I had to leave Felipe who was very young. I had to leave Sayu. His older brother Anthony made the first move, contacting the New York Gauchos—a year-old youth basketball program in the heart of the Bronx. It was like a dream to see a kid who come like this, at 14 years old. Lopez dealt with depression during his worst times at St. The burden was a hell of a lot more than just not being the best.
He was all their dreams. After retirement from playing, Lopez embarks on a mission to build organizations, including The Felipe Lopez Foundation , based out of his church in the South Bronx providing help and guidance to local children, and his work as an ambassador with NBA Cares, where he takes constant trips to the Dominican Republic for major causes, including the aim to reduce and eventually eliminate Malaria and basketball related programs around the island.
The Dominican Dream is an immigrant tale, a personal victory camouflaged as a failed basketball career where, thanks to the unconditional love and nurturing of his family, the hero finds true happiness while also realizing that throughout the good times and the bad, his community was always there, ready to welcome him home.
Dos A Cero is back. Those pages were filled with negative news in the ensuing years. Perhaps he would have been better off leaving before then, as he was urged to do.
Lopez would have been a high draft pick before his freshman season, when he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, or even after it, before the years of college allowed scouts to pick apart his game. He got there eventually as a late first-round pick in and played five seasons, averaging 5. Lopez is active in the community through his nonprofit foundation and NBA Cares, president of a community center basketball team in the Dominican Republic, and has returned to St.
So how would he answer that question he sometimes gets, about what happened to Felipe Lopez? Sections U. Lopez was a lithe slasher who ran like a gazelle and had hops that inspired tall tales. He laughs. In the summer of '92, prior to Lopez's junior year, sneaker impresario Sonny Vaccaro put together the inaugural ABCD Camp, an all-star game, of sorts, for the nation's top prospects. Rasheed Wallace was there. He was sort of an enigma," recalls Tarik Turner, Lopez's teammate for all four years at St.
Plus, he didn't speak much English at the time, so he was quiet. And guys were just really anxious to see what he was about. Nobody knew how he got so good, so fast. There goes Felipe. But on this one break it was a two-on-one, and Felipe got caught in midair. But the defender jumped out to deflect a pass. So, Felipe, still hanging, just threw the ball off the glass to himself and dunked it.
He couldn't be so much better than us and be the same age," Hamilton says. The New Yorker wrote him up in March The story by Susan Orlean documented a hysteria of sorts.
The city's Dominican population treating him like Michael Jordan—or even Michael Jackson, for that matter. Emanuel Richardson, who played for Rice's archrival St. Raymond's, once said, "When you dealt with Felipe, it was like Carnival. They were doing everything but roasting pigs. He was before the YouTube Era, so there's not a lot of footage of his exploits.
But, I'm telling you: I was there. People weren't even close to him. He was doing whatever he wanted, to whomever he wanted. Michael O'Neill had photographed plenty of athletes for Sports Illustrated , but his shoot with Lopez would be one to remember. With Lopez hopping up and down on a trampoline on a big boat in the Hudson River, the shoot began. And we have to make sure that we're getting the Statue of Liberty in the right spot in the background. It all happened in real time.
Felipe made that picture. There are not many athletes so closely associated with one photo. It was iconic. When it hit the stands, it made Lopez a celebrity for the casual fan. And it also undoubtedly raised expectations for his college career. Having not grown up stateside, Lopez and his family weren't acutely aware of the import of his cover turn. It was too much, too fast for any freshman. Not just Felipe. Lopez's career at St. Johns was underwhelming. The arrival of Fran Fraschilla his junior year righted a wayward ship, and St.
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