A dream deferred, now restored.(basketball player Muhammed Lasege wins eligibility case against NCAA)(Brief Article)

Muhammed Lasege is 20 years old. He's a 6-11 Nigerian who played his country's primitive form of basketball. A student so bright his grades were all save for one B, his dream was a college education in the United States. Because his family couldn't afford that education, and because Nigerian basketball players have seen their contemporaries emigrate to America, Lasege decided he would try to earn a scholarship with his basketball ability, meager as it was.

That decision set in motion a three-year odyssey that took Lasege across three continents and made him an unwitting actor in a harrowing international drama that moved from Nigeria to Moscow to a Kentucky courtroom where, last week, and hooray for this, Muhammed Lasege's dream was made real.

Thanks to a judge's order, he will play basketball for the University of Louisville. How much he plays and how soon, no one knows. He came to Louisville raw and untutored, and he hasn't played competitively in two years.

"But he's got potential," Louisville coach Denny Crum says. "He's a good, big athlete with a nice shooting touch. He's not a superstar or an all-American, but he can help us."

In his two limbo years, Lasege has been a victim of NCAA cynicism. The administrators governing college athletics have been made cynical by long exposure to snakes. That cynicism may be useful, but when it produces indifference to life's complexities, as it did with Muhammed Lasege, that blindness is evidence of corruption. Seldom challenged in court, NCAA's administrators seem to believe their rules supersede this nation's laws.

Those administrators ruled Lasege ineligible on grounds he had signed two contracts to play professional basketball in Russia (one for $9,000) and received benefits (an apartment, chauffeur).

That NCAA ruling did not go unchallenged. Attorney James E. Milliman represented Lasege before Judge Geoffrey P. Morris of the Jefferson Circuit Court.