Vintage Detroit

SAN ANTONIO -- It was the summer of 1999 at Detroit 's Condon Playground, just a few blocks south of where Edsel Ford Freeway cuts through the inner city, and Frank Lewis , an old high school teammate of Durand "Speedy" Walker's, said he was bringing over "a special one" from his block of 30th Street. Walker, the coach of The Family, a prominent Motor City AAU program, was holding a summer camp at Condon, and the 12-year-old whom Lewis had in tow did not look special. Strange was more like it. "He was this skinny kid who weighed about 60 pounds, wearing red high-top Chuck Taylors when nobody was still wearing those, and had an afro all over the place," Walker said. "He looked like he would fall apart on the court."

But once Chris Douglas-Roberts got a basketball in his hands, he did things that, according to Walker, were more fit for Rucker Park than Condon Playground. The nascent, herky-jerky game that Walker saw would become Douglas-Roberts ' signature when it fully bloomed at Memphis , where he's a first-team All-America as a junior after averaging 17.7 points on 54.5 percent shooting. Tigers freshman point guard Derrick Rose describes what the 6-foot-7 Douglas-Roberts does as "old-man moves" -- "because he's got little tricks he can do with the ball to fool you." All of the tricks in Douglas-Roberts ' arsenal in 2008, from inside-out dribbles, to ultra-low cross-overs, to rarely seen mid-range push shots, stand out in the college game like a pair of canvas Chucks next to the latest innovations from Adidas and Nike .

Even now, as the 37-1 Tigers on are the verge of a Final Four date with UCLA , nearly everything about Douglas-Roberts is uniquely vintage: He shares an acronym-of-a-nickname, "CDR," with a digital-media format that went out with the rise of the iPod . His on-court style tends to evoke comparisons from the '70s rather than this decade, so much so that teammates like Robert Dozier tend to say, "I've never seen anybody play like that." The baggy T-shirt Douglas-Roberts used to sport under his jersey, before ditching it in the tournament, was reminiscent of Kenny Anderson at Georgia Tech in 1990. And the rolled-over mess of socks that Douglas-Roberts wears in triplicate on each foot -- "to warm me up," he says -- make his calves look downright mummified, as if they were straight out of ancient Egypt .

"Chris always was a trendsetter," said Walker, who would go on to coach Douglas-Roberts with The Family. "From the day I met him, he always marched to his own beat. Whatever the style was at the time, Chris set his own."

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While young guns like Rose are wont to give Douglas-Roberts ' game broad labels like "old-man," the old men back home have a more specific comparison for CDR. "Every rec-ball gym you go to in Detroit , there's an old guy talking about Gervin when they see me play," says Douglas-Roberts . "Every time. It never fails." Indeed, the finger-roll that CDR often employs on slashing drives comes straight from the book of George Gervin , Detroit 's most famous basketball product and a three-time NBA scoring leader with the San Antonio Spurs from 1978-80. Douglas-Roberts is too young to have seen Gervin 's trademark move or cool collectedness in the flesh, but based on highlights from ESPN Classic , CDR says the parallels are legit. "We both really don't sweat," he said, "and we make things look effortless, [even though] it's really not."

When Memphis coaches were recruiting Douglas-Roberts in Detroit , what they saw was a rail-thin scorer who weighed less than the 180 pounds he was listed at in recruiting profiles, but still managed to get to the rim in hard-nosed, low-scoring public-school games. "For him to play at that level in physical battles, you knew that he was a real competitor," says Tigers assistant Derek Kellogg. In September '04, Memphis took a commitment from Douglas-Roberts instead of leaving a scholarship open for hometown phenom J.P. Prince , a similar wing player who was then regarded as the No. 21 overall prospect in the country by Rivals.com . Douglas-Roberts was ranked 54 spots below Prince , who has yet to achieve stardom at Tennessee , and 65 spots below fellow Naismith and Wooden Award finalist Tyler Hansbrough of North Carolina , but Kellogg says, "We could see that [ Douglas-Roberts ] would be better than that, once he put some weight on his frame and expanded his game."

Douglas-Roberts ' mother, Judy Roberts, says her son's "singular focus" on a basketball career has helped him thrive despite his slender frame and unorthodox skill set. His obsession with the sport was almost innate: When a 3-year-old Douglas-Roberts was presented a football helmet as a gift from his father, Chris turned it upside down to use as a makeshift hoop for wadded-up socks. Judy still remembers how "aggravating" the sound of Chris incessantly bouncing a ball out in front of their house was, and how, in the seventh grade, he received an "A" on a composition that stated exactly how he'd progress from high school, to a college that played NBA -style basketball, to the pros. ("That was a seventh-grade composition. And I can tell you, the details have been pretty much realized at this point," Judy says.) If Douglas-Roberts chooses to turn pro after this season, the composition should be complete: He's projected to be a late first-round pick.

It was appropriately ironic, though -- given that Douglas-Roberts is regarded as a master of misdirection on the perimeter -- that he had to weather a few diversions from his best-laid plans, most prominently the brief derailment of his high-school career in Detroit . CDR starred for his first three seasons at Cass Tech, a academically minded magnet school Judy Roberts says she wanted her son to attend, even though she later got the feeling that he "hated" being there. An A/B student early on, Douglas-Roberts let his grades slip to the point that he was put on academic probation as a junior -- a situation that ended with him transferring, despite Cass Tech's objections, to Northwestern High, a more traditional inner-city public school, and then being ruled ineligible for the first half of his senior year. As a result, he missed the bulk of his final season.

The ineligibility, says Judy, "cost Chris everything he had worked for for three years." Walker felt the same way, saying, "It did major damage. He didn't make first team All-City, All-State or anything, when he probably should have been Mr. Basketball [in Michigan ]." Douglas-Roberts ' reputation had already been hurt by clashing with coaches -- and eventually leaving early -- from the USA Basketball's Youth Development Festival in Colorado Springs , Colo. , the summer before his senior year, and some colleges began to pull out of the pursuit for his services. Neither Michigan nor Michigan State offered CDR a scholarship, and his three finalists were Arizona , Miami and Memphis .