OPINION

By Mike DeCourcy

updated 5:51 p.m. ET July 31, 2008

Mike DeCourcy

To explain how far Hasheem Thabeet has traveled as a basketball player, you could start in Tanzania, the place of his birth. That would be intriguing, but it only conveys his long journey to play the game in a circumstance where he can learn, improve and test himself against the best competition among players his age.

You could go back to his first days as a freshman at Connecticut, when he'd run up and down the court like Asafa Powell but stumble around the lane like Will Ferrell. That would be entertaining, but it only suggests he once was fearful -- not that one day he might become fearsome.

No, the best place to go for an understanding of how profoundly Thabeet has improved is inside the mind of the point guard whose job it is to get him the basketball. A.J. Price ran the UConn offense last season, when the 7-3 Thabeet averaged 10.5 points and shot 60.3 percent from the floor as a sophomore center. Price says he frequently hesitated to throw an entry pass to Thabeet, even when he had perfect post-up position with a defender at his back and no double-team in sight.

"I had to think twice: time, game situation, score. Because you wouldn't always get the best result," Price says. "Hasheem's hunger to go get the ball is different than last year. I just see a total difference. He demands the ball. You almost have to throw it to him."

Price, recovering from surgery to repair a torn ACL, hasn't been throwing those passes in UConn's summer pickup games. But he watches Huskies guard Jerome Dyson toss lobs toward the rim, just like the Orlando Magic do for star center Dwight Howard. And he sees Thabeet grabbing the ball with his snowshoe-size mitts and stuffing it in the basket.

It's a picture of the one player who might block what many perceive to be an inevitable, inexorable march by the North Carolina Tar Heels toward the 2009 NCAA championship. Thabeet's ascent could make the Huskies the team best equipped to challenge Carolina.

"We're on a mission for a national championship, but we've got to win games first," Thabeet says, his deep voice tinted with a distinctive accent. "Right now, we're working hard to get to Detroit and play in the Final Four. We're not thinking about, 'Yeah, we're going to win a national championship.' How are we going to get there? That's what we're thinking about."

Though the story of how Thabeet came to play basketball in America isn't uncommon, it's still pretty amazing. He played soccer as a boy in Dar es Salaam and wasn't introduced to the sport that would change his life until he was 15. He quickly showed a talent for the game and embraced the suggestion it might help him come to the United States and advance his education. He began e-mailing coaches here and eventually wound up at Cypress Community Christian, a high school near Houston. He went from project to prospect to player in a blur.

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Although home seems far away now, Thabeet has returned to Tanzania each of the past two offseasons. He was back in May for three weeks, even though that meant sacrificing some of the weight and strength gains he had made; he had gotten up to 278 but dropped 12 pounds and is working to get that back and add more. But the trip gave him the opportunity to attend the Sullivan Summit, an annual gathering of world government and political leaders designed to examine how Africa can improve and enrich itself and its people.

Thabeet's basketball success has earned him an appointment as a "sports ambassador" for Tanzania. "There were a lot of presidents from Europe (at the summit); Jesse Jackson (was there)," he says. "I got to meet all of them. It was great."

Thabeet believes he eventually will return to live in Tanzania, but he can't even bring himself now to say he misses home.

"Because over here there's a lot of opportunity," Thabeet says. "There's a lot of things you can do more than in Tanzania. People I went to school with, they don't have jobs. They're just over there hanging out. I don't think it's a good place at all for somebody that's not ... the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor."

After each of Thabeet's first two seasons at UConn, the mock draft types predicted he would enter the NBA draft so he could help out his family financially. But Thabeet is serious about his game. He is trying not just to make money but to make it big.

Thabeet is rare among today's collegians in that he actually heeded the advice of his college coaches to spend another year in Division I. Now his expected advancement as a scorer and the obvious dearth of talent in the next draft are leading to his being projected as a top five pick.

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