by Marc Skelton
As the years passed, I came to regard my cosmic slumber in the ice pod as a haven, however brief it was. Whenever I felt comfortable, I also had this uneasy feeling it wouldn’t last. And anytime I found solace, my mom would arrive and rip it from me. I dreamed about having more than she could take away, and I played hoops more to be alone, to create a gap that separated me from her and my stepdad, until their transgressions receded from my mind. Nothing made sense without basketball.
She told my stepfather what I did when we got home. He mumbled something and continued watching television. He was an alien to me. I never really knew him. Always quiet, foreboding, never really interested in anything, not mountaineering, not race cars, only his mashed potatoes and gravy that he’d wash down with vodka mixed with orange juice.
On April 12, 2009, forty-eight years after Yuri Gagarin launched into space for the first time, my first daughter Nina was born. Later on I discovered Yuri loved basketball. He said it helped him get through astronaut school. He also became a basketball coach. There are some strange cosmic connections that we can’t really explain in life.
SCHOOL AND SCHOOLMASTERS
On October 5, 1977, President Jimmy Carter toured the Bronx and called Charlotte Street and the surrounding area the worst slum in America. When you look at photos from the seventies, it appears as if an asteroid smashed into the Bronx, causing the kind of damage that only something from outer space could have. I have never seen photos that make me think of silence more. If sound doesn’t travel in space, these photographs convey the silence of a kind of social outer space. Three years later, Ronald Reagan returned and claimed Carter hadn’t fixed a thing.
A few blocks from Charlotte Street is a two-toned gingerbread brick building located at the corner of West Farms Road and Jennings Street in the Bronx. The building was once a nondescript factory, indistinguishable amid the archipelago of former factories in the Bronx.
The school was once a garment factory for those recovering from tuberculosis or depression; I like to think of it as a sanitarium for the convalescing who needed a job. Now it’s a high school for anyone in the neighborhood who wants a sound education.
Little is known about the Altro Health and Rehabilitation Services Workshop, except that on March 13, 1958, Nom Lee, a Chinese immigrant and employee, shot and killed a coworker and held the other two hundred employees hostage. I have packaged this grisly fact into a ghost story retold with great gusto to unexpecting eleventh graders every Halloween.
What else is known about the Altro factory is that its name was a shortened version of “altruistic,” an attempt to help people who may not have been able to work elsewhere. The workshop was founded in 1913 by Jewish philanthropies. Over a century later, altruism still echoes within the walls at 1021 Jennings Street. Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School has become one of the best beat-the-odds schools in the world.
What odds? The odds of a child in a middle-class family in the 1980s earning more than her parents in her lifetime was less than 50 percent. Social mobility has been unplugged. For a few decades we kept putting bread into the toaster, waiting for the toaster to turn on. Then we start yelling at the bread, “What’s wrong with you?” We shake the toaster and give it a whack. Finally, we give up, throw away the toaster, and find something else to eat. So what do you think the odds are of someone born into poverty in this century making it out of poverty?
Social mobility has plateaued in the United States; in fact, the race-wealth gap has quadrupled in the last thirty years. The climb up the shaky economic ladder has always been, to say the least, an obstacle-filled journey. Eighteen years into the new millennium, and more and more Americans are born without rungs on their ladders. In America, there is a certain pathos we feel for those who climb out of poverty, and a certain disappointment we harbor for those who don’t.
Anchored in the poorest urban congressional district in the United States and one of the most segregated sections in New York City, Fannie Lou has been the touchstone for small school success in the city for more than twenty years. Fannie Lou may not be the holy grail of high schools, but it is damn close. Emma Lazarus would have written a poem about this school. Imagine a school where everyone is welcomed. Too old? Come on in. Didn’t get the right score on the state exam? No problem. You were absent a lot of days in middle school? You had to take care of your mother? You had to translate for her too? You have a kid? How old are you? It doesn’t matter, have a seat. Bienvenidos a Estados Unidos! Si, aquí tu hijo puede entrar la escuela. Si, gratis. You can’t pass the Regents Exams? Don’t worry, we got you. Your high school closed? How many? Twenty students? Sure, come on in.
