Word: boatright
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Little kids still ring ryan Boatright's doorbell, wondering if the future University of Southern California point guard can come outside to play. During a recent family dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, as dessert crept dangerously close to the start of a movie at the mall, panic swept over Ryan's face. He looked as if he'd rather do a month's worth of dishes than spend another second of Saturday night with his family...
...other words, Ryan Boatright is 14 years old. Yet this summer, the 5-ft. 9-in., 138-lb. hoopster rocked college sports when he announced that he would play basketball at USC--in four years. He hadn't even picked a high school at that point. Boatright, now a freshman at East Aurora High outside Chicago, is the face of the latest alarming trend in the often shady game of college-sports recruiting: coaches offering scholarships to athletes very early in their schoolboy (and schoolgirl) careers. It requires teens to make a critical decision before they even grasp geometry...
...certainly can't blame Ryan Boatright and his family for wanting to secure a spot at usc. "So many people are getting loans and are in great debt just to pay for college," says Boatright's mother Tanesha, 32. "To get a free ride, as a single mother with four kids, that's all you can ask for." That's surely sensible. But in a saner world, kids like Ryan wouldn't be tempted to jump so young. Let his game mature--at 14, he needs muscle, and rotation on his jump shot. Let his mind mature--maybe...
...Boatright, a bright, personable kid with a supportive extended family worth rooting for, knows he's a marked man. Every point guard from Chicago to Peoria wants to knock the hotshot USC recruit off his perch. He's unfazed. "I like the pressure," says Boatright, noshing on a chocolate long john at Dunkin' Donuts before a Saturday-morning shootaround. "I feed off it. I hear all the negative stuff, I just add another workout. I'll make them feel stupid...
...Boatright and his colleagues are working on a technique that would let ophthalmologists fix genes that not just fail to express themselves, like Robert Johnson's, but that have mutated in a way that they express themselves abnormally, a trickier proposition because doctors need to add something and suppress something else at the same time. (Boatright and co. would inject short DNA strands that, where they bound with the patient's DNA at the point of the fault, would alert the body's existing repair mechanisms to the problem). The future looks bright indeed...