The most exciting player in college basketball came into the world much as he is now, a carousel of motion, arms akimbo, legs jiggling, feet shuffling in the air. And when the nurses swaddled Nate Robinson for the first time, his father — an athlete himself, then seven months away from being the MVP of the Orange Bowl — looked at the boy and smiled into the future.
"My son is going to be great," Jacque Robinson said.
At which point he bestowed upon his child the nickname "Nate the Great."
And the son did everything he could to live up to the title even if he never grew to be taller than a small SUV. He was Nate the Great, bounding off couches, running hurdles on an imaginary track filled with trash cans and lawn chairs. He wore homemade crowns around the house and urged his mother to buy him birthday cakes with crowns made of frosting.
People looked at the tiny boy who boasted of NBA dreams, and they laughed. He was too small, they said. But the rejection only emboldened Nate the Great. Doubt him? They would learn.
This was how he came to dunk a basketball in eighth grade. How at just 180 pounds he was the high school running back nobody could tackle. And how at barely more than 5 1/2 feet tall the little junior guard from the University of Washington became the most exciting player in a sport of giants.
"I hear I can't do things a lot," Nate Robinson says, a small smile playing on his lips. "It just goes in one ear and out the other."
In this NCAA tournament that starts today, Washington is an unlikely No. 1 seed, playing Montana at 3:10 p.m. in Boise, Idaho. But if the Washington Huskies are college basketball's most unlikely top seed, Nate Robinson is the game's most improbable story, the one almost nobody believed would make it here.
Like Jacque Robinson, who was a star running back at Washington, the son also was a football prodigy still famous for a 98-yard kickoff return in high school where everybody — even the officials — were looking for him in the pile of tacklers while he was standing in the end zone on the other side of the field. So good that USC Coach Pete Carroll came to Seattle's Rainier Beach High in Nate's senior year and told the player that he would become the Trojans' next great Heisman Trophy winner if only he would pledge his life to USC.
But USC wasn't offering basketball. Nobody was offering basketball despite Nate's qualifications as a McDonald's All-American finalist because major colleges don't offer basketball scholarships to football players who say they are 5 feet 9 and yet have been measured at no more than a finger over 5-7.
In the end, he went to his home-town Washington, the place that offered him a football scholarship along with permission to play basketball at the end of the fall. He played cornerback as a freshman for the football team, starting six games, intercepting two passes and heading straight to the gym to shoot baskets for an hour after his football practices.
Then the moment the Huskies football season ended, he stripped off his shoulder pads and never went back.
Great leap
College basketball's most exciting player is a burst of Husky purple on the court, skittering around 7-footers, leaping from nowhere to snatch a pass and flying into the stands to save a loose ball. But it's when he jumps that everybody stops, mainly because no one has seen a player so small leap so high. There seems no logical explanation for why a player an inch shorter than his little cousin on the Washington women's team can dunk.
And not just dunk but to send his stout little body hurling over men more than a foot taller as he does it.
"He jumps like he's someone who is 6-foot-6," teammate Brandon Roy says.
Or as Washington Coach Lorenzo Romar says with a bemused laugh: "He is the only one who doesn't know he's 5-9."
Nate Robinson shrugs. Growing up his father would always tell him "it's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog." For years the analogy stumped the boy. "What does that mean?" he used to ask.
Now he understands. He's Nate the Great, which means there's nothing he can't do.
"He has this ability to make you forget what you came to watch," Romar says. "Whatever you came to watch, you leave thinking of him. You zone in on his every move because you don't know what he's going to do next. It might be a big dunk or it might be a defensive play where he jumps in and steals a pass. Or maybe he takes a charge.
"You don't know. But you want to see."
Robinson's first basketball game at Washington was a disaster. He still had the football in him, careening into opposing players, being whistled for fouls almost every time he took a step.
The second, on the road at Santa Clara, didn't start much better. He still didn't know any of the plays, he had been to only a couple of basketball practices and hadn't even learned any of the defenses. Nonetheless Romar tepidly let him on the court early in the second half just to get him accustomed to the game. Suddenly Robinson stole a pass and raced down the court for a layup, then another, a jump shot and a rebound. The player who didn't know a single play had taken over the game on instinct alone. By the end, he had 19 points in 18 minutes and the crowd rose as he left the court, giving the littlest player on the opposing team a standing ovation.
