COLUMBIA, S.C. -- "My name is Jamel Bradley and I am deaf," says Jamel Bradley into the camera. Only he doesn't say it, he signs it -- signifying with his hands what he would normally describe with his voice, so that all the hearing-impaired folks watching SportsCenter will understand.

It's not as if South Carolina's senior shooting guard cannot hear anything. In fact, since he arrived in Columbia out of Beckley, W.Va., and was fitted for a pair of state-of-the-art, omnidirectional hearing aids, he can communicate on and off the court nearly as well as anybody with 100-percent hearing. "I really never think of myself as different," says Bradley, the Gamecocks' leading scorer with 14.6 ppg. "Even though people like to separate the two groups of the hearing and the deaf, I've always felt I could be as normal as anybody in this world."

It's his outside shot that's way above average. Bradley is a hellacious three-point bomber, who last week broke the South Carolina career record for trifectas -- draining five (for a total of 219) and scoring a game-high 22 points in the Gamecocks' huge 80-67 upset win over Georgia.

It was over a 20-minute period before the game, however, that Bradley especially distinguished himself -- meeting and signing his willowy arms off with a large group of starry-eyed kids who visibly were bursting with both happiness and pride that one of their hearing-disabled own had not only become a sports celebrity but would give so much of his time to them.

"When I was growing up, I really never had a role model," Bradley says. "That person to come up and say: ‘I have been through this, this is how you work it out, this is what you have to do.' With the kids I always focus on them keeping their hearing aids in, wearing them all the time, because I know how hard it is to do that."

Bradley was barely 18 months old when he contracted a fever that reached 106 degrees for three days and nearly cost him his life. It did cost him his hearing until his parents, Robert and Shirley, purchased his first hearing aids. Then came the real hardship -- peer pressure.

"I was angry and upset because everybody would laugh and stare at me, saying some remarks about my hearing aids. It really made me cry and I didn't want to go to school. It made me feel like I didn't belong," Bradley says. The youngster would constantly throw the instruments away, causing his mother to look everywhere from the family washing machine to the yard outside at all hours of the day and night.

Through an older brother, however, Jamel discovered basketball -- "a way of being involved with friends, to talk and keep people from looking at me and saying ‘what are those things behind your ears?' " he laughs.

Former South Carolina coach Eddie Fogler was more interested in the things Bradley did behind the rainbow arc; the coach worked tirelessly to get a set of new, digital hearing aids approved by the NCAA -- instruments that Bradley could program to whatever situation he found himself in, whether a loud coliseum or a silent conversation with children.

The day the freshman Bradley emerged on campus with his "new ears," he experienced a whole new world of different sounds, the first one very odd. "Jamel was trying to figure out what it was," says Karen Pettus, USC's director of disability services. "And then somebody realized it was the birds chirping in the trees."

"I thought I was going crazy, just insane," Bradley says. "Then something in my room started making some noise and I was like: ‘What is that?' It was just killing me so I went through my whole dorm room searching and searching and finally I figured out it was my clock ticking."

On the court the difference was equally striking.

"Huge," Bradley says. "The crowds got louder and louder, but my hearing aids pushed the noise off to the sides so I could understand what was going on. I heard my coaches and teammates, I didn't have to rely on signals or lip reading much anymore."

The fierce way the spindly 6'2" Bradley competes, however, bouncing off bodies like a ping-pong ball, the hearing aids sometimes go bouncing themselves. Then there's the problem of batteries. Bradley: "Some days my battery will go dead and I'll be out there like ‘what's going on?' and my teammates will just laugh and say ‘Dude, throw them to the sidelines!' "

"Once Jamel yanked them out and threw them," says mom Shirley, "and I said 'Oh, no! That's $5,000 you are throwing across the court. Be a little more concerned!' "

Having finally learned to play without sign language, last summer Bradley found himself having to sign all over again. That's when he led the U.S. Deaflympics team -- that's the correct spelling by the way, to differentiate the deaf games from that other graft- and commercial-besmirched operation -- to the gold medal in Rome, Italy, scoring 33 points in the championship game. "We brought up Jamel not to depend on signing all the time," says Shirley. "But in Rome he absolutely had to sign. It was strange for him because there was absolutely no speaking. If you did speak, there would be a penalty or disqualification."

Upon returning for his final season in Gamecock land, however, Bradley could not shake his newly gained habit. "I guess I forgot I had a voice again," he laughs. "I kept right on signing and my teammates were like: ‘What are you doing? What is up with your hands?' I was like: ‘Yeah, okay, whatever.' Hey, I was just showcasing my many skills. Sign language is just the prettiest language in the world because you get to see people's hands moving real fast and also see their facial expressions ... if they are sad, happy, things like that."

South Carolina coach Dave Odom, the man who replaced Fogler this season -- the Gamecocks are 13-8 (3-5 in the SEC) after losing at Kentucky on Saturday, with a home game against Florida Tuesday night -- says the only hesitancy he experiences with Bradley is when he has to move him over to point guard when senior Aaron Lucas is out of the game. "If [Jamel] is running and his back is to me, I wonder if he can hear me. So I am reluctant to put him at the point where he might be at a disadvantage," says Odom.

On the other hand, as the focal point of the deaf children who show up all over the SEC to meet him -- he annually entertains kids in Lexington, Ky., Knoxville, Tenn., and other enemy enclaves -- Bradley is at a supreme advantage.

"When I get my chance, I'm there 24-7 for these kids," he says. "I go out immediately to talk to them because I know they are pretty much saying if I can accomplish these things, keeping my hearing aids in, they can do the same. I tell them my life story and how I overcame the problems. It makes my heart happy to contribute something and make them feel better."

"Jamel is very much a hero in this [hearing-impaired] community," says Pettus. "So often these kids are told you can't play basketball because you are deaf or you can't do this or that because you are deaf. And Jamel basically says to them: No, that's not right. I did it and you can, too."

The other day ESPN producer Andy Tennant was finishing up a video shoot with Bradley in which Jamel had one chance to nail a three for the camera before he had to get ready for a game. "Pressure's on. Swish it and get out of here," I joked.

The kid looked at the camera, smiled and signed "I love to shoot the three." Then he calmly turned around, fired and hit nothing but nylon.

Before he left Bradley signed one more time: "Nice talking to you," his hands described. "See you later."

Watch SportsCenter's feature on Bradley Tuesday night at 6 p.m.

Curry Kirkpatrick is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at curry.kirkpatrick@espnmag.com.