DL Nader Abdallah (official thread)

[DaddyBigBucks]

There is good reason to consider Nader Abdallah to fill in as the rotating captain for the defense. Considering the way we've seen Ohio kids play against the Buckeyes, especially in the 'Shoe; it wouldn't be surprising to see him play like a man possessed.

 

[Buckskin86]

Bittersweet homecoming for Buckeyes' Abdallah
By Jon Spencer, (Mansfield, Ohio) News Journal

COLUMBUS, Ohio ? Ohio State defensive tackle Nader Abdallah is the only Buckeye going home to New Orleans to play LSU in the national championship game on Jan. 7.

Which begs a tough question: Home to what?

His family's downtown business and their home in nearby Metairie, La., were destroyed two years ago by Hurricane Katrina. His father, Younes, and mother, Izzieh ? both Palestinian immigrants ? have moved back to the Middle East. Two brothers and a sister relocated to Houston.

Bittersweet homecoming for Buckeyes' Abdallah - USATODAY.com

 

[OSUBasketballJunkie]

Bucknuts.com (Free)

Tattered Remains, Unbreakable Family Bond........by Jeff Rapp. Great read.

 

[Buckskin86]

National title game brings Abdallah family back to New Orleans to finish their story

By Tom Archdeacon
Staff Writer
Sunday, December 23, 2007

He was passed out cold on the attic floor, overcome by exhaustion, by the fumes of a nearby leaking gas pipe, by the sense he just wanted a moment's respite from the overwhelming destruction, the bullet-riddled anarchy, the seemingly hopeless consequence that surrounded him on all sides.

By nightfall, if the water lapping at the attic floorboards didn't kill him, the looters already shooting at him likely would.

That was Wesam Abdallah's predicament after the winds of Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, and the floodwaters from the broken levees submerged much of the city.

He was trapped in the attic of the Abdallah family's combination grocery, restaurant, butcher shop, clothing store, video-game room and check-cashing kiosk ? the ghetto equivalent of a Wal-Mart, a place local folks called Hulio's ? at the corner of LaSalle and Sixth, just across the street from the notorious Magnolia Projects in uptown New Orleans' Third Ward.

"He would have died," Nader Abdallah, Wesam's youngest brother and the Ohio State Buckeyes' 295-pound starting defensive tackle said before practice the other day. "But that's when something unbelievable happened. He'll tell you, it was a miracle."

After some initial hesitation, Wesam ? or Sam as he's known to longtime friends ? did tell it by phone from Houston, where he now lives: "I haven't told this to anybody but my family and friends. It was really crazy.

"I'd gotten dizzy and passed out. All of a sudden, though, I had a bird flapping its wings in my face. A big hole had been ripped in the roof, and that bird flew in and woke me up. That's when it hit me ? I had to get out of there or I'd be dead."

National title game brings Abdallah family back to New Orleans to finish their story

 

[osugrad21]

Scout $

Nader says this will be the greatest experience of his life and he is looking forward to returning to Louisiana.

 

[OSUBasketballJunkie]

Link

Wed, December 26, 2007

Buckeye preps for emotional return to Big Easy

UPDATED: 2007-12-26 04:38:57 MST


COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When the Ohio State Buckeyes arrive in New Orleans on Jan. 2 for the national championship game against Louisiana State University, defensive tackle Nader Abdallah will serve as unofficial tour guide.
There are parts of his hometown, however, he'll stay away from. Seeing them again is just too painful.
"I'll take some of my teammates and show them around, show them the sights, but I don't want them to go far," Abdallah said. "There are some sad places now. There are parts of town that looked like they were destroyed yesterday, not two years ago. There are certain places that will never get back to normal."

Continued......

 

[MililaniBuckeye]

I'll state the totally obvious, but look for Nader to be a difference maker in this game...

 

[GrizzlyBuck]

I'll state the totally obvious, but look for Nader to be a difference maker in this game...

I'm pleasantly suprised by Nader's play this year, he has played very well, glad he got everything straight off the field (nothing bad, just weight, parents moving away etc.) so he could play to his potential. He will definately have added incentive to excel in Nawlins.

 

[Buckskin86]

Abdallah back home, but return bittersweet
Hurricane Katrina cut wide swath through his family's lives
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 5:56 AM
By Tim May
THE COLMBUS DISPATCH

NEW ORLEANS -- In the morning chill of the first day of 2008, Ruben Saulsberry, 57, and Jay Don Tucker, 52, met as usual in a vacant lot just off the corner of LaSalle and Sixth streets in the city's near-west side.

They were there to do a little talking, a little drinking ("I do like the gin," Saulsberry said) and, in Tucker's case, a little dancing. Call it a New Year's Eve hanging-on, because even their boom box was blaring before 11 a.m.

In the two decades before Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005, Saulsberry and Tucker would have sought re-supply in a corner called the LaSalle Street Market.

"We called it Hulio's. Everybody called it Hulio's," Saulsberry said. "Oh, yeah, that was our store. That was this whole neighborhood's store. It seemed like anything you needed, they had it. They'd give you credit. They'd cash your check."

Or as Tucker put it, "That place was it."

Nader Abdallah knows. The Ohio State defensive tackle is the youngest son of Younes and Izzieh Abdallah, and his family owned and operated the store for 25 years. He had plenty of duties before he started playing football his junior year at Rummel High School.

"I did pretty much everything," Nader Abdallah said. "I was a butcher, a cook. I worked the cash register. I managed the store. I stocked the store. I pretty much ran the store."