How does a school educate those who don’t have decent housing, who don’t have the proper eyeglasses, who don’t have books on their nightstands, food in the refrigerator, extra cash around the house to pay for incidentals, a quiet place to do homework? Let me say it is not easy.
Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School was designed to welcome all students; more specifically, to offer kids in the Bronx a sound high school education. It attempts to widen the narrow opportunities available in the Bronx. Our college guidance counselors were able to help the class of 2017 receive more than $1.5 million in college scholarships.
In the last twelve years in New York, small schools with a student population of five hundred students have increasingly replaced the large comprehensive high schools, those with over two thousand students, throughout the city. More and more small high schools have been created this century. As a result, high school graduation rates in New York City have also improved steadily over the last ten years. The credit has been given to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but the teachers, staff, administrators, students, and their families also deserve some as well.
Fannie Lou was one of the first small high schools in New York City. It was created in 1993 when the Board of Education and the State Education Department closed James Monroe High School in the Bronx. After many years of ineptitude and neglect, six small high schools were born to correct the abysmal, if not criminal, 26.9 percent graduation rate of James Monroe High School in 1992. Without reservation I can say Fannie Lou is the beacon of the small schools movement. Smaller high schools with smaller student bodies, particularly those that serve the communities of its surrounding neighborhoods, can operate like a village, where students, teachers, and parents get to know and support each other better. This proximity fosters stronger, more intimate relationships and increases student engagement.
To see why Fannie Lou was chosen by the National Education Policy Center as a Gold Medal School of Opportunity, simply look at our graduation rate. In 2017, Fannie Lou’s graduation rate was 68 percent. A 40 percent increase in the graduation rate while serving children from the same neighborhood speaks volumes about the work Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School has accomplished.
What makes Fannie Lou such an incredible place? First, imagine an environment where students and teachers can treat school as an intellectual community. Second, teachers don’t just hand out worksheets and wait for the bell to ring. Students are asked to be active learners, not passive participants. They study the Bronx River not only by visiting it, but by building boats and rowing the only freshwater river in New York City. They learn math by building dodecahedrons out of plywood. They participate in internships across the city. Fannie Lou prepares students to live productive lives after high school.
TRYOUTS: OCTOBER 5, 2016
I was concentrating like a blackjack dealer, shuffling through creased parental consent documents, juggling physical forms, searching for the parent’s signature, hunting for physicians’ registry numbers, vigilant that no one was trying to cheat and sneak into tryouts. Kyheem Taylor, Luis Padilla, and Gaby Acuria, the assistant coaches, were playing gatekeepers: denying entry to anyone without the proper paperwork, counting the number of boys in the gym, drawing invisible lines from names to faces the way skilled teachers m
emorize new students on the first day of school. I thought I needed to see my doctor soon too. Rarely did I question my fitness as a coach, a teacher, a father, or a husband, but at that moment I did. I’m not convinced coaching basketball is the healthiest thing I could be doing. A few seasons ago, a fellow PSAL coach died from a brain aneurysm at forty-four years old. Former Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser died from a heart attack at fifty-six. It is easy to lose yourself in this game. This season I promised myself to exercise more, go to yoga, and eat better.
“All set. Twenty-seven. Let’s go. Circle up.”
The gym was warm with excitement. Twenty-seven young men tried to squeeze around the red circle at half-court.
“Welcome to Fannie Lou basketball,” I announced. “We are looking for a few guys who are committed to team basketball.”
