What's a man supposed to say...when he's asked to care for a desperate child while still learning to live for his team, while still preparing to live with his girlfriend, while still trying to live that Viva Las Vegas (because, you know, it was a little hard to Viva Las Latvia and Viva Las Wisconsin)? What's a man supposed to say...when this desperate child, who has never lived with a dad before (and sometimes no mom), who has never lived with rules before (and sometimes no food), is living with this terrible pain and this terrible secret that he doesn't want to share (because, you know, they might not understand)? What's a man supposed to say...when three months go by and this desperate child still can't look him in the eye and cries every day, and the woman who brought them together, the woman who always has all the answers and all the comfort, doesn't have any answers or comfort to give? What's a man supposed to say...when this desperate child is too young to be able to act so old?

Grow up? Get tough? Fight? Is that what a man's supposed to say?

When UNLV center Kaspars Kambala first met Deandre 2 1/2 years ago, he only wished it was that easy. That battling the boy's problems was like battling street thugs in Latvia, or depression in Wisconsin, or temptation in Vegas. But of course it wasn't. Because a child doesn't work like that. A 7-year-old requires so much more, and this would be so much harder -- harder than a postseason ban or a crusty new coach or anything basketball could ever throw at him.

It is, and always will be, a work in progress -- a complicated, wonderful, painful, beautiful work in progress. And yet this much is already clear: It is Kaspars Kambala's greatest victory.

The first thing you notice about UNLV's senior center is...well, you kind of notice everything. The dude's large. He has size 15 feet and bear-claw hands and a compact 6'9" frame boasting 250 pounds of power and nastiness. He has a seriously chiseled jaw that juts nearly parallel to the ground -- and when he shaves his head (he currently sports a Tigerized crew cut), he has a Mr. Clean vibe going. He is ridiculously flexible. In warm-ups, he'll grab the bottom of his feet with his hands and touch his nose to the hardwood. He practices yoga in his free time -- and for a special party trick, he'll do splits on two opposing chairs, Van Damme-style.

No, he's not fast (not even close). And no, he won't burn you from the perimeter (he's never taken a three-point shot). But Kambala is a holy terror down low, a real old-school SOB. In a recent game against an outmanned Chicago State squad, he effortlessly cleared his defender with his right hand, took an entry pass with his left and floated to the hoop for an easy lay-in. Then he did it again a minute later. And two minutes after that. He finished with 24 points and 15 rebounds, his 33rd career double-double. This season, the 22-year-old Kambala leads the Rebels in scoring (17.3 ppg through Jan. 15), rebounding (9.9 rpg) and field-goal percentage (58%), despite facing double- and triple-teams. "We don't want Kas to be cute," says interim head coach Max Good. "We want him going through the chin to the rim."

Kambala has been defending that chin of his ever since he can remember. Growing up in Soviet-controlled Latvia, he had it easier than most because his father -- a former member of the Soviet national basketball team -- had a lucrative construction job. But that also made it harder. When 13-year-old Kas moved to Riga, the capital, to attend school with other elite ballers, he spent nearly every day fending off those who wanted his money, jacket, shoes, whatever possessions he had. "I've had friends who have been pulled into alleyways and woke up with nothing on," he says. "I'd see kids standing there in the snow, with no shoes and no jacket. It was harsh. You had to get street smarts pretty quick, or you'd get jacked for your stuff."

Going back to Mom and Dad was not an option. "My dad's nose is crooked because somebody once got him with brass knuckles," Kambala says. "He'd be like, 'Kas, fight!' It was a joke to him. 'Oh, you got jacked today? Ha, funny.'"

There would be tougher fights -- emotional fights -- when Kas moved to Mequon, Wis., in 1995 to play hoops for Homestead High. Living with a surrogate family lined up by one of his dad's American business partners, Kas struggled to relate to American kids. "When I was 14, I'd take a train home at 1 a.m., with somebody fighting next to me," he says. "These kids had babysitters until they were 14." Worse still, Kambala was forced to sit out his junior year by the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association -- and he took out his frustration in practice, banging so hard on teammates he ended up in shoving matches with coach John Chekouras. "I was ready to get the hell out," he says. Instead, Kambala stuck it out, averaging 21 points and 12 boards as a senior, attracting nearly every major Division I program. He picked UNLV over UCLA, Florida and Cincinnati for several reasons: climate (warm, for a change), lifestyle (fast, for a change) and coach ("likable" Billy Bayno, for a change).

Grow up? Get tough? Fight?

It's what Kaspars Kambala knew how to do best. But when he arrived in Las Vegas, he would soon discover it doesn't always work that way.

