Between holiday traveling, sick kids, and all that is swirling (much like a flushed toilet) around the football program; the stuff on basketball has gotten a short shrift. Time to skip ahead. Past beating Robert Morris and Penn, but before the City Game’s debut at the Con on Wednesday night.

Class of 2012 Kiwi Center, Steve Adams got a lot of attention in the New Zealand paper. Hell of a story really.

“I don’t like thinking about it,” he says. “Pretty much everything I had in Rotorua was crap.” His father died when he was 13, but had been ill for some time before that. His mother wasn’t around much. His three older siblings all cared, but had their own lives to lead. So Adams did what he chose. He chose not to attend school, and also to hang out with some suspect types.

“I would call them bad people,” he says. “I thought they were good people, Mongrel Mob people, but they were obviously bad guys. But I was still hanging out with them and getting up to mischief.”

Luckily Adams had an inkling of the value of his body and stayed away from drugs. But it was not an easy time for him when his father died. “I got jealous of everyone with family. I’d see them and just hate them. They’d take it for granted…. I was just like ‘what’s the point?’ You could say depressed. I didn’t want to go on in life. I didn’t go to school. I hated everything.

“Then my [half-]brother [former Tall Black Warren Adams] came along, and since he’s my brother he kicked my arse and told me to come to Wellington. I thought ‘what the hell, I might as well’.”

As life-changing moments go, this was a biggie. Warren, now into his 40s and driving trucks for a living, got wind of Steven’s situation in Rotorua and acted. He did the only thing he could, and got Steven and older brother Sid out of there.

He comes from a substantially sizable family. One with plenty of athletic talent, as another older sister is an world and Olympic shot-put champion, Valerie Adams.

His half-brother, Warren, introduced him to Blossom Cameron, who 20 years earlier took in Warren.

Blossom, a personal trainer, moved Steven into her Wellington apartment and started giving him some discipline and life skills.

“He thought I was his fairy godmother,” Blossom said. “He didn’t have any clothes, so I went and bought him clothes. He didn’t have any food, and we had food every week. But it was almost like he’d been sheltered from all the ugliness in life. He just saw it as it was, `I sleep on the floor, big deal’. He was just a simple kid, fresh in all ways. He’s just an absolute gentle giant.”

Enter another major influence – NBL legend Kenny McFadden, a former Saints teammate of Warren’s. McFadden sized up the youngster – 1.93m and not yet 15 – and told him if he committed to the 6.30am weekday training sessions, he would do all he could to advance him as a basketballer.

“After about a year I knew he had the potential to go all the way,” McFadden said.

“Steve has natural aggression, big hands, big feet, and that desire to want to train every day… there’s not another kid as good as him anywhere in the world.”

At the time he had stopped attending school, he wasn’t even fully literate. Since being taken in by Cameron, he has gotten an education. He has been attending a quality private school for the last few years.

When no other school in Wellington would take him in 2008, the prestigious Scots College offered him a partial scholarship.

Arriving only semi-literate, he required a lot of assistance.

“The biggest challenge was just getting him going back to school every day,” recalls headmaster Graeme Yule. “He was a rough diamond, to put it mildly.”

But: “It became apparent he was actually quite bright, and very savvy. Now with his basketball he’s flicked a switch. He’s figured out what he needs to do.”

Blossom – now Steven’s legal guardian – ensures there are no distractions.

Video games have been banned from their apartment, but they have recently hooked up Sky because of Steven’s last report card.

These are the stories that remind us of how sports matter beyond cheering interests. How they can help provide direction and something akin to salvation. I would have to believe that if he ends up on the New Zealand Olympic basketball team, odds should be high for a soft-focus feature on NBC in 2012.

This. Well, I just don’t know what to say about this bit.

Q: In the spirit of the week, if Jamie Dixon’s Pitt team were a side dish in a Thanksgiving Day meal, what would it be?

DeCourcy: Wow. This sounds a bit Clark Kellogg-ish, but I’ll roll with it. I’ll say Pitt’s Panthers would be the mashed potatoes of a Thanksgiving dinner: always there, always reliable, versatile enough to accommodate a number of different ingredients, occasionally cold but almost never disappointing.

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like mashed potatoes, just as it’s hard to find anyone who has a problem with Pitt. The Panthers do this thing right. They play hard. They play together. They play for each other. What’s not to like?

Moving on.

Solid story/puffer on Nasir Robinson and what he brings to the team.

“He’s unique in that he can guard in the post and on the perimeter,” Dixon said. “Very few guys can do that. That’s the first thing. Offensively, he does some things that makes your offense better, things that won’t show up in stats. His movement without the ball, his ability to reverse the ball. These are things coaches look at. It’s hard to quantify.”

For those who believed the emergence of redshirt freshman Talib Zanna would diminish Robinson’s role once he returned, they might want to study Dixon’s words carefully. Dixon is a big fan of Robinson’s intangible qualities.

Robinson boasts modest career statistics (6.6 points and 5.6 rebounds per game entering this season), but it is clear that he is viewed as one of the more indispensable players in Dixon’s arsenal. Robinson played 23 minutes in Pitt’s victory Tuesday night against Robert Morris after playing seven minutes against Maryland and 24 minutes against Texas in New York.

And even though Robinson only scored two points against the Colonials, he did many of the little things that endear him to Dixon. He played with his usual brand of toughness, he hustled and grabbed 11 rebounds. Against the Longhorns he had nine points and two rebounds.

“His toughness is infectious,” Dixon said.

I really became a fan of Nas partway through last season. There were players that were just bigger and skilled that could abuse him, but the number was a lot smaller than I ever thought going into last year. Even just coming back from his injury, he has not shown any fear and was strong against Texas.

Finally, congrats to the Oakland Zoo on getting a new site. Hope they post more than once a year or two.