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Friday, March 15, 2002

By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

On Fridays, the earliest Steve Logan could get to work was 2 p.m. At the Male Box Shoeshine Parlor on Cleveland's East side, shoes cost $3, boots $7. Each shoe shiner earned $2 for a pair of shoes and $4 for a pair of boots, plus tips, so Logan needed to get there as soon as possible.

On Saturdays, there were no restrictions. Logan sometimes reported as early as 7 a.m., and he worked as long as he could, as late as 10 p.m. He needed the money.

"I wanted to be independent," he said. "I didn't want to bother my mother for clothes or hair dressers."

Logan was 12 years old.

His father had left home. His mother was dealing with it. His older sister was going to school, and he didn't want her to worry about him. "I had to grow up fast," he said.

Logan, Cincinnati's All-American senior point guard, is a little guy, barely 6 feet tall. But he has plenty of practice at shouldering responsibility.

Which might explain why he doesn't think it was exactly a superhuman feat that he has propelled the Bearcats -- who were unranked in the preseason -- to a school-record 30 victories, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA West Region and a first-round game today at Mellon Arena against 16th-seeded Boston University.

For the Bearcats to succeed, Logan had to cope with every variation of junk defense designed to stop him -- clearly, he has done so, averaging 22 points and 5.2 assists -- and the rest of the Bearcats needed to stop standing around watching him perform.

"When he's creating his own shot it's hard not to watch him," senior forward Jamaal Davis said. "Maybe you'll learn a little bit."

The odds were low that Logan would find himself in such a position.

First, he had to survive his neighborhood; a couple of his best friends are doing 15 to 20 years in federal jails. His mother solved that problem by working overtime and devising a payment plan to send her son to St. Edward High School, a private school with 900 boys -- nearly all white -- with ties, neat haircuts and spiffy shoes.

"It was like maximum security," Logan said.

Every day, he took three city buses to school. He learned to get along. And he played a little basketball, too, averaging 24.3 points, 5.8 assists and 2.5 steals as a senior, when he was named Ohio's Division I Player of the Year.

Then he had to lose weight.

Even in high school, Logan was too heavy. "We're a big-boned family," he said. "We eat good." When opposing fans wanted to taunt him, they chanted, "Logan's hungry."

In college, the extra weight gave him bigger problems. And somehow the discipline he had learned as a young shoe-shine boy didn't help him.

"High school was so much easier," he said. "I was stuck in the high school mentality."

After two years at Cincinnati, Logan was ready to transfer. He might have done so, if not for the intervention of the man he calls Uncle Clarence, Clarence Newby, who owns the Male Box Shoeshine Parlor.

Newby told the Cincinnati Enquirer that he told Logan: "No, son. You're going to stick it out. You're going to call Coach Huggins aside and say we can work it out. If you leave and redshirt, that's quitting. I don't want to hear no more about transferring. It's not even up for discussion."

The heart-to-heart talk with Coach Bob Huggins -- and a personal epiphany after he was charged with driving under the influence in August 2000, a few months before his junior season -- changed Logan's attitude.

The 25 pounds he shed by giving up fast food, eating chicken and fish for three months and spending more time at practice -- "stay late and go early, that's how you work on your game," he said -- made his moves that much harder to stop.

Since then, he has twice been named Conference USA's Player of the Year. He is Cincinnati's No. 2 career scorer with 1,940 points, behind only Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson. He has played in 133 games at Cincinnati, a school record, and he has won 110 of them, also more than any other Bearcats player.

"He's grown up a bunch in just his approach to life," Huggins told the Cincinnati Enquirer. "Lo was really one of those guys who did as little as he possibly could in every endeavor he was involved in. ... He's not that way now."