The October after-school sun turned the gym the color of Doritos. Tryouts are the annual tradition of trying to figure out who will taste good in January. A new team reminded me of the empty glass jars we would fill with fruit and vegetables in Moldova, where I taught in the Peace Corps. In the fall the jars sat near the kitchen window full of sunshine. The sedate gold lids wore sweaters of cobwebs before we would fill them with peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I loved canning food and preparing jams in the fall so we could eat fruits and vegetables in the winter. What you need every fall is to select a few salted big men who love to rebound, a sprinkling of dried dedicated defenders, and a plump peach who sets bruising picks, then put them on the shelf, where they will help you get through the long winter months.
“I don’t like hero basketball,” I continued. “Actually, I hate it. If you think this team needs you, you should probably leave now. We have a wrestling team if you want to compete for individual honor or glory.”
Basketball is a simple game. On offense we want to take the highest-percentage shot available: layups, open three-pointers, and foul shots. We avoid the mid-range game, those shots inside the three-point arc and outside the paint. On defense we are going to pressure the ball and create turnovers. Those turnovers result in easy baskets.
It sometimes takes years for players to be able to understand the science, math, and psychology of Fannie Lou basketball. I like to think of our team as the San Antonio Spurs of the PSAL. They found a winning formula by selecting talent from overseas. We have a lot of kids on the team whose parents were born overseas. There’s a hunger and a toughness in them that I admire and really like coaching. Walfri shows it every day. Charles cannot be stopped when he’s going to grab a rebound. Once Frankie Williams decides to drive to the hoop, it’s over.
As a coach, I have exploited these attributes along with teaching and demanding team basketball over hero ball. How can we run an egalitarian offense when children are at their narcissistic peak? We throw away the unhealthy junk food that feeds bad teams: poor shot selection, one-on-one basketball, defensive and offensive irresponsibility. We stress an unyielding pressure on defense, especially on the ball. I know I will never tame the New York City player inside them, nor do I want to. I just want to create a team-first attitude with a no-nonsense approach to the game.
I concluded my harangue by saying, “That championship banner behind you is lonely. The only way that banner gets some company is with a team-first agenda.”
The 2013 championship banner nailed to the porcelain plaster did in fact look lonely. The year 2013 might as well have been 1993 on the time horizon of the kids encircling me. They were in middle school the last time we won a championship. I thought about the guys on the 2013 team. They are legends, justifiably so. All we needed this year were a few guys who, like our 2013 squad, had a peculiar propensity to make the extra pass and play defense.
“Okay. We are good.” I looked at Frankie.
“Let’s stretch,” Frankie Williams, our intelligent sophomore point guard, barked. Frankie is cereal-box handsome. His good looks belie his competitive fire. His face belonged at your kitchen table to greet you in the morning. He had a vague resemblance to Trayvon Martin and the singer Usher. I first met Frankie when he was in sixth grade, and he has always had a great attitude and vision about his future, the school, and the team. Frankie came to Fannie Lou because he “felt like there are a lot of opportunities for minorities. If you use school the right way, you’ll see the world from a different perspective.”
As a freshman he recognized right away that if he knew the plays and played defense, he could get playing time. He became a starter after the third game. I probably should have started him the first game. Our gym is the size of a garden shed. The new and returning kids followed his orders and began warming up. Arms swung like shears, and legs kicked like the handles of shovels and rakes dancing in the air.
I heard the wood creak for the first time this season. Years ago a pipe burst in the middle of the winter, flooding the gym. The wood, as is nature’s order, swallowed up the water; the court now has Band-Aid-like replacement panels, is warped in other spots, and in certain sections is like the old deck of a seasoned ship. If you run your hand on it, it feels like a worn bannister, especially at half-court, where the replacement wood meets the antediluvian wood and forms twists and turns.
