A step ahead of the crowd

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Sean Singletary heard it all the time around his house. Anything you touch, you're supposed to try to succeed at. Be a leader, not part of a clique.

Growing up in the city's Mount Airy section, Sean was a point guard and a star receiver, and he ran track. He sang in the choir and played the violin and took piano lessons. Before he was a teenager, Sean entered a citywide math competition - figuring out all equations you could make from the number 24.

He won it.

All these years later, he isn't one of the crowd. This season, he led Virginia to a surprising share of the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season men's basketball title. When the 65-team NCAA tournament field is announced tonight, the Cavaliers will hear their name for the first time in six years. Plenty of the 65 teams have Philly guys, but this year, Singletary is the best of them, a two-time all-ACC first-teamer. He might be the best player in the country for his size, just under 6 feet.

Tough? Singletary played his freshman year with a bum shoulder and his sophomore year with a bad hip and never said much about either until the season was over and it was time for surgery.

"Although he's highly skilled and he's quick and all those kind of things, his best attribute lives inside of him," said Virginia basketball coach Dave Leitao. "His soul and his intensity."

This is a guy with a mom who went from West Oak Lane to Princeton - who was taking classes at Penn at night when she was still at Girls' High - and a dad who is a retired Philadelphia police detective. Harold and Jacqui Singletary were always the team parents for everything. But Singletary also has attended funerals for lifelong buddies and rec-league teammates, and he talks about basketball not always being enough to make it out.

"Out of 50 guys I played a lot with, only about four are doing something," Singletary said. "All of them were real good."

However, from a young age, he knew there was a path. There was an NBA player, Doug Overton, from his grandmother's block. He went to Overton's basketball camp when he was 9. Overton, now a St. Joseph's assistant, always laid it out for him:

You never know who's watching you. You know what you got here. It's tough to put your foot in the door. Once you're through that door, keep working hard.

That helps explain why Singletary picked up the phone the other day and called another Philly guy who was having a tough week.

"You called a Dukie?" a reporter said at a news conference when Singletary revealed that he had talked to Duke's Gerald Henderson, a frequent AAU teammate, the day after Henderson had bloodied and broken North Carolina star Tyler Hansbrough's nose and been suspended for an ACC-tournament game.

"He's from Philadelphia," Singletary said of Henderson, adding nothing more.

If Singletary sounds too good to be true, his life hasn't been. He showed up at Virginia knowing that he was leaving a father who had prostate cancer and a mother with breast cancer and his grandmother had cancer, too. Remission found them all, but he also had to worry about his older brother, Harold, serving in the Army in Iraq.

"I always woke up in the morning, wondering what he was doing," Singletary said, speaking quietly. "I was real excited when he came back."

It turns out, Sean himself was tough from the womb. His family wasn't sure he was going to survive, because of a blood disorder when he was born. Soon after his birth, his lungs gave out. It wasn't until he was 6 months old that his parents were confident he was going to make it.

But that toughness on the court - Singletary's mother certainly doesn't attribute it to growing up in the city. That wasn't his story.

"He wouldn't want me to say this, but he barely could take a bus," Jacqui Singletary said. "We would take him to North Philadelphia; sometimes those were the teams he was scheduled to play against. He learned to be a lot tougher, learned to play where they hit a little harder, where basketball was their life, and their ticket out. Basketball never had to be the ticket out. It was just, he excelled at it, so he plays basketball."

From a young age, long before Sean ended up at Penn Charter, and before dress codes really gained favor, the Singletary boys already had to deal with one. These were the family rules: They were never allowed to wear sneakers to school, and always wore button-down shirts - although their mom found out later that maybe they would sometimes sneak sneakers and more casual shirts in their bags so they could dress like the other kids in grade school.

Sean Singletary doesn't want it painted like he was some perfect kid. He's gotten in trouble, he said, not that he wants the details in the newspaper. But here's mom again, telling the truth: "It's not all that physical talent, it's what inside of Sean. Sean has an intuitive nature about things. We always said that he saw things, not in the way the average person saw them. He saw things from the inside out. He loves so hard, he cares so much. When Sean was younger, we couldn't pass a person on the street without making a donation. 'Mom, there's another one. . . . OK, Sean. . . . Mom, are we going to make sandwiches?' "

He didn't go to Penn Charter right away from grade school, Jacqui Singletary said.

"Penn Charter was always on top of the list," she said. "But he knew so many of the kids going to Penn Charter. We wanted our boys to branch out more, learn to stand on your own."

As a sophomore, Singletary was at the Perkiomen School, a boarding school in Pennsburg, Montgomery County. Sean's older brother had gone there. But along the way, something affected his family's thinking.

"He's better than we thought," his parents said to each other as they watched him play basketball.

A big factor, he said, was that he couldn't play AAU ball during the school year. The family had some heavy discussions about what to do. Penn Charter was a good fit for a lot of reasons, not just the competitive basketball within the Inter-Ac. Even the dress code was all right, Singletary said. Collared shirts, but no jacket and tie. He could live with that.

For college, Singletary had all sorts of recruiting choices. His ability to control a game was no mystery to the coaches who flocked to see him play. Plenty of them told Singletary they would give him the ball from the start. But Virginia had all sorts of things that appealed to him. He talked of the challenge of returning the basketball program to a prestigious place. (Before this season, Virginia had five straight losing seasons within the ACC.) He was intrigued by interest from powerhouses such as Kansas and UCLA. But with all that was going on in his family, Virginia's East Coast location really appealed to him.

The school founded by Thomas Jefferson as "an academic village" also was building a $129 million palace for its basketball program. It opened this season with state-of-the-art everything. The scoreboard has eight video screens. There are separate practice courts, a weight room, a dining facility, and an academic center.

Singletary has gotten questions about whether he might leave after this season and declare for the NBA draft. He mentions his mother's desire to see him with a degree. He shares that desire and will stay for another season, he said.

"A degree from the University of Virginia, you can pretty much do what you want," Singletary said.

He's at the social center of an elite group of Philly ballplayers, the guys around his age. He talks to former Villanova star Kyle Lowry, now with the Memphis Grizzlies, about once a week. Last year, he called the Episcopal Academy guys, Henderson and North Carolina's Wayne Ellington, in a sort of welcome-to-the-ACC way. "I helped Wayne and Gerald, even though I didn't want to," he joked. "I used to tell them, a lot of people are going to be coming at you, you don't really know for what."

He has more to say, of course, to his own teammates.

"He made life very, very easy for me, from the first few days that I was here," said Leitao, who arrived after Singletary's freshman season, bringing a more up-tempo system. "From the conversations that we had, it was apparent to me that he was going to be somebody I could depend on, somebody that really thought like I thought and wanted what I wanted."

This season, the backcourt of Singletary and senior J.R. Reynolds is routinely mentioned in discussions of the nation's best guard pairings. Singletary averages 18.8 points a game, and Reynolds averages 18.

Singletary opened the season with 25 points in a win over Arizona, scored 37 against Gonzaga, and hit a memorable game-winning shot to beat Duke on national television.

The bottom line: Those words he heard at home, about never being satisfied blending in with the crowd, have transferred to playing top-level college ball.

"I knew it would be tough," Singletary said. "But as soon as I stepped on the court, I felt comfortable."