Osby Coming Up Big For Terrapins

By Mike Ashley

Bambale Osby is a big picture kind of guy.
Then again, everything about Osby is big – his massive arms, his huge hair, his enormous cars, his out-sized personality and lately, his big play, particularly in the biggest situations in the Terrapins’ biggest games. But the biggest secret about Maryland’s big man is that Osby’s free-flowing style of play and his fun-loving demeanor belie an almost world-weary countenance.

“ I saw a mother with like a three-month-old baby, and she was shooting crack,” Osby’s voice trails off, emotional at the memory of growing up on the bad side of town in Richmond, Va. “You’d see people get killed all around you. You’ve seen drugs and people getting strung out on drugs. Every year I was in a public school, four or five people I knew got killed.”

Osby was the first on the scene when his best friend was gunned down a few years ago. He had trouble sleeping after that incident and he’ll talk about all the bad things he saw, and that he did now, almost like he feels an obligation to make people understand. It’s a big burden for a college senior to carry around but Osby knows it’s all part of the process that has brought him to where he is now.

“ I got in a lot of fights,” he says. “It was something I thought I had to do because of the people I was running with. I thought I had to impress them. I had to show them I could fight, that I wasn’t a chump or a push-over. If I had known better than to hang out with those people I wouldn’t have had to go through that.”

Osby knew if he were to survive, and to lead the type of life he could only dream about at that point, he had to make major changes in his own life.
He was 12-years old.

“ When I wanted to change the way I was, the guys I was running with really retaliated,” he recalls. “They beat up my brother. They chased me home. They shot out the back of one of my mom’s car window. They were hanging around the house.”

So perhaps Bambale Mbulatale Emmanuel Osby’s biggest achievement is how he made a big escape from the north side of Richmond and a life headed in the wrong direction. And he did it by putting his inquisitive mind and his burgeoning body to work. Even at a tender age, Osby learned to step back and look at a wider view of life.

“ Once you come to the understanding that everyone has their own path, you can deal with these things,” he says. “I was fortunate to have people around me who could help me understand and deal with things I saw.”

As a 10-year-old on the threshold of big decisions about his own life, Osby turned to big brother. Levi, two years older, was just starting to enjoy basketball in Tony Squire’s rapidly-growing Richmond AAU organization, and though Bambale wasn’t old enough to play yet, he became a fixture at practices and on the sidelines at games.

“ Bambale was too young to play but he was so big,” recalls Squires. “He was always around basketball and when he turned 12, he started playing for us. He was such an intelligent kid and he was driven. He’s the type of kid who would run through a wall if someone told him it would make him a better player.”

Levi wasn’t bad either. He’s currently playing professionally in Germany after playing at Siena and Shepherd. Younger sister Lucy is playing at North Carolina Central, and there are three other Osby children (all significantly older), too, though none of the others as bound to basketball.

Bambale’s mother, Komba, is from central Africa, and Bambale’s name translates to “two is stronger than one,” a reference to his coming into the world close in age to Levi. “We’re close,” Bambale says of his mother and brother and the younger part of the Osby family he grew up with. “My dad’s family is in Nebraska and my mom’s family is in Africa, and I can’t speak any of those languages. So it’s just us.”

Well, not exactly. Osby has never met a stranger. While some college basketball fans might thing Osby casts an intimidating aura on the court, he’s quick to smile, easy to laugh and open to talk to anyone about anything.

“ He’s just like his father,” says his mother. “His father was very bright and always saw the positive in people. Bambale is the same way.”

Osby has shown that trait over and over. After he scored the game-winning basket to knock off top-ranked North Carolina, there was video making the rounds on YouTube that caught a Carolina co-ed yelling at him to “Go back to the ghetto!” as the game ended.

Osby took the comment in stride. “It’s funny the amount of stuff you hear, people way up in the rafters yelling something,” he smiles, growingly amused. “They’re just frustrated, mad. You’ve got ignorance everywhere. It wouldn’t be nothing for me to go back to the ghetto…I’m not offended. Going back to the ghetto? Who knows where we’re from? All of us could be from Alaska or something. How would she know? If she wants to go back to my neighborhood, we can spend a night there and see how she feels.”

