LOS ANGELES — The sun would crest over the desert hills in Las Cruces, its beating rays inescapable to most marooned in New Mexico. But Rashaun Agee kept his room black. He had shut the light out. He shut it all out.
He would FaceTime his uncle Delroy Folkes those few years ago, from his dorm at New Mexico State, and Folkes would be confused. It was the daytime. But the only light from the other end of the phone would come from the soft glow from Agee’s television, from the in-game Madden menu, dancing with the shadows across his face.
That face was a mask. It wasn’t twisted by sorrow, or even unhappy, on the surface. Folkes just knew his nephew. A happy Agee burns with chatter, and this Agee had retreated into quiet. Into darkness.
A few short years after finding his way from the south side of Chicago, Agee lost it. He missed a grade during a breakout senior year of high school, and redshirted his first year at New Mexico State. He couldn’t fix that. He tore his knee and tweaked his back during his sophomore year. He couldn’t fix that. His beloved high school coach Arthur Goodwin, the man who had taught him toughness, the man they called Goodie, called Agee one day and told him he was fighting cancer. Again.
He, especially, couldn’t fix that.
At one point, mother Tatonisha Worrell couldn’t stomach the helplessness of simply telling her son to read the word of God, and flew from Chicago to Las Cruces. She slept on Agee’s top bunk, in his dorm. One night, she heard sniffles down below, and mother and son began crying together.
“The one thing I always want you to remember is, with or without bouncing a ball, that you’re still a phenomenal man,” Worrell told him, that night.
“And there’s still going to be a story written about you.”
Now at USC, Agee is writing it himself, a story he wants his little cousins and little brothers and the youth of Chicago to read so they, too, never quit on their dream. He had plunged to the very depths of college basketball, finding himself in JUCO ball in Casper, Wyoming, and emerged as the sun shines again in the heights of Los Angeles. His emergence at center has helped stabilize USC (13-9 overall, 5-6 Big Ten) stabilize its season, averaging 12 points and 5.7 rebounds and several jolts of immeasurable energy since a big Jan. 11 road win against then-No. 13 Illinois.
It hasn’t been easy, head coach Eric Musselman prodding Agee for more. But he’s welcomed that. Agee has kept the late Goodwin’s voice in his head all these years later, the man who pushed him long before Musselman: Man, you better not quit.
Now Agee beams when he speaks, and his eyes pop when he laughs, and he flexes every rippled fiber of his 6-foot-something frame with gusto against the 7-foot behemoths of the Big Ten.
“He has his joy back, and with joy comes peace,” Worrell said, soft pride crackling in her voice. “Because he knows exactly who he is.”
“It took him a long time to get back there,” she continued. “And he found it.”
NO MORE ‘CRYBABY’
When he was a year old, Agee was just learning to say Mama. Then he swallowed a bottle top and almost choked to death.
He was strong, even at that tiny age, Worrell remembered. It took a team of about four firefighters and EMTs to hold him down and pry the top out of his mouth with a pair of forceps.
When he would try and talk, after that, his speech came in the form of warbled grunts. Mm. Mm! “Just say it!” Worrell would plead. But Agee couldn’t, frustrated. He would smack the wall. He would toss his sippy cup, in anguish. His mother didn’t know what to do, and doctors didn’t either.
Agee didn’t say a single word until he was 4 years old. Worrell, still, believes it was trauma.
Her son found himself in the ninth grade, finally, an average couple of years of basketball blossoming a confident young man slamming down dunks at Chicago’s Bogan High. “Ma, I got it now,” Agee would tell Worrell. She would ask him what he meant. He would just smile, the sign he was at home.
You would get messed with in Chicago if someone sensed weakness, Agee said. His toughness was not born, but learned. Growing up in a large Jamaican family, Agee was the “baby,” as Folkes put it; with a large heart came large feelings, and his family knew it. A one-on-one game in high school with brother Tajuan, a former Iona basketball standout who was always a few years older and a couple of inches taller, ended with Tajuan blocking Agee’s shot.
“Look how you’re grabbing me! You my son,” Agee barked at Tajuan as the two walked away. “I showed you, my son. You can’t guard me or nothing.”
“Game,” the older brother simply repeated, back in Agee’s face. “Game. Game.”
Goodwin – Coach Goodie – eventually gave Agee his edge at Bogan. The coach, loving and caring but tough as nails, would run his program ragged. And he took a special liking to Agee, who became one of the best players in Illinois. If he noticed a single wrinkle of discontent on Agee’s face, he would pull him off the court, Worrell remembered, no matter the score. Goodie’s lessons were countless, Agee’s buttons constantly pressed.
