No Reason to Snub Manhattan Frosh With 'The Nub'

The first player with one hand to play NCAA Division I college basketball admits there is one thing he definitely can't do. "The monkey bars," Kevin Laue says. "I've tried to swing and catch myself with the same arm before, but it just doesn't work."

Pantomiming the action, Laue laughs at the visual. His right arm is as long as a pool stick, the hand attached to it as big as a baseball glove. He stands just a smidgen under seven feet, with a mop of red hair still showing traces of Halloween's color dye ("A vampire," he says of his costume, "how original.") He wears size 17 shoes, practices with an army cadet's discipline and blushes when someone wonders if his on-court mean streak rolls over into the real world.

"Not at all. In my position you can't play nice. I'm a gentle giant when I'm not playing basketball. I guess I just had to learn to defend myself on the court a different way because of this," Laue, a freshman center at Manhattan College, says. He lifts what he fondly calls, "The Nub" -- the curve of his left elbow, dotted with scar tissue. He lost the rest of his arm at birth when it became tangled with an umbilical cord, wedging the limb against his neck and cutting off circulation. Had that arm not been there to provide a buffer between the cord and his throat in the womb, doctors have said Laue would not have survived.

"So it saved me," he says, rubbing The Nub. "The rest of my life, or my arm? That's a good trade."

"He Was Born That Way, but He's Like Superman"

Enter Laue's hemisphere for more than just a few minutes and several things stand out: his Bill Waltonish hair, his height, his California accent that sometimes clicks into surfer dude cadence and, sure, his Nub. More than anything, Laue radiates a kind of self-assurance and poise not usually embraced by 19-year-olds, especially ones who have been gawked at and linked to an ugly word -- "can't" -- by people who should know better.

That word is as appealing as chewing on glass to Manhattan College's Barry Rohrssen, the lone Division I coach to offer Laue a full scholarship when everyone else turned the other way. And that word certainly never entered the vocabulary of Laue's mother, Jodi Jarnagin, who remembers when her son was about four years old, and a gaggle of little boys approached her on the playground and asked what happened to Kevin.

"My footwork had to be different, the way I rotate my body had to be different, my vision had to be different. ... It seemed like a whole different game to me than everybody else."
- Kevin Laue "Oh, he was born that way, but he's like Superman," she told them. "You should watch him go up ladders and on the swings." One kid took his arm and curled it under his shirt, to mimic the cool redhead. Soon they were following Laue around the playground, copying his moves. "That," Jodi says now, "was the turning point. It was 'look at what Kevin can do, not what he can't do.'"

Cut by his seventh grade basketball team, Laue's growth spurt in middle school, coupled with a single-minded determination to succeed at hoops when soccer would have been the safer, easier choice, enabled him to make varsity as a junior at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif. He'd palm the ball with his right hand, use his Nub for stabilizing support on rebounds and passes, and visualize the whole court two moves before everyone else.

"Definitely, it was challenging at first. Everyone's doing with two hands what I have to do with one," Laue says. "My footwork had to be different, the way I rotate my body had to be different, my vision had to be different. Whole other layers were added because of my situation. It seemed like a whole different game to me than everybody else. I've had a lot of great coaches but I'm still self-taught in a lot of ways because I never had a one-handed coach."

We are standing on a second-floor bridge overlooking the bleachers at Draddy Gymnasium, home to the Manhattan College Jaspers. It's a quaint, Catholic liberal arts school tucked inside the leafy hillside of Riverdale, which is part of the Bronx -- but not really the Bronx, people around here are quick to point out, and several miles north of actual Manhattan. The Jaspers have just beaten New Jersey Institute of Technology, 70-58, to open the season, Laue picking up one rebound during the three-minute stint he's on the court. He towered over everyone -- at 6-11, Laue is the second-biggest player in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference – his long arm itching to knock down the ball. After a couple frenetic, first-game-nervous trips up and down the parquet, Laue slipped easily into the game's rhythm and whirl.

"To be honest, I didn't really notice he had only one arm at first," says Nick Lopez, a NJIT forward, when I ask him what it was like to guard Laue. "When we were at the free throw line waiting, I felt him jab me in the back (with the Nub) and I was like, 'Oh, what is that?' It felt a little different but after that, he was just another basketball player. He's tough, he's tall."

