THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 23, 1995 TAG: 9501230131
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 146 lines
Nine years passed from the time Sean Blackwell left Manor High School in the 11th grade to the day he showed up as a freshman at Virginia Wesleyan College.
He had nearly a decade to paint houses, drive trucks and live hand-to-mouth. To lose jobs and not find better ones because he had no diploma.
To lose a girlfriend to cancer and a child, he thinks, to premature birth.
To counsel underprivileged children about being the best they could be, and know he was a fraud.
To play rough-and-tumble recreation-league basketball and, at 6-foot-8 and 220 pounds, realize he was wasting athletic gifts from God.
To stare into his past, and ache over an empty future.
So when Blackwell, then 27, arrived at the office of Virginia Wesleyan basketball coach Terry Butterfield last spring, it was not a revelation as much as a step in a slow transformation. A virtual baptism, in which a searcher shed the dust of the hard road for the sheen of personal enrichment.
The past few months have done nothing to blunt Blackwell's momentum. He is more than a semester into his pursuit of a college degree, and 15 games into a blooming basketball career. And he is 33 days past his 28th birthday, the big, old man on campus who answers happily to ``Grandpa.'' Who could care less about any generation gap, but is well along in closing an open wound in his life.
``There are so many people in their graves today who didn't maximize their potential,'' Blackwell says, paraphrasing the message of a favorite book. ``(The author) said when we don't maximize our potential, we rob a generation of people. He was talking about children.
``And it just hit me. Here I am, 6-foot-8, dealing with kids - I've always worked with kids - and I didn't want to rob them of what it is they need to be successful in life. I didn't want to die without fulfilling my potential.''
Today, Blackwell will tell you most anything is within reach. For the first time, he is a real student. He sits up front, dresses sharply, locks onto his teachers' eyes.
That focus extends to the court. By all accounts a physical gem scuffed by street ball when practice began, Blackwell has started to emerge as a steady force for the Division III Marlins, who are 9-7.
In the last two weeks he has regularly scored and rebounded in double figures. He is averaging 10.8 points and 7.8 rebounds a game, and his 29 blocked shots lead the Old Dominion Athletic Conference.
``It's like somebody just ignited him,'' Butterfield says. ``To his credit, his intensity level has improved dramatically since he started. As he continues to develop a competitive attitude, he's going to get better and better.
``He doesn't want to come here just for the experience of playing. There are players and there are players, and Sean wants to be a player.''
After feeling his way, Blackwell has become part of the team, fellow freshman Russ DeMont says.
``We're good friends,'' DeMont says. ``Sean's had parent troubles; my parents divorced, and sometimes I'll talk to him and ask how he managed to get through it all. He's experienced so much life in general. We've talked about him being in eighth grade when I was still in diapers just about. I can't believe that.''
Blackwell's potential lay dormant as he grew up in Chesapeake and Portsmouth. It was a nonsupportive, broken home, he says, that he shared with his older brother, Kevin, ``an angel'' whom Blackwell regarded with jealousy then but now likes and respects.
Blackwell mostly goofed around in high school at Deep Creek and Manor, liked basketball but didn't play for either school and flunked too many classes. Forced to repeat his junior year at Manor, Blackwell was on the same path to nowhere when he says an administrator at midyear ``suggested'' he drop out and pursue a General Equivalency Diploma.
He failed his first attempt at the GED, then shelved the idea and went to work, though it wasn't always regular. Blackwell started a painting business but struggled. He welded, drove a truck for a meat company, worked in a factory.
He dated older women, and lost one he planned to marry when she succumbed to cancer. ``Traumatic,'' Blackwell says. ``The only time I ever cried at a funeral.''
Later, a new girlfriend, in her mid-30s, told him she was carrying his child. Nearing her due date, she disappeared and surfaced with family in New Jersey, Blackwell says. Weeks after the baby was due, Blackwell says he finally got to see his daughter. But the baby cried and cried when he held her. Something wasn't right - she missed her real father.
``A pretend child,'' Blackwell calls her. His girlfriend finally admitted the child was really her granddaughter, that Blackwell's child died soon after birth. He doesn't know what to believe.
Blackwell says this in a soft, deliberate baritone, gazing out a window.
``I went to church,'' Blackwell says. ``I was saved.''
For Blackwell, tragedy will always be a matter of fact, but his is the antithesis of the weepy tale of woe. From his minister to Janine Lancaster, who shares a Hampton apartment with Blackwell, to Janine's positive-thinking brother Xavier to the people at Virginia Wesleyan, Blackwell is enveloped by uplifting influences who help him help himself. Blackwell always wanted to try for his GED again, but it took Janine to push him until he passed in 1993.
``Three hundred sixty-five days times eight years,'' Blackwell says. ``That's how long I thought about that. I felt like I had received my doctorate.''
He nursed thoughts of college, but Janine made him make the first phone calls to Old Dominion, Christopher Newport and Virginia Wesleyan, which was most willing to work with him as a student-athlete.
He hurdled more fear and doubt than the average freshman, while he and Janine had to commit to a financially tough journey. Grants covered much of Wesleyan's $10,900 tuition this year - Wesleyan does not give athletic scholarships - but Blackwell took more than $2,000 in loans.
They won't be able to do that each year, Janine says. She works three part-time jobs - one as a professional clown - and takes community-college courses. When Blackwell's car is down, he takes four buses 1 1/2 hours to school and gets home as he can, sometimes with teammates, sometimes with Janine. Many days they barely see each other.
``No doubt this has been a big adjustment for both of us,'' Janine says. ``But it hurt to see all his potential not being used. He never had much support or love in his past, but I said, `Well, you've met the right person because you're going to get it now.' ''
Xavier Lancaster, WVEC TV's market development manager, says he has shared his believe-and-achieve foundation with Blackwell and stood back and admired the view.
``The credit goes to him,'' Lancaster says. ``When you take that first step into the unknown, you don't know where you're going to go. But he's found pleasure and joy, the reinforcement that he can accomplish this. He's very much doing it on his own.''
Blackwell insists his degree will come in four years, though he and Janine wonder if the money will be there for him to remain at Wesleyan. If he improves enough, despite his age, Blackwell figures he could entice a Division I or II school to take a chance with a scholarship. At the end, he suspects a few years as a pro player in Europe might be pretty good.
Regardless, Blackwell is awash in direction, drive and larger meaning, and he has embraced them like the newfound friends they are.
``This isn't about me,'' Blackwell says. ``I'm just a tool for what's going to happen. I feel this is my calling. It might sound crazy to some people, but I want to work with kids, in any aspect. And I want to be able to show kids the way. Not just say, `You can do this,' but show them.''
For nine years, ``I was a hypocrite,'' Sean Blackwell says. ``I got tired of being a hypocrite.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color photo]
L. TODD SPENCER/Staff
L. TODD SPENCER/Staff
Sean Blackwell, improving rapidly for Virginia Wesleyan, can
envision, down the road, a few years as a pro player in Europe.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB