I know that we’ve been on a Memphis kick today, but I can’t help it if the best story written comes from the city.
Skal Labissiere is Haitian. He was living in Haiti two and a half years ago when the island was hit with a devastating earthquake that killed 300,000 people.
That alone is a story in and of itself.
For Labissietre, it gets even more incredible:A wall fell on Labissiere’s back and legs.
He was trapped for three hours.
“My dad was going crazy outside because he was the only one outside,” Labissiere said. “The rest of us were inside the house, and my dad later told me that he pinched himself because he thought he must’ve been dreaming. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing; the house just fell right down on top of us. Boom! I thought we were going to die. He said he thought we were dead. But he just kept calling our names and digging and digging, and we finally heard him and responded, and I just remember being buried under a wall and yelling, ‘Dad, you promised me I’d make it to the NBA!’ I’ve never told anybody that, but that’s what I said to my dad.”
And his response?
“He just kept digging,” Labissiere said. “He just kept digging and digging.”
To call Labissiere unbelievably lucky would be an understatement. The fact that the kid appears to be relatively unaffected by the fact that he nearly lost his life in a natural disaster that of that magnitude is a miracle, really.
And now throw in the fact that the kid has a chance to develop into an NBA player and, well, it’s amazing.
It’s the kind of thing Disney movies get made about.
Rob Dauster is the editor of the college basketball website Ballin’ is a Habit. You can find him on twitter @robdauster.