Finding inner fire

Cedrick Banks has turned his back on trouble and become the star UIC needed

February 07, 2003|By Skip Myslenski, Tribune staff reporter.

The stuff is fine, so fine, and my, how tempting it is. That clean car, those sharp clothes, that shiny jewelry and those signature shoes. Cedrick Banks covets it all, every bit of that finery parading through his neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago.

It doesn't matter that he is still a student at Westinghouse High School, where he will develop into one of the state's finest basketball players. Nor does it matter that his mother, Macy, a single parent, can't afford to buy such things on the money she pulls in, working at a local restaurant or some pizza parlor. Banks knows how he can get that stuff.

"I'd be thinking, `Man, if I sold drugs, I'd be like them riding around in nice cars, wearing nice clothes, nice shoes,'" he remembers.

"There's a lot of those temptations," says Chris Head, Banks' high school coach. "When you leave the friendly confines of Westinghouse, you have neighborhood gangs, neighborhood drug dealers. Every night someone gets shot [or] someone gets into a fight. All those things pull at a young man. It's tough."

"But he knew he couldn't be with drugs in the house," says Freeman Banks, the grandfather who helped raise his daughter's son. "That's out. He knew I wouldn't allow that. I never allowed cussing, no drugs, nothing in my house."

Cedrick Banks concludes: "Something told me, `Man, you'll make it. Just take your time. Just let the years go by and don't get into any trouble.'

"That's what I've been doing."

Cedrick Banks escaped the temptations, and today he is a star for Illinois-Chicago. He is a lightning-quick guard, a 6-foot-2-inch whirling dervish, a left-handed sniper who ignored the blandishments of major programs to stay home and build a legacy of his own.

He is perhaps the city's finest college player, and as the Flames prepare for rugged road tests at Butler on Saturday and Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Thursday, he is averaging 20.7 points per game and looking to guide them to a second straight appearance in the NCAA tournament.

"A lot of people were telling me, `Don't stay in Chicago. You're not going to make it--a lot of people will try and get you to hang out with them,'" Banks said, recalling his choice of schools.

"But when I'm listening to that, I'm saying in my head, `I don't have to hang out if I don't want to. I make my own choices.' UIC wasn't really a big-name school. That's why I chose to come here. There's already big names at other places. I felt if I come here, I could be that big-name player."

He has done that under UIC coach Jimmy Collins.

"Cedrick's awfully good, an awfully talented kid," Collins said. "And he's one of the most coachable kids I've had the pleasure of coaching. He takes constructive criticism, and the next play you can see him trying to put into play what you just asked him to put into play. He's not only good as a player, he's good as a kid."

That is the greater journey taken by Banks, who as a high school senior was an All-State player but an indifferent student. He skipped classes, wandered the school's halls, ignored assignments.

Head suspended him once for his academic failings. Did he ever think Banks was close to sliding down a slippery slope?

"Real close," said Head, who is now at Proviso West. Then he laughed. "Real close."

Banks' academic problems forced him to sit out his first year at UIC. Even before then, he felt the sting of taunting.

"A lot of people were downing me because my grades weren't up to par," he said. "A lot of people were downing me, saying you're going to have to go juco. Just downing me, making me look like I'm nothing.

"I took that in with me so I could prove people wrong. So far, that's what I'm doing--I'm proving them wrong. I'm not a dumb person. It's just that I was dumb not to go to class."

His first year, when he was ineligible to practice or play, he lifted weights, shot baskets at the Columbus Park fieldhouse and at first attended his team's games. But that was depressing, and too often Banks found himself thinking, "I should be out there. Why didn't I go to class?"

Collins also was an indifferent student in high school and as a college freshman, and in Banks he saw his younger self. So he pushed Banks to attend class, to do his homework. He called Banks in his dorm room, visited Banks in his dorm room and traveled to the West Side to visit Banks' mother and grandparents.

"Look--I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it," Banks once snapped at Collins.

"Yeah. I've heard that so many times," Collins sarcastically replied.

Banks remembers: "He stayed on top of me. I didn't really dislike him for staying on top of me. But when you hear things so much, it's, `OK. OK. I'm doing it. I'm doing it.'"