Pounding the Rock
Page 1
Copyright © 2019 by Marc Skelton
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover photograph by Patrick McCloskey of HS Box Scores NYC, LLC
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Skelton, Marc, 1974– author.
Title: Pounding the rock : basketball dreams and real life in a Bronx high school / by Marc Skelton.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027159 | ISBN 9780385542654 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385542661 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School (New York, N.Y)—Basketball—History. | Fannie Lou Hamer Panthers (Basketball team)—History. | Basketball—New York (State)—New York—History. | High school students—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Bronx (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions. | Skelton, Marc, 1974– | Basketball coaches—New York (State)—New York—Biography.
Classification: LCC GV885.43.F36 S54 2019 | DDC 796.323/62097471 2 23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027159
Ebook ISBN 9780385542661
v5.4
ep
To Jessica
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
—Jacob Riis
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
2016–2017 Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School Basketball Team
Preface
Warm-Up
PART ONE: THE PRESEASON
Walfri
Let’s Go!
School and Schoolmasters
Tryouts: October 5, 2016
Coach C
The Bronx
First Year: 2003
The Trojan Horse Theory of Basketball
The Tale of Two Forwards
Brian Is Missing
PART TWO: REGULAR SEASON
November
The 2016 Election
Game One Versus DeWitt Clinton
Our School
Home Opener
The Albatross
Werner Herzog Gets Me Through
Game Theory
Prince Don’t Miss
The Castaway
The Death Star
Tyree Rising
The Jelly
Spies Like Us
Frankie’s Leg
Apoplectic
The Shark Massacre: South Bronx Prep, Game Number One
Fannie Lou Hamer
Seven to Go
Have a Good Practice
“My Foe Outstretched Beneath the Tree”
A Second Chance
Frankie’s Return
Federalists
Gogol in the Bronx
Harpoon
PART THREE: PLAYOFFS
NYC Hoops
The Grand Armada
Wagner
Townsend Harris
The Great Transition
Quarterfinals
The Adams Chronicles
The Rematch
Headwinds
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
2016–2017
FANNIE LOU HAMER FREEDOM HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL TEAM
TEAM NAME: Panthers
COLORS: Red, White, and Black
SCHOOL ADDRESS: 1021 Jennings Street, the Bronx, New York 10460
HEAD COACH: Marc Skelton
ASSISTANT COACH: Gaby Acuria, Kyheem Taylor
MANAGERS: Dalen Ward, Mohammed Fofana, Henry Gonzalez, Alams Beato
PREFACE
In 2013, the Fannie Lou Hamer Panthers won the New York City Public Schools Athletic League Class B basketball championship. It was the first championship in any sport in school history. What does a coach do after his team has won a championship? He starts writing a book, of course.
For a long while I had wanted to write about basketball. So in the summer of 2013, I started writing about the game I love. Writing was my off-season. It was not something I could do during the school year; teaching responsibilities, coaching obligations, and family duties leave very little time to breathe, never mind write. But during the summer, the noise that’s stuck in my head after teaching or coaching is absent.
I didn’t know where to send my work. On a whim I sent an email to Ray Anczelowicz, who runs a basketball website called Gotham Hoops. We started with a Coaches’ Corner piece. Every two weeks or so I would write something about my team, basketball camp, the off-season, the mid-range jump shot, or the NBA playoffs. I developed longer pieces, like “Remember the Yugoslavs: The Death of Yugoslavian Basketball.” Even less interesting was “The Banality of Basketball.” They were tongue-in-cheek sports ballads with a historical and literary tilt. I enjoyed writing them. It was fun and harmless.
Then one day in August 2014, I got a call from Nancy Mann, at the time the principal at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School. She said a reporter from the New York Times had called and wanted to talk to me about basketball.
I had had one strange brush with what we might call “big media” before this. There was a phone call I had in 2006 with someone whose name I have long forgotten. We can just call him Hollywood. He’d somehow learned I was to become the new basketball coach.
“It will look like this. Magic or Bill Bradley will come in and help you coach. We have Magic Johnson on board, and he can move mountains,” said Hollywood for an opener.
“You guys were the worst team in New York City last year, right? The school is in a tough area of the Bronx. I’ve read it is in the poorest urban congressional district in the United States.”
Hollywood had done his homework. In the 2005–06 season, the Fannie Lou basketball team was 0-18. The school is located in one of the poorest sections of the country.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t even the coach last year.”
