GARY | Branden Dawson spent most of his freshman season watching everyone else play basketball.
Academically ineligible, his name was off the roster, an omission that didn't sit well with the soft-spoken swing player.
That wake-up call caused Dawson to intensify his academic pursuits. When he earned his way back onto the team at Lew Wallace, his coach, Renaldo Thomas, gave him the only jersey not being used -- No. 13.
That was the number Thomas wore at Roosevelt in the early 1980s.
Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson also wore that number while leading Roosevelt to the 1991 state championship, earning the Indiana Mr. Basketball award and springboarding a career that took him to Purdue and an 11-year stay in the NBA.
"I didn't want to give (Dawson) that number," Thomas said. "I didn't want anyone to wear it. That's too much pressure on a kid. But Branden has lived up to that number. I think, when it's all said and done, he's going to surpass what the Big Dog did."
In the last 15 years, recruiting has become infinitely more publicized, scrutinized and digitized, and in that time no local player has been ranked as highly as Dawson is right now.
Rivals.com rates Dawson as the No. 16 recruit in the country for the Class of 2011. Scout.com has him at No. 21, ESPN at 29th.
Despite a rich tradition of championships and Division I players, before this summer, the Region never had a representative in the top 25 of any reputed national list in the age of dot-com rankings.
Dawson has more than 2,000 recruiting letters at his home, and he's received scholarship offers from Arizona, Cincinnati, Georgetown, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Marquette, Michigan State, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, Purdue, Tennessee, UCLA and Xavier.
But the quiet 6-foot-6 junior stays humble in the spotlight.
He knows where he's been. He knows where he's at. And he knows where he wants to go.
"I don't want to be Glenn Robinson," Dawson said. "I just want to be Branden Dawson."
A tough start
Cassandra Dawson is a single mother of three. She played basketball at Roosevelt from 1987 through 1989. She didn't want to be on the team, but her mother and her coach coaxed the tall teenager on to the court.
"I was forced to play," she said.
When Branden, known as BJ all around Gary because his middle name is James, was 7, a bright future didn't seem possible. Without a father in his life for direction or correction, he began running on the wild side of the street. He got kicked out of school on several occasions.
He stole money from his mother and other family members, hardly batting an eye. And these weren't a few isolated incidents. It kept getting worse.
One day a student said something to Dawson that made him mad. So he waited until no one was looking and he urinated on the classmate's coat.
"He was going down the wrong path," Cassandra said. "In order for me to not kill him, I got him started in something. I got him away from the streets. He started playing basketball, and that changed everything. It got his mind on something else."
Branden sums it up more matter-of-factly than his mother: "If it wasn't for basketball, I'd probably be in prison," he said.
A faded tattoo on Dawson's right arm somewhat tells his story. It's a basketball with a dagger through the top. Two words -- "My curse" -- are inked into space to the left of the basketball. And those two words are positive, he said.
"I'm cursed with a gift," Dawson said.
The gift became evident when Dawson started playing for Midtown Biddy Basketball at Tolleston Middle School. He had done more fooling around than shooting around. But when he tied his shoes and walked out on the court something happened. Someone hit the light switch.
"Something hit me," Dawson said. "And I didn't know what it was. But I started playing, and I was good. I stopped hanging around with the wrong crowd because I didn't want anything to take the game away from me."
When his report card kept him off the court during his freshman season, it reminded him that the game, indeed, could be snatched from him.
"I was new to the school, and I was hanging around with the wrong people," Dawson said. "But when I saw all my friends playing and I was sitting, it woke me up. I've been on the honor roll ever since."
Making a name
Once Dawson returned to the team as a ninth-grader, he led the Hornets to the Gary championship for freshman teams. He donned the No. 13 jersey for varsity and scored 16 points and grabbed 13 rebounds in Wallace's one-point loss to Wirt in the sectional.
That was the beginning.
"That let people know what they were and would be dealing with," Thomas said. "For a freshman to do that in a sectional game, he's special. We don't get players like him around here very often. BJ has a chance to be one of the very best. Ever."
Last season Dawson averaged 17.3 points, 15 rebounds, 4.1 assists, 4.5 steals and 3.8 blocks per game as a sophomore for Lew Wallace. Word of his talent spread quickly during the regular season. Purdue coach Matt Painter came to Glen Park to watch Wallace beat West Side, and soon afterward everyone wanted to see the new No. 13 in Gary.
