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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > June > 11 > Entry
BLOG: Miami’s Newble takes on China, Nike and the Celtics
Everyone is talking about Los Angeles Lakers backup players Sasha Vujacic and Jordan Farmar and the series-changing contributions they made coming off the bench against Boston in Game Three of the NBA Finals, Tuesday night.
Thanks to Vujacic’s 20 points and Farmar’s all-around play, L.A. now trails the Celtics just 2-1 in their best-of-seven series.
But if you look at the much bigger picture — if you look at all of life, not just a world whose parameters are a 94-by-54 (foot) basketball court — there’s another guy on the L.A. bench more valuable than anybody in the finals.
I’m talking about Ira Newble, the 6-foot-7 former Miami RedHawk and eight-year NBA veteran who rarely plays for the Lakers, but is making the kind of life-changing contributions that few other pro athletes are willing to tackle these days.
Beginning last season when he was with the Cleveland Cavs, Newble has tried not only to educate his fellow NBA players about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan — where government-backed militias have targeted non-Arab civilians, killed up to 400,000 people and displaced another 2.5 million — but get them involved in helping force some accountability and change.
His activism — among other things he wrote a critical letter to Hu Jintao, the president of China, which is the leading importer of Sudan oil and, in turn, a financier of weapons there — seems to have cost Newble his endorsement deal with Nike.
I’ve known Newble for 13 years and he one of the most interesting athletes with whom I’ve ever dealt. That he’s spoken out for the down-trodden — and didn’t worry about the consequences — doesn’t surprise me.
He’s the son of a civil rights activist and he’s also a guy who knows a little about being an underdog himself.
With a low ACT score coming out of high school in suburban Detroit, he ended up playing junior college basketball in Mississippi, then coming to Miami, where he initially butted heads with then coach Herb Sendek.
But he found a mentor in Charlie Coles, then a RedHawks assistant, but the head coach the next year when Sendek went to North Carolina State.
“Coach Coles stepped in and helped me stay,” Newble told me a few years ago when we talked in the Cavs dressing room. “I have a lot of love, a lot of respect for him. He always had my back, encouraged me and showed me the right way to go. Back then, he used to tell me that one day — though he didn’t know when or where — he knew I’d be in the pros.”
Even so, it was a long, no-frills road to the NBA for Newble. In five seasons of minor-league basketball — not counting a trip overseas to play in Cyprus — he played in the IBA for the Wisconsin Blast and in the CBA for the Idaho Stampede, Columbus Cagerz, Camden Power, Oklahoma Storm and Flint Fuze.
Finally he impressed the San Antonio Spurs enough in tryout camp that he made the team for 27 games in the 2000-2001 season. Another tryout the next year in Atlanta got him in a Hawks uniform. Eventually he settled in as a Cavs back-up and defensive stopper.
He was traded in late February to lowly Seattle — part of the Wally Szczerbiak, Delonte West deal — got his release there, sat out 30 days per NBA rule and eventually opted for a 10-day try-out with Los Angeles, rather than a return contract with Cleveland.
His gamble paid off. He made the Lakers team.
As for his Darfur concerns, they began last season when he read a newspaper article about a college English professor, Eric Reeves, who was working for relief for Darfur.
He talked to Reeves, learned about China’s involvement — “How could they be a legitimate host of the Olympic while underwriting genocide and war?” Newble would later tell the Los Angeles Times — and then put together two pages of facts. With the permission of coach Mike Brown he put those sheets into his teammates’ lockers.
“I realized a lot of my teammates were like I had been,” Newble told the Times.. “They had no clue what was going on in Darfur. So I addressed my teammates in the locker room one day after practice.”
He said everyone on the team— except LeBron James and Damon Jones — signed the protest letter to China.
Over the summer he took what he called a “life-changing trip” with actress Mia Farrow to the Sudanese refugee camps in neighboring Chad.
He tells of seeing children draw pictures of their parents being killed. He said he talked to a young man whose eyes had been gouged out and he listened to a young woman talk about being repeatedly raped.
When he got no response from the letter to China, Newble asked Nike to produce some bracelets to symbolize the suffering in Darfur.
“I got a response from Lynn Merritt of Nike that I will never forget,” Newble’s agent Steve Kauffman told the Times. “Referring to Ira, Merritt told me, ‘What a pain in the (ass) he must be to the Cavs, bringing this into the workplace. That would be like me coming into your place of employment and asking you to join the Islam Nation.’ I was horrified. I couldn’t believe what he had just said.”
Needless to say Newble and Nike soon parted ways.
But while he lost an endorsement, the former RedHawk seems to have picked up some good karma. With his pickup by the Lakers, he is now the only player to appear in the NBA Finals for the second straight year.
Even with that, he’s able to see the bigger picture:
“I love the game,” he told reporters last month, “but I never thought I was in it just to dribble the ball up and down the court.”
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By Nick
June 12, 2008 4:26 PM | Link to this
Ira is and always has been a class act. It’s always nice to hear about good people who work hard and succeed in life. Well done Ira!