01:08 AM EST on Sunday, March 6, 2005

BARRINGTON -- Ray Cross was helping to coach an AAU team called the R.I. Breakers when he first met Michael Gore.

At the time, Gore seemed like just another urban stereotype, a kid headed for a future that didn't promise to be good. Gore's mother had died when he was 12, he didn't deal with his father, and he was living with his aunt, with whom he constantly clashed.

He was a freshman at Mount Pleasant High School at the time, but already he knew his dreams were dying all around him. He got bad grades, he often skipped school, and when he did go he sat in the back of classrooms and did nothing. And when he looked at the older kids he saw too many drugs, and too many seniors who already had children.

"I didn't have any guidance," he says. "No one to look up to. It was like I was in a state of depression. School meant nothing at all. That wasn't what was cool. Getting good grades was to be a geek, or a nerd."

The only thing that really meant anything at all was playing on the Breakers, and not just because basketball was one of the few things that made him feel good about himself. But this is

not about basketball, not really.

This is about the raising of a child, about love and sacrifice, brotherhood and commitment. About family, too. What it really means. Ultimately, it's about how a man and his son opened their hearts to a kid who needed all the help he could get.

Cross, originally from New York City, came here 10 years ago to work for Hasbro, where he is in human resources. He moved to Cumberland, and later got involved coaching the Breakers, a team his son Ray played on. When he heard that Gore's aunt was thinking about making him a ward of the state, Cross decided to have Gore come stay with him and his son.

"I talked to Ray Jr. about it," says Cross, "and he said he was all right with it. In the beginning it was only going to be for a short while."

And in the beginning Gore didn't like it. To him, Cumberland was the country. Too boring. Too dull. Nothing to do. And he wasn't too crazy about St. Andrew's, his new school, either, one that had small classes and structure and teachers who believed in his potential, all the things his previous schools didn't have.

But every day, Ray Cross got up and drove his son and Gore from Cumberland to Barrington before going to work, and every afternoon he picked them up. And every night his son and Gore would do their homework and wait until the next day when they would do it all over again.

"In the beginning, I liked the idea of Mike living with us," Ray Cross Jr. says. "I was the one who had asked for it to happen, because it was just my father and I. But then we started to clash. It was an adjustment."

For Gore, too.

It was all new.

New family. New school. New life.

And, in the beginning, he fought it. Not agressively. But fighting it just the same. Until the day Ray Cross put him up against the wall and told him that as long as Gore was going to live in his house he was going to do well in school, and he was going to do the right thing. That Cross wasn't going to help pay to send Gore to St. Andrew's and watch him squander his opportunity.

"That's the deal," says Ray Cross. "I do my part, and they do their part in school."

He says it's the way he was raised in New York, that it's all about education. It's what his mother once drilled into his head, what he had drilled into his son's head, and now he was going to drill it into Gore's too, one way or the other. Education as the passport to a better life.

"It's not about me," Cross says. "It's about them."

It's now four years later, and it hasn't always been easy. Cross essentially functions as a single parent, as he is separated from his wife, who lives in New York City with their daughter. He refinanced his home to send his son and Gore to St. Andrew's. He has spent a lot of days driving back and forth to Barrington. In a world where a lot of of people give lip service to helping kids, Cross is one of those unsung heroes. Not that his son is surprised.

"My dad would do anything to help people out," says Ray Cross Jr. "I've always been proud of what my father's done."

And now, in its own way, it's all been rewarded.

Last spring, his son Ray was awarded a Martin Luther King scholarship to Providence College. Last fall, he walked on to the basketball team, content to be just a peripheral part of big-time college basketball, before injuries struck the Friars' backcourt and Ray Cross Jr. found himself in games, a heartwarming story in the midst of a disappointing PC season.

"I never thought any of this could happen," he says. "I couldn't even have pictured this."

Gore is a senior at St. Andrew's, where he's become a good student, and been in some of the school's theater productions. He also has been given a basketball scholarship to St. Peter's in New Jersey. Next fall he will be the first person in his family to go to college, a place that four years ago seemed as far away as the moon.

Ray Cross stresses that it wasn't just him, that he had help. From Dave Vitale, the head of the Breakers. From Mike Stephens, the Providence man who is a college basketball official, whom Gore says is "the first person who looked into me and saw something."

It takes a village to raise a child?

Sometimes, even more than that.

It's a lesson Ray Cross now wants to pass on. He sees what's happened to both Gore and his son, sees what happens when kids are made to focus on school and grades, sees what happens when kids are given structure and guidance, an environment where their dreams can grow. He says he now is going to do it for other kids, teach them that this is what happens when you do well in school, do what's right, passing on the lessons his mother once gave him.

Ray Cross Jr. now regards Gore as his brother, sees that it was not easy for Gore to join a new family.

And Michael Gore?

He knows what Ray Cross did for him, how at a time when he needed it most he was thrown a life raft, given a second chance. He knows that without Ray Cross taking him in, his life probably would be very different now, knows that every opportunity he gave to his son he gave to him too.

Not that Ray Cross thinks that his son and Gore owe him anything.

"The only thing they owe me is good grades," he says.

Gore says there's more.

"I owe him the respect of a son," he says.