Luol Deng: A Tale of Wau

by Jim Huber
HOFMAG.com Exclusive
Wau, Sudan

The tiny cinderblock building, kept only for the most honored of the regional governor’s guests, smells of war. Five giant, silent men sit with their backs to the walls, automatic weapons resting in their laps.

There is no electricity and so, with the vicious sun already slipped behind the trees, one solitary candle flickers across the room.

There is no running water and so the bathroom, as such, is a putrid, vile closet to the left of the open door.

A rooster, confused and timeless, crows outside the one window.

Mangy mongrel dogs fight for the table scraps from the banquet just finished, an indescribable collection of meats, fruits and flatbread. Someone whispered camel. Another suggested goat. A third just shook his head as if to say “don’t ask.” After having toured the city, it was as though they had gone hut-to-hut, gathering whatever anyone had left, to honor the visiting guests.

One expects the average NBA player to come either from the mean streets or the back roads. Hardly from rutted dirt streets such as this in the heart of the Sudan.

While Luol Deng’s body is in the middle of another NBA season, his mind is with his father back in Sudan.

This is the home of Luol Deng of the Chicago Bulls. Wau once was a city of some 75,000, the proud home of a fine university. Today, perhaps 300,000 swell the area, with battered truckloads of refugees arriving every day, men, women, children all fleeing the terror of the genocide not far from here.

Deng was born here, the son of a well-to-do politician. When the civil war came, Luol’s father gathered his family in the dead of night and sent them first to Egypt, and finally to London. Luol’s story is well-told, of learning to play basketball in an English suburb, going to prep school in New Jersey, and on to Duke for a year before going into the NBA.

But while he flourishes in his heroic role in the Bulls’ rebirth, his father is back in Sudan trying to rebuild his homeland. There are heroes, you see, and there are heroes.

“You come,” the proud old man told me by phone one day, “you come, and then you tell America what needs to be done.”

The word “ravaged” doesn’t do justice. There isn’t much in our thesaurus that would. No electricity, no running water, not one paved road, nothing that would suggest a single vestige of civilization. The only building that seemed to escape the thunderous war was a beautiful mosque, so stark in its symbolism for the war between the Muslims and Christians. The mosque remains for what might be a half-dozen remaining Muslims. The Christians have ruins.

The hut where Luol and his brothers and sisters grew up was shelled nearly beyond recognition. The father gently stepped through the door, leading the way.

“This...” he waved a large black hand, “this...”

The hand covered his eyes for a moment before he gathered himself and changed directions.

“Come, see the school we have built.”

For some reason, and I could only assume it was because of his son the Chicago Bull, Aldo Deng wanted me to see the town’s basketball team more than anything.

“One day,” he said, “we will represent Sudan in the World Championships. You will see and remember this.”

There is one, raised outdoor court, made of cement blocks, with a teetering hoop nailed to a pole at each end. Anything out-of-bounds on any side falls two feet to the red clay below.

The “team,” eight or nine boys and one old woman, wear whatever they were given or could find. One young man plays barefoot, another in ragged sandals. The ball, so threadbare it seems ready to explode, is the only ball in the entire region. One basketball and 300,000 people, Aldo Deng cried, isn’t it an outrage? We need uniforms and sneakers, coaches and especially balls.

I nodded. And electricity and water and....

“Yes, but we deal with the heart of our children,” he said quietly, smiling. “This is our future.”

I sat that night on the banks of a tributary of the Nile and watched the villagers bathe and gather water for their meals. Children and cattle wandered and drank from the same river.

Another fire began to light the evening sky on the southern banks, another refugee camp being built. I imagined what they had gone through these last years, tried to imagine what meager meals they had managed just that day. The guilt of what I had left on the table that evening flooded me.

The father, the armed guards standing in the shadows behind him, came and sat with me. We said nothing for the longest time, our eyes and minds and hearts wandering the skyline.

Finally he turned to me.

“Will you tell?”

I nodded.

But what?

BACK TO BLAIR BASKETBALL IN THE NEWS

return to top