Rob Oller commentary: Oden still possesses unspoiled personality
Sunday, July 13, 2008 3:44 AM
By Rob Oller
File Photo
"I've got a little kid heart sometimes," Greg Oden said last week after working out in the Schottenstein Center.
Basketball is full of big players. It needs more big kids like Greg Oden -- athletes who are childlike, not childish. Big difference.
A child marvels at the wonders of the world. Shows off one minute and turns painfully shy the next. Doesn't consider himself so big, status-wise, that a small and simple life is something to be shunned.
That is Oden, a little boy inside a 7-foot body. He holds an endearing 11-year-old's outlook expressed through the face of a 35-year-old who actually is 20. Greg Olden the Young'en.
The Portland Trailblazers center currently is back on Ohio State's campus, living with Mike Conley Jr., attending summer classes and looking forward to working with actual kids as part of the Old Spice Buckeye Stars basketball camp for ages 7-18 at Worthington Kilbourne on July 29-31. Two other former Buckeyes teammates, Conley Jr. and Daequan Cook, will join Oden at the camp.
"I've got a little kid heart sometimes," Oden said last week after working out in the Schottenstein Center, where he trains four days a week with a Blazers trainer flown in weekly from Portland. "I still have a good connection with kids. Sometimes I really know what they're thinking."