Throughout his 14-year NBA career, Sedale Threatt wore many different hats — at times a playmaker off the bench, later in his career a pretty solid perimeter scorer and in the early ’90s — Magic Johnson’s replacement at the point with the Lakers. One hat Threatt evidently never wore, however, was what the people around my way — by which I mean Bell Biv DeVoe, in a song — used to call a jimmy hat. Now one of Sedale’s (estimated!) 14 children has surfaced as a star quarterback with Division I-AA Lehigh. In the New York Times — link via TrueHoop — Michael Weinreb tells Sedale Threatt Jr.’s story:
œI love my name, and I love my father, but I don™t like him, Sedale Jr. (above) said in a recent telephone interview from the Lehigh campus. œThe No. 1 lesson my father did teach me is how not to be a father.
His mother, who played basketball at the University of Massachusetts, said she met Threatt Sr. at a playground pickup game in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s, when he was a guard for the 76ers. She said they dated for about a year. When she got pregnant, she said, Sedale Sr. told her he would support her financially. But payments were sporadic.
She took him to family court for the first time in 1989. In 2000 in Boston, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to pay child support for several of his children, including Sedale Jr., and was sentenced to six months in prison…
Jackson said she refused to go on welfare, in part to serve as an example to her son. They bounced between various residences for several years. She and Sedale Jr. recalled that their overtures toward his father were repeatedly rebuffed; Sedale Jr. spent a couple of weeks with his father in Arizona as part of a court order when he was a teenager, but has not seen him since.
But Jackson also refused to paint an overtly negative portrait of him.
œPeople would say: ˜How can you do this? You™re giving your child false hope,™ she said. œBut I didn™t want him to be another young man whose father walked out on him. I didn™t want him to be a young angry black man.
Jackson, who eventually became director of community relations for the New England Patriots, now works at an investment bank and lives in a house in Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood. She sent her son to private schools, and said that although Sedale Sr. promised to help pay the tuition at Lehigh, he had yet to contribute.
Would it stun you terribly to know that Sedale Sr. — now living in Australia and running basketball camps for And1 (seriously) — refused comment for the article? No? Okay. Travis Henry, consider yourself challenged for father of the year honors.