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Union, N.J. — Carla Roberson prefers the word "shy," or even "extremely shy."
She knows her second son, Tyler, has been branded the strong, silent type. But that depiction fails to consider his rowdy living room behavior, when he and his father, Edmon, and his three brothers camp in front of the television and shout about whatever sport rules the room. It fails to consider the sly jokes Roberson inserts into the most banal of situations, the hilarity heightened by the unexpected source of its origin. It fails to note his enthusiastic embrace of video games, when Call of Duty or NBA 2K can elicit colorful exclamations.
"His teammates love Tyler," Syracuse assistant basketball coach Adrian Autry said of the Orange's senior forward. "They always say, 'He's not as quiet as you think he is.'"
His mother calls him "misrepresented and probably misunderstood." But for most who know him, cracking the Tyler Roberson code can be a daunting, draining exercise. It requires patience. It requires time. It requires the understanding that to extract information, to understand what transpires inside his head means talking and probing and caring enough to try.
For his coaches, Roberson starts as an inscrutable blank slate. Slowly, incrementally, his personality emerges, his level of trust rises.
"It's hard to read him. It is," said Charlie Naddaf, a coach in the AAU New Jersey RoadRunners program. "In a way that's good because in competition, they don't know how to attack you. But in ways it's not so good because things might bother him and eat him up on the inside and he doesn't let it out. You have to ask questions. Because he doesn't complain. He doesn't complain about anything."
"He was very quiet when he first got here. Always respectful. But you never knew if he was listening, if he wasn't," Autry said. "It took some time. A lot of times, I didn't know if I was getting my point across, if I was annoying him. I just really tried to get a read on him. So that was frustrating — I just didn't know."
In a world that rewards extroverts, in a sport rich with Charles Barkley personalities, Roberson recedes. He rarely participates in social media. He exhibits none of the chest-thumping behavior of some college basketball peers. His most external form of expression exists on the basketball court, where he can run and dunk and exude an aggression otherwise absent from the polite interactions of his everyday life.
And Roberson is fine with that.
"It's just who I am," he said. "I'm comfortable this way."
Roberson rules
Like most families, the Robersons raised their five children with rules. They were taught to respect people, particularly elders, but also friends and classmates. They were instilled with the "values of the Lord," Carla Roberson said, with the understanding that kindness and consideration should guide their behavior. When he messed up, Roberson said, his parents punished him.
The children — Edmon, Jr., 23, Tyler, 21, Jordan, 19, Colbe, 15 and Kayla, 9 — never gave their parents "a day of stress or struggle," Carla Roberson said. Corey Edwards has been friends with Tyler Roberson for about a decade. He can't remember a time when Roberson got into trouble.
The family home in Union, located about 40 minutes from Madison Square Garden if traffic cooperates, rests on the corner of a tidy middle class neighborhood. On a sultry August evening, the streets are silent and nearly empty of cars and pedestrians.
"My husband and I, though we don't have a great deal of money, our children have always grown up in nice neighborhoods," Carla Roberson said. "We're not in an area that's drug-infested. We're not in an area that's being shot-up. It's nothing like that. Our area might not be the wealthiest, but it's an area that's nice and full of good people. People wave 'hi.' People are hard-working."
Edmon Roberson, who played some basketball in his day, introduced his sons to the game. By the time Tyler was 3 or 4, he displayed an astonishing capacity for dribbling the ball and a devout interest in the sport. The first time Edmon Roberson brought his son to play in an organized setting, Tyler excitedly asked when they could return. Basketball camps, with their promises of skill-building, beckoned. Edmon Roberson conducted the research and presented his wife with the possibilities.
"I'd say we didn't have the money. And my husband was like, 'Don't worry about it. I'll work extra hours. We're going to do it,'" Carla Roberson said. "These camps would cost like $300. I was the one taking him because I was home, but my husband would work very, very hard to get the money so he could go to these different camps."