What happens when a 19-year-old white Latvian who's busy busting noses in practice and hitting The Strip (and the strip bars) and who otherwise seems entirely preoccupied with making himself The Man ... meets a 26-year-old black Californian who's busy working on a second postgrad degree and becoming Ms. Black Nevada and who otherwise seems entirely preoccupied with saving the world?

Love at first sight? Please.

Jessica Graham and Kaspars Kambala met two months into his freshman year and were dating steadily soon after. But they wouldn't acknowledge they were an item until they dealt with some issues. Age. Race. Fame. You know, the big stuff. Kas may have been an "old" 19, but, as Jess says, "he still had some stuff to get out of his system." Kas may have teased Jess about her "pro-black power thing," but some UNLV boosters whispered in his ear: Why can't you find a pretty white girl? Kas may have relished his role as the Rebels' go-to guy, but Jess was wary of the perception she was out to get something from this guy.

After a year of playing "we're just friends," it became a little too hard and a little too silly to deny the truth.

Jess: "Kas was magnetic, powerful, endearing. I just knew that he would do something big. And in a sense I wanted to inspire that."

Kas: "She was not the kind of woman I was used to dealing with. She had a mind of her own. I needed a strong person in my life. And she was caring."

Yeah, she was. At the time, Jessica was the executive director of the I Have a Dream Foundation, working in an outreach office in the Bud Weeks Plaza, probably the worst project area in Clark County. "They called it the Third World," she says. She would walk around the iron-gated fortress and escort kids home, or round them up and take them to UNLV games, or invite them over to Kambala's apartment and feed them potato chips and soda. As Kas puts it: "There were always 15 kids over at my house, screaming 'Kas! Kas! Kas!' She wanted to help everyone."

So of course he didn't think much of it when, while playing in the European championships in Italy after his freshman year, he got a call from Jessica, asking if it was all right if she brought home a kid. (They were now living together.) "I'm having a good time, swimming in the Adriatic, chilling in the sun," Kas recalls. "I'm like, 'Just a kid? Cool.'"

But when he came back that fall, he didn't find just a kid living in his home. He found Deandre, a deeply troubled 7-year-old boy from Bud Weeks whose mother had asked Jess to take him in when she was jailed on drug charges. "Trey" was an independent kid who knew to knock on his neighbor's door for food, but who had never been told to brush his teeth, or to go to school, or to go to bed. He was incredibly quiet, and painfully sensitive. "If we chastised him, he'd immediately bawl," Jess says.

Her instinct was to baby him, let him be a kid. "I had an instant love," she says. And Kas? His instinct was to, well ... when you grow up someplace where you don't speak unless you're spoken to, where love is understood, not expressed, where you learn to guard your chin from all angles, the instinct is different. "You can't just tell me to love somebody," he says. "It takes time. I would say, 'Trey, it's okay to take your cereal bowl to the sink. When I was your age, I'd bring home bags of groceries for my mom every day. Kids do that.'"

He might as well have been speaking Latvian. "Trey never asked for Kas,"

Jess says. "Never wanted to know where he was, never said he missed him when he was gone. When he needed something, it was 'Miss Jessica, Miss Jessica.' It was never Kas."

Except when it mattered most. Six months after Trey moved in, Jess took him to a doctor after he complained to a school nurse about pain in his groin. What the doctor discovered was devastating -- the signs of unspeakable abuse. Who did this? How did this happen? A horrified Jess went at Trey from every angle, desperately searching for answers. Trey shut her out completely. "I had babied him so much," she says, "that he couldn't turn to me about something like this because he thought he'd get in trouble or I'd be sad." Finally, she urged him to talk with Kas, hoping the boy might respond better to a male perspective -- or, in this case, to someone with enough emotional distance to convince him he had nothing to lose.

So what does a man say when a desperate child has a terrible pain and a terrible secret he doesn't want to share? Grow up? Get tough? Fight? It doesn't work like that, and this time Kas knew it. He wasn't quite sure what to say when he asked Trey to go for a walk, yet somehow he said all the right things. Somehow he knew enough to say, Everybody gets scared. Everybody has pain. But if you tell us what happened, we can start to make the pain go away.

The hurt Kas uncovered was almost beyond his ability to fathom. Trey was one of several children who had been sexually abused by a babysitter at Bud Weeks (a teenage girl has since been sentenced as a juvenile offender). "It was heartbreaking," Kas says. "But I just tried to make him understand that it was all right, he didn't have to worry about being hurt anymore."

There would be counseling, of course, but Kas knew he'd need to do more. He invented what he called D-Day: Every other week, he and Deandre would spend an entire day together, shooting hoops, hitting the mall, seeing a movie. Kas also began doing more of the little things, like asking Trey what he wanted for dinner, reading to him, making sure he brushed his teeth. He even got him a spot as a UNLV ball boy, so the two could sit together on the bench. "Kas learned how to relate with Trey on a personal level, and things turned around 180," Jess says. "Now, it's to the point where Trey cries when Kas leaves."

