“Sometimes I’m in the game and I still want to cry, but I can’t do that. I’m on national television,” said Maryland guard Rasheed Sulaimon, shown before a game in November.
Rasheed Sulaimon stuck around Xfinity Center after Maryland’s most difficult practice of the season earlier this month. The senior guard took position under a basket to help his teammates put on a basketball clinic for a group of Special Olympians. He memorized each of the Special Olympians’ names, even if they didn’t know his.
They likely didn’t know everything he had been through over the past year, which included a controversial dismissal from the Duke basketball team and a subsequent rebirth as a graduate transfer at Maryland. Sulaimon wasn’t going to be judged here, so he cheered each one of the campers and clapped as they drove in for layups. At the end of the drill, he called the group together for a huddle.“Bring it in,” he said with smile. “I had fun playing with you guys. Keep working, okay?”
It wasn’t all that different from the messages Sulaimon tries to deliver when he occasionally calls huddles with his Maryland teammates when they’re on the road. Sometimes when he touches the ball, opposing crowds chant “No means no,” playing off the sexual assault allegations against Sulaimon reported last spring by Duke’s student newspaper, the Chronicle. He vehemently denies the accusations, which did not result in criminal or university charges, but they follow him.
In those moments when the catcalls ring, Sulaimon gathers his teammates during a dead ball. They just stare at him and wait for him to say something related to basketball. He just tells them he needs them for a moment.
“Sometimes I’m in the game and I still want to cry, but I can’t do that. I’m on national television,” said Sulaimon, who will take the stage again when seventh-ranked Maryland (17-2, 6-1 Big Ten) visits No. 11 Michigan State (16-4, 3-4) on Saturday night.
Turbulence at Duke
Some letters reflected on Sulaimon’s strengths and weaknesses as a player. Others focused on his schoolwork and his sister’s budding volleyball career. Turgeon would tell Sulaimon about his son Leo’s birthday or about life as a coach in Texas. Though it was a late recruiting push by Turgeon to try and sway a coveted prospect, it stuck with Sulaimon as a genuine gesture. Nonetheless, Sulaimon already had made up his mind about attending Duke.
“Everyone wanted him,” said Marland Lowe, who coached Sulaimon’s AAU team in Houston. “When he was, like, in middle school, he always wanted to try and go to Duke. When Duke offered, that’s all he wanted.”
But after Sulaimon starred at Duke as a freshman in 2012-2013, averaging 11.6 points and 3.4 rebounds per game, there were signs that his career in Durham was unraveling. He was criticized by Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski for showing up out of shape before his sophomore season. Early on in his junior season, he was relegated to a reserve role on a team that eventually won a national championship. He drew more criticism from Krzyzewski after picking up a technical foul against Elon for shoving an opponent to the court. He also was reportedly thrown out of practice several times, and by late January 2015, he became the first player to be dismissed by Krzyzewski in his 35-year coaching career.
“ ’Sheed is like a little brother to me. He and I have been close since the first day he stepped into Duke,” said former Duke guard Jay Williams, who is now an ESPN analyst. “It was very difficult to watch how that whole situation played out. But at the end of the day, he needed to do what was best for him, and so did the program.”
While Sulaimon has declined to provide details on the exact reason for his departure from Durham, he admits there are some situations and circumstances he would have handled differently as a player. He denied any link between his dismissal and the allegations made last March, when the Chronicle reported that two women accused Sulaimon of sexually assaulting them in separate incidents. The two women declined to go to law enforcement or cooperate with a university investigation. Krzyzewski and Duke officials have declined to discuss Sulaimon’s dismissal. “It’s tough when you read things that portray you as someone who you’re not, when [allegations] are totally, totally false,” Sulaimon said. “They portray you in a manner where you know — and all the people who know you know — it’s not your character at all.”
The move to Maryland
“I had no idea what I was going to do,” Sulaimon said.
He resolved to return to Durham, heeding the advice of his family to attain his degree from one of the country’s top universities. It also was the quickest way for Sulaimon to return to a college basketball court as a graduate transfer.
He had difficulty going back. There were days when he didn’t want to be seen in public. There were nights when he would cry himself to sleep and call his mother to get through it.
And in that dark time, his relationship was rekindled with Turgeon and assistant Dustin Clark, who followed Turgeon from Texas A&M to Maryland in May 2011.
Clark, who was busy in College Park helping Maryland reach its first NCAA tournament in five seasons, called Sulaimon every day to check on him and talk about life. After about two weeks, those discussions began to involve Sulaimon’s basketball future.
Sulaimon had known Turgeon since a meeting at a basketball camp when he was 13. Sulaimon was struggling to guard an older player named Joe Young, who is now a forward for the Indiana Pacers. “He’s pretty good, huh?” Turgeon asked a shy Sulaimon before directing the youngster to crowd his opponent’s legs and wear him down on defense.
Sulaimon visited College Park, committed to Maryland three days later, May 11, and later that summer earned the degree from Duke that made him immediately eligible to play for the Terrapins. Years after Turgeon’s first basketball tip, Sulaimon is his new team’s best perimeter defender and half of arguably the best back court in the country, along with Wooden Award candidate Melo Trimble.
“The one thing I did love for ’Sheed was that I was very concerned about his overall mentality, if he would allow that situation to break him mentally,” said Williams, who watched Sulaimon work out individually in Durham every day last summer as he prepared to join his new team. “The beautiful thing about him is that he’s a fighter.”
‘This is the real me’
“I definitely felt like I wanted to go to a mountaintop and scream, ‘This is the real me,’ ” he said.
Sulaimon since has helped mentor the sophomore Trimble and has become a respected voice in the locker room. Players on a team with Final Four ambitions look not at Sulaimon’s checkered past with Duke but rather the big-game experience learned in his time with the Blue Devils.
“He’s got a bunch of big wins on his résumé, throughout his career,” Maryland forward Robert Carter said. “He’s not letting us relax.”
As much as he just wanted to blend in once he arrived in College Park, the reality is that he can’t. A 70-67 loss at Michigan on Jan. 12 was painful; he missed a potential game-tying three-pointer in the final seconds after spending the game blocking out crude chants from the student section. When he is heckled on the road — it was worst when Maryland traveled to play Duke’s archrival, North Carolina, in early December — it provides a reminder of what he has tried to move on from.
While Sulaimon is known as an aggressive player, not afraid to jaw with opponents or get into his teammates’ faces, he has worked to show his softer side, as he did to a number of Special Olympics athletes in a mostly empty arena last month, two nights after the Michigan loss.
“It’s kind of funny how things happen and how things unfold, and I never thought I would be in this position where I would have the opportunity to play for him again,” Sulaimon said. “Now that I am here, it kind of feels like this is where I was always supposed to be.”
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