Emerging from Despair - Mike Dale looks to the future

Belleville star Mike Dale knows that sitting out his freshman
year at SIU as a Prop 48 will be a piece of cake,
because he's been through much worse.

Dale looks to future

By Frank Rusnak
Today, Mike Dale looks forward to what he expects will be five of the best years of his life. But exactly one year ago to this week, he wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to play basketball ever again.

A 6’5” swingman from Belleville East, he will be a Prop 48 at Southern Illinois next year, as a partial academic qualifier. This high-scoring slasher had a future in serious question during the summer of ’02.

"What? I knew it was a knife or some glass."

Mike Dale
Belleville East H.S.

It was a party just like any other on a hot, muggy day in Belleville, when Michael “my friends call me Mike” Dale showed up with a few of his buddies looking for a good time. Just like on the court, Dale made a move at the party – only this wasn’t on a praying mantis-like defender, but a girl, who happened to be taken.

When Girl X’s boyfriend, a Belleville East football player, saw Dale talking to his woman, he wasn’t happy, and he made sure to let Dale know it. There was alcohol at this party, and the disgruntled boyfriend had been drinking, but Dale claims to not have been.

“There were some words exchanged,” recalls Dale. “I walked outside then I saw him on the corner of my eye walking up to me.”

That’s when Dale said he reacted instinctively, and swung at the approaching, ticked-off boyfriend. After several more punches and reciprocating jabs were thrown, Dale grabbed his new sparring partner’s shirt and they wrestled each other to the ground. With Dale on top, he felt a stinging pain, unlike any other, in his side above his hip.

“What?” Dale thought at that moment. “I knew it was a knife or some glass.”

Sure enough, it was a knife – a steak knife, to be exact – that was pulled out of the boyfriend’s pocket. When Dale stopped to look at his newly formed wound, he was stabbed again, this time in the stomach. With two holes in his body, and realizing the excessive amount of blood he was loosing, Dale fought the assailant off of him.

With the two finally separated, Dale's friends threw the soon to be (temporarily) imprisoned football player up against a car as the ambulance was called.

On the way to the hospital, Dale was thinking, “I can't play no more …. What if? What if?”

"I was kind of out of it," said Dale's mom, Deborah Edwards, when she was alerted of the news over the phone. "I was just hoping and praying for the best. All I wanted to know was that he was OK."

Lucky to find out no organs were punctured, Dale had his wounds stitched up and then stapled closed. At his bedside came a detective, which began the pending legal situation.

For the next six days, Dale stayed in the hospital living off a hearty diet of ice chips and Popsicles with his stomach not strong enough to handle solids yet.

When he finally got around to walking again, he professes he looked like a “hunchback” with his slouched-over strut. Walking was painful on his stomach and just standing up straight caused throbbing. Here was a finely-tuned athlete primed for almost any athletic endeavor, and now, he had his goals set high for the accomplishment of a single sit-up.

With a recipe of grandmother-prescribed coco-butter on the wound for quick healing, and improving sit-ups, Dale was out of action for two strenuous months where it hurt him just to watch his team play in summer league games while he could do nothing but observe from the sidelines.

While Dale was on the injured list throughout the summer, word traveled quickly around recruiting circles about what happened to him.

“We don’t want a guy like that in our program,” said one Division I assistant coach.

He was thought of as a thug who partied all night, hung with the wrong crowd and no one wanted to extend any interest, let alone a scholarship, towards him.

“Most of [the colleges] stopped calling and I knew what the reason was,” said Dale. “After that incident a lot of colleges really dropped off. Basically, they thought I was a problem. They can't take chances like that with a scholarship. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I'm really a good kid.”

One college that failed to cease its recruitment of Dale was local SIU-Carbondale. A big part, Dale claims, to SIU’s unwavering commitment was his former teammate at Belleville East and current SIU player, Stetson Hairston, who he said preached that it was a ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ situation to the Saluki coaching staff.

”We’re good friends and anytime he's in town we play pickup games at East,” said Dale, of Hairston.

It also helped Dale’s cause that he went on to recover 100 percent from the injury and averaged 19 points and eight rebounds for the Lancers.

His team had a modest .500 record (13-13) in a tough Southwestern conference with powers Belleville West, East St. Louis and Edwardsville. “Just keeping a positive attitude and trying to give every team a good game,” said Dale, about his commitment through the season. “Most of the games we lost it wasn't a blowout. We just couldn't pull them out because we didn't have enough weapons at the end.”

Dale went off for game-highs against some of the top teams in southern Illinois. He toasted Carbondale for 37 and hit Althoff and it’s super sophomore Kevin Lisch for a career-high of 43.

“Around here everything is about Lisch, so I just had to go out prove myself in that game,” said Dale.

And for the next five years of his career, he’ll be set on proving SIU made the right decision in taking a chance on him.