This is also where we love to trap the ball on defense. This is our version of mayhem: the perfect marriage of chaos and discipline. Imagine how difficult it is to dribble a ball when two ravenous defenders are running at you; it is even more difficult to get out of the trap when the ball feels like Phil Niekro just rubbed sandpaper all over it and it dances away from your fingertips as the defenders close in. There are invisible speed bumps all over the blond wood that slow down the game like a despotic governor strategically creating traffic jams on a holiday weekend. I have to hammer in the nails on the replacement boards each year. Yet there is still a sacred geometry intact on our court. It is not congruent with other high school gyms. The typical high school gym is eighty-four feet in length and fifty feet in width. Never mind what the dimensions are in our gym. All I’m going to say is, our gym is small and opposing teams know it is a pain in the ass to play here.
The black volleyball rectangle is surrounded by a larger concentric red rectangle. There is a dotted red line that perforates the court into halves from rim to rim. A sheepish, somnolent black panther rests at half-court. Saucer-size golden coins hide the pits for the volleyball poles, for now covered like mini-manholes. The industrial low-pressure sodium lights cast a mustard sunset; they create a perpetual twilight effect. The white brick walls were painted in August and still have some luster left. Up above, a few dangling ceiling tiles look like giant frosted Mini Wheats. If the size of the court or the surface doesn’t give us advantage enough, there is the school’s all-time leader in blocked shots: the obtrusive white heating duct that runs the length of the ceiling and makes three points from the right wing all but impossible.
The team sat encircling Frankie, some reaching for their toes, one or two cupping their new sneakers with their palms. One new kid in an orange Knicks shirt, whose fishbowl belly wouldn’t let him touch his toes, sat unnoticed by his peers, defeated before the first bounce of a ball. Everyone had their eyes closed. Frankie yelled out the odd numbers and the chorus barked back the even: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!” “Everyone count,” someone demanded, as if making the pre-practice count loud would somehow lessen the brutal two-hour tryout. Or was the uniformity of counting together somehow important to the start of the season? This was the first ritual as a new team. There was a certain calmness in the gym as Frankie, looking like the hub of a bicycle wheel, sat encircled, the team creating radii around him. Their legs formed uneven spokes, the colorful neon socks and array of loud sneakers looking like rainbow spoke beads on a child’s bike. It was a new season. There was a sense of freshness and innocence, like a baby’s first tooth. A new team was being born.
There was a choreographed sequence of stretches: first the h
amstrings, then the quads, then the IT band stretch; it felt like a yoga studio, an ashram in the Bronx.
As the team stretched, my stomach was throwing scorching fireballs, disguised as burps, into my throat. Was I nervous? Did I drink too much coffee? I drank some water. The lukewarm water from the fountain only made the burning worse. I leaned against the red padding on the wall. It was ripped and torn and had tiny holes, as if a hungry caterpillar lived in the gym. The walls were a two-tiered system of stacks of porcelain and pumpkin-colored cement blocks. The five windows above let in the hum of the traffic on the Sheridan Expressway. Yet before I could start posting quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, the silence was broken when the gym door was yanked open.
“Yo, Frankie, get outta there. Seniors get the center of the circle!”
Xavier Rivera, along with Walfri and Shamar Carpenter one of three returning seniors, proprietarily sauntered into the gym. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans. Bespectacled, he carried his goggles in a small black case. We’d received donations over the summer, and I was able to purchase sports goggles with corrective lenses for X.
“No, X. You’re late and he’s right. Get dressed, get warmed up. Let’s go,” I stabbed back.
My voice cracked with fury. I smashed the tranquillity. As you can see, I’m more of an Enchiridion guy than a yogi. X’s lateness and arrogance destroyed the Vipassanā meditation vibe, and the devotional om mani padme hum sprinted out of the gym. The tension grew, but everyone stayed silent. I don’t recommend beginning a season by berating a senior; yet I had been transformed into a modern manticore haunting an underprepared, overconfident upperclassman because of some presumed hierarchy.
Here lies the paradox of coaching: I liked Xavier. He had played since he was a freshman. Recklessly yelling at him was like an act of vandalism. Senior year carried with it a sort of heightened status; it meant you had experience and you’d reached the pinnacle of the high school sports hierarchy. I’d just spray-painted all over Xavier’s senior year.
