Yaxel Lendeborg’s mom practically dragged him to basketball stardom. As she battles cancer, he’s paying her back

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Washington, DC (CNN) — Each morning, Yissel Raposo woke up early to make sure her three daughters had what they needed to get out the door – breakfast, belongings, school supplies.

Then she packed her son, Yaxel Lendeborg, in the car and drove him through the-not-so-nice downtown part of Camden, New Jersey, to the local community college. Raposo dropped Lendeborg off and then headed to work.

All before 9 a.m.

For years, through her own father’s death and her son’s high school years, Raposo watched Lendeborg slowly slip away. Angry, depressed, lost, the boy she knew had so much more kept giving so much less. She made what can best be described as an intervention, essentially telling Lendeborg that he was not only out of options; he was done with the right to choose.

She would chart his path. She would direct his future. She would make sure he made something out of himself.

This February, after Raposo guided Lendeborg on a path that eventually wound its way to Ann Arbor, Michigan, after the lost boy turned into one of the best college basketball players on the planet, Lendeborg penned a thank you letter to his mother on The Player’s Tribune.

“How my Mom Saved My Life,” he called it.

Now, as Michigan rolls into the Sweet 16 and a date with Alabama, Lendeborg is returning the favor as Raposo battles cancer.

When Raposo isn’t feeling well, when the chemo treatments leave her ragged and exhausted, she cues up a video on her computer.

“I watch Yaxel play,” she tells CNN Sports, “and that makes me so happy.”

The world does not always deliver in fair doses. Just as Lendeborg finally saw the rewards for all of the effort his mother poured into him, Raposo was diagnosed with cancer. As Lendeborg’s star rose this season – from Big Ten player of the week to Big Ten Player of the Year – his mother tried to figure out her chemo schedule.

She needed 12 treatments but asked the doctor purposefully to space them out.

“I wanted the time off during the tournament,” she says of her planning. “And the doctor, he knew if I was near Yaxel, it would be good for me.”

And so last week, as Lendeborg scorched Saint Louis for 25 points, six rebounds and two assists, his mother sat behind the bench wearing a maize hooded sweatshirt beneath his blue jersey. This weekend she will travel to Chicago. If there’s a Final Four trip, she’ll be there.

“She’s a little disobedient,” her son told CNN Sports in the locker room. “I tell her stay away, to rest, but she doesn’t listen.”

What is it they say about karma? Not too long ago, it was Lendeborg who didn’t listen.

Trying to reach a lost boy

Lendeborg is the son of two athletes. His father, Pedro, played basketball for the Dominican Republic national team and Raposo hooped and played volleyball for both the national team and the American University of Puerto Rico. A job opportunity moved the family from Puerto Rico to Pennsauken, New Jersey – just across the river from Philadelphia.

Lendeborg lost his grandfather not long after they moved, a loss that gutted him more deeply than he realized at the time.

“Depressed,” he says now. “I was really depressed.”

He reacted like kids so often do, burying his emotions and portraying himself as the opposite of what he felt. The hurt kid became the class clown, the super friendly boy who was content to pal around with his buddies and leave applying himself to everyone else. Lendeborg was cut from his middle-school team and didn’t have the grades to make his high school team.

Which was fine with him. He didn’t feel a burning drive of purpose, anyway. He wasn’t a bad kid, didn’t get into trouble. He just sort of drifted aimlessly, like a balloon without a tether.

Raposo tried everything. She emptied his room of everything, right down to the door. She forced him to sign up for a job at the warehouse where she worked. Lendenborg spent his idle time pushing and unloading pallets of phone accessories. He was only disappointed that his high school friends didn’t want to join him.

“I thought that would make it more fun, but they didn’t want to do it,” he said. “It was hard, but I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life, anyway.”

By Lendeborg’s senior year, Raposo had enough. She fetched him from yet another listless marathon day of PlayStation at a friend’s house. Following the age-old wisdom of many a parent, she used her car as a cocoon to guarantee Lendeborg’s undivided attention. There, in the minivan, she laid out the plan she had cultivated with the assist of guidance counselors at the high school.