By his freshman year at Union High School, Roberson attracted the attention of Sandy Pyonin and his New Jersey RoadRunners, an AAU team that counts Kyrie Irving as its most famous graduate. Roberson had yet to play a minute of varsity basketball. The summer of his RoadRunners debut, college coaches noticed him. Charlie Naddaf said Roberson possessed a natural athleticism and an insatiable desire to improve. He spent hours in the gym, a basement facility located in a Jewish community center. Roberson liked seeing results. He liked working on a specific skill and translating that effort into tangible points and rebounds.
A new start
Roberson transferred to Roselle Catholic his sophomore year. He had struggled with his workload in the large, sprawling Union public school system. Roselle Catholic, with its smaller class sizes and its lower teacher-student ratio, appealed to the Robersons.
"It was like a complete turnaround," Carla Roberson said. "They were extremely active in his academics. They really wanted to help. Union wanted to help, but it didn't seem like they had the right tools and the right resources to do it. Roselle Catholic was completely different."
At Roselle Catholic, Roberson thrived. He averaged 17.5 points and 11.7 rebounds for a powerhouse high school team that went 25-5 his senior year and won a state championship. He piled up double-doubles. Jim Boeheim remembers Roberson as a high school talent who ran the floor, rebounded and regularly made 15-foot jump shots. Major college coaches courted him and Edmon Roberson marveled that famous basketball personalities like Larry Brown and Boeheim actually sat in his living room, pitching his son to pick their schools.
Roberson selected Syracuse from a final three that included Villanova and Kansas. He loved the recruiting game.
"The whole process was fun," he said. "Talking to coaches. Deciding where I wanted to go was all fun. It's still fun to me, the whole basketball process."
Mike Hopkins recruited Roberson, but Autry coaches the SU forwards and inherited him once he arrived on Syracuse's campus. He was struck by Roberson's speed and jumping ability. He was mystified by his opaque personality. Dajuan Coleman, too, said Roberson's first couple years at Syracuse were marked by his quiet, understated presence.
Autry wanted to impart the specifics of the Syracuse defense, to polish Roberson's shooting stroke by improving its mechanics. At first, he had no idea whether Roberson considered him an irritating thorn in his side or whether he stoically accepted and processed the information.
"We've jumped leaps and bounds since then. But that was over time," Autry said. "I mean, he's a gym rat. So we were by ourselves a lot one-on-one. And it was just talking to him, sitting down with him, asking him a lot of questions. Then, I was just asking him questions to make him talk to me. That was huge, just being able to see how he sees things."
For Boeheim, communication with Roberson involves a precise set of instructions. He details what he expects, teaches him how to play the forward position, explains his options in each offensive situation. Boeheim is not much for nuance. His relationship with Roberson was microscopically examined last season after one uninspired Roberson performance and a now infamous Boeheim quote that "if I had anyone else he wouldn't play a minute." A syracuse.com story that included the line drew 525 comments and prompted conversations about Boeheim's treatment of certain players.
No doghouse
Boeheim disputes the idea that he "has a doghouse," and suggests that the players people believe inhabit this fictional doghouse "are probably guys I like better than other guys." Boeheim said he likes Roberson. He described him as "a great kid," who never incites trouble, never "says anything out of line," always shows up on time ready to work. On that particular day in February, Roberson took one shot and grabbed four rebounds in 25 minutes; the Orange lost to nemesis Pittsburgh in the Carrier Dome.
"What I said was very simple. I said if I had somebody else, he wouldn't play. I mean, I said he wouldn't play a minute, but there's always some sense of exaggeration to make a point," Boeheim said. "It wasn't meant to crush him. It really wasn't anything. It was just a statement."
Roberson, sitting in the RoadRunners gym months later, said the comment and ensuing uproar did not embarrass or humiliate him. Over the years, he said, he has reconciled Boeheim's coaching style, his methods of motivation. He has vowed, he said, to use each of Boeheim's public comments to drive him, to extract from each pointed message an inspirational nugget to guide his next performance.
