There’s no way I’d ever tell her what was really going on. But not telling the truth is not the same as lying. Right?
For example, that stupid Health & Rec course. Taught by a Mr. Russo, a skinny little guy, who wore phys-ed pants that had a permanent knitted crease, a Ban Lon shirt with USA embroidered on his heart pocket, thick glasses, the last crew cut in America . . . He looked like some Caspar Milquetoast accountant, and he was listed in the catalog as being an assistant coach for the women’s fencing team.
Okay, including me, there were only six in the class. All of them women, who regarded me with puzzled glances but never deigned to talk to me.
The curriculum included the “history, philosophy, and contribution of the leisure and play movement to school and community.” Also to be emphasized were “new trends in building and park designs.”
Even with his little pip-squeak voice, Russo was certainly enthusiastic. According to him, “The growth of the health and recreation culture was a significant factor in the development of Western Civilization.”
I could hardly sit there and keep a straight face.
Even worse, I had a paper due by the end of September—“Children’s Safety and the Creation of Sand Gardens in the late 1880s in Boston”—a paper that, despite Coach Lee’s promise, I had to write myself.
Coach Lee, what did you do to me?
I even thought of just dropping the course, until I discovered that in order to maintain my status as a matriculated student (and therefore be eligible to play a varsity sport), I had to be enrolled in a minimum of twelve credits.
Okay. What if I just stopped showing up so the course would still be on the books? Ah, but then I’d be ineligible to hoop in the spring semester.
And, of course, it was too late to find a substitute course.
The class was bad enough, but how to explain it all to my father when he would inevitably demand to see my grade transcript at the end of the semester?
Next on my don’t-tell-Mother list was my nutty roommate. He was always there whenever I was there. Didn’t he go to classes? And it also seemed that instead of sleeping, he wrote, read, and fidgeted with his slide rule all night long. Even when I woke up in the dark nighttime hours to pee, he was still working at his desk. Worse still, all night long he noisily crunched on potato chips, and loudly belched after taking huge swigs from two-liter bottles of Coke.
The only way I could get a good night’s sleep was to buy one of those sleep masks and a package of rubber earplugs.
I certainly couldn’t tell her what was happening on the auxiliary basketball court that was adjacent to the swimming pool in the basement of Kramer. That’s where the daily pickup games began every afternoon at 3:30, and according to a note placed in my mail cubicle in the basement of my dorm, attendance was strictly voluntary. The note also said that none of the basketball coaches were permitted to attend.
Okay, so I showed up ready to go and, indeed, none of the coaches were there. (BTW, I still hadn’t met or even seen Coach Woody.) However, up there in the last row of the only pull-out bleacher stands, somebody (who turned out to be one of the basketball team’s student managers) was taping the action.
What the fuck. Didn’t make any difference to me. I was eager to go against Marwane Wright and show him what I had.
Too bad the runs absolutely and totally sucked.
None of the holdover guys who were in last season’s rotation were there. Just four end-of-the-bench scrubs, two walk-ons who hoped to make the team, plus six freshmen recruits. No surprise that all the guys (except the walk-ons) were incredibly talented. However, the vibe was that we were all competing for the attention and approval of whoever would be watching the tapes, so there was not a hint of camaraderie and virtually no friendly communication.
But the worst part was that the point guards and big men dominated the ball so much that all I really did was run up and down the court.
However, there was one recruit—a hard-muscled, six-eleven brother named LeVonn Mitchell—who actually threw me a couple of nifty kick-out passes that I turned into made treys. In return, I tossed a perfect lob to him on the run that he ferociously dunked.
Actually, his name and game were familiar because he’d been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated and was universally touted as being the best high school player in the country. LeVonn came from somewhere in Florida and his team not only won three state championships during his high school career but it was also undefeated.
He was said to have been the most widely recruited schoolboy since Lew Alcindor, and was projected to grow another two inches.
Yet LeVonn played with an awareness and unselfishness that belied his status as a national celebrity. It was obvious that he enjoyed playing with me as much as I enjoyed playing with him.
He was clearly the best player on the court.
When the kid who was taping the action started to pack up his equipment, we all understood that the games were done. That’s when LeVonn and I made a beeline for each other.
“Good run, man,” he said.
“I agree.”
We introduced ourselves, went through the usual hand jive, and arranged to get together for dinner.
Which was still another fucked-up scene.
Lee had told me that the varsity athletes ate in a separate section of the dining hall, but we actually had our own separate room, where admittance was gained only after a uniformed guard inspected our IDs and checked our names off a long list. It was a huge space with enough tables and chairs to seat maybe two hundred of us.
All the players on the various teams sat with their teammates, but the returning basketball lettermen waved us freshman away when we approached with our trays loaded with food.
And the food was indeed first-class. Deep buffet bins filled with fish, chicken, steaks, pork chops, hamburgers—along with different kinds of potatoes and plenty of veggies. Also there for the taking were different kinds of cookies, cakes, pies, and fresh fruit. Plus containers of milk and fruit drinks, bottles of water, and even shakers of protein powder.
