I

n the back of a dimly lit ballroom at a midtown Manhattan hotel stands the 19-year-old many consider the most exciting talent among the incoming class of NBA rookies. He is 6-foot-5. He wears his hair in a small, fashionably tousled puff. He smiles broadly.

Nobody notices.

The room is full of sportswriters eager to talk. But most ignore Emmanuel Mudiay.

He settles his long-fingered hands carefully inside the pockets of his slim blue suit and waits. He is accustomed to this, "sort of sneaking up on people," he says. "I like it that way."

The ones being pushed toward the cameras at the NBA draft lottery on this May night are the collegiate standouts. They've been on magazine covers. They've battled through March Madness. They've been seen by tens of millions. There is Duke's Jahlil Okafor, the national champ, natty in a gleaming brown suit with a red handkerchief peeking from a chest pocket. There is Wisconsin's Frank Kaminsky, ruffled and reedy. "Frank the Tank!" bellows the master of ceremonies. "Frank the Tank!"

There, too, is the player almost everyone assumes will be taken first -- Kentucky's Karl-Anthony Towns. When he walks past, square-shouldered and focused, someone blurts: "Oh, look, Towns! It's Towns!"

Mudiay? He's surrounded by silence, until finally, a reporter sidles up. Then another. It's hardly a scrum.

There's a centered, soft-spoken stillness about him. As he answers their questions, the two reporters are forced to lean in to hear. After a minute passes, they leave. Mudiay slips behind a gray curtain and heads back to his hotel room.

Nobody notices.

He is the first basketball player from an American high school to skip college and go straight to Asia and play for the Chinese Basketball Association. He signed for $1.2 million. (Brandon Jennings paved the way in 2008 when he went to Italy.) Few Americans know Mudiay. Fewer have heard of his Chinese team: the Guangdong Southern Tigers. Even fewer have seen him play.

His peers have followed the slickly paved, tightly controlled path to the NBA: prep stardom followed by college stardom. They are young and eager, possessed of a kind of gushing, intercollegiate awe.

Mudiay is different. He's seen too much, lived too much, his life filled with more turbulence and uncertainty by 19 than most NBA players will see in their lifetime. He's ready for the pressure to lift, for the deadline to arrive.

He's ready to be noticed.

TWO NIGHTS AFTER the lottery, at a tony prep school in Manhattan, Mudiay is polishing his perimeter game. His form is elegant -- a metronomic rise from slender ankles past sturdy hips, guided by sinewy, outstretched arms. For stretches, however, he misses as many shots as he makes. He leaves the court, brow tight with frustration, vowing that he will "keep on grinding." Two weeks later, inside a Dallas gym at almost midnight, he continues pushing, driving himself to exhaustion. This time he hits 17 of 20 from deep, including eight 3-pointers in a row.

He's lived with a monkish devotion to basketball since he was a kid, says he thrives off the "mind-clearing release" it provides. He counts on one hand how many late-night parties he's attended. He's had one small glass of alcohol, in China, when he worried that not finishing the wine poured for him at a team banquet would be viewed as a cultural affront. He spends free time with family.

His skills are rare for someone nearly six and a half feet tall. He dribbles low and nimbly. His feet pad across the court almost soundlessly. His hands are large; he palms the ball with ease. His bounce passes skim across the court with a casual flick.

Three weeks after the lottery, he invites reporters to watch him at a sprawling gym in the San Fernando Valley, north of downtown Los Angeles. One is Mark Heisler, who has covered basketball for the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and others since the late 1960s. Mudiay sprints and cuts and launches toward the rim, unfurling a series of tomahawk jams. "Explosive. Wow!" Heisler says, wide-eyed. He compares Mudiay to Russell Westbrook, Derrick Rose, a young Kobe Bryant -- even to Elgin Baylor. "I knew he was an athlete, but wow, I wasn't expecting this. It's possible that the moment he turns pro, he is the most athletic point guard there has ever been." Heisler pauses. He adds an appropriate dose of caution, the same dose NBA executives have added when considering Mudiay. "Right now, remember, he's working out against air."

