Barclays Center honcho Bruce Ratner first helped give a blind Sudanese ex-slave partial sight, and then provided the teen with the chance to use it for a special childhood-dream treat — watching an NBA game.
Ker Deng, 19 — whose ex-master blinded him years ago by rubbing peppers in his eyes and hanging him upside down from a tree over a fire — was thrilled as he sat courtside at the arena with the developer to watch the Brooklyn Nets last week.
“It was really amazing. I could tell when [the players] were moving and shooting. They were very tall,” Deng told The Post.
Thanks to three eye surgeries in the past two years, which his “Uncle Bruce” paid for, he can now see colors, shapes and sizes, Deng said. He also followed the game’s movement by listening to the ball being dribbled.
Ratner, who owns a minority share of the team, even assisted Deng, yelling out key words, such as “pass,” “dribble,” and “shoot” as the action unfolded.
At halftime, Deng received another perk: Ratner brought him to rap mogul Jay-Z’s luxury suite, so the teen could meet his idol.
At the end of the game, when Nets ace Joe Johnson drained a buzzer-beating jumper, leading the club to a thrilling 113-111 overtime win over the Milwaukee Bucks, Deng responded like any typical teen.
He high-fived other fans around him, screaming and whistling loudly.
For Deng, who described the game-day experience as being “happy in the darkness,” the evening illustrated the amazing upward swing his life has taken since meeting the developer and his sister, Fox News analyst Ellen Ratner, in Sudan in April 2011.
Deng and his mother, both South Sudanese Christians, had been captured years earlier by vicious North Sudanese tribal thugs during the country’s bloody civil war. He spent his days picking tea, nights sleeping with goats and spare time trying to avoid routine beatings.
He was released only because his captors deemed him useless as a worker after being blinded.
The Ratners, touched by Deng’s horrifying ordeal, helped get him a temporary visa, so he could undergo the eye surgeries. The siblings say they now consider him a member of the family, with Bruce picking up his medical bills and other expenses.
Deng plans to undergo another retinal attachment to get back more of his sight.
Shortly after a 2011 Post report about the Ratners’ fight to keep Deng in America, the teen was granted a student visa to attend Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Mass.
Ellen Ratner says he’s “doing well there, excelling in math and physics” and learning to play the piano.
He’s also learned to speak and read English with the help of a Braille computer, skied for the first time earlier this month, and won awards as a runner.
“I am a very pushy Jewish mother, so I want him to be president of South Sudan some day,” Ellen Ratner said.