Much better than the semislop the civilian students ate.
However, the football players—all hundred-plus of them—ate like horses and acted like pigs. Juvenile pigs. Screaming, laughing, lifting entire tables to show off, having at least one food fight every week and one fistfight every three days.
It was bedlam. But everybody seemed to be okay with all the goings-on. Everybody, that is, except me and LeVonn.
“This is too fucking crazy,” he said after we loaded our eats. “I been putting up with it so far, but I had enough. Let’s go eat in the other cafeteria.”
We found a table in a secluded corner and exchanged life stories, his being much more interesting than mine.
“My father was killed in Vietnam when I was real little, so my two older brothers, Darren and LaMarcus, remember him, but I don’t. They used to talk about what a good dad he was, playin’ catch, takin’ them fishin’, and that’d make me crazy, I got so pissed off. We all lived with Grandma and Grandpa on the outskirts of Orlando. A run-down neighborhood what didn’t even have a name.
“We had us a outhouse out back what we were afraid to use ’cause of the snakes in the grass we had to walk through. My Mama’s cure for every time we got sick was a big dose of castor oil, and if one of us got sick, then we all got doses. But we all tried to hide it from Mama if one of us did get sick ’cause that castor oil would give us the runs and then we’d have to be runnin’ to the outhouse in the dead a night.
““I mean, we was poor, but we ate what we had—chicken necks was a treat. And we was clean and happy. I didn’t really know I was poor until I went to the high school what had been integrated the first year that Darren went there.
“Oh, man. Jim Crow. The KKK. Burning crosses. I remember all of that growin’ up. When I was little
, I remember how one of the black kids I knew from school, his uncle was lynched. But none of them crackers never came into our particular neighborhood ’cause every house there had a loaded shotgun set up right over the inside of the front door.
“Anyway, me and my brothers played basketball, but they never grew big like me. Then I went to high school and kept growin’, and did really good. And here I am.”
“I know you were recruited like crazy, LeVonn, so how come you came here?”
He leaned back and flashed me a suspicious look. Could he trust me? A white boy from Yankee Land whose parents had indoor plumbing?
“You know,” I said, “when he made that home visit, Coach Lee said they’d get me some kind of a job to give me some extra spending money. So, when I got here, he told me what the job was. To turn the outside lights of my dorm off in the morning and on at night. Right? So I went to Sylvia, the lady at the front desk? And asked her where the switches were? She told me that the lights are connected to a sensor that turns them on and off automatically. Even so, every Friday afternoon so far there’s been an envelope with five new twenty-dollar bills in my mailbox. But, hey, I got no complaints. Know what I mean?”
His shoulders relaxed, he leaned forward and whispered this: “I got a lot of real good offers. From Indiana. Duke. UNLV. Michigan State. All a them. No-show jobs like you got. A new car for Mama. But you know what made the difference? . . . The school here opened up a savings account in a local bank in my mama’s name and put ten thousand dollars in it.”
“Holy shit!”
“Yeah, I know. But it’s real tricky ’cause Mama has to be real careful how to spend the money so’s it don’t call no attention to havin’ so much of it. I mean, I leave that stuff to her and Grandma and Grandpa to figure out.”
“Better to have it than not to have it.”
“I hear ya.”
“So you don’t have a job here at school? My job is to check my mailbox every Friday afternoon and pick up an envelope with a hundred bucks in cash inside.”
“ Me too. I don’t have to do nothin’ and I also get a envelope with cash money in it.”
I raised a curious eyebrow, and he said, “Two hundred.”
“I guess you’re twice as good a player as me,” I laughed. “And I think you proved that today.”
Then we both laughed. And before we parted we exchanged a bro hug.
“Hi. Yeah. It’s me. . . . Fine. . . .”
Chapter Six
Ihated my English Comp teacher, and she hated me.
It all started the first day of class.
Ms. Thomas was a little Tweety Bird of a woman, her yellow hair worn in a bun, her dresses always patterned with some kind of floral design, arms making a slight flapping motion whenever she talked in her squeaky voice. As though she were trying to fly away.
She made it clear even before all of us were seated and had stopped fidgeting that she was “a strict punctuationist.” She pointed to several large signs posted on every wall—“MYP.”
“‘Mind Your Punctuation,’” she interpreted. “I’ve had brilliant students who were good enough to be professional writers whom I’ve failed because of their poor punctuation.”
Her first lesson covered parts of speech, and this is what she wrote on the blackboard:
What is a noun.
Some smart guy in the first-row center raised his arm and furiously waggled his hand as though it was on fire.
“‘A person, place, or thing,’” he said when she called on him.
“That’s absolutely correct,” she smiled.
That’s when I fucked up. But, really, I couldn’t help myself. And who could blame me?
My raised hand got her attention, so I said, “That answer is superfluous, because it answers a question that wasn’t asked. In truth, the word ‘what’ in the sentence on the blackboard is not a noun. It’s really an interrogative pronoun. MYP, Ms. Thomas.”
