He was born in a town with a population of about 5,000, to a mother who was 15 and a father who was 18. They never married.

His grandmother, Elizabeth, raised him. They had food on the table and clothes on their backs. They had love, they just didn't have any money.

He respected his father, Wilson, but his father was never there for him.

His mother, Debbie, tried to be there for him, but that didn't always work out, either.

"They had me when they were young," DeShields explained, "and they had a lot of living to do. I tell them that we can't really make up for lost time, we just have to go on from here and make the most of it."

When DeShields was in junior high school, he watched his mother fall into the snare of alcoholism. That, Debbie now says, forced her son to grow up quickly, far sooner than any 12-year-old should be expected to do.

"I had a problem with alcohol, and Delino had a lot of decisions to make at a young age," she said, adding that she has not had a drink in four years. "My alcoholism made him grow up. My not being there for him made him dig deeper within himself.

"You wish you could change things in the past, but some things you can't. In the last four years, we have started a whole new relationship and we are very close. Delino is always saying to me, 'I had a hard time raising you, Mom.' "

As DeShields grew older, he finally had a choice, or so it seemed. He was the second black quarterback at Seaford High, in Seaford, Del.--the first was his uncle--and he also starred in baseball and basketball. The only sport he couldn't handle was wrestling.

From an early age, though, DeShields knew what sport he wanted to play. Even when a basketball was bigger than him, his mother said, he handled it with skill.

He became so good, in fact, that Rollie

Massimino at Villanova offered him the only freshman basketball scholarship

available for the 1987 season, and he accepted. His future, it seemed, was set.

But the Montreal Expos also selected DeShields, a shortstop, in the first round of the 1987 draft, and with that came a bonus of $140,000--a pittance to most players now but a lot of money then.

DeShields loved basketball, but his grandmother lost her house around that time because of financial difficulties and, as agonizing as the decision was to make, there really was little question what DeShields would do. He signed with the Expos.