In the sectional opener against Roosevelt, Dawson drew plenty of attention to himself, scoring 32 points and grabbing 15 rebounds in a 95-84 loss.
He has a great shot from the perimeter. He can take it to the basket with authority. But what separates Dawson from most perimeter players in Indiana is his tenacious rebounding. His 15 boards per game despite spending the majority of the night away from the basket put him in select company.
That's why Mike Krzyzewski knows who Dawson is. As do Roy Williams, Bill Self and Rick Barnes, among many others.
"I've had conversations with 20 of the top 25 teams in the country last year, and all of those talks were about Branden," said James Dye, Dawson's AAU coach. "And when the phone rings and I pick it up, I'm not talking to an assistant. Branden's game and his future has the head coach of these schools calling.
"That's how special he is."
Dawson and his AAU team, the SYF Players, were in a tournament in Milwaukee last summer. They were playing a team with three top-20 players. The opposing team quickly jumped on SYF, with several dunks that brought fans to their feet. Those players began taunting Dawson. They weren't alone.
The other coach, according to Dye, told Dawson, "You sure don't look like the 26th-best player in the country."
Dawson, who sometimes blends into the scenery in games, got angry. Over the next hour and a half, he put on a show, finishing with 29 points and 17 rebounds.
He quietly walked over to the coach after the game and said, "Coach, I did not disappoint you, did I?"
Right after that tournament, Dawson surged up the charts of prospects and into the recruiting blogosphere.
The SYF roster has included Luke Harangody, E'Twaun Moore, Robbie Hummel and other Region standouts in recent years, but this summer the Players were at even more prestigious events than usual. They played in North Carolina's gym. They played on Duke's floor. They were invited to participate in a tourney at Tennessee.
"When you're getting invited to those kind of events, it's because the coaches at those places respect your kid and want to see him perform," Dye said. "Branden doesn't understand what all the hoopla is about. He is just having fun playing basketball. As good as he was in that sectional game last year, he's even better now.
"I'm telling you right now he'll be a Top 5 player in the country by next July."
Back home again
Dawson walks the halls at Lew Wallace on school days, occasionally stopping to see a security guard named Catherine Dawson, his grandmother, whose desk is by the metal detectors at the back of the school.
She laughed and said she is upset with her grandson.
"He never walks over and says, 'Hi, grandma,'" Catherine said. "He only says, 'Grandma, what you got to eat?' Then, he starts opening up the drawers and looking around."
Dawson's appetite amazes his teammates. In Los Angeles last summer for an AAU tournament, he sat down for breakfast and had a plate of waffles, five sausages, 10 pieces of bacon and a full plate of eggs. Wallace teammate Jamal Johnson said he saw Dawson devour four McChicken sandwiches in one sitting.
"BJ can put it down," Johnson said. "He leads the team in that area, too."
Dawson always wore No. 22 in his younger days. And he planned to wear 22 this winter for the Hornets, even sporting it at a preseason photo shoot. But at a recent practice he noticed the jersey was too small and he put Big Dog's famous number back on.
Thomas took Roosevelt to the state championship game in 1982. He wore 13. Robinson took the Panthers to the 1991 state championship. He wore that number. Thomas finished No. 2 in the Mr. Basketball voting; Robinson was No. 1.
That's where Thomas believes Dawson should be, too.
"He's the best player in Indiana," Thomas said. "People in the Region are going to see him play over the next two years, and if they disagree with me, they can come up and we can talk about it. Watch this kid play and tell me I'm wrong."
Dawson went to Robinson's camp in Gary when he was a youngster. He plays with Glenn Robinson Jr., a sophomore at Lake Central, with SYF. This season Dawson is hoping to take his high school team where Thomas and Robinson did -- the state finals in Indianapolis.
"I pray every night that I stay healthy and that we have a good season," Dawson said. "I want this team to go far. I hope that we can. When I was a freshman I was just focusing on playing. I didn't think about the number on my chest.
"Yeah, I'm going to stick to 13. I guess that's the number I'm supposed to wear."
BOYS BASKETBALL | 2009-10 SEASON PREVIEW
More online
See a video of Branden Dawson dribbling, shooting and dunking. His raw talent is drawing scholarship offers from both coasts and various points between. See the skills for yourself at NWI.COM.