What does a man say? "It is a lot of responsibility to raise a kid," Kambala says. "But it's an awesome feeling to know that someone is looking up to you as a father figure."

And it has made all the difference as this man wages his latest battle.

Just when it seemed like everything was coming together, Kambala's world blew up again on Dec. 11, when Bill Bayno was fired by UNLV in the fallout from the Lamar Odom recruiting scandal. The 38-year-old coach was especially tight with Kas, who would stop by his office, his home, call him on his cell, at all times of the day. When Bayno learned he'd been fired, he called Kambala at 2 a.m. The next day, when Bayno addressed his team -- the same meeting in which AD Charles Cavagnaro would tell the Rebels they'd been suspended from postseason play -- Kas cried along with the coach.

But that hit would be nothing like the ones he'd take from Bayno's replacement. Kas got his first taste of Max Good when the Maine Central Institute coach interviewed for the top assistant's job in 1999. The 59-year-old Good remembers the meeting going something like this:

Good: I hear you're pretty tough.

Kambala: Yup.

Good: I may not be here very long, but I'm gonna whip your ass.

Kambala: You really think you can whip me?

Good: Let me explain something to you. You will probably whip me. But I will get you the next day, with an ice pick in your f-ing head. And you'll be sitting in a wheelchair drinking out of a drool cup the rest of your life.

"I was kidding, of course," Good says. "But he leaves that meeting and tells [teammate] Mark Dickel, 'This old f-er is crazy.'"

When Good took over for Bayno, he immediately got after his star. Kas played a lackluster, foul-ridden first half against Pepperdine on Dec. 22, so Good benched him for the start of the second half. (Kambala says it was the first time anyone had done that.) When Kas went to dinner recently with banned booster David Chapman -- the dentist at the center of the Odom mess -- Good chewed him out and told a local reporter, "I've driven off players for less than that." (Kambala says Chapman has never offered him a thing. "I consider him a friend. Was I supposed to turn my back on a friend?")

Several Rebels, notably fiery senior guard Trevor Diggs, have followed Good's lead. When Kambala got off to an uninspired start against Monmouth on Dec. 28, Diggs pushed him in the chest and got in his face during a timeout. After UNLV's disastrous 28-point loss to BYU on Jan. 15 -- a game in which Kambala scored a career-low two points in 20 minutes -- Diggs told a local reporter that Kas had "quit on us," then repeated the comment out loud to the Rebels when he boarded the team bus. "We've had to get on Kas this year," says senior guard Danny Brotherson. "There are times when he's gotten lax, when he hasn't been the leader we need him to be."

But through all the criticism and call-outs, Kambala has done something the old Kas never would have done -- dealt with his emotions and moved on. "Before I met my family, I would have walked around with a lot of anger in me," he says. "Having a family to go home to calms me down." (As do occasional calls to Bayno, whose advice is always the same: "Do whatever Coach tells you to do.")

Give Good some credit, too, for loosening up just a tad -- even as he's dogged by rumors that Rick Pitino is about to hijack his job. After a recent game, Good spotted Kambala in the hallway. The conversation went something like this:

Good: Hey, Kas, how's Deandre? Jessica says he broke his arm?

Kas: Yeah, he was at his mom's, playing football. He says a fat kid fell on him.

Good: Is he going to be all right?

Kas: Yeah, he'll be fine...but he can't wait to come home.

It's still hard sometimes. Trey will always bear the scars of abuse. Kas and Jess fight over when to push him and when to pull him in. Trey's mother signed over custodial rights when she left prison last year, but how could they deny him the chance to get to know his own blood? For the past six months, on the recommendation of Trey's counselor, Kas and Jess have shared him with his mother, who lives in Utah. "I don't want him to ever think that we severed ties with his natural family," Jess says.

It's still hard sometimes, but things are so much better now. Kas and Jess were married over the summer, and Trey was their ring-bearer. He ran around all day with a cheek-carving smile plastered on his face. Just like a kid. The Kambalas moved into a townhouse in the fall, and Trey has his own room. He's got a Nintendo in there, and Dragon Ball Z posters and cut-outs of his favorite basketball players. Just like a kid. And once Kas realizes his NBA dreams (he's currently projected as a mid-to-late first-rounder), the Kambalas will bring Trey wherever they go. He'll attend private school and make new friends and-Kas promises -- take out the trash. Just like a son. "We're going to adopt him," Kas says. "It's what we want to do."

Grow up? Get tough? Fight?

Maybe later.

This article appears in the February 5 issue of ESPN The Magazine.