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Star high school athlete becomes his own man By Erik Brady, USA TODAY MONMOUTH JUNCTION, N.J.  Joakim Noah broke away from the celebratory hug of his Lawrenceville School teammates and sought out his father, watching from the front row behind the Big Red bench. Joakim Noah helped his team win a state high school basketball title. By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY "State championship," Joakim said as he wrapped his father in a long embrace. "Bravo," answered Yannick Noah, who has heard that word more than he has said it. Joakim will take his first steps on a national stage Wednesday when he plays in the EA Sports Roundball Classic, an all-star game in Chicago for some of the nation's best high school basketball players. This comes a generation after his dreadlocked father exploded into international celebrity in 1983 as the first Frenchman to win the French Open in 39 years. Joakim's high school teammates know his father is a tennis legend, but they are perhaps too young and too American to appreciate the depth of Yannick's exalted status as a cultural hero in France, where these days he is a reggae star. "They're my boys — we hang out all the time," the 6-10 Joakim says of his Big Red brethren. "But it's not like we talk about each other's parents." (Related audio: Joakim talks/sings about life) Yannick, 43, looks delighted when advised of this. "That sounds like a healthy, adolescent attitude," he says, smiling widely. This is the story of a son who threw himself into basketball from an early age as a way to get simultaneously closer to and further from his famous forebear. Joakim uses his chosen sport — played on a court with nets, just not a tennis court — to gain his own identity and the approval of a mostly absent father. It is a complex trick. "I don't want people to think of me as just someone who has a famous father or something like that," Joakim says. "I want to do my own thing. I think that's what motivates me to play hard every night. It's to be my own person. "Don't get it wrong. I love my father more than anything. I am so proud of everything my father stands for and what he does. My father is like my best friend and my biggest influence. He's like my main man. But I don't want people to think of me as just his son." Yannick, who lives outside Paris, says this is precisely why Joakim moved to New York with his mother and sister six years ago. The USA was where the boy could be his own person — and learn the sport he loved — without the crushing psychic weight of a father who is all at once a cultural icon, a political symbol, a pop music star and a gossip-page habitué. "Look around," Yannick says of the packed gym at South Brunswick High School, where the state finals for prep schools were played. "No one knows me. Joakim can live the life he wants in the States." Joakim (pronounced JO-a-kim, says his mother, though many classmates say JO-keem) will play next season at the University of Florida, which he chose over such suitors as Virginia, Maryland and Notre Dame. He wants to study world religions and learn Arabic. At Lawrenceville, a prep school redolent of old trees and old money, his favorite courses are Myth and Ritual, which he took last semester, and Religion and Politics in the Middle East, which he's taking now. Father-son conflict is at the root of much classical mythology and religious tradition. Zeus, father figure of the Olympian gods, overthrew his father, Cronus, who had in turn castrated his father, Uranus; Abraham nearly slew Isaac; the central story of Christianity is of God the father sacrificing his only son for the sins of mankind. Such stories represent "a motif that appears across times and cultures," says Amy Glenn, who teaches Joakim's favorite courses. The stories "are about the transference of power and prestige and about finding yourself." Child of myth Joakim, 19, doesn't remember when he became aware that his father was not merely a sports hero but an emotional touchstone. "You don't really think of that when you're small," Joakim says. "I still don't really think of my dad being a hero. I mean, he's just my pops." Yannick's life reads like something out of modern myth. U.S. tennis star Arthur Ashe was touring Cameroon in 1971 when he discovered an 11-year-old tennis prodigy. Yannick, son of a French mother and Cameroonian father, had been born in France, and Ashe arranged for him to return to play tennis at a French academy in Nice. In 1983 Yannick won the French Open against Mats Wilander in Paris. The bravos still echo. Later he met and married Swedish beauty queen Cecilia Rodhe. They lived in New York to be far from his madding crowd of French admirers. Joakim was born there less than two years after his father's only Grand Slam victory. Joakim himself seems a child of myth. His mother was Miss Sweden (literally, in 1978), and his father remains Mr. France (figuratively, for all time). Joakim's bent toward basketball began early: Patrick Ewing, a friend of Yannick's, gave Joakim a small basketball as a present when he was a baby. Joakim's family