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In 1990, Adonal David Foyle saw his future and dreaded it. With an eighth-grade education, living on a tiny Caribbean island that had neither electricity nor running water, his likeliest fate was to become a fisherman.
His life since then has been made of stuff that, if written as fiction, would be rejected as absurd. Introduced to basketball at age 15, Mr. Foyle became, in order, athlete, immigrant, star, scholar, National Basketball Association player, labor activist and, soon, United States citizen.
Now, add another improbable activity to the list: crusader for campaign finance reform.
With the help of the American college professors who are his surrogate parents, Mr. Foyle has created Democracy Matters, a group dedicated to limiting the influence of money in politics, backing it up with some fraction - he will not say how much - of his N.B.A. millions. Focusing on recruiting college students to the cause, the group has created chapters on 16 campuses, most of them in New York, and has hopes of adding many more, with the help of Mr. Foyle's visits.
On July 18, he made his first lobbying trip, to the state Capitol, where he met with lawmakers and held a news conference with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and others in support of campaign finance legislation. The visit was meant to draw attention rather than make real news; it is not every day that a 6-foot-10-inch professional athlete surfaces with a cause in Albany. But he is deadly serious about his subject.
"It's the one issue that connects all the other issues," said Mr. Foyle, 26, asserting that environmental, labor and other causes would benefit from limits on campaign contributions and spending. "This is fundamental to our democracy."
Like most of the extraordinary events in his life, he shares credit for his new venture with Joan and Jay Mandle, the decidedly left-of-center academics who brought him to the United States and became his legal guardians. After years of taking part in their politically charged dinner-table debates, he recently expressed an interest in campa
ign
finance."They immediately sent several books and a bunch of articles for me to read, so I'm going around the N.B.A., from plane to plane, with a computer and all these books in my hands," he said. "The players are looking at me like I'm certifiably nuts."
So far, Mr. Foyle said, he has discussed his interest in politics with just or two members of his team, the Golden State Warriors. But he is determined to get other players to share his concerns, and envisions Democracy Matters sponsoring television and radio ads featuring professional players urging fans to register and vote.
His elders often say that young people are apathetic, but Mr. Foyle decided that they simply lacked a cause. So he set out to give them one. "If you organize students," he said, "you organize the future."
Democracy Matters took several of its newly designated campus coordinators recently to a conference at a hotel in Alexandria, Va., held by Public Campaign, an advocacy group devoted to public financing of campaigns, in hopes of inspiring them and teaching them organizing techniques.
"Incumbents can and do use their position to extract money from wealthy individuals who want legislative favors," Mr. Foyle said in an address to the conference. "We should not be surprised, only alarmed, when people refuse to participate in what they believe to be a rigged system."
Despite the grim words, his manner is disarming. He laughs frequently, mostly at himself; dispenses hugs readily; and cries easily. When chairs were in short supply for a workshop with student organizers at last weekend's conference, he plopped himself on the carpet.
Mr. Foyle is not the typical professional athlete, to say the least. When he talks of fighting discrimination, he cites, along with racial minorities, the rights of women and gays. He writes poetry (which he will not show to reporters). Despite turning professional after his junior year, he graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University with a degree in history, and he is working toward a master's degree in Sports Psychology at John F. Kennedy University, which, like his team, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. An enthusiastic fan of the theater, he made an improbable Stanley Kowalski in a college production of "A Streetcar Named Desire."
His Golden State Warriors teammates sometimes hint that they see him as a bit of an oddball, but they have also made him their representative to the players' union, a sign of respect. He is also the official spokesperson for the Warriors "Tall Tales" Reading program. And he participated in the "Making the Grade" program, a comprehensive program that serves as a tool to prevent middle schoolers from dropping out of school when they reach high school
Mr. Foyle was born on Canouan, a speck of an island in the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. His father abandoned the family when he was 6, and then his mother left Canouan to find work. Adonal, his two older sisters sisters and his younger brother stayed on Canouan, population 500, with their grandmother.
At 15, it dawned on him that his only choices were to pass the entrance exam for secondary school or, like most of his peers, get a job.
"That was the real hurdle, the real turning point of my life," he said. "Then I start truly studying under the kerosene lamp and with candles, and my grandmother screaming about how expensive candles are. I just knew that this was my last chance."
He passed the test, and moved to Union Island for secondary school. He had never seen basketball played, but was soon recruited to play for both his school and a local club team. Prior to that he played soccer and tennis and participated in track and field.
A few months later, he was playing in a tournament in Dominica, another island nation, where he met Jay Mandle, who was refereeing, and Joan Mandle, who was keeping score. Mr. Mandle, an economist, and Mrs. Mandle, a sociologist-anthropologist, had spent years studying and fostering the spread of basketball in the Caribbean.
"He was not the best player on the team, and the team was not the best in the tournament," Jay Mandle said.
"No, they were the worst," said Joan Mandle.
"They won a game."
"Yeah, they beat Grenada, but Grenada had a one-eyed point guard."
Still, they saw in Mr. Foyle enough raw talent to believe that basketball could be a ticket to a college education.
Within a few weeks, the couple had sponsored Mr. Foyle for entry to the United States. A year later, he was living with them in Hamilton, a town of 4,000 people in upstate New York and home to Colgate, where they were teaching. (Mr. Mandle remains at Colgate, while Mrs. Mandle left teaching a few years ago, worked on several political campaigns, and now works full time for Democracy Matters as its executive director.)
Mr. Foyle enrolled at Colgate, and while he was on the basketball team, it played in the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament for the first time. He was named both a second-team all-American and an academic all-American, and was the Warriors' first-round draft choice in 1997. Currently he ranks number six in blocks per game (2.69) and number ten in blocks (156.0).
His professional career has been the only part of his adult life lacking a fairy-tale gloss. The Warriors are one of the league's weakest teams, he has been set back by injuries, and he remains a reserve, playing forward and center.
But such challenges, Mr. Foyle says, pale next to what he has been through.
"I'm different from other players in that I had different challenges, and I've had these great resources at home," he said. Asked if his colleagues were apolitical, he said: "I don't think so. I'm certainly going to test that theory."
The Associated Press