NEW ORLEANS — Drive through the 3rd Ward and you don’t need a hurricane to tell you how far certain parts of this city must come. You cruise past small, dilapidated houses with cyclone fences closing off nothing but debris-strewn vacant lots and trouble. Scruffy cemeteries, with their graves above ground, cover three blocks.
Sixth Street leads right into the Magnolia projects, a drab, two-story housing development representing one of the worst danger zones in a city full of them. Drug dealings. Shootings. Overdoses. Prostitution. You name it, the 3rd Ward has it.
The one bastion of peace in the neighborhood was a modest little all-purpose grocery store on the corner of Sixth and LaSalle called the LaSalle Street Market. To locals it was Hulio’s. That’s what they called store owner Younes Abdallah, father of Ohio State defensive tackle Nader Abdallah.
This past Wednesday, five days before Abdallah leads his top-ranked Buckeyes (11-1) into the Superdome against his home-state Louisiana State Tigers (11-2) for the national title, three old men huddled against the cold next to Hulio’s. A random-toothed man who would only give his name as “Johnson” between long chugs from a bottle of Seagram’s gin stood next to Donald Jarreau, a disabled Vietnam veteran with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
The 3rd Ward has experienced a lot of bad times, and this was one of them. In the early-morning hours of Dec. 29, Hulio’s went up in flames, leaving the store barely more than a pile of burnt kindling and memories.
“It was cold that night,” Jarreau said. “Somebody might’ve went in there and got warmed up. They got a lot of homeless people still looking for places to sleep at night. And they were cold.”
The commercial damage stands at zero. Hulio’s had long since been abandoned. Two-and-a-half years ago, looters ravaged whatever the floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina didn’t. But to the 3rd Ward and the Abdallahs, Hulio’s represented so much more. As Nader Abdallah developed into one of the nation’s top recruits at Archbishop Rummel High School, he worked there, selling food, clothes and whatever knickknacks the locals needed. Younes cashed checks for one and all.
Crime in the 3rd was constant. Gunfire was a routine occurrence. Nader saw one man have a seizure from a drug overdose outside the store and die. Yet in the 25 years before the hurricane, since Younes arrived in the United States, the store was never robbed.
“We miss the grocery store,” Jarreau said. “It was convenient for us because all we had to do was walk out of the house and it was 24 hours because he opened the window at night.”
Younes, 59, has returned to New Orleans to watch his son play for a national title. He has returned from a place that represents a more peaceful life than what he left in New Orleans, a place where the devastation isn’t nearly as great as what his family experienced in the horrific wake of Katrina.
The West Bank.
Story of survival
Younes, Nader and older brother Mazen sat in a coffee shop of the Ohio State team hotel looking like a typical football family. Younes wore a red ball cap reading “BUCKEYE DAD.” Mazen wore an OSU cap and Nader had his sharp, scarlet Ohio State warm-up suit. You wouldn’t know they were Palestinian until you heard the father’s accent, saw their dark, handsome features and heard their story of survival and perseverance.
If Katrina ever disgorged any happy endings from its path of tragedy, this story may be one of them. Without Katrina, maybe Mazen wouldn’t have spent three months in Columbus last year getting his underachieving brother to rise into a starter. Maybe Younes would never have returned to his proud homeland, where he plants in his garden and dreams of peace without crying.
“One thing that’s really common about most Palestinians is they have a chip on their shoulder,” said Mazen, 27, a lawyer in Houston. “They have something to prove. There’s always a struggle in their heart, mainly because they don’t really have a country for themselves. So there’s a struggle in their heart to do something good for everybody, to show that they’re a good example from wherever they come from.
“Actually, that transcends into Nader’s career and everything he’s doing.”
It all started the last week of August 2005. Nader was beginning his redshirt freshman year, and a cousin in Miami made a frantic call about a hurricane headed toward New Orleans. Nader called his family, who were already headed to Houston. However, the eldest brother, Wesam, stayed back to mind the store.
The store held up against the hurricane and became a survival station for neighbors desperate for supplies. Then the flood came and the store was destroyed. It didn’t level the 3rd Ward, but Wesam had to leap into the water from the roof and swim past floating bodies, some unearthed from the cemeteries, to reach dry land. No one could reach anyone, as cellphone towers had collapsed.
Back at Ohio State, Nader had a hard time focusing on football.
“(Coaches) let me hold my cell phones during meetings,” he said. “All the coaches were real helpful. Everybody was real concerned. The whole time during practice I wasn’t into practice. I was worried about what was going on.”
The family home in neighboring Metairie was also flooded and eventually rebuilt and sold. Soon after, Wesam went to Houston and the family drove to Columbus to watch Nader’s first game, arriving just before the opening kickoff. But the 22-hour drive took its toll. Younes fell asleep during the game. He didn’t miss much. Nader played six minutes.
He played in only eight games his first two years, and while his father followed games on the Internet from his home in Ramallah, Mazen slowly fumed in Houston. His brother had taken recruiting trips to Ohio State, Florida State, Tennessee, Michigan State and Colorado (“Boulder was one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen,” Nader said.) but had become known more as a Katrina survivor than a Buckeye lineman.
“I got lost in the mix,” Nader said. “Instead of going out there and taking my position, I was the guy in the back who waited for his position. I put on extra weight. I wasn’t as dedicated as much as I am now. Last year I had a wake-up call.”
Sounding the alarm was Mazen, who spent January through March in Columbus last year getting into his brother’s head. His advice? Know that nothing would be handed to him.
“He has a chip on his shoulder to prove that he’s what Ohio State . . . (that he) is what they expected him to be,” Mazen said. “He is what Ohio State fans expected him to be: being a major contributor to the No. 1 defense in the country. You ask what part of him is Palestinian? It’s that struggle inside to make something of himself.”
Nader’s stats aren’t glittery. He has only 18 tackles and a sack, but Ohio State’s defensive tackles are expected to clear space for its standout linebackers more than pile up gaudy numbers. He has started the past six games for the nation’s top-ranked defense (225.2 yards per game).
“You can see a great difference in his growth,” Ohio State coach Jim Tressel said. “Not maybe all because his brother spent time with him. A lot of the things happened naturally, and coaches were very patient watching him grow. But his brother made a big impact.”
Rooting for Abdallah
Back in the 3rd Ward, the future isn’t quite so bright. The Magnolia projects are half torn down and the city wants to raze them and rebuild in what has become a major turf war. Jarreau said rent for little one-bedroom houses in the neighborhood has jumped from $300 to $690.
But like the Abdallahs, the residents are survivors. So is this neighborhood.
“It’ll be back,” Jarreau said. “All they got to do is keep on rebuilding these houses and go back down on the rent. Nobody can pay that kind of rent for the amount of money they’re paying you to work here.”
Monday night, however, Jarreau can forget about the 3rd Ward and think about national glory instead. His LSU Tigers are playing for a national title. He pulled down his trousers to reveal purple and gold LSU shorts that matched his purple pullover. But what about Nader Abdallah, what about the son of the 3rd Ward’s favorite grocer?
“I’ll root for Abdallah,” Jarreau said with a smile, “but not Ohio State.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
