The offseason months while covering the UConn men’s basketball program in the 2000s included crapshoot visits to Guyer Gym, where players would gather for pickup games without any obligation to interviews as they wrapped up workouts.
As a beat reporter in 2005-2011, I’d watch and wait and hope to catch someone for a comment as the team filed out. That private and casual setting — not one of a packed arena or a national TV audience or backboard-shaking dunks for a highlight reel — is where my favorite Stanley Robinson memory took shape.
It was the summer of 2007, after his freshman season, and he spotted me from afar. Players went straight for an exit in one direction, and before I could decide who to chase with the usual “Got a second?” routine, Robinson was headed my way, approaching slowly, turning and letting his back hit the wall before he slid down and sat on the floor.
“How are things at the paper?” he said.
No other player ever asked me that.
“Good, Sticks. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m just fine,” he said, the standard response, and so began a chat more about life than basketball with a Deep South kid from Birmingham, Ala., a young father far away and at least initially out of place in Storrs. In years since, thoughts of that old gym have always taken me to thoughts of Robinson and thoughts of Robinson have always taken me to thoughts of that old gym and the gentle humanity a complicated young man showed with his back to that wall.
Robinson, 32, died last week in Birmingham, a crushing blow to those who knew him or tried to know him, those who figured him out or didn’t, those who grew up with him in Alabama, those who adopted him as a son and brother in Connecticut, those who saw both his joy and sadness, those who watched his thunderous dunks and even those who only had the pleasure of occasionally chatting with him.
Mostly, of course, to his family members, including his three daughters. We don’t know exactly what happened but we know exactly what it means and feels like. His smile was extinguished forever. Hearts were shattered. Potential was lost.
I started getting texts and reading tweets last Wednesday, the daggers that deplete breath and inject sadness. I thought about Guyer more so than Gampel Pavilion. I thought about Robinson’s wide smile. I thought about his frowns and vacant stares, too, because those were evident on days not defined by the vibrancy he brought to life and to a basketball program.
He was “Sticks” from the get-go because he was “Sticks” back home in Birmingham, where he was called that for his skinny legs and arms, a nickname he loved enough to have printed on his diploma from Huffman High. No one, as it would turn out, was more fun to be around. No one’s body language, on and off the court, spoke more strongly to the emotional place he was in at a given time.
No one joked liked Sticks. No one went silent like Sticks. No one was more at the heart of something. No one was more removed.
Because just like Robinson could open up, he could disappear, make you wonder, even make you worry. During his freshman season, I told him I wanted to do a story on player tattoos, focusing on his ink as an entry point. He could not have been more excited. He posed for a Courant photo shoot. We arranged to meet for an interview at Gampel maybe a week later and he greeted me enthusiastically when I arrived.
“I just have to change,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Robinson went into the locker room and never returned. I wasn’t upset, just puzzled, but I shouldn’t have been, given Robinson’s pattern, with powerful and conflicting emotions both guiding and following him through every day, it seemed.
I liked Stanley as much as any player I’ve ever been around. As a beat reporter, you write from a place of objectivity but everyone with a laptop is a human first and whatever else second. I rooted for Stanley because I root for people. I can’t say I was a friend. I didn’t know him well enough. But I was a fan of the person he was, and the person he could become.
In 106 games at UConn, Robinson had 1,231 points, 776 rebounds and the best dunks in program history. There were few better players in the nation down the stretch of the 2008-09 Final Four season, when he returned from a semester off to work at a scrap metal yard and, really, work on organizing his life.
Robinson was selected with the second-to-last pick in the 2010 NBA draft by the Magic but was cut on the last day of camp. His NBA dream was derailed in no small part due to a torn Achilles’ tendon, a staph infection and other injuries.
He was arguably the most athletically gifted player ever to wear a UConn jersey, a guy who could nearly put his forehead to the rim, dominating stretches of games — and seasons — with one slam and scream after another. I don’t believe Gampel was ever louder than when Robinson caught a 45-foot lob from Jerome Dyson and finished, one handed, against Texas in front of a student section gone haywire. Ahhhhh!
There were many other “wow” moments: the windmill against Syracuse in the six-overtime game; “The Stanley Robinson Show,” as CBS’ Jay Bilas put it while Sticks was dunking his way over Chattanooga in the 2009 NCAA Tournament opener; a 35-game streak of scoring in double-figures.
There were so many entertaining and innocent moments, too: his preference for slippers in the design of “Stewie” from “Family Guy;” his in-game hug of an irate Jim Calhoun; his “The dude can shoot!” explanation to Calhoun for particular defensive struggles against Central Florida in 2007-08; his easygoing way of beginning stories with “I’m quite sure,” like in 2006-07 when he said, “I’m quite sure me and Big Baby are just fine” after dunking on Glen Davis late in UConn’s loss at LSU; his interruption of a crowded Calhoun press conference in December 2008 to give his coach a Christmas gift.
There were also many moments that were insightful or quizzical, or both. Robinson would fade, utterly dominant on the court when locked in, hard to even notice when he wasn’t, yet so consistently kind and affable when you could pin him down. Here one minute, gone the next, Robinson was perhaps the most unpredictable and likable player in UConn history.
The 2007-08 season ended with an upset loss to San Diego in the first round of the NCAA Tournament with De’Jon Jackson, guarded by Robinson, hitting the winning shot. Robinson hid in the bathroom as the media entered the locker room afterwards, people around the program describing him as inconsolable.
When UConn made its annual visit to the Capitol for “Husky Day,” he usually trailed behind, hands in his pockets. No one’s happiness was more apparent when he was happy. No one’s sadness was more apparent when he was sad. I hope he was happy more often than not over the past 10 years. I’m quite sure he made so many feel a joy that he, himself, deserved.
Columnist Mike Anthony can be reached at manthony@courant.com
