HE arrived in this country, tall and skinny and speaking with a Jamaican accent.

''You know how cruel kids can be at 11, 12, 13,'' said Mike Jarvis, who became his high school coach. ''I told him that one day they'd be buying tickets to watch him play.''

This was back in the neighborhood between Central Square and the Charles River, Jarvis said. ''It was not Boston,'' Jarvis said. ''It was Cambridge.''

Jarvis, who maintains his finely tuned sense of being an outsider even as the coach of St. John's, was trying to explain his friend Patrick Ewing, who retired as a basketball player yesterday.

Ewing has been an enigma to many of the fans in Madison Square Garden, to say nothing of some of his professional coaches. He never satisfied the needs of the New York news media, if that is indeed possible.