A basketball star’s lessons on failure and redemption

He's not famous, at least not to the kids in school today, certainly not like his friends LeBron James, Steph Curry and Michael Jordan.

But at 6 foot 11, standing in front of school groups in a bright, red polo shirt, Will Kirkaldy leaves a powerful impression — especially after his long-ago classmate Joe DeLong introduces him as a basketball star who was headed toward a life of hoops royalty like those megastars.

Kirkaldy has something to tell these kids and from what I saw in Bridgeport and Norwalk — part of his weeklong trek to cities across Connecticut — they are listening closely. It's not exactly about success; no, he didn't make it to that NBA dream, at least not on the court.

But it's not just about failure, not by a long shot. Will Kirkaldy tells a remarkable story of faith, hard work, mistakes and mostly, getting up after life knocks you down.

He takes his young listeners from the scared world of a fourth grader bullied by three girls, to national stardom, then shame and humiliation more than once, then back up to the edge of greatness and back down in an instant; and finally to a life of purpose — including removing and waving a prosthetic leg to make a point that will, for some of these youths, last a lifetime.

Kirkaldy's story starts in Brooklyn as the youngest of five children of a mother who immigrated from Panama and a father who was not in the family's life. He was the tallest person in the school, taller even than the principal, but those three girls would beat him up — until one day in his second try at the fourth grade, he decided he'd had enough.

Seeing them out the window, he refused to leave the school. A janitor told him he couldn't stay — he had to face his fears and fight back. Or, young Will could head to the school gym, where they were holding basketball tryouts.

“I had no idea about the game of basketball, none. I didn't have a favorite player,” he told 60 students at Bridgeport's Central High School Tuesday. “I was simply trying to avoid a beatdown.”

He made the team in borrowed sneakers thanks to his height. And he stayed with the sport. “I changed my surroundings, I changed my friends, I changed the social atmosphere,” he recounted. “Those same three girls were in that middle school. But this time they were fans of mine.”

By the spring of ninth grade, he was smoking and drinking, struggling with his grades, doing OK, not great in classes. But basketball had made him someone special. “I was declared the No. 1 freshman on the East Coast,” he said.

Now the kids listening to Kirkaldy know what's coming, though not the details. He talked about the setbacks and the triumphs at every stage — an arrest for a crime he didn't commit that nearly sent him to prison for 28 years, a top-five ranking in the nation as a basketball prospect, a horrible car crash, a university official who helps him find a new path.

“You guys are going through stuff today,” he tells the Central High School students. “And it's frightening, and you have this doubt but at some point in time you're going to have to face it, even if it's not today. So I did that. And you're going to do that. And you're going to fail. Just like me. I want to tell you right here, right now, that you will fail ... you will fail. But failure does not depict or describe who you are. Whoever you are today is not who you'll be tomorrow. So look for tomorrow. That's what I did.”

At age 49, he's still a work in progress, a paraprofessional at one New Jersey high school and a junior varsity basketball coach at another; looking back at more than a decade working for the National Basketball Association, the league where he was destined, or so it seemed, to make a fortune; looking ahead to finally finishing his college degree.

Kirkaldy came to this tour of urban schools in Connecticut, which ended Friday, not from a talent agency, not to plug a book — which he really should write — but through Joe DeLong, who knew of Kirkaldy when both attended West Virginia University. DeLong, then a WVU football lineman and now CEO of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, wondered recently what ever happened to Kirkaldy and googled him. They connected.

CCM and Dalio Education, part of the Greenwich family's philanthropic foundation, sponsored the visit.

The budding star Will Kirkaldy traveled the nation and the world in that summer after 9ninth grade, playing hoops in Europe, California, Texas, Arizona. “I even came here to Connecticut,” he said.

By 10th grade, he didn't think he needed to show up in phys ed class, and so he flunked — leaving him ineligible to play ball that year, effectively kicked out of school. “We were supposed to win the championship,” he said. “Success is so close if you just try ... but I didn't try, I failed.”

The ups and downs kept coming, higher heights, lower lows.

After time as a dropout, he moves to Oak Hill Academy in Virginia — “There's only books, basketball and God” — and leads the team to a national high school championship and an undefeated season as a junior. Now he's in the elite with Juwon Howard, Penny Hardaway and Chris Webber as the nation's top high school prospects.

He agrees to attend St. John's University under legendary coach Lou Carnesecca, but travels for a partying recruitment visit to Syracuse University — where he finds himself in a hotel room with an undergraduate woman. She comes out of the bathroom screaming. Police arrive.

“She said that I raped her,” he tells the high school students. “I told the police I didn't rape her ... They put me in a cell and said that I was under arrest.”

Kirkaldy refuses to tell the middle schoolers in Norwalk what crime he was accused of committing, despite their pleas.

Amid national headlines, Kirkaldy faced 28 years on the rape charge. He declined repeated plea bargains for less prison time. Then a private investigator hired by his mother found a videotape that showed two young women plotted to frame him on a false rape charge.

The judge tells him he can restore his freedom — but not his reputation. The top college offers were long gone.

After a good year at West Virginia, Kirkaldy determined to join the NBA, a promise he had made to his family back in ninth grade. But on April 19, 1992, he was in a car driven by his buddy that crashed into a mountain at 85 miles per hour, shattering his right femur and destroying his left lower leg.

“They told me I'd be lucky if I ever walked again . ... They need to amputate my leg. I said ‘No you won't.' I told them, ‘Use me like you would a guinea pig. I want you to try anything and everything to make me better.' ”

In painful detail, Kirkaldy describes four years of more than 30 operations, including installation of a device that required he turn screws to keep his bones together. In the end he lost the leg below his knee to infection. “I felt happy because I had my leg amputated on my terms ... after I had tried every possible option.”

“One thing that you cannot do is give up,” he tells his listeners. “My question today to you is, what is your backup plan?”

Kirkaldy had enrolled at St. John's. Through a dean who had followed his story, he gained an internship at the NBA. That turned into a 13-year stint working with players on off-court events such as commercials and speeches. There, he did have the respect of a great basketball talent, he told me.

He had, in a real sense, made it to the NBA — and then he left to pursue a dream of working with students.

“Today I am living my purpose and my destiny. This is what I love to do,” he tells the kids in Norwalk — before they mob him for his autograph, his face lighting up like he was one of them.

At Central High in Bridgeport, 10th grader Liom Gonzalez is taken. “He got to the NBA despite the crash, despite the rape allegations and everything — it must make me do better, not give up as easily as I do,” he tells me.

Liom returned to the room where Kirkaldy spoke to ask a question about his philosophy. A few minutes later, a music teacher, Joe DeGroat, showed up to meet Kirkaldy. “It was powerful — whatever you said, made it down the hall and then back to me,” DeGroat said.

Kirkaldy, DeLong, DeGroat and two other teachers talked about reaching young people. Later, in Norwalk, after he told his story on the basketball court of the George Washington Carver Community Center, the middle school kids ask him to take some shots. He had told me he still plays in an over-40 league, prosthetic device and all.

He refuses to shoot. They keep at it. As he heads for the door after a 9-hour day of three presentations, he steps behind the three-point line with a ball — and launches it straight through the hoop. Just like it was all part of a plan.