Don’t come in here being soft.
When you get to the next level, this will be unacceptable.
C’mon, Mama’s boy. C’mon, crybaby.
Years later, Agee speaks of the late Goodwin with a smile, slightly forlorn. He would need it, for what was coming.
“I look at him now,” Worrell said of her son, “and I laugh. Because I’m like, ‘Yeah, he’s not that crybaby anymore.’”
‘HEART’ MATTERS MOST
Nobody, really, knows how tall Agee actually is.
He has been listed at 6-8 at USC and Bowling Green, and at 6-7 at New Mexico State and Casper College. Musselman has called Agee 6-6 publicly. USC teammate Saint Thomas has called him 6-5. Back at Casper, then-head coach Shaun Gutting fielded a variety of calls from Division I coaches asking Agee’s height.
“He’s anywhere between 6-foot-5 and 6-foot-9,” Gutting told them.
When he came to Gutting and Casper, in 2021, Agee was lost. He had spent two years largely away from basketball, and Goodwin, once his fuel, had died that spring. Anxiety crept in, Agee reflected. Depression came. Worrell saw her son break down.
“I really believe in my heart, he felt he was not going to go any farther – that it was over,” Worrell reflected.
The staff at Casper, and roster, breathed life. Gutting sold Agee on giving him freedom to simply play – through injury, through rust, through mistakes. He would yell at Agee to shoot, and let a center put the ball on the floor, and handle off screens.
“They allowed me to do everything in order to become me again,” Agee reflected, “and really find the love for basketball again.”
He went out every night, Agee said, with the thought in his head: if you were to stop, how would Goodie look at you? He kept Goodwin with him, there in JUCO ball in Wyoming, and whether Agee was 6-5 or 6-9 didn’t matter. He had an innate, Dennis Rodman-esque fight for rebounding angles, and Agee put up 11.5 rebounds per game at Casper. Two years later at Bowling Green, he averaged a double-double.
“As long as you have heart, that’s, I feel like, all you need to be tough,” Agee said. “I don’t have to be strong to be tough. I don’t have to be the tallest to be tough.”
“Long as you got the heart.”
When Agee entered the transfer portal out of Bowling Green, Musselman came calling. The coach was a grinder, and needed toughness, and saw it in Agee. And the path that once drifted away had come back.
“Like, this is the door, the opportunity, that God chose for me to go through the first time, that I messed up,” Agee reflected. “And He’s given me a second chance.”
UNDERSTAND YOUR ROLE
In September, in the midst of one of Musselman’s frenzied practices, he paused drills to briefly gather the group.
“Shaun,” USC’s head coach barked, “your practice habits have improved more than anybody.”
Agee smiled, slapping hands with wing Thomas.
He was figuring out his role, by then. And then it slipped away. Musselman tried working Agee at power forward some, and it was rocky. Positive call-outs were accompanied by negative call-outs, and Musselman needled Agee over his motor, and Agee’s mother would remind him he was no longer at a level of basketball where he could simply sit back and chill.
I thought you were from Chicago? Musselman barked at Agee, as Thomas recounted after one January game. You’re not supposed to be soft.
“He’s trying to light a fire,” Agee smiled, speaking of Musselman. “He does it, and it does light a fire. Because I’m like – and then, when I do it, I look at him like, ‘Yeahhhh. Yeah, who from – I’m from Chicago.’”
For a month, Agee didn’t play more than 15 minutes in any game. Before the start of Big Ten play against Oregon, though, Agee’s uncle Folkes urged him to stay ready.
“Shaun’s from Chicago,” Folkes said. “He a Chicago kid. Muss recruited him because he’s an (expletive) dog. So go out there and be an (expletive) dog.”
Two games later, playing in Washington, Agee shook off back spasms for a breakout 15-point night. A month later, he largely became USC’s closing center, bearing the brunt of conference matchups with big men who were three or four or five inches taller on any given night.
He has relished those matchups, because Agee finds joy in grit. In toughness. In talking. In screaming. With a minute left and USC holding a five-point lead in a crucial matchup with Michigan State last Saturday, Agee found himself switched onto a Spartans guard – and locked him up for several seconds before forcing a shot-clock violation.
He bounded down the court, slapping hands with assistant coach Quincy Pondexter, stepping with beaming smile into the spotlight.
“You see him smiling – he get an and-one, he get fouled, or he diving on the floor, he’s smiling,” Folkes said. “Because he understands now, what his role is. He understands what this thing is.”
“He understands.”
