San Antonio
Ask NBA millionaire Eduardo Najera to identify a mentor he owes everything, and his answer is a slam dunk, but has zero to do with basketball.
“Mrs. Medina,” says Najera, a smile filling his face.
Evelyn Medina is a high school Spanish teacher who cannot sink a free throw.
What she taught Najera is anything’s possible in America.
Thirteen miles across town from the arena where the Nuggets and Spurs are competing in the NBA playoffs, you can find Medina at Cornerstone Christian Academy, where students wear uniforms in hues of the U.S. flag, the Bible is embraced as a textbook and golden statues of athletes rub elbows in the school’s crowded trophy case.
“This is where my basketball journey began,” says Najera, now paid one Ferrari shy of $4 million per year as a defensive specialist off Denver’s bench.
His annual salary dwarfs the career earnings from Medina’s labors in the classroom.
If professional sports teaches us anything, however, it’s that money cannot begin to measure the true value of work.
When Najera came to America from Mexico at age 17, leaving behind his family in Chihuahua, he dreamed of earning a college scholarship with an
English vocabulary limited to ordering a meatball sandwich at Subway.
“The number of English words I knew was almost none,” Najera recalls. “Want to know the truth? I didn’t learn English in school. I learned talking to girls on the telephone. They thought my accent was cute, so they helped me out.”
A dozen years after enrolling as a senior at Cornerstone Christian, Najera can boast of becoming only the second player from his native country to strike it rich in the NBA.
Pro sports are booked solid with fairy tales of hitting the lottery. That’s not the point.
This is a story about the boundless power in the kindness of strangers and the unexpected legacies love can inspire.
A broken hand prevented Najera from playing in the series opener against San Antonio, but the 6-foot-8 forward can still handle a knife and fork. So he reserved time on this business trip to visit a restaurant with John and Sandra Schieffer, who embraced him when Najera needed a host family as a teenager new to Texas.
When the bellies were full and napkins waved surrender, Najera reached for the tab, only to be bumped away with the same intensity felt when beaten to a loose rebound.
“They wouldn’t let me pay for dinner. Can you believe that?” Najera says. “They still treat me like their own kid.”
Which makes sense, when you think about it.
Better than anyone, Najera knows it’s impossible to repay the debt he owes the Schieffers. Love runs deeper than any wallet.
“More than language or culture, I can tell you what that family meant to me,” Najera says. “I am a better person because of them. I came to them as a 17-year-old who was at a rebellious age, a wild kid without much discipline. Yet they opened their doors and their hearts to me. That changed me as a person. Forever. For the good.”
At noon in the recently built gym at Cornerstone Christian, boys play hoops. Shots rattle the rim. The sound of dribbling echoes off walls. Bodies sweat.
One of the glistening faces belongs to junior Michael Schieffer, who was a 5-year-old prepping for his first solo bike flight when his parents introduced Najera as his big brother.
“He got me into the sport,”
Schieffer says.
Najera can bounce a basketball on an invisible string from foot to thigh to head, juggling like a soccer magician. His athletic skills were never in doubt. A high school of 500 students gave him the faith he could pass college entrance exams, even after failing once, twice, three times.
While Najera admits, “I was scared,” Medina recalls a student who sought her out every morning before first bell, asking her to explain the mysteries of a culture where Bart and Homer Simpson were as famous as any president named Bush. When Najera finally passed his SAT to the satisfaction of college recruiters, his father called a trusted friend, expressing concern that the intrepid dream of a Mexican basketball pioneer could get swallowed whole and spit out in America.
Not to worry, replied the friend. This Najera possesses a rock head. Which turned out to be a good thing. What a young immigrant had learned at Cornerstone Christian is talent and ambition might not suffice, but resolve of granite never shatters.
“Students ask me all the time: ‘Should I be a teacher?’ And I always tell them the same thing,” Medina says. “The beauty of teaching is how many lives you can impact in a positive way. But you don’t get to see the results immediately and never really know the full impact until many years down the line, when some little thing happens to remind you it was all worthwhile.”
In Mexico, a new youth league, already populated by 8,000 children, has been created through the generosity of a Nuggets forward.
All the basketball Najera really needed to know in life he learned from Mrs. Medina.
Play it forward.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
