Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  When you coach from the heart, there is also a relentless push for justice, for better access to opportunities, to wear better uniforms and sneakers, to find ways to get eyeglasses for guys who have trouble seeing, or an extra pair of socks, another sweatshirt, for fairness, for equality, for better self-esteem. How can I expect them to perform at their best when we have Yeltsin-era uniforms? New sneakers and uniforms are a tiny shield against the gargantuan hardships of growing up in the Bronx. If I want my guys to live healthy, productive lives later on, the years we spend together need to be transformative.

  X’s head hung low like a question mark, the weight of the embarrassment crushing him. He slowly got dressed and joined the circle. I could have said, “Namaste, Xavier, can I have your papers please, join us in the circle” or “He’s right, Frankie, seniors lead us.” But I didn’t. How could I be so uncharitable?

  Twenty-eight teenage boys hopped, squatted, and swiveled on the worn hardwood; fifty-six sneakers squeaked with delight at the start of the new season. This immense pursuit, which sometimes turns manic, starts with an ambitious image of us holding the championship trophy uncomfortably high over our heads, as we awkwardly grasp a white banner, cameras flash, and we inexplicably are never looking at the right camera at the right time. I am stuck on the pursuit of the feeling when you win. I am stuck on this dream: to hope, to pray, this is the key to winning a championship. I know it doesn’t work if the right people aren’t leading us. But if the right kids can help us, we can achieve our goal. I believe basketball can add a rung to the socioeconomic ladder. It can be a tailwind for kids who face headwinds every day. Yet I just made things really uncomfortable for a young man I have known since he was thirteen.

  * * *

  —

  Xavier Rivera came into the season as he had the previous three: burdened with expectations. I thought he could be the leader, the savvy veteran who helps the young guys with the ups and downs of the season. Xavier had always worked hard. He was a solid student. He was going to compete with Shamar and Tyree Morris for the shooting guard spot. If he didn’t start, he could be an excellent sixth