My attempt to stonewall or build an alibi didn’t work. I was a rookie coach, and he knew that.
“That doesn’t matter,” Hollywood said. “Magic can move mountains.”
* * *
—
This was a real phone conversation. I was about to start my first year coaching, and someone already planned to do a reality television show about me and my team. He wanted cameras to follow me and the players around. All I could envision was cheap, badly done television. Another ghetto exploitation film about rough times, drugs, guns, hope, and basketball. As you can probably guess, the Fannie Lou basketball reality television show ne
ver happened. As a rule, teachers hate movies about teaching. They seem to always ring false. We witness humanity; we try to prevent failure, we observe children’s complete and incomplete metamorphoses, we vouch for their honesty, we mend, we yell, we hush, we give high fives, we give stickers, we watch meltdowns, we clean up everything. Anytime anything is written about schools, I always see the thin line between fostering and exploiting. This phone call was clearly about the latter.
So I wasn’t quick to call the Times back. I was nervous. Then I did.
Michael Powell, the Times journalist, explained to me that he had just moved over to the sports section and he’d Googled something like “The Death of New York City Basketball.” I had written a hackneyed piece on that subject, and Powell found it. I gave him a witches’ brew of reasons why New York City, while still firmly a basketball city, was not producing NBA All-Stars at the rate that it once did. I offered up criticisms of everyone: among them, Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) culture in general and the Knicks in particular for producing such a bad product year after year. It was as if a dark cloud, like the one in Ghostbusters, had descended upon the city, causing our hoop dreams to become haunted ghouls with broken jump shots. Near the conclusion of our conversation, I invited Powell to tryouts in October. The next thing I knew, I had two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists, Powell and the Times staff photographer Todd Heisler, sitting in the school cafeteria a few minutes before the start of the 2014–15 season. They were embedded with us all season. In July 2015 the New York Times published a piece titled “A Long Hardwood Journey” documenting our season.
* * *
—
It was a difficult season for the Fannie Lou Panthers. We were in a transition year. It felt like we had nine power forwards on the team. We had a shipload of distractions. Our record was 15 wins, 11 losses.
Did the reporter and the photographer distract us at all from playing our best basketball? It’s hard to say. In retrospect they probably saved our season. It was as if we had guests over and needed to be on our best behavior. But unlike guests who can wear out their welcome quickly, we really enjoyed having Michael and Todd around simply to talk to. When asked what it was like to pursue the city championship, I said our job was to “harpoon the whale.” “Harpooning” has many meanings, as does “the whale.” Winning can be the key to unlocking some of life’s doors.
The story this book tells is not about one of the greatest teams in New York City basketball history. It is a book that tackles ideas of education in the twenty-first century, self-actualization, brotherhood, failure, courage, and faith. I think it is important to view basketball as a great symbol of enlightenment among uncertainty. I offer you a first-person account, a coach’s viewpoint, of the overachieving basketball team at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School as we attempt to win a 2016–17 city championship against the odds. This story is as much about basketball as Moby-Dick is about the pursuit of a white whale. Which is to say that something larger than basketball is at stake. This is a portrait of a small school in a big city and of a neighborhood and borough that is continually changing and evolving. But the fact is, they are all winning.
WARM-UP
It was one of the most important film sessions of the season, and I wrapped it up early. I didn’t want us to be late. It was February, and another regular season was coming to an end. A win on Friday most likely would give us home-court advantage for the first two rounds in the citywide playoffs. Lose and we could theoretically play on the road somewhere in Chinatown or the Rockaways, I imagined.
Four o’clock came around, and the team and I grabbed some seats in a classroom. I overheard some complaints on our way up the staircase. There were thoughts and questions, some said out loud, others in a whisper: What are we doing? We have a game tomorrow, Coach. This is a teachers’ meeting, we don’t belong here. We’re supposed to get ready for the Archimedes game. Or something along these lines.
Walfri Restitullo, the senior power forward, entered the room and sat down quietly. With his maroon hoodie zipped up and his chin-strap beard a little overgrown, he looked the part of the elder statesman. He had enjoyed a solid senior season, averaging 10 points and almost 9 rebounds a game. As the leader of the team he sat quietly, expecting the others to follow his example. They did.
