Edition: U.S. / Global

Built on Solid Ground; There's No Place Like the 'Hood for Coleman

Published: September 26, 1993

The young boys playing down the street rushed over to say hello. Old Joe Wilkey waved from the porch of the house next door, as did Dorothy Johns, whose son ran with Derrick Coleman when they were teen-agers.

The boys, no older than 8, came to let the 26-year-old star of the New Jersey Nets know they were making good use of the trendy black sneakers -- the ones he endorses on television, of course -- that he had given them.

"These little guys related to you?" a visitor asked Coleman.

"Hey, everybody in the neighborhood's a relative," he said.

Well, almost. After Coleman had steered his white pickup truck onto Hazelwood in North-Central Detroit one recent afternoon, after he had driven past Hudson's Playground and recalled being jumped by seven older boys when he was 12 and had just relocated from Mobile, Ala., he zeroed in on the homes of actual blood relations.

"I got cousins here," he said, pointing left, then right, then adding, "and around the corner, and on the next block, too."

He couldn't really recall exactly how many there were. "Fifteen, 20," he guessed.

Derrick Coleman, who cites family and responsibility as the dominant themes in his life, never knew his father. The mother who raised him, Dassie, moved to the Detroit suburbs a while back, and became the target of her son's prickly needle. How could she move out from Hazelwood, the old neighborhood, he half-seriously wanted to know, when he was going to move back in?

Although he is loath to surrender the Detroit River view he has from his rented apartment in a downtown tower, Coleman, who is single, bought the house last year with the intention of making it his off-season home. It will be ready for occupation sometime this fall. He had both floors gutted, and it is being redone exactly to suit his taste, to fulfill his dream, which, it turns out, includes not just the house, but the 'hood.

"This is it," Coleman said, easing his 6-foot-10-inch, 230-pound frame from the truck he parked on the tree-lined street in an area of mostly neat, two-story flat brick homes, though some were run-down and a few vacant or burned-out. "This is the one I bought right here, and over there is my aunt and uncle's."

The houses were adjacent, separated by what will be Coleman's driveway and knock-around basketball court.

"This is actually the house I grew up in," he said, motioning toward Mary and Robert Turner's house, where his uncle was his surrogate father and his cousins, with nicknames like Banana, Pokey and Big Bob, left an only child feeling as if his immediate family was wondrously large and his childhood was Main Street, America.

The suburbs, Coleman said, are not for him. As it is, he owns a condo west of the Meadowlands, and finds the streets eerily quiet, to the point of irritation. And as if to support his preference for an urban setting, his New Jersey in-season home was recently robbed. A Nice Place to Live

"I like my neighborhood," he said, though others describe it as not the toughest in Detroit but no place for the faint of heart. "To me, it's nice. It's not the projects. It's the only place where I can relax, where it's just, 'What's up, Derrick?' and not, 'Oooh, there's Derrick Coleman.'

"I mean, where does it say that when you get money, you have to move from where you came from? Why does my life have to change?"

Nowhere, except it usually works out that way, which is why Coleman's philosophical blueprint goes against more than the flow of decades-old suburban flight from the troubled Motor City. By making an investment of a few hundred thousand dollars that no sane accountant would advise, he appears to be the converse of the contemporary professional athlete, who has become wildly rich, but generally out of reach in any city, out of touch with fans and roots.

This has especially been the case in Detroit, with regards to pro basketball, the so-called city game. The Pistons left downtown 15 years ago and eventually built their Palace in Auburn Hills, Mich., at least an hour's drive from their outdated former downtown home, Cobo Arena. 'It's Sad'

The party line for the Pistons' exit was that Detroit was becoming too dangerous to attract the typical fan who could afford rising National Basketball Association ticket prices. But that has been refuted hundreds of times by the Detroit Red Wings, who lure white, suburban sellout crowds to hockey games at the downtown Joe Louis Arena.

"It's sad," said Isiah Thomas, the Pistons' most identifiable player. But playing that far from downtown, he said, makes living there impractical. He says he maintains contact in small ways, like getting his hair cut in the city. "I really respect what Derrick is doing," he said.

A few hours after Coleman gave a visitor a tour of his neighborhood and home-in-progress, he played in a charity game at Joe Louis to benefit inner-city youth. A team of Detroit pros met a team from Chicago.

One Piston, Coleman's former Nets buddy, Terry Mills, played for Detroit. Thomas coached the Chicago team. The loudest cheers from the crowd of about 8,000 were for Coleman and his close friend and high school rival, Steve Smith of the Miami Heat, lending credence to Mills's claim that "Derrick is Detroit basketball."