Lendeborg, she said, would go to Camden Community College for dual enrollment courses, where there would be nothing – no friends, no PlayStation – to distract him. He would get his grades up and try out for the basketball team again. He’d at least graduate.

“You will have to sacrifice, but I will, too,” she said, explaining the morning routine she’d follow to get him to school.

And then Raposo delivered the exclamation point, invoking her late father, the man her son called ‘Papa.’

“My dad, the thing he always said to us,” she shared with him, “You have to be something in this life.”

Using his talent

The basketball gods do not hand over the keys to the palace to a kid who played 12 games in high school. That is not how it works. Lendeborg today feels like an overnight sensation, bursting on the scene in his maize-and-blue out of nowhere.

He is, in fact, more like a character actor who finally got a shot as a lead.

To get to Ann Arbor, he first had to travel to Yuma, Arizona, a 15-minute ride to the Mexico border. Best known as the one-year home to Nate “Tiny” Archibald, the coaches at Arizona Western took a flier on the kid with almost no game tape largely because he was 6-foot-8.

Lendeborg was not exactly thrilled with the relocation plan, but far away from home and far away from his mom, he finally was left to make the right choices on his own – to go to class, to go to practice, to work and apply himself. Lendeborg excelled. In three seasons (one shortened by Covid-19) at Arizona Western, he twice earned JUCO All-American honors.

He made the jump to Division I at UAB, showing little trouble adjusting to the competition. In his two seasons with the Blazers, he twice earned defensive player of the year and, in his final season there, became one of two D-1 players to finish with 600 points, 400 rebounds and 150 assists.

The other is Larry Bird.

By the end of his UAB career, the player who couldn’t find his way onto the high school court became the most coveted player in the transfer portal. Lendeborg was familiar with Dusty May – May’s old school, Florida Atlantic, went toe-to-toe with UAB in Lendeborg’s first season there – which sealed the deal for Michigan over both Kentucky and Auburn.

Which is an absurd list of options for a kid who barely played high school ball.

“Honestly, I didn’t think he was going to become as successful as he is,” Raposo said. “I just wanted him to play somewhere because I knew he had God-given talent. I just wanted him to use it.”

‘Pure and genuine’

As the Wolverines made their way off the KeyBank Center court with their Sweet 16 ticket punched, Lendeborg grabbed a white hat and a Sharpie from one of the kids hankering for autographs near the tunnel exit.

He inked his name to the brim and was about to turn around to hand it back to the kid when an administrator wrapped her arms around Lendeborg’s waist and started to tug him up the ramp.

“Wait,” Lendeborg laughed, “I still have the hat.”

The 240-pound Lendeborg won the battle against the petite staffer, turning to hand the signed cap back to its owner. He didn’t win the war. As kids clamored for more autographs, Lendeborg reluctantly sighed, “I can’t. I have to go,” making it clear that, were it up for him, he would have stayed there for hours.

This is the dichotomy of Lendeborg. He throws basketball gut punches at his opponents but does it with a smile. He exudes joy while delivering misery. He had just nearly single-handedly eviscerated Saint Louis and rather than go preen about his great game in a media session, he had to be dragged away from a bunch of kids.

“Pure and genuine” is how May, describes him. “He doesn’t know how to use coachspeak. He doesn’t know how to use playerspeak. He just speaks from the heart all the time.”

Portal courtships do not allow coaches to know players as well as they’d like to. May knew he was getting a great player in Lendeborg. He believed, from all he heard, he was getting a good kid and a hard worker. But it was when he saw Lendeborg with his family that the coach figured it all out.

The night before the Wolverines played Saint Louis, May tossed on his sweats and was making his way through the team hotel hallway to watch some film. He came upon Lendeborg and his mom and sisters.

“They’re all just so warm and happy and proud of Yax,” he said. “It’s a heckuva story.”

And one that Raposo, at least, doesn’t believe has written its last chapter.

“I’m flying to Chicago,” she says of her “disobedient” plan for the regional semifinal. “I get nervous before the game, but when he plays, I’m so excited. It’s a feeling of everything in my body. Just everything.”

A feeling of living.

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