He Wanted to Play Basketball. He Finally Got the Chance.

Good morning. Today we’ll find out about the improbable story of how someone went from playing pickup basketball to being a star at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. We’ll also look at former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s effort to torpedo a state ethics commission.

Last week, Arthur Dukes Jr., a 26-year-old student at LaGuardia Community College, was named player of the year by the City University of New York Athletic Conference. It was a remarkable capstone to a year that had begun with Dukes working as a security guard at a Foot Locker store and playing a pickup game at a Harlem public school. It ended with him reigning as the captain of LaGuardia’s team and as the leading scorer among all players in Division III of the National Junior College Athletic Association.

I asked Katherine Rosman, who covered Dukes’s sudden success, to explain his basketball odyssey.

He went through a lot before he got to LaGuardia and became a star, didn’t he?

His collegiate basketball dreams first got caught up in other things that quashed them. He went first to Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, N.Y.

Community college athletics can be a springboard to Division I and Division II schools. But the coach barely played him at all. He had a lackluster freshman showing that was cut short in March 2020 by the pandemic. He moved back home, living with his parents and seven siblings in a two-bedroom apartment.