"I've seen a lot of basketball, but I've never seen that one before," Romar says.
Yet in Nate's world, such things are commonplace.
His senior year of high school, he stole a night that was supposed to belong to LeBron James. At the Slam Dunk to the Beach tournament in Delaware, the gym was filled to see James in a later game, when Robinson in his No. 2 jersey swooped in to snatch a rebound from a 6-10 NBA draft prospect named DeAngelo Brown and then dunked all in one motion. The gym erupted, and for a moment, the crowd forgot about James began to chant: "Give it to No. 2! Give it to No. 2!"
Every game brings something new -- a flying dunk off the glass, a spinning jump shot taken among three bigger players that bounces off the top of the backboard and somehow rolls through the rim, a long arcing jump shot from the farthest corner of the court.
"Nate, I think, visualizes himself doing special things 24 hours a day," Romar says. "He lives out special fantasies that keep coming true for him.
"He's at his best when he's almost out of control. It's like the child when they learn to walk. You start holding him, but you want to let him walk so you pull your hands back and let him go on his own."
Motion picture
The most exciting player in college basketball can't sit still. He is constantly in motion, tapping his feet, standing up, pacing around. Roy always cherishes the moments Nate appears to be subdued, when things are quiet, because in an instant everything can change and the room will fly into chaos.
"He's always ready to go 100 mph," Roy says.
Jacque Robinson has a theory about all this. He thinks it has to do with his son's size. Because Nate is so close to the ground he creates more energy, kind of like a spring that is pulled down as far as it can go, then when the spring is released, it hurtles into the air. This is how Nate can jump so high, he surmises. It's also how his son can possess these endless reserves of enthusiasm that propel him through games.
Perhaps with a less vivacious player this would be a disaster. But so much of basketball is about energy, and the verve of UW's littlest player makes the team more effective. It's something that can't be measured in numbers though Nate's at 16.7 points, 4.6 assists and 1.7 steals a game are good. Rather it's the way he gets those statistics that make him so vital.
"I just think whatever I put my mind to, I can do it," he says.
Last spring the NBA invited him to its draft camp in Chicago. It was something of a surprise because the NBA isn't usually in the business of giving extended tryouts to players who opposing fans greet by displaying pictures of Gary Coleman. But this was a new challenge, something more for Robinson to prove.
Soon Romar's phone started to ring.
"You wouldn't believe what this guy is doing," the scouts shouted.
"I see it every day," Romar replied.
By the end of the second day, Pacers President Larry Bird had told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "He was very impressive; if he stays in college, they will win the whole thing next year."
During the Pacific-10 tournament just a few weeks earlier, Robinson -- still dressed in his Washington uniform -- walked up to Bird and said "Mr. Larry Bird, can I have your autograph?"
Now with the future suddenly open, he pondered the NBA, dreamed of the money and ultimately decided that Bird was right. He was Nate the Great, after all, and if he returned, Washington could indeed win the whole NCAA tournament. It was a notion that seemed preposterous at the time given the way the Huskies barely made the NCAAs and lost in the first round. But after winning the Pac-10 tournament last weekend and getting the No. 1 seed, well, nothing seems impossible in Nate Robinson's world.
"It opened my eyes," he says of the draft camp. "It made me a better player. It made me understand the game. I know now what I have to learn."
The NBA will be there this summer, and while Robinson won't give a hint about anything, the understanding around Washington is that this time he will leave.
Someone will take him, of course. Even in the world of NBA giants there is room for a player who doesn't know when to stop.
But there was another reason Robinson said no to the NBA. His girlfriend, Sheena Felitz, was pregnant, and Nate, at 21, was going to be a father of a baby boy, just like Jacque in the months before winning the Orange Bowl MVP.
Nate wanted to be there for his son's first year. He even knew exactly what his name should be.
"Greathanial."
The women groaned.
Ultimately, he lost the name fight, having to settle for his second choice, Nahmier, which his mother Renee Busch says is a combination of Nate's name and that of former Saint Joseph's star Jameer Nelson, who was last year's college player of the year despite being just 6-feet tall.
As his father did two decades before, Nate Robinson stood in a hospital room as the nurses swaddled his son. He looked down at his son already squirming in his arms.
And he told him he, too, would one day be great, just like his father.
