City of Basketball Love

By Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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PHILADELPHIA, PA — The little boy is still there, restless, and wide-eyed, and filled with wonder. He is buried under a mammoth 6-foot-10, 238-pound frame that surfaces sporadically in Thomas Sorber’s warm smile, in his genteel demeanor off the court, and in the intrepid way he plays basketball.

The six-year-old inside also rises when his voice will suddenly crack with emotion at a brief memory, about something he had no control over, nor could do anything about. He should have gone that day, he tells himself. He should have been there. He forgets how young he was; how he didn’t know. He was at that tender age when the world is sitting on the living room floor playing video games, when Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are real, and there is no such thing as death.

Take Thomas Sorber off the court, and he is the world’s largest teddy bear. On the court, especially this season, Archbishop Ryan’s Georgetown-bound center is a monster.

He could easily be angry at the world. He could walk around as a brooding giant. He doesn’t. Tenneh, his mother, wouldn’t let him. The mother of two has been the relentless, sturdy foundation of his life. Without her, Thomas openly wonders where he would be. Without her, his path may not be heading to Washington, D.C., eagerly waiting to be next in line of the great tradition of Georgetown centers. Without her, he knows he would not have overcome the sudden loss of his father, Peter, when he was six from colon cancer.

Thomas is arguably the best high school player in Philadelphia right now — maybe the state, along with Imhotep’s Connecticut-bound 6-1 senior guard Ahmad Nowell and Archbishop Wood’s Miami-commit and reigning Catholic League MVP, 6-foot-4 senior guard Jalil Bethea. Sorber, who recently surpassed 1,000 career points, is making a strong case for himself through the first month-and-a-half of this season, averaging 21 points and 12 rebounds a game. He established a Ryan single-game school record 41 points in a 75-56 victory over Rutgers Prep on Dec. 29, on 18-of-23 shooting, with 19 rebounds, and 10 blocked shots. He snapped a record that had stood for a quarter century, back when Ryan’s Anthony Starace dropped 38 on now-defunct Bishop McDevitt in 1998.

Sorber plays on that rare pantheon with a fine blend of size, quickness, and agility, and will go down as the greatest player in Ryan history.

He is 17 pounds lighter, undergoing a complete body change, and as he gets older and more mature, he is finding a new faculty to singlehandedly change games that he did not know he had.

It comes from within. It comes from, he senses, a six-year-old who adapted to how cold the world could be. He also knows where he derives his power—“My mom,” he says.

“My mom stepped up as mother and father to both me and my brother,” says Thomas, who cannot help but smile when he talks.

Then he whisked back to that day, Saturday, Aug. 31, 2013, sitting on the living room floor, a six-year-old playing video games watching the solemn look on the faces as they streamed into the house that morning. He goes back to his maternal grandfather pulling he and his older brother, Peter, aside to the rear kitchen to tell them that their father had died. Peter, then 11, burst into tears. Thomas immediately ran to console him, rubbing his back.

“I just couldn’t believe he was dead; I really didn’t understand what was going on; I always thought everything was going to be okay,” Thomas says today. “I didn’t know how to feel. I remember feeling my father’s forehead when he was lying there in the casket. It was freezing cold. The whole thing was like a bad dream to me. I suppose I had to touch him to believe he was dead. But it didn’t hit me. Not then. Everyone else around me was crying. I didn’t. I was this little kid who did not realize what was happening, and that nothing would be the same again. I suppose it really hit me a few times. I know one time that it hit.”

A week later, the first day of second grade. Thomas stood there fresh off the bus at the foot of the steps, watching as fathers took their kids by the hand and led them into school.

Pent up anguish came pouring out.

“I mean everything just came out and I didn’t care. I stood there realizing I won’t have that, my father won’t be there like the fathers of those kids,” he remembered.

A second-grade teacher took his hand and pulled him into a counseling room. She sat him down at a table aware of his situation, hugging him and reinforcing that everything was going to be okay. Then a small decision that helped shape Thomas occurred next: “I was letting everything out, and I could remember the teacher consoling me. Then she asked me if I wanted to go home that day. I said ‘No, I wanted to stay.’ I wiped the tears from my face. All I said was, ‘I’ll be fine.’”

He went through the whole school day. Sorber thought about that day 11 years later.

“I had my father in the back of my head and I was thinking about my mom, I was not going to run away,” he said. “My father was gone. I couldn’t change that. I had to move forward. I suppose that six-year-old was a tough, brave little kid. It’s funny, I never thought about it that way until now. I stayed in school. I had a real excuse to leave, but I stayed. I think that helped me to heal. It helped me face reality.”

His parents being Liberian, Thomas’ first love was soccer. His father was an imposing force on a soccer field at 6-foot-5. Soon after his father’s passing, Thomas began gravitating toward basketball. He was always tall for his age, the height genetics coming from Peter’s side. By his freshman year, he was 6-7. He has grown three inches since he entered high school.

“My brother always used to beat me playing basketball one-on-one, and never took it easy on me, knocked me down, all that, I remember I would go running to my mom complaining, and she hated that,” Thomas recalled, laughing. “I worked out with Peter’s high school team when I was around 10. I remember there were times I didn’t want to go. My mom forced me to go. She thought it would toughen me up. PJ (his brother) helped my game. He stepped in a little for my dad, trying to set a path for me as a role model.

“But my mom was really the one who had to play the role of mom and dad.”

