wakes up early in the morning to play with Ashawn. He changes Ashawn's Pampers. He takes Ashawn to the mall. He reads him SpongeBob books and teaches him phonics. "They're inseparable," Tony said. Rice tacks photographs of Ashawn in his locker. He made the screen saver in both of his cell phones a picture of Ashawn.

"I look at him, and I realize that my life is beyond me," Rice said. "It's not just about me. That pretty much pushes me. He's everywhere in my life, and everybody knows that."

Said Allison, "I think he wants to be the father that his father never was to him. He understands what he has to do for his son's sake."

This season, foremost, that means graduating. Close behind is returning the Eagles to the stature Rice knew when he came to Boston College. He knows Troy Bell advanced to the Sweet 16 his senior season. He watched Craig Smith go out with a 28-win season when Rice was a freshman, then watched Jared Dudley win 21 games the next season.

Rice's Eagles sputtered to a 14-17 finish last season, last in the ACC. He collected information about the NBA, and grappled with the decision before deciding he wanted a better exit.

"I felt like if I left early, then my legacy here at BC wouldn't be the same as the Troy Bells and the Craig Smiths and the Jared Dudleys and Sean Marshalls," Rice said. "When they left, they all went out with a bang. I felt like me leaving with a 14-17 mark, it wouldn't mark my position in BC history."

The decision came quickly then. He realizes it may have been tougher had he known what he knows now. "Some of the struggles that my family is going through," Rice said. "I'm not going to pinpoint everything right now."

Rice had shared enough. He showed a visitor the way out of Conte Forum and headed to a team meeting, making certain not to be late. He has made himself a leader, for his teammates and, first, for two people in Richmond, Va.

"His mother and his son," Tony said. "That's the reason why he works."

Adam Kilgore can be reached at akilgore@globe.com

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in Tuesday's Sports section about Boston College basketball player Tyrese Rice incorrectly stated which years the team qualified for the NCAA Tournament. The Eagles were not in the tournament in 2003, when Troy Bell was the team's star guard.