Shot-blocking and defense have always been Laue's strengths, but he'll have to earn his minutes like every other frosh. The journey won't be easy; it never has been.

He used to tell kids who wondered about his missing chunk of limb that a shark gobbled it during a mad surf session in the Pacific. "Now I don't want them to be afraid of the ocean, so I've stopped using that line," Laue says. Humor often is his best retort: he can't (there's that awful word again) do all the moves in the YMCA dance, can't do those darn monkey bars. "But I bet you can't tie your shoes with one hand," he says of the trick he learned in the second grade, with help from grandma. Jodi remembers her son coming home from school in the fourth grade, with a letter from someone calling him a "one-armed Jack." It was the usual hurtful banter, and she gave him advice many mothers are forced to share with their picked-upon children. "There are going to be people who have a good heart and people who are mean-spirited," she told Kevin. "Focus on the good and pray for those with mean spirits."

In high school, at an away game against a rival team, the students in one section moved their arms in harmony in the air to mock Laue. But Jodi had long provided her son a safe place to share and deal with his feelings (his birth father died when Kevin was 10), and this time he was secure and strong enough to ignore the taunts.

"Mom, she just loved me to death," Laue says of the source of his self-confidence.

Whatever chances Laue had of getting noticed by major colleges were crushed when he broke his leg during his senior year. Still determined to chase his dream, Laue paid his own way and enrolled the next fall in Virginia's Fork Union Military Academy, 3,000 miles from home. Founded in 1898, Fork Union is an all-boys post-graduate prep school where bugles rouse students at sunrise, crew cuts and military attire are required and iPods and cell phones are banned.

"Every day was boot camp," Laue says. "I think they were shocked a one-armed kid could fire a rifle."

He averaged 10 points and five rebounds last year at Fork Union, a school long considered a pipeline to Division I universities. "Coaches would come to scout me, but nobody stepped up," Laue says. "You'd get a triple-double or whatever and coaches would come out and tell you good game, then recruit the guy you played against. I heard I was a risk, but nobody said that to my face."

"Are You For Real?"

One of the more than 150 players to have jumped from Fork Union to Division I ball is Franklin Martin. His eclectic career has since carried him from coaching to working out draft prospects to independent filmmaking. He met Laue during a summer tournament in 2007, started filming him for a documentary, helped him connect with Fork Union and, eventually, placed a call to Rohrssen that buzzed with divine intervention.

"This kid, I think he's really good, that's the first thing Frank Martin tells me," Rohrssen says. "He goes on about his defense and how tough he is and how he's such a good rebounder -- on and on -- and then he pauses and says, 'But he's got one arm.'"

Rohrssen adds a dramatic pause himself before finishing the story.

"I said, 'Are you for real?'

To understand why the hair bristled on Rohrssen's arms at that moment, you have to understand the chills he used to get in the summer of '93, every time Jim Abbott, the major league pitcher who was born without a right arm, would take the mound for the Yankees. Raised and schooled on the streets of Brooklyn -- people who know him still call him "Slice" -- Rohrssen isn't generally the sentimental sort, but he was touched deeply by Abbott's story.

"Being a baseball fan, I couldn't take my eyes off him every time he pitched," Rohrssen says. "I'd think about how often did he walk on a sandlot and get told he couldn't play, how often did he walk on a baseball field and get told he wasn't good enough? The pain that someone goes through and the frustration they have to deal with, those are the things that stuck with me.

"Someone had to give Jim Abbott a chance. Someone had to believe in him."

Martin's call to Rohrssen was a serendipitous sign linking a one-armed pitcher to a one-armed basketball player and the coaches who believed in them.

"Heart means something in this game and it means something in this world. If you have it, it can take you far."
- Coach Barry Rohrssen,
Manhattan CollegeDuring his first visit to Manhattan College, before Rohrssen offered Laue a scholarship, the coach and the recruit caught the No. 1 subway downtown, stopping at Ground Zero so Laue could view the immense hole caused by the September 11 attacks. That, Rohrssen said, is where real tragedy occurred; he wanted to gauge how well Laue adjusted to things, see if self-pity was part of his makeup, but within five seconds Rohrssen knew Laue didn't need to be introduced to motivation.

