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Bryant's Success In The Books
9/26/2006 12:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Sept. 26, 2006
By Jeff Faraudo, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
Johnnie Bryant will begin his junior basketball season at the University of Utah in the fall. He figures he will complete his work toward a degree in sports management by the middle of his senior year.
Not bad for a guy who was academically ineligible his sophomore year and the first semester as a junior at Bishop O'Dowd High.
And, oh yeah, this will be Bryant's second bachelor's degree from Utah - he picked up a diploma in human development and family studies on May 5 after just three years in college. "When I saw my son with that cap and gown on," said Brenda Bryant, Johnnie's mother, "I thought I was going to faint right on the spot."
"To know everything I'd been through, I made myself happy that day," said Bryant, 20. "I felt I made my family proud. It was a feeling I can't forget."
He won't forget how he got there, either. He did it with the help of a mentor familiar with his path, a supportive mother who was able to let go, and through his own determination to play Division I basketball.
"What he did is very unusual," Utah coach RayGiacoletti said. "Most kids talk about it, very few follow through with it."
Bryant, who averaged 13.1 points as a starting guard for the Utes last season, was a third-team all-state pick as a senior in high school. He led O'Dowd into the quarterfinals of the state tournament, then scored 40 points and made the winning 3-point basket for the Hayward Area Athletic League all-stars vs. the best from the OAL. The Oakland squad featured Ayinde Ubaka, who was headed to Cal on a scholarship.
Four-year schools were interested in Bryant, too, but only until they got a whiff of his grades. "Once they saw that transcript, I fell off the face of the earth," Bryant said. He's tried to block out the details, but believes his nadir was a 1.5 grade-point average one semester. His mother remembers it as worse than that.
There were reasons for his troubles, although Bryant won't hide behind them as excuses. Primarily, there was the illness to Brenda Bryant, a single mom who battled a severe case of diverticulitis that caused her to require more than two dozen blood transfusions to remedy internal bleeding. Johnnie found his mother passed out on the bed at home one day and - despite the fact that he only had his learners permit - drove her to the emergency room.
"They brought me back (from nearly dead) twice," said Brenda Payton, who ultimately had two surgeries before regaining full health.
In the meantime, Bryant basically ignored his school work. "I had terrible study habits," he said. "All I wanted to do was play basketball."
After missing his entire sophomore season, Bryant said he felt helpless. Then during a summer camp before Bryant's junior year, coach Mike Phelps introduced Bryant to Lou Richie, an O'Dowd alum and new assistant coach at the school.
Bryant was academically ineligible again in the fall term, prompting Richie to ask if he wanted help. Bryant said yes. They structured study time, dividing it into shorter chunks that allowed Bryant to focus and complete his assignments. They developed strategies for test preparation, and Richie would not let Bryant slide.
"He gave me hope," Bryant said.
Bryant's grades steadily climbed - he posted a 3.0 GPA as a senior - although he wasn't sufficiently qualified for a four-year school. Still, the tide had turned.
Brenda Bryant believes Richie may have saved her son. As a mother, she said there was only so much she could do. Johnnie needed a male role model.
"I don't know where my son would be if he had not had a Lou Richie in his life during those crucial years," Brenda Bryant said. "As a young black male, he could have gone in the wrong direction. He could have been one of the statistics."
Giacoletti called Brenda Bryant "the world's best mother," but agreed Johnnie needed a man to take an interest in him. "Lou was that person," Giacoletti said. "He was a great mentor - honest, straight forward, and he gave him direction.
"And Johnnie was the type of young man who listened."
Brenda Bryant moved to Stockton to buy a home during her son's senior year at O'Dowd, so Johnnie lived with Richie during the week and stayed with his grandparents on the weekends.
Bryant said his mother's greatest contribution to his turnaround was a willingness to relinquish some "parenting" authority to Richie. "She let Lou be the big brother mentor. She never interfered," Bryant said. "If he said I had to be up at six o'clock in the morning, that was it." Richie felt obligated to lend a hand because he had been on the receiving end of the same type of help. He began his college days as a walk-on basketball player at UCLA, then flunked out of school.
After his uncle, Sam Robinson, stepped in and got him pointed in the right direction, Richie wound up with a degree from Clemson and a mandate to help another.
"I'm honoring what he made me promise him," said Richie, who gave Bryant the same directive.
"I can never repay him," Bryant said. "He told me, 'All I want you to do is promise me you'll help somebody else.'"
After O'Dowd, Bryant enrolled at City College of San Francisco, averaged 15 points as a freshman for a 23-6 team and was an all-Coast Conference pick. Then he left CCSF for Ohlone College in Fremont, where he sat out the basketball season and made the fierce push to complete his two-year degree a semester early.
By taking 27 units in the fall of 2004 - including online classes and independent study - Bryant earned his JC degree and immediately enrolled at Utah for the spring term. He continued to pile up the units through summer school, then last year, finishing in May just one statistics class shy of graduation. The school allowed to collect his diploma, anyway.
"It was a humbling experience," Bryant said. "The whole thing made me realize there's more to life than basketball. It showed me you can't have success in one thing if you don't have success in another."
Bryant has two more seasons of basketball eligibility at Utah, for which Giacoletti is grateful.
"We put a whole lot on Johnnie's plate last year and he did a really good job with it," the coach said. "He's going to be better for it." Richie, now the head coach at Bishop O'Dowd, is convinced Bryant's impact will extend beyond basketball.
"That young man, he's going to be an incredible asset to our community," Richie said. "He's going to be able to say to any kid, 'I got horrible grades. I was a knucklehead. And I got my college degree in three years.'
"How many kids come out of Oakland with that story?"
Players Mentioned
G
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