Growing up, there were few moments when Jonny Flynn didn’t have a tennis ball hovering around his hands as he wove through his neighborhood or his high school hallways in Niagara Falls, N.Y. At night, he’d tuck a basketball into bed alongside him.

As a shortstop on the baseball diamond, he’d wait impatiently for the next grounder to be hit in his direction.

‘I guess you can call me greedy,’ Flynn grinned.

Tracing the development of Flynn, Syracuse’s sophomore point guard, usually follows the same path across a few different athletic contexts. In each of them, he’s always demanded to be the center of attention.

On the Pop Warner fields, Flynn was a quarterback. On the baseball field, he was a shortstop.

And for Syracuse, Flynn has logged 1,379 minutes this season with the ball often near his hands, orchestrating the offense as the leather weaves through his legs with impressive pace. Of all the talent Flynn possesses as SU’s floor general, it is his ability to dribble a basketball that may be most acute.

‘He’s almost like Isaiah Thomas,’ said SU assistant coach Mike Hopkins, who added that Flynn is the best ball-handler he’s ever coached. ‘He’s a great ball handler in terms of being able to make spectacular moves with the dribble.’

The spectacular was on display on Sunday, when Flynn preceded a picture-perfect fadeaway against Arizona State with a bounce through the legs that needed slo-mo to appreciate. All at once, dribbling re-emerged as a focal point of Flynn’s game.

He was back on the playground, trying to earn oohs and ahhs as a requisite for acceptance into the pickup games the older (and bigger) guys would play. Then, Flynn needed his dribbling to do the talking.

‘Being a small guy, you’ve got to do something to stand out and get on the court,’ Flynn said before practice Tuesday. ‘If you can’t do something like that, if you can’t get oohs and ahhs, the older guys won’t pick you. I think that had a lot to do with it.’

There are natural elements, too. Flynn’s hands are unusually large. His quickness translates into a jerkiness that can elude defenders. His coordination is honed from years of palm-to-leather interaction.

And there’s his personality, that greed he refers to: the desire to want to have the ball in his hands. For a while, it wasn’t always a basketball. Flynn’s first true athletic love was baseball, playing shortstop. On youth football fields, he ran the offenses as a quarterback.

‘When you have to lead your team on the football field and you have to have 11 guys on offense on the same page, that really helped my leadership ability out,’ Flynn said.

But for years, there was Flynn bounding down the hallways of his high school, bouncing a tennis ball. One summer, he broke his right wrist. For the rest of the break, he dribbled solely with his off hand.

‘I don’t think I remember seeing him without the ball sitting in his left,’ Niagara Falls High School assistant basketball coach Sal Constantino said.

Each instance has pieced together the formation of Flynn as a sort of dribbling dervish, still collecting oohs on a national level as he waltzes his way past defenders. At times, it seems Flynn is toying with defenses.

In practice, as in games, Flynn has fun, reveling in the enhanced skill he possesses (and others wave at). To Hopkins, it’s showmanship; to teammates, it’s annoying.

On a skip pass one day in practice, 6-foot-7 Wesley Johnson followed the ball to its recipient, Flynn. Anticipating a pass, Johnson barely had time to notice the crossover dribble Flynn used to skirt past him.

‘I was mad,’ Johnson said. ‘He started laughing.’

In high school, Flynn once literally made a defender fall backwards on a move. From that point on, no one played tight up on him.

‘You would have some kids that just wouldn’t guard him for fear of what would happen,’ Constantino said.

Always with a smile, but that doesn’t make Flynn’s killer crossover less deadly. It’s survival out there, and Flynn, at 6 feet and 185 pounds, has known he’s needed elusion to guarantee his spot on the court since he was a boy. With any team, since youth, the ball has never traveled far from Flynn’s palm.

It’s a comforting feeling, for Syracuse fans, that he’s developed such adeptness at handling it.

‘I just go out there and try to make the play that’s at hand,’ Flynn said. ‘Sometimes I might do a little too much, but it’s fun. I always have to have fun out there, and that’s fun to me: making people look silly.’

Zach Schonbrun is the Daily Orange sports columnist, where his columns appear every Wednesday. He can be reached at zsschonb@syr.edu.

Published on March 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm