Head Fake

Hard to figure what Jon Scheyer will do on any given day. But the Illinois prep star will eat your lunch on the court

Jon Scheyer is used to labels. He's been called slow because he's white, soft because he's suburban, standard-bearer because he's Jewish (sort of). But now the 18-year-old Illinois prep enters his senior season at Glenbrook North High with a new tag: traitor. "What are you going to do?" he says. "You can't control people's reactions. Look, I don't have it nearly as bad as J.J. Redick does."

Yeah, well, the season hasn't begun. It's not just that the Chicago suburbanite dissed his home state Illini to sign with the Duke Blue Devils. The lanky 6'5" guard, who averaged 25.3 ppg while leading his school to a Hickoryesque state title last year, also went against the family. Scheyer plays for Dave Weber, brother of Illinois coach Bruce Weber. So Scheyer's choice didn't play too well up and down I-57. Bruce took the loss hard, and the pressure of the process exhausted his little brother. "At the end, the communication broke down a bit, and I knew why," Dave says. "It was hard for Jon to come and talk to me, because he knew I wanted him to go to Illinois."

These days, Illini supporters who used to tell Scheyer he'd be as big as Elvis act as if they never wanted him at all. One fan on Illiniboard.com wrote, "Scheyer will fit right in with the long lineage of pompous, arrogant players that attend Duke." Of course, Scheyer's "betrayal" also has them wondering this: if Bruce Weber can't even work a family angle to land the player, how can he recruit the rest of the country? It's easy to feel their pain.

Scheyer agonized over his decision but felt a deeper connection to Coach K. It didn't hurt that the Duke icon made an encouraging phone call to the kid during last spring's state tourney. (The next night, Scheyer dropped a supersectional-record 48.) "He really gets me," the prep star says. "I felt he had my life planned out for me."

Besides, Scheyer has been playing against type his whole basketball life. He was a pale, scrawny sixth-grader when he joined a junior rec league in Evanston, Ill.-the Fellowship of Afro-American Men. Scheyer craved competition. The competition craved contact. "They used to knock him down, try to hurt him," says Caroline Nute, a teammate's mom. "A lot of them didn't like him because he could play and he's white."

Scheyer stuck with it and collected the MVP trophy two years later, but the on-court racism has continued, usually in ways more subtle than the coach in a tourney in New Orleans who kept yelling, "Get the white boy!"

Scheyer patterns his game after Ray Allen's, yet it draws comparisons to Larry Bird's. His handle is questioned, even though his crossover would freeze an electron. The kid himself doesn't quite know what to make of what he has. "It's not like I'm 6'8" with long arms and superathletic," Scheyer says. "I have nothing special about me, and here I am doing it anyway."

Julian Wright, a top frosh at Kansas, saw it all firsthand as Scheyer's AAU teammate. "Everyone wants to label you," Wright says. "He's the top senior in the state, but some people just can't accept that he's a complete player."

Of course others want to see him as much more than that. When Knick Eddy Curry played for Thornwood High in South Holland, Ill., he'd drawn 92 hits in the Chicago Tribune by November of his senior season. Scheyer has already cracked the Trib 182 times. Kids mail him hand-drawn portraits, invite him to birthday parties, beg him to shoot hoops. He obliges when he can. "When I was little, I would have died for something like that," he says. Scheyer thinks some of the attention is misdirected. Once it was discovered that Glenbrook North's starters all had Jewish ties, The Chicago Jewish News devoted 3,100 words to them, and The Forward, a national Jewish newspaper, blared, "These Kids Can Jump: Boychik Team Wins Illinois Title."

"It was almost at the point where it wasn't about how we played," Scheyer says. "If they want to write about my being Jewish, that's fine. It's not an issue to me. [Heck, under more traditional branches of Judaism he isn't even Jewish, since mom Laury isn't.] People can say whatever they want. You're not going to be able to stop them." Yeah, but you wish they'd get the label right once in a while.

So let's try this one on for size:

Jon Scheyer, basketball player.

Now, can we all please move on?

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