It was trying, especially working as much as she did. She found refuge in the U.S. from a war that was ripping apart Liberia. Working overtime, feet swollen, eyes half mast, was rather comfortable from where she came.

She would leave at around 5:30 in the morning and not return until sometimes five or six at night. Then she got a job in Atlantic City and one of her sisters would watch the boys when she would take the two-hour roundtrip trek from home and back.

“She would never tell us she was tired,” Thomas recalled. “I would see her falling asleep on the couch watching TV. She was exhausted. You could see the exhaustion on her face. But she kept telling me everything was okay. I would help her upstairs after she worked overtime 17 hours a day, when I was 12, 13. I understand now. Everything comes from her. You don’t really appreciate things until you get older. I didn’t even know I was any good at basketball until I was around 13, 14. Things were getting easier.

“But I would always be tired because I was never in shape. I was a chubby kid. My mom and grandmom would always have food in front of me, especially during the holidays (laughs). I understand it comes from nurturing. But I got up to around 260. Last year, I was around 255, 258. I had to lose the weight. The last time I may have been 230 was when I was in eighth grade (laughs).”

Tenneh makes sure she is at every one of Thomas’ games.

Thomas could hear her calming thick, Liberian accent when he is standing on the free throw line—able to cut through the packed, raucous Palestra din during a Catholic League playoff game.

Thomas visits his father’s grave often by himself. He will update Peter on what he is doing, where he is going, what big games Ryan has coming up.

“I would be upset when I would see other kids with their dads, and there was that energy there, that question ‘Why me, why did my dad die?’ You go through it, but you get through it,” Thomas said. “I would visit my father in the hospital and knew he was sick. As a kid, you don’t know how serious. The day I didn’t go is the day he died. It stuck with me. Thinking about it, it catches me a little. But I look where I am going. I’m going to Georgetown. As I’m getting older, I feel my dad more. I have a good idea he would be pretty proud of me.”

There is a good chance he would.

Thomas finds himself the curator of a valuable gift, carrying part of his father’s soul.

****

Once you meet and speak with Tenneh Sorber, it makes sense. You see where her son gets his genial qualities. She came to the United States to escape the Liberian civil war in 1999 when she was 28 to live with her father in New York. She was shot at and had the ground under her feet quake from bombs living in Monrovia. There were more than a few instances she almost died.

From a distance at night, the firefights would illuminate the skies like whirling fire flies. One time while picking up her younger sister in Monrovia, Tenneh walked into a battle. She had to crouch between cars, and trees to work her way to the school where her sister was, crawling on the ground to avoid the bullets overhead.

Once she arrived in the U.S., she was so traumatized by the bombing that on her first Fourth of July celebration hearing firecrackers she dropped to the floor. Though the scars of a lost sister who died in childbirth due to a lack of medication are everlasting.

“It was crazy,” she recalled. “I would not call it courage. You do what you must do to live through it. That’s what Thomas did when Peter died. He had to grow up fast. He is courageous. He faced a lot when he was young. We got a lot of help from our family and friends. I remember Thomas did not cry when Peter died.”

A year after Peter was buried, Tenneh brought Thomas to the cemetery. That is when the realization hit Thomas a second time that the emotional dam burst.

“Thomas hugged his father’s gravestone and he wouldn’t let go,” Tenneh recalled. “We were all emotional. We had to pull him away. He just busted open. It was good, because he had to let it out. When Peter was dying, I wondered how I would take care of the kids. He told me he wanted me to leave them in Catholic school. God would make a way for them. He did.”

Tenneh, who works in the medical field, is thankful her sons were not there in the end. Peter was in great pain and in bad condition.

“They tried to put Peter in a home hospice, but I did not want the kids to see him that way,” she said. “Peter knew the end was coming, and he did not want his kids seeing him like that.”

She sometimes still works 16 hours a day, getting up around 5 in the morning and works to sometimes 11 at night. However, she will hardly miss a game. She will rearrange her schedule to make sure she is courtside.

And there is a lot to be excited about Ryan basketball this season. Raiders’ coach Joe Zeglinski has done wonders with the program. Ryan has never won a Catholic League boys’ basketball championship. With Thomas at the hub, there is a strong chance that could change.

“Thomas is a special kid, someone you rarely come across,” Zeglinski said. “He has that kind of personality that you want to be around a kid like that, such a leader, so humble. You would see him in the morning and he would be smiling and happy when no one else is. The other thing is Thomas is not needy, though he is someone you want to help.

“He’s meant so much to the culture of the school and the program. When you know his story, it makes him that much more impressive.”

Sorber is a brilliant player, though in the past, the added weight he carried sometimes prevented him from making second and third efforts. Losing 30 pounds has made him nimble, and that much more imposing inside.

“What Thomas has been through has made him who he is, someone who will push through anything, and it’s why everyone gravitates towards him,” Zeglinski said. “He is unbelievable. Since he has been at Ryan, he is the same person every day. It’s something he learned at a young age. He has that it factor. He wants to bring Georgetown back as the next great big man. He will do it, too.”     

The only thing left for Thomas is going out a winner. He wants to carry that mantle.

“That’s all I want,” he said. “I’m set. I’m going to Georgetown. I know the history here. We have never won a Catholic League championship. You get reminded of that when you walk into our gym. We have no banner hanging saying ‘Philadelphia Catholic League champions’ or ‘PA state champions.’ I would like to see one go up before I leave here.”

Tenneh is already making plans to take time off in March.

Joseph Santoliquito is a hall of fame, award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here [mobile.twitter.com].