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| Alston's Ascension from the Asphalt Part I By Ben Couch – NJNETS.com December 11, 2009 |
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NOTE: This feature is reprinted from Nets All Access, the official game night program of Nets Basketball. EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.—Following a steal, Rajon Rondo was flying upcourt on the break. With one man to beat, the layup seemed a foregone conclusion, two points about to be sliced off an early-November deficit against the Nets. The Celtics’ fourth-year point guard is one of the NBA’s premier finishers, converting .569 of nearly 500 attempts at the rim a year ago. But the defender beat him to the dotted semicircle, barely broke out of his backpedal and juked right, then left, and committed to the right while swiping at the ball. The defensive feint caused Rondo to bring the ball back into the defender’s hands, which knocked it off Rondo’s body and out-of-bounds. Turnover. Rafer Alston, he knows a few tricks. “That’s always been (in my repertoire),” Alston says. “You’ve got to understand the guys game. Rondo and Dwyane Wade, they like the Euro step: one and slide away. So if you know he’s going to do that, you want to tie him up so you can play that play well. It’s not easy because those guys come at you full speed.” Now 33 years old, playing his 11th NBA season for his sixth team, the most effective moves have become more subtle than they once were for a man known as “Skip to my Lou.” Twenty years ago, Cardozo High School coach Ron Naclerio (who coached Alston in youth leagues and high school) remembers a slight 13-year-old nicknamed “Shorty” debuting in organized New York-area play late in a game, facing a fullcourt press. With handles so smooth he seemed to pour moves across pavement, Alston eluded the first defender, split a pair at halfcourt, and put the ball between the fourth man’s legs before the fifth blocked the layup out-of-bounds.
Alston’s game progressed steadily and by the time he was 16, Skip was earning regular minutes at the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic tournament at Rucker Park. But for all playground success, Alston struggled to push away the pull of the streets during high school – he averaged 25 points as a sophomore before eligibility issues limited him to 10 games during the next two seasons. Spending two semesters at prep school and then attending two junior colleges before transferring to Fresno State, Alston was selected with the 39th pick of the 1998 draft. Naclerio said that Alston had played himself into the first round at the pre-draft camp, but background checks cost him (most likely due to a 1998 arrest for violating parole). He went unsigned after training camp. Yet at the same time his NBA career was floundering, his streetball legend exploded nationally in the summer of 1999, with the release of the AND1 Mixtape, Vol. 1. The previous year, Naclerio had sent in a collection of homemade tapes of Alston’s playground exploits, including the infamous clip of Alston yo-yoing the ball as he “skipped” up the court. The fledgling sneaker company signed Alston – making him the first non-NBA player with a shoe deal – compiled the footage and set it to music. A grassroots, word-of-mouth campaign led to the Mixtape becoming the must-see, must-have item of the summer. Read on to find out more about Rafer's journey, which next progressed to the NBA when he signed with Milwaukee that fall: Alston's Ascension, Part II.
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