HEIGHT: Windell Austin never wanted to accept it, but he was made to play basketball.

• Gail Wood

• The Olympian

Eventually, he would accept the unchangeable and embrace his fate. He would become a shot blocker. And a rebound snatcher.

For most of the past seven years, Windell Austin resisted it, but now he has become a basketball player. At long last, he has cashed in on his greatest assest—his lanky, 6-foot-9 frame. Begrudgingly, he has accepted his ticket out of south central Los Angeles.

And Brian Kissinger, the coach at South Puget Sound Community College, became the unsuspecting benefactor. Unannounced, Austin walked into Kissinger’s office last month, asked to turn out, and thereby ended a self-imposed exile from basketball the 23-year-old sophomore began when he quit the University of Nevada four years ago. It was a junior-college coach’s dream come true.

“When a 6’9” guy walks into your office you tend to take notice,” Kissinger said. So last week Austin played his first organized game in four years. He pulled down eight rebounds but missed six of seven shots. The rust showed and so did his nerves.

“Everyone on the team had to know I was nervous. Even the coach,” Austin said. Motion on the court seemed a jumbled, senseless blur. His heartbeat was at a hummingbird’s pace. “We kept trying to run this play and I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be,” he said. “I felt like a freshman out there.”

It was his first game since walking away from a scholarship at Nevada in 1990. He was tired of the routine of basketball practice, tired of playing a game pushed on him because he was tall. “I didn’t want to play anymore. I was tired of the hassles of it,” he said.

Basketball and Austin have never been the best of friends. Even when he sprouted 11 inches in three years of high school, Austin resisted the sport. He kept closing his eyes to the obvious—height, and a graceful, easy stride. “I always saw myself as a football player, “Austin said. “But people were always telling me to play basketball. “It was forced on me.”

Yet the one thing Windell Austin couldn’t stop being was tall. He was tall when he enlisted in the Marines shortly after quitting school. He was tall when he worked nights as a janitor in south central L.A. And tall when he sold button-down shirts in a department store. Then one day, tired of working nowhere jobs, Austin got an idea.

I said, “I’m 6’9. I might as well use it. That’s when I decided to play basketball and go back to school,” he said. “Basketball has always been more of a means to an end. We were too poor to go to college any other way. So here I am.”

But this time things are different from when he first left for Reno to play for Len Stevens, the former Saint Martin’s coach. This time he’s not playing for his mom, or his cousin, or his best friend. “I’m playing for me. For the first time I’m having fun,” said Austin.

Austin originally came to Olympia a year ago on the advise of a Saint Martin’s booster. He came here with the intention of playing at Saint Martin’s. However, when Austin dropped out of school at mid-term at Nevada his accumulative grade point dropped below the required 2-point and he was ineligible at Saint Martin’s. That’s when he headed for Kissinger’s office.

Austin, who is separated from his wife and has one child, is determined to make it work. He’s working a graveyard shift as a security guard at Saint Martin’s. After working from 7p.m. to 5 a.m. three nights a week, he grabs five hours of sleep, heads for classes and then hits the court. “There’s no question he can play,” Kissinger said.

And for the first time, he’s playing basketball because he wants to. Not just because he’s tall enough.