"There's nothing much you can do about it except play harder and use it in a positive way," he said. "If I had used it in a negative way, it would have made the situation worse for me. I had to take it and help it fuel me to play."
Carla Roberson instinctively reacts with concern about her children's emotional states and worries about their feelings, she said.
"But I continue to tell Tyler, you always have to have respect for Boeheim. He's your coach so no matter what, you continue to give him that respect. And Tyler has so much respect for Boeheim," she said. "I never babied my children. I always taught them to take whatever criticism they got in stride. As a senior, Tyler is pretty much used to Boeheim. He knows what to expect."
Rebounds, rebounds, rebounds
Syracuse coaches expect Roberson to provide a bounty of rebounds this season. Boeheim calls him one of the nation's five best rebounding forwards. Coleman, who has studied the way Roberson collects missed shots, said nobody elevates quicker for the ball.
Roberson wants to transcend his primary role, to expand his opportunities on offense this season. Boeheim believes his 2016-17 team will push more in transition, where Roberson can use his speed to finish on the break.
He is skeptical, at this point, about Roberson's ability to make mid-range shots. Roberson routinely visits the Melo Center late at night to indulge in solitary shooting sessions, Boeheim said. According to hoop-math.com, Roberson shot 66 percent at the rim last season; only Coleman was better there. He made 27 percent of his jump shots. That number, Boeheim said, needs to improve.
"The difficult part for me is I want him to be better. I want him to have a career," Boeheim said. "And if he was shooting better, we would win more games. It's as simple as that."
Last week in New Jersey, Roberson was the player Syracuse wants him to be. He drained 12-footers off the dribble, sank step-back jumpers, caught the ball and swished shots inside the lane. He played with confidence, with energy and with a loose, infectious joy. After two hours of basketball games, he stayed for another hour and practiced shooting, his brothers Edmon and Colbe rebounding for him. He soaked through three t-shirts.
Autry said Roberson's jump shot has improved. Coleman, too, has noticed an expanded Roberson skill set.
"You can tell in pickup he's been better shooting the ball and he's actually handling the ball a little bit better," Coleman said. "I think this year, if he makes a couple, Coach will be confident with him shooting it."
Coleman considers Roberson "a great teammate," a guy who devotes time to his craft and is an easy, approachable companion. The last couple years, Coleman said, Roberson's personality has emerged from an initial shroud of silence. He's "laid-back and chill," Coleman said, "and if you hang out with him outside of Melo, he's actually pretty funny."
For Roberson, college has been an educational journey.
"I've learned a lot. I've grown a lot on and off the court," he said. "Just being on my own. And this might sound basic, but it's waking up every morning in time for class, doing laundry, cooking, doing dishes. Living on my own. Learning how to talk to people. Things that I might not have had to do in high school or might not have felt comfortable doing. Like this interview. It's definitely helped me grow up as a man and as a person."
Board games and gifts for mom
Back home in Union, he fills his free time with friends and family. His friend Corey Edwards said Roberson declines party invitations and prefers to see movies (action and horror films are his favorites) or play video games. He pokes around Netflix to locate shows that amuse him. And he eats a lot. Carla Roberson said she often enters the kitchen at 6 or 7 each morning, sees Tyler there and asks whether he's consuming his first of several breakfasts that day.
His mother sees the generosity in her son, the gentle way he treats people. He surprises her with money to get her hair and nails done. He plays Life, Trouble, Monopoly, Sorry — any board game his 9-year-old sister desires. He participates in family movie night.
He is loudly and visibly present at home in Union, where he can "do goofy stuff" as his brother Edmon describes it, where he can prompt an eruption of laughter with his sneaky sense of humor.
That Tyler Roberson, his brother said, seems to withdraw in public, to measure what he says and does in ways that are unrecognizable to those who know him and love him best.
"This is the way I've been my whole life," Roberson said. "I think I've grown as a person, but I'm not going to change. I'm more of a laid-back, chill kind of person. That's my personality. I don't think there's a downside to it. That's just who I am."
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