moved to Paris when he was 3, a year before his parents divorced. At 13 Joakim returned to New York with his mother and sister Yelena, a year younger. Yannick remained in Europe, where he had already married British model Heather Stewart-Whyte and begun a second family. Joakim, by then approaching 6-0, played basketball at a gym down the street from his home in the New York neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen. There he met Tyrone Green, who taught him the game as he grew into his willowy 6-10 frame. "Jo already had a mind for basketball," Green says. "He just understood things." Joakim played basketball at Poly Prep in Brooklyn before transferring this season to the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school on a stately campus of 700 acres in Lawrenceville, N.J., 5 miles from Princeton. He is a year older than many of his classmates because of his moves between continents. He was homesick at first, and the Big Red struggled. But they hit stride in mid-January, when they played undefeated St. Benedict's, starring North Carolina recruit J.R. Smith. Joakim (24 points, 12 rebounds) led Lawrenceville to an upset as the Big Red crowd chanted, "JO-keem NO-ah!" Yannick, who was in the country, was supposed to be there. But he attended a dinner for the Arthur Ashe Foundation in New York that night. Joakim said he understood. Ashe, after all, is in some sense Yannick's spiritual father. A week later Joakim sat in a classroom and talked about how the Big Red were going to win the state title and how he hoped his father would be there for that. "He didn't come (to any games) last year either," Joakim said. "I know he'll be there this year." An African Viking The state championship game for large prep schools was played Feb. 22 at South Brunswick High, home of the Vikings, whose nickname is painted on the court. Rodhe, who is a sculptor, saw that as a good omen. "Joakim is an African with Viking blood," she said. The game was a rematch between 22-4 Lawrenceville and 29-1 St. Benedict's. The Big Red rode a balanced, team-first approach to a 90-68 victory. Joakim scored 23 points. He runs the court well and has a soft touch around the basket, though he will have to get stronger to play in the rugged Southeastern Conference. In the first two rows behind the Big Red bench were Joakim's biggest fans. Yannick, who was in the USA for 15 days and attended two other playoff games, sat next to Green. Isabelle Camus, who is pregnant with Yannick's fifth child and second son, shot video. (Yannick, who's been divorced twice, isn't married to Camus.) Yelena, who has her mother's pageant-ready cheekbones, sat among extended family and friends. "Jo is doing what he always wanted to do," she said, "ever since he was a little boy." Yannick's daughters from his second marriage, Elyja, 8, and Jenaye, 6, climbed excitedly into Joakim's lanky arms when he emerged from the locker room after the game. Familial smiles filled the gym. Rodhe held hands with Camus as the clan headed for the door. "To have a child who does what he loves," Rodhe said, "you can't ask for more." Yannick, Camus, Elyja and Jenaye flew back to Paris days later. Multiple dual natures The walls of Joakim's dorm room at Lawrenceville are covered with Bob Marley posters. Joakim sometimes wears a tattered Marley T-shirt his father used to wear in the 1970s, though he mostly keeps it stored as if it is a relic — holy and holey. "I listen to Bob Marley every day," Joakim says. And to his father's reggae as well? "No, I don't listen to my pops," he says. "I'm just happy he's doing his thing." Joakim says his father's music — a fusion of reggae, zouk and pop — is for dancing. Marley's music is for more. Joakim believes it is infused with the power of myth. If you are the big tree, We are the small ax, Sharpened to cut you down, Ready to cut you down. "I love that," Joakim says. "There's so many (lyrics) I love." At 6-10, Joakim could be a big tree, except he doesn't see it that way. "I still see myself as the small ax," he says. "Because one person is always going to be that small ax." In ancient mythology, Cronus uses not an ax but a sickle to cut down his father. In modern myth, Cronus (merged with another god) appears sometimes as Father Time, sickle slung over his shoulder — myth degenerated to cartoon in the New World. The old gods live closer to the surface in older cultures. That is especially so in Norse and African countries, says Rodhe, who figures her son is drawn to myth by dint of family tree. If Joakim were a creature from mythology, he would be a griffin, a beast that is eagle and lion in one body. Joakim has multiple dual natures: He is black and white, man and child, African and Scandinavian, American and European, devoted son and his own man. His life's story is only at its start, but it already has mythic echoes: a son of greatness, striving for greatness of his own, against great odds. "I know. Every time I think about it, it's crazy." Joakim says. "Everybody has their stories, though. Everybody comes from somewhere. The thing about America is, a lot of people just don't know."