BuckeyeXtra - The Columbus Dispatch : Abdallah back home, but return bittersweet

 

[shetuck]

The Lantern: Abdallah's homecoming

Abdallah's homecoming

Defensive tackle accustomed to adversity on, off field

By: Zack Timmons

Posted: 1/4/08

As the water began to rise around Wesam Abdallah inside LaSalle's Street Market in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, his brother Nader was busy trying to earn a spot on the defensive line for Ohio State.

Nader Abdallah, a Metairie, La. native, was fighting for playing time when Hurricane Katrina passed through the neighborhood he used to call home in August 2005.

Younes and Izzieh Abdallah fled their Magnolia Projects residence in the Third Ward with son Mazen and daughter Linda, while Wesam stayed behind to care for the family store.

Realizing a Dream
"It was a restaurant, grocery store (and) meat market," Nader said. "It was pretty much the projects' corner store."

Hulio's, as locals referred to the store, was all the Abdallah's had. Having immigrated from Palestine, Younes and Izzieh met up with a family member in New Orleans to get their feet on the ground.

The store they built garnered enough respect to last 25 years without being robbed in one of the city's more dangerous areas.

It was a family project, with each member dedicating themselves to the day-to-day operations when time permitted. Nader had spent two-thirds of his life helping the family maintain the corner store.

"I was a butcher, stocked shelves, worked the cash register," the fourth-year junior said. "I worked there since I was 6-years-old. I didn't play football until I was a junior in high school, so that was pretty much my whole life. People came in for Po' Boys, jambalaya, gumbo. We could serve it all, anything you could imagine. It was an everything-you-need store."

cont'd...

 

[OSUBasketballJunkie]

Link

Buckeye returns home to find ghost town

Abdallah's family business in New Orleans destroyed by Katrina

OPINION
By Jim Litke

updated 8:51 p.m. ET, Sat., Jan. 5, 2008

Jim Litke


NEW ORLEANS - Up and in the weight room of the Woody Hayes Center by 6 a.m. every morning, the kid transformed himself day by wearying day, hoping against hope that somehow his hometown would do the same.
If life were as easy to script as a football play or a workout regimen, it might have done just that.
Instead, Nader Abdallah came back to show his Ohio State teammates the neighborhood where he grew up and found himself in the middle of a ghost town.

?I?m happy things are starting to get back to normal,? he paused, ?in some places.
?But back where we started, where our family?s store used to be, the people who had nothing still have nothing. It ain?t coming back anytime soon.?

Continued......

 

[Buckskin86]

The Abdallah family stands in front of what remains of their family store in New Orleans' 3rd Ward. The business did not survive the floods that accompanied Hurricane Katrina, and fire destroyed the building itself on Dec. 29. (Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune )

Abdallah family looks to rise from the ashes
With Nader playing for the Buckeyes in the national championship game, the return to New Orleans brings memories of what they've lost
By John Henderson
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 01/06/2008 01:29:03 AM MST

NEW ORLEANS ? Drive through the 3rd Ward and you don't need a hurricane to tell you how far certain parts of this city must come. You cruise past small, dilapidated houses with cyclone fences closing off nothing but debris-strewn vacant lots and trouble. Scruffy cemeteries, with their graves above ground, cover three blocks.

Sixth Street leads right into the Magnolia projects, a drab, two-story housing development representing one of the worst danger zones in a city full of them. Drug dealings. Shootings. Overdoses. Prostitution. You name it, the 3rd Ward has it.

The one bastion of peace in the neighborhood was a modest little all-purpose grocery store on the corner of Sixth and LaSalle called the LaSalle Street Market. To locals it was Hulio's. That's what they called store owner Younes Abdallah, father of Ohio State defensive tackle Nader Abdallah.

This past Wednesday, five days before Abdallah leads his top-ranked Buckeyes (11-1) into the Superdome against his home-state Louisiana State Tigers (11-2) for the national title, three old men huddled against the cold next to Hulio's. A random-toothed man who would only give his name as "Johnson" between long chugs from a bottle of Seagram's gin stood next to Donald Jarreau, a disabled Vietnam veteran with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

The Denver Post - Abdallah family looks to rise from the ashes

 

[Buckskin86]

DREW SHARP: Ravaged city a sad memory for the Bayou Buckeye
January 6, 2008

BY DREW SHARP

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

NEW ORLEANS -- The party still rolls down Bourbon Street, striking a definitive scarlet-and-gray-colored theme this week. This remains a city that embraces the celebratory spirit, and with fans from Ohio State and Louisiana State spilling into town for Monday night's national championship game, they're encouraged to come together and "laissez les bon temps roulez" as they say here.

Let the good times roll.

But there was another communal gathering two miles west.

A family stood at the intersection of Sixth and LaSalle Street in the city's impoverished Third Ward Magnolia Projects, where once stood not only their life's work but a neighborhood's soul.

But Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent collapse of the levees swept it all away.

"There's nothing there," said Ohio State defensive tackle Nader Abdallah, returning to his hometown for the second time since Katrina struck the Gulf in September 2005. "It's a ghost town. You stand there and feel like crying because next to nothing has changed since the last time I was there."

DREW SHARP: Ravaged city a sad memory for the Bayou Buckeye

 

[DownSouthBuck]

At Least He Got a Sack!!!

Ohio State's Nader Abdallah celebrates after sacking LSU quarterback Matt Flynn in the first quarter of the BCS National Championship Game at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, Monday, January 7, 2008. Mike Cardew / Akron Beacon Journal/MCT

 

[osugrad21]

BN$--Abdallah Hoping To Build On Junior Campaign

Nader talks about his progress last season and his hopes for this season.