By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Interstates 68 and 79 may be the most traveled roads to get to Morgantown, but make no mistake that there are far more interesting journeys when taken on the backroads of life.
It’s been that way with Dan Jennings, a broad-shoulder freshman basketball player, whose smile is far brighter than the past he’s endured to reach West Virginia.
Jennings threatens to be a legend here before his time, a man-child out of Staten Island who stands 6-feet, 8-inches tall, weighs 260 pounds and has the athleticism and strength that scream out to be noticed here and beyond, all the way into the draft rooms of the National Basketball Association.
Getting there is his goal and he believes that Bob Huggins is the man who can bring it to him.
“The year after I played at Oak Hill Academy I started researching him,” Jennings admits, speaking of what would be his next-to-last year of pre-college basketball in this strange world where players bounce from school to school as often as do their basketballs.
“I’ve been following him. He sends players at my position to the NBA. Look what he did with Joe Alexander in one year,” Jennings said.
Indeed, the athletically-gifted Alexander had been recruited by John Beilein, Huggins’ successor, but had never reached the heights to which he could jump under Beilein. Huggins came in, brought out the best in him and after one season he had become the No. 8 pick in the NBA draft.
Alexander had traveled one of those interesting backroads to West Virginia, having grown up in the Orient, his father being an executive with the Nestle Company, coming home to Maryland, where he wound up in prep school before being discovered by Beilein.
While Alexander had a more exotic life than Jennings, Jennings learned life’s lessons from the bottom up.
That he survived is a major accomplishment. That he is in college, reaching out for the riches and the good life that a professional athlete can enjoy, is downright incredible.
“I’ve been in bad places in my life, and there were times I thought I’d be on the streets doing something bad,” he told the Charleston Daily Mail earlier this year. “Basketball has helped me though all my struggles in life and kept me focused. Without basketball, I’d be focused on the negative stuff. I’ve had turmoil, but I’ve been focused on a goal instead, and it’s helped me block out all the trials and tribulations.”
Jennings has been in foster care pretty much full time since he was 5, his biological mother fighting drug addiction and unable to care for him.
It was a hard, dismal life, moving from foster home to foster home, all through the five boroughs of New York. There was no stability, no ongoing direction. It was live here, live there.
Some of the homes were better than others, but none were what you would as a child trying to learn about life and love, right and wrong, in a city where temptation was far more prevalent than warmth and kindness.
It went that way for three years before he was reunited with his mother, a circumstance that lasted only two years before she relapsed back into the world of drugs.
It was then, at age 10, that Cora Darby came into his life and the first time he had someone who cared, someone who could give him what a child craves.
A few years back she adopted him. She also saved him.
Darby has four children of her own and is a long-time pastor in the All Saints Church of Christ in God.
“She’s been the biggest impact,” Jennings has said. “When I first came in, I barely had any clothes. I was dirty. I wasn’t taken care of properly at that age. She took care of me, taught me morals, forced me to go to church when all I wanted to do was hang out with my friends, gave me a curfew. It was tough and at the time I hated it, but if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.”
He did, eventually, create a relationship with his mother, who has been off drugs for four years.
There was, however, work that needed to be done academically and he became something of a basketball gypsy, playing at Oak Hill Academy, then at St. Thomas More, in Connecticut, where teammate Devin Ebanks attended school for a year.
“Moving around was tough, but I wanted to play college basketball and I knew I had to move to certain places to (make) my academics better,” he said.
In many ways, he is typical of the kind of kid Huggins has taken chances on, talented, well-meaning, trying to escape a tough background. When some failed, Huggins took a bad rap, but more succeeded and reached whatever goals they had.
Jennings well could be one of them for he is a gifted, hard-working player who enjoys the game and the work that goes into it.
This is especially true on the defensive end of the court, where he is a shot-blocking, rebounding monster.
“I like to block shots, I like to pound the post, I like to rebound,” he said. “When you do all those things it opens up the offense. You get me two dunks a game and I’m happy.”
Some have compared Jennings to one-time NBA star Shawn Kemp, but he doesn’t quite buy it.
“I’m athletic, but you can’t compare yourself to a legend. I’m happy that’s been said, but you can’t live up that. Kemp was a monster,” Jennings said.
What better time to be a monster than Halloween?
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