Osby understands that his appearance – big man, big Afro – brings that kind of attention. His free-flowing ‘fro has become quite the cause for concern in College Park, his own fan club popping up across from the Maryland bench, a bunch of students in Osby t-shirts and wigs, delighting at his every move, that is except when he locks down his hair.

“ Those are my guys but they don’t like the cornrows too much,” he says. “When I go to the cornrows, they bring out the ‘Free the ‘Fro’ sign. That’s really funny.”

Things didn’t always come so easily for Osby with other people, though. After starting his high school years at Thomas Jefferson High, his mother enrolled him in Benedictine Catholic School, a completely different world from anything the young Osby had seen.

“ My whole life I had been in public schools, all-black, urban schools, boys’ and girls’ schools, schools with 5,000-7,000 students,” he says. “Then I go to Benedictine. It’s 200 people. It’s all boys. It’s all white. It’s military. It’s Catholic. It’s structured. That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. For the first two months I just couldn’t talk to anyone. I was scared. I was shook and everyday I’d get up and say, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to go back to T.J.’

“ But then I found out that they were just people, that they had the same interests as you; that they laughed at a joke just like you. Then it was easy.”

Meanwhile, Osby soaked up coaching, becoming part of an extended basketball family that included Squire and fellow AAU coaches Kent Greenway and Antone Exum. Bambale has always collected friends in his varying social circumstances with the same gusto he collects rebounds in a crowd in the paint.

He is, just as on the court, often an irresistible force.
“ When Boom walks in the room, everyone knows it’s Boom,” says fellow senior James Gist. “He doesn’t have to say a word. That’s how you describe Boom. He’s impressive on his own.”
“ Wherever he goes, Bambale does not put anyone down, he always elevates people,” adds his mother. “And people are drawn to that.”

By his senior year under coach Bruce Croxton, Osby and Benedictine were cutting down championship nets and he was accepting a scholarship to New Mexico, where things didn’t work out so well and he had a falling out with the coach. Far from home and his support network, Osby didn’t have his AAU sounding board to help him ponder life and basketball questions.

He ended up at Paris (Tx.) Junior College the following season in 2005-06, but averaged just 6.0 points and 5.0 rebounds, flying mostly under the recruiting radar. Through some quirk – someone who knew someone – Osby actually landed in a junior college all-star game in Indianapolis where he finally had a chance to show recruiters what he could do. Then-Terps assistant Rob Moxley was paying attention.

Gary Williams green-lighted the late signing, hoping to add some experience and size to his front line. Osby, by then being recruited by George Washington, Tulane and Dayton, was delighted to become a Terrapin, a team he had followed as a kid.

Perhaps ironically, Osby would develop the best relationship he has had with a head college coach with the volatile Williams. But Williams has always recognized Osby’s desire and hard-work though he is sometime perplexed by Osby’s inquisitiveness at inopportune times during practice.
“ That’s Boom, he loves for people to know he’s not just a basketball player,” explains the coach. “He asks questions about other things, politics and things like that, and I pretend I know the answers. What he does really well is give us energy.”

Osby has nearly doubled his scoring and rebounding averages and he has the game-winning shot that beat the No. 1 team in the country, not to mention nine double-figure scoring games during a recent 10-game streak. Oh, yeah, Maryland won eight of those games.

“ It’s funny how easy it is,” Osby says unabashedly of the offensive surge. “You go out there and you’re playing Boston College and North Carolina and all these teams and you’re scoring and scoring and scoring, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I can really play with these guys.’ That’s one of the reasons I came to the ACC. If I’m going to play basketball, let me see if I can play at the highest level.”

It’s a big achievement, Boom, as is earning his degree in family studies this spring. Osby hopes to make the big leap to the NBA or professional basketball somewhere but he has other big plans, too.

“ I want to get three Wal-Marts across the country, Home Depot-size places and have auto shops, interior shops, paint shops all-in-one for old cars,” he smiles, harkening to his collection of five old Cadillacs, a ’59 Ford and an old truck. “I’m just going to do old cars, haul them back and forth all over the place.