The previous Tuesday evening we had scored 115 points, a school record, in a win. It was our twenty-second victory of the year. A win on Friday and we would equal the previous year’s win total of twenty-three, another school record. This would be an outstanding accomplishment, but we were still haunted by our five-point loss in the 2016 Public Schools Athletic League semifinal game to enjoy it. The accomplishment was somehow sullied by the loss to Jane Addams High School that year. We were anxious for the regular season to finish and for the playoffs to start. But first I wanted the team to attend this teachers’ meeting.
* * *
—
Mr. Bob Moses entered the room. We, the students and teachers, were seated, or I should say scattered, across the room. Some of us were standing or leaning against the wall. Some were seated alone at a table while the rest were piled up next to each other like defunct bumper cars. Mr. Moses wore a heather-gray pullover, and a blue-collared shirt poked out around his neck. He had on dark pants and black shoes. He was bald on top, with snow-white hair above his ears and what could be the start of a beard on his face.
Kate Belin, the venerated math teacher at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, introduced Mr. Moses. I knew I was in the presence of greatness when with a flick of the wrist Mr. Moses asked if we could arrange the tables so we could all be seated. Quickly, the tables were shoved together to form a shape I have seen only in a game of Tetris: a square in the middle with an L-shaped desk married to another irregular S-shaped tetromino. Mr. Moses was silent as tables, chairs, and people were moved into a more intimate setting.
“So, this school is named Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School,” Mr. Moses began once we were all seated around him. A long pause followed. Then a question. “What’s it about?” Mr. Moses had us, the teachers, in rapture, while the team looked nervous. He commanded the room with a whisper.
“I knew Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.” Once he said this, I knew I should have given the boys a quick primer on Bob Moses, but I wanted to surprise them. He had been the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also known by its acronym SNCC. He was instrumental in leading the voter registration drive in Mississippi in 1964, also known as Freedom Summer. I also knew that nobody was worried about our film session anymore. At one of the most important moments of the season, it takes a man of Bob Moses’s significance for basketball to drift away from our minds. The guys were locked in.
“Does anyone know when slavery was outlawed in the United States?” Mr. Moses asked mildly. A few eyes shift to me, the history teacher. Of course I am thinking, 1865, Thirteenth Amendment. Is this a test? I wonder. Before anyone can say anything, he pops another question: “What happened on December seventh, 1941?” Charles Davis, a junior power forward, our leading scorer and rebounder, raises his hand. “Pearl Harbor.” Teachers and his teammates nodded proudly.
This was not going to be one of those meetings where you could answer one question and stop paying attention. The gravity of our guest was so powerful that nobody wanted to continue film or even go to the gym. So compelling was Mr. Moses in the first few minutes that Walfri and Charles started taking notes, and soon so did the whole team. Mr. Moses encouraged everyone, including teachers, to take notes. Class was in session.
“Slavery ended with Circular 3591.”
“What’s that?” everyone in the room was asking themselves.
“Who is the president in 1941?”
Kenneth Castro, a shy junior shooting guard, raises his hand. “Roosevelt.”
“Right,” Mr. Moses says. “In 1941, December twelfth, Franklin Roosevelt is president.
Francis Biddle is the attorney general. He issues Circular 3591 to every state attorney general and tells them from henceforth the FBI is not to prosecute peonage as indebtedness, right? It’s to prosecute peonage as indentured servitude and slavery. He’s telling these state attorney generals that they have got to stop rounding up young black men for vagrancy, charging them with indebtedness, and sending them off to the slave labor camps to build the steel industry in this country, right?”
Following the Civil War, there was a need for labor on plantations. Local governments discovered a new way to enslave the newly freed slaves of the South. If a man owed money, he could be sent to prison to pay off his debt. Or he could be sent to a nearby plantation and work off his fine. It didn’t take long for debt slavery to become institutionalized after the Civil War.
Mr. Moses paused, then continued. “Now, why is Biddle sending out that letter? Because the country has just been attacked. Pearl Harbor, December seventh. And Roosevelt knows he’s going to need black soldiers. Slavery officially ended in 1941.”
We are a country that “lurches,” he said. He explained that in 1787 the United States Constitution was written; then the Civil War of 1861–65, or what he referred to as “the War of Constitutional People over Constitutional Property,” was fought; and then another shift in the country happened during what we know as the Reconstruction Era, which Mr. Moses properly called “Redemption.” The third era of reform would be the civil rights era, and we are now two-thirds of the way through that. (Although I was thinking that with Donald Trump in the White House, we are not lurching anymore. It looks like we have fallen flat on our faces.)