"Everything he said and did was exactly right, which is how he lives his life," Rohrssen says. The fourth-year coach who earned his recruiting chops as an assistant at Pittsburgh points out that plenty of scholarships get awarded to kids who have dubious grades, or issues off the court, or attitude problems. Rohrssen wasn't just offering the last, precious full-ride to a one-handed hoopster because of an epiphany, or because it was, as fellow Brooklynite Spike Lee might have noted, the right thing to do.

"Kevin runs the ball well for someone his size, he has tremendous energy, he does a nice job of attacking the basket offensively," Rohrssen says, ticking off Laue's attributes outside of the defensive bubble. "Heart means something in this game and it means something in this world. If you have it, it can take you far."

The critical phone calls and nasty messages began to arrive as soon as word got out that Manhattan College had signed a player who wasn't built like the typical recruit. Some in the insular basketball community told Rohrssen he was committing "career suicide," that he'd never live down this move.

"They left my boss, our athletic director, a voicemail saying, 'What's wrong, aren't you guys capable of finding players with two hands?'" Rohrssen says. "Very cruel statements were made, like 'Why would you waste a scholarship?' I'd say, 'Have you seen him play? No? Then you're not just making a cruel statement, you're ignorant.'"

Criticism that rankles the coach flows off Laue's back like water on a surfboard.

"He doesn't even hear it," says Darryl Crawford, a Jasper senior forward out of Harlem and one of Laue's summer suite mates. "When he first got on the court, he surprised me. Even guys on our team, they were surprised at our first practice. [They] thought he'd be easy to get a rebound off. I didn't know he was that good, but he's real, real good. He's got a nice turnaround move that's kind of like a sky hook."

Crawford gestures out the window, toward the campus' bucolic grounds. "If you go out there right now and ask around, you'd hear how everyone loves him," he says. "Kevin's really social. He's probably the most popular guy on our team."

"It Gives You a Purpose"

At an age where insecurities fester -- even for athletes, maybe even more so for athletes -- Laue has a higher goal than becoming the first player with one arm to reach the Division I basketball ranks. He can't even count how many emails and messages he receives from parents wanting advice for their child born with one limb, from kids struggling to follow Laue's path, from teachers asking how they can help stop bullying.

"Tons and tons," Laue says of the correspondence that somehow finds him in this little corner of New York. "They're so powerful, almost overwhelming. I wish I had one day a week where I could sit and answer them. It takes me awhile, but I make sure to get to every one. It gives you a purpose."

Randy and Julie Kaplan's son Evan, now 22 months, was born with a condition similar to Laue's. Randy read about Laue in a newspaper, tracked him down at Fork Union, told him he was excited to hear about his success. "Here's a kid, not allowed to even use a cell phone, but he wrote me back to thank me and said to contact him anytime if we ever had any questions," Kaplan says.

"My son does everything now. He turns book pages, he'll be president one day if he wants to. We believe in saying, 'You will do this, not you can't do this.'"

Kaplan and Laue, their connection forged because of what a community called Unlimbited Possibilities calls "upper limb differences," met recently with Abbott, the retired MLB pitcher with one arm. Ages ago, before Kevin turned into a mini-Superman on the playground ladder and swings, Jodi had written to Abbott, but never heard back.

"He was like, 'I'm sorry I didn't answer your mom all those years ago.' I told him it's cool," Laue says. "He was pretty busy living his dream back then."

Entrenched on a campus not far from the old Yankee Stadium, the site of Abbott's no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians in 1993, Laue has his own dreams, aspirations that aren't weighed down by doubts or that four-letter word, "can't." He's thinking about running for class president. He'd like to play pro ball overseas one day. "There are a million things I need to improve on before that will happen," he says. "But it's not impossible."

Mostly he wants to touch others with his condition, inspire them to see beyond what they don't have. "Nothing's out of reach," says Kevin Laue, who will never stop trying to conquer the monkey bars.