Gamecocks sophomore has overcome obstacles

COLUMBIA - Add them up.

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Eleven teammates on South Carolina's basketball team. Five managers. Three assistant coaches. The head coach. A dozen or so others closely linked to the team.

Ball their life stories together and place them on one side of a balance. Now, add Tre Kelley's tale to the opposite side of the scale.

The sophomore point guard says it will undoubtedly come crashing down in his direction.

Nearly two decades of dealing with daily dangers and scarring torrents of tragedy in Washington, D.C., has given him an experience that the others cannot touch, one that none of them truly understand.

"Nobody's been through anything close to this. None of them," said Kelley, who turns 20 today. "They know that I'm from D.C., and they know that it's tough and violent, but that's all they can say.

"Everyone thinks I'm a nice guy and whatever, but none of them are close to what I've been through. Nothing close."

BUT HERE'S THE THING: Kelley, despite a shroud of shyness and outwardly subdued disposition, wants them to know him, to understand the parts of his whole.

He wants them to trace his steps to this university, a place so many doubted he'd ever see. To comprehend his deep-rooted loyalty for those who did help him get here. To feel his painstaking grief for friends and family taken from his life far too early, his angst for those he left behind in a crime-riddled neighborhood that seems to sink deeper by the day.

Above all, he wants to show them a young man driven enough to transcend the damage of his upbringing, that although scarred, he's living proof that a soul can conquer overwhelming odds to arrive at the pinnacle of aspiration.

THAT JULY AFTERNOON nine years ago started just like so many others had.

Tre was at his grandmother's, where he liked to spend his summers with the neighborhood kids he considered his best friends, guys who had taught him what basketball was all about.

A few of them were kicked back in the living room after a sticky hot afternoon on the playground. Tre, 11, was treating himself to a slice of pie.

A friend stopped him midbite and said he should go check on his grandmother, who sounded like she was crying in her bedroom.

Tre brushed it off. He knew his grandmother's laugh sounded exactly like her cry.

"Man, she's laughing. You're crazy," he said.

The friend prodded him again.

When Tre entered her room, Lila Haythe looked up with tears streaming down her face. She repeated her grandson's name over and over again through her wails.

"Your mother's dead," she finally managed to say.

Monica Kelley was beaten to death by a man she had been seeing while she and Tre's father were navigating through a rocky period.

After she repeated it again, Tre launched his pie against the wall and bolted from the apartment.

As he paced the Saratoga neighborhood streets for the better part of a half-hour, his mind raced with each step.

"I don't have a mother no more," he recalled thinking. "This is my mother. I don't have her. Being without her for the rest of my life? I couldn't even imagine."

BOTH TRE AND HIS FATHER said they couldn't stomach the endless memories of Monica surrounding them in their home - the same home Tre's younger brother, Edmond, died at only 13 days old.

The two stayed at Haythe's cozy 14th Street Northeast apartment, and Alfrie later found his own place just three blocks away.

At a pre-teen crossroads of sorts, Haythe's moral standards kept Tre, still grieving with countless nights of only "dozes of sleep," in line when many feared he would fall to the streets - including his friend Nathaniel "Fatts" Holmes, who had been killed in a drug-related shooting.

"I feel like God is with him because he didn't come out like some boys would," Haythe said. "Animosity, something like that. That's not him. Maybe it's because I was here and I was praying for him. Maybe that's what it is."

Despite the evil that Tre said could be found only steps from her front door, Haythe created a haven strongly based on her rooted faith.

THE SIGNS ARE ALL AROUND: A wall tapestry that says, "We know that God causes everything to work together for good." A large-print Bible on the dining table open to Psalm 48, a lesson about shunning worldly possessions. Dottie Peoples belting out a gospel version of I Believe I Can Fly on the living room stereo.

The world around him, laden with drugs and violence, was blotted out by his grandmother's reverent environment and doting care.

"He was better than that," said family friend Delonte Taylor, who's helped Tre mold his basketball skills since ninth grade. "Those things are beneath him. He doesn't even see things like that."