INSIDE THE BEIGE living room of the Mudiay family residence in a working-class, mostly black subdivision in Dallas, Emmanuel sits alongside his mother, Therese. The home is tidy and no-nonsense: black couch, midsize flat-screen TV, Oriental rug lying atop wall-to-wall carpet. The only artifact suggesting this is where an accomplished young athlete spent his high school years is a square plaque given to Emmanuel for being named outstanding player at a basketball camp.

It's almost as if it's not Emmanuel's home. In many ways, it's not -- born, as he was, nearly 8,000 miles south and east, in Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), a country that was mired in war during his early childhood. "Pressure?" he asks. "I was born into pressure that is bigger than basketball. When I'm playing, I will flash back about something that happened when I was younger, and I use basketball to take it out on that."

A beat passes. He rubs his hands together. "But the past I don't talk about much. My mom always says, 'Don't go around carrying scars.'"

Emmanuel was the baby of the family, just 1 year old when his father, Jean-Paul, collapsed at a barbecue and died. Emmanuel's brothers, Stephane and Jean-Michel, were 7 and 5; civil war was raging around them, President Mobutu Sese Seko clinging desperately and in the worst way to power. "Gunshots and protests and chaos," Therese says, her halting English laced with a French accent. "Chaos. Total chaos."

Before the war, the middle-class family had lived in a neighborhood shielded from the worst of the country's problems. But once the war started, no place was safe. Gunmen strafed the streets. Young boys strode past the family residence carrying automatic rifles. Homes were ransacked. Combatants killed their enemies by forcing them into tires up to their waists, dousing the tires with gasoline and setting them afire.

There were weeks when the violence was so severe that Therese would shutter her boys inside. Emmanuel remembers only a foreboding sense of terror. "I never actually saw somebody get shot," he says, fidgeting in his chair. "But I do remember hearing gunshots every night and seeing a dead body on the street."

Stephane, the eldest, watched over Jean-Michel and Emmanuel, but Stephane himself was a target. He had a high forehead and a narrow face, causing him to resemble a Tutsi from neighboring Rwanda. "Back then," Therese says, "if they think you are Tutsi, they kill you. There was nothing good about that time."

Therese recalls praying one night on her knees, pleading for direction. "God, you are the father of the orphan and defender of the widow," she implored. When she rose, she was convinced that God wanted her family to flee. So in 2000, Therese cobbled together plane fare to Texas, where a sister lived. She would apply for asylum once she got there, then send for her boys, who would stay with their paternal grandparents in Kinshasa. They waited. Then they moved to Zambia and lived with a relative of their father. They waited some more. In the United States, their mother worried she would never see them again. At home, they feared the same.

Pressure? I was born into pressure that is bigger than basketball. - Emmanuel Mudiay

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Mudiay boys huddled in front of a television and watched the Twin Towers collapse. They couldn't comprehend what had happened. They feared that their mother had been killed. Jean-Michel and Stephane say their little brother was with them. But Emmanuel, who was 5, cannot recall it, the memory perhaps buried by fear.

When the brothers finally joined Therese a year later in a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Texas, Emmanuel would not leave his mother's side and would watch as she trudged into the evening darkness to her job as a nursing assistant at an assisted living home. He would be awake by 7:30 in the morning to greet her when she returned.

For the older boys, basketball became a touchstone, their early flashes of talent helping them gain acceptance in a foreign land. It also introduced them to Lori Monette-Gardner, a civil engineer and coach who had gained a reputation for guiding young boys to success on the court, and a straight path off of it. She coached Stephane and Jean-Michel and came to know Therese and her struggles -- even paying rent and buying food were no sure thing on her salary. The coach and her husband took the boys in when they could, sometimes for weeks at a time, buying them clothes and food, offering the comforts of a five-bedroom house with a pool.

On a gravelly half court in the backyard, Emmanuel learned the game. He'd mimic the left-handed shot of his favorite player, Lakers guard Derek Fisher, with startling perfection. "At night," Monette-Gardner says, "you could hear him speaking through the walls, talking in his sleep, that thick French accent he had then, saying, 'Pass me the ball. Pass me the ball. Someone, someone, pass me the ball.' "

On Sundays, Emmanuel sat in church at Therese's side filling notebooks with drawings of the NBA logo and with promises to himself that he would play professionally. Once he made the NBA, he wrote, he would take care of his mother -- always.