She blushed, quickly changed the period at the end of her sentence to a question mark, and just as quickly dismissed us.
At the end of our next session, she gave us our first writing assignment, “My Favorite Hobby,” to be typed and submitted on Monday.
Guess what I wrote about: The challenge of isolation basketball. The glory of pick-and-rolls and give-and-goes. Teamwork and knowing your role. The court being metaphorically tilted to that offense is played downhill, while defense is played uphill—and the center-jump circle spins but remains in place like the nub of an axle in the center of a wheel.
I really didn’t know what that last sentence meant, but it somehow sounded “deep” and meaningful.
And, I must admit, all of it beautifully written.
But she gave me D+ and her handwritten note said, “So many arcane phrases that the entire piece makes little sense!!!!”
Thenceforth things went from bad to worse.
Her midterm exam consisted of a composition—“How Taking This Course Is Making Me a Better Writer”—plus a bunch of bullshit “True or False” questions:
The verb in this sentence is “is.” ______
The sentence “He enjoyed his studying” is a perfect example of a gerund. ______
Fool that I am, I wrote T or F in answer to the questions, and because I “didn’t follow instructions,” my grade was D–.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A week before practice began, the camera man was absent, but Marwane Wright and the other eight returning players showed up for the afternoon runs. Wright took charge and announced that he would play on the red team along with the four best holdovers, and that LeVonn could team up with the other four lettermen to form the yellow squad.
The rest of us watched the scrimmage for ninety minutes without any of us being summoned to play. My fellow recruits only sat and watched, but I ran wind sprints outside the sidelines and did some shooting in between the runs.
Definitely a fucked-up situation.
I was also disgusted by the way Wright and his buddies played. They never ran full-speed, and except when they dutifully passed the ball to Wright, they only had eyes for the basket.
Only LeVonn played hard, dominating the glass and blocking shots. When he smacked a lazy layup attempted by Wright, I expected that the smackee would retaliate with some super-duper move that would embarrass LeVonn. But all the guy did was laugh.
I began to be concerned about what the upcoming season really had in store.
My first contact with Coach Woody certainly did nothing to alleviate my foreboding.
Prior to our initial practice, we were all wearing our practice gear as we convened in the Film Room, where Coach Woody kept us waiting and fidgeting for fifteen minutes before making an appearance. He was preceded by his six assistants, walking two abreast, all of them wearing shiny red sweat suits with USA emblazoned across the front in large, scripted yellow letters.
Then came Coach Woody, bringing up the rear. He was clad in a shiny black sweat suit with “South” written in a convex curve above the concave “Arizona”—and both in extra-large yellow block letters. While his escorts were hatless, Coach Woody wore a black hat with “Coach Woody” written in yellow script above the bill.
I knew that he had been an All-American center at Ole Miss back in the late 1930s and had played with a modest degree of success in the scrambled alphabet of pre-BAA-cum-NBA leagues. The ABL, EBL, MBL, NBL, and PBLA. In those days he was listed as being six feet seven inches and a trim 220 pounds.
After a military stint in WW II, during which he played basketball and never saw active service, CW began his coaching career as an assistant to William Kramer. Twelve years ago, when Kramer became USA’s athletic director, CW became the head coach.
The only images I had previously seen of CW was of him leaning toward the game action from the bench, or else shaking hands with some
player or big-shot politician. He had always looked extremely fit for a middle-aged man, so imagine my surprise to see him in person looking somewhat stooped and with an ample belly.
Even so, his grand entrance definitely had a militaristic air. I almost felt like jumping to my feet, standing at attention, and jerking my right hand into a stiff salute.
The cadre of assistants parted in perfect unison, forming two lines of three standing off to the side. (I‘d later discover that Coach Lee was the only assistant whose voice I would regularly hear. The other guys mostly chased down loose balls, and rebounded and passed during shooting drills.)
Then, with his hands placed firmly on his hips, His Imperial Coachness strode forward and began to speak:
“Boys, you should all feel privileged to be playing for the University of Southern Arizona. We have a glorious tradition here, which I’m sure you are all well aware of. And we’re counting on you to continue that tradition.”
He paused to clear his throat with a loose, noisy cough.
I’ll bet he smokes cigarettes.
“A lot will be demanded of you. Obedience. Honesty. Good behavior on and off the court. And diligent effort in practice as well as in games. Nothing less will be tolerated.”
Another fluid cough, more hacking than the previous one.
“Now, some of you boys might be thinking of abandoning us here at Southern Arizona and choosing to turn pro before you graduate, like some other college boys are starting to do. But I would consider that to be a personal betrayal and a personal insult. We have gifted you the chance for a totally free college education, and an excellent one at that. Injuries, incompetence . . . There are numerous reasons why a boy might be a failure in the pros. But a college degree will never fail you. So, boys, it behooves you to show your loyalty and your appreciation to the school and, more importantly, to me, by staying the course. To do so will be to ensure that your life will be a success.”
Trouthe, Lies, and Basketball Page 4