Tre said Haythe's rules weren't stringent, but instead based on a level of trust between them. He said he never wanted to violate that.

"I couldn't take advantage of her," Tre said. "I made it my way not to get into any trouble."

Alfrie said he's thanked Haythe many times for her help in raising his son.

"God made her for a special reason, and that's to take care of her family," he said. "She's done that admirably."

DON'T UNDERESTIMATE his father's presence in his life, Tre said.

His heart breaks every time he thinks about his cousin Nate's life. Nate, three years older than Tre, was an 'A' and 'B' student who fell in with the wrong crowd in middle school and has been in and out of trouble with the police ever since. Currently he's in jail for violating his probation.

"I wish I could have helped him," Tre said.

Tre points to Nate's lack of a father figure - his father is Tre's uncle, who was killed - as a central reason his cousin has stumbled through life.

Even though Aslfrie might not have always been under the same roof, he was always there for guidance.

"I'm right here to help him just like always," said Alfrie, who's living with his mother in eastern North Carolina, only a few hours from Columbia.

Additionally, Tre had other male mentors in his life: Taylor and Lorenzo Roach, his coach at Dunbar High.

With their help, Tre blossomed at Dunbar, averaging 25.3 points and seven assists per game his final three years at the school. He was named All-Met his junior and senior years, and he led Dunbar to an appearance in the highly regarded city championship his final season.

Despite his gaudy numbers and growing notoriety as one of the city's best young talents, he remained humble.

He'd set his sights on something larger than local stardom. He thought a college scholarship was, at best, a ticket to the NBA. At the very worst, it was the means to a productive job after earning a degree.

He owed that scholarship - and whatever it led to - to his father, his grandmother and the others who had nudged him along the way.

"There have been so many before him that have gone to school, flunked out and now they're back doing nothing," said Roach, himself a former Dunbar point guard from the early '90s. "Tre couldn't handle that. He fears that."

He knew staying grounded was fundamental to avoiding that end.

"He brings a sense of decency and morality and character that's very hard to find in today's background," said Gamecocks assistant coach Rick Duckett, who calls Tre his son, the latest father figure to emerge.

"He's a profoundly good person."

But one who still can't shake profoundly familiar hurt.

PICTURE TRE, home in the District for Christmas, walking into the Dunbar gym he owned a couple of years earlier.

His eyes head straight for the rafters, bouncing from one championship banner to another, those honoring teams and players from the school's long history of winning ways on the court.

His gaze halts when his scan stops at his own name and number. It's the first time he's seen this symbol, recognition for his all-Met distinctions.

His chest puffs with pride when he sees he's now one of those Dunbar greats he emulated and sought counsel from for so many years. Then the pride's gone, replaced by a twinge of teeming angst and anger.

Suddenly, Tre wishes he could climb to the gym's ceiling, rip down his newly hung banner and burn it. He wants to plunge a knife inside his basketball and watch the air spew out. He wants to take the college scholarship he worships, tear the papers into bits and see the wind carry them away.

HE'D FLUSH HIS FUTURE in basketball right along with it and be content to do so.

He'd do it without second thought if he could have his mother back - maybe even for just one conversation. Tre says he talks to her spirit often - and he visited her grave once during his junior year in high school to tell her how he was doing - but it's not the same.

"I could have been able to talk her about anything. I would have loved that," he says. "I would trade it all in. I would trade it all in. I don't care."

On the contrary, it's because he does care. In striking contrast to fallen friends and others left spinning without aim in the D.C. streets, he cares about his past, present and future.

Even though his life, as he says, bears more weight than the team that surrounds him, it will, in the end, bear more fruit.

"I think he's able to endure because, what else can the kid go through that he hasn't already?" Roach says. "The kid's a strong kid. He's proven that. What else has to happen to prove this kid is strong?"

Reach Travis Haney at (706) 823-3304 or travis.haney@augustachronicle.com.