He said he didn't really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he'd never celebrated a birthday in his life. But Jerry Joseph's birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year's Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry's brand-new life. There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.

Danny Wright, the 50-year-old basketball coach who had taken Jerry in a few months before, noticed the kid get misty-eyed, just as he had at his first Christmas a week earlier. When his wife saw Jerry crying, she too was moved to tears. Wright stood by as his five children, none of them his own biologically, surrounded their new brother. The youngest, a 2-year-old adopted girl named Ariana, crawled into Jerry's giant arms. They sang the boy a song, told him to make a wish. It's a moment Wright keeps coming back to, when Jerry closed his bright brown eyes. What could the boy have wished for? he wonders. Basketball glory, maybe, and untold riches in the pros. But if Wright had to guess, he'd say Jerry offered a more solemn prayer: that if this life somehow turned out to be a dream, he'd never feel a pinch—that he'd never wake up in another world.

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At the far edge of the oil-rich Permian Basin, the rust-colored town of Odessa, Texas, is profoundly dedicated to two things: church and football. The only mall in town has an oversize tablet of the Ten Commandments on permanent display; the city's 19,000-seat stadium plays host to the champion Permian Panthers, the high school football team that lured Buzz Bissinger down Interstate 20 over two decades ago to write Friday Night Lights.

Jerry Joseph showed up here on a Greyhound in February 2009, carrying little more than a birth certificate and a duffel bag of old clothes. He'd been homeless in Haiti, he said, and stowed away on a boat to Florida. The good Christians of Odessa welcomed the stranger like a lost soul. Danny Wright, a sharply pressed figure who could be mistaken for a minister, took him into his home, gave him a bed alongside his 16-year-old son. And just like the man-child in The Blind Side—which was still playing at the local theater—Jerry rewarded the love he received, becoming a good student, a dedicated Christian, and a dominant force on the court.

"We're nice people here," says Roy Garcia, the principal at Odessa's Permian High School. "Good people with good hearts. That's what makes this place what it is." Garcia first met Jerry one afternoon in late February, when the boy walked into his school looking to register for ninth grade. He was with a man he introduced as his half brother. Garcia, who jokes that he looks like a Hispanic Super Mario, remembers Jerry vividly, even among the 2,500 kids at Permian. It wasn't just his height. He was full around the chest; his face was thick. "Like, well, like a full-grown man," he says. At first the principal assumed Jerry's companion—whose name, he later learned, was Jabari Caldwell—was the registering student. But it didn't matter, he explained, because in the Odessa school district, ninth grade is at the junior high.

Down the road at Nimitz Junior High, Jerry presented a Haitian birth certificate verifying he was born in 1994. He explained that Caldwell was his legal guardian, that they'd be staying in the dorms at nearby University of Texas of the Permian Basin (UTPB), where Caldwell was on the basketball team. Caldwell signed an affidavit saying he was Jerry's half brother, and as is the law for any child who is homeless or has only temporary lodging, the boy was enrolled immediately.

Basketball coach Melvon Anders was in the Nimitz gym a few days later and saw Jerry take his shirt off. "I was like, Jee-sus Christ!" he says. The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse. He'd never met a freshman like him. Then again, plenty of kids have tattoos these days, and this kind of early development is not unheard of, especially in basketball. When LeBron James was 16 and already nationally known, he could have passed for 24. As a junior in high school, Greg Oden looked like a middle-aged man.

The coach kept an eye on Jerry when classes started. Most kids that size are magnets for fistfights, but in his four months at Nimitz, Jerry never got into a single one, unless you count the brawl he broke up before it started. He was studious, a hard worker—"a pleasure to have in class, actually," Anders says. Despite never attending a school of any kind in Haiti—which of course meant no school records to transfer in—Jerry breezed through his accelerated "catch-up" curriculum. He explained that when he was little, his relatives brought him textbooks from the United States. He had a slight accent but spoke English well. A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult. Once a teacher mistook him for a substitute.

Jerry had a beautiful wide smile and what nearly everyone describes as an exotic "swagger." He skipped down the halls when he thought nobody was watching. With his headphones on, he would sway and sing—sometimes in Creole—lost in a world all his own. If anybody asked, he explained he was living in the dorm with his brother because his parents were dead. With an answer like that, nobody asked much more. Plus, once you watched him play ball, it was hard to think of anything else. Coach Anders saw him up close in a spring student-faculty game. "We were out there stretching, and he ran up to the other rim and threw down this monster dunk," he says. "I've never seen a 15-year-old do that. I've had kids taller than him, and they still can't dunk like that."

When the coach asked the boy where he learned to hoop, Jerry said he'd seen the game on television and played a little on the streets of Haiti. Anders wondered if maybe the kid wasn't some kind of prodigy.

At Nimitz, Jerry never asked for a handout, which, of course, made people all the more willing to help. That summer, when school let out, some of the coaches recommended him for a job in the concession stand at the public pool. Melvon Anders supervised him. Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee—never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register. One dry-roasted day in August, someone asked him about his home, and Jerry pulled up Google maps on an iPhone. He showed a group, Anders included, a mountain in Haiti where he grew up. He said that most of his life was spent herding goats. They all listened dumbstruck. Goats? A hut on a mountainside? "Who were we to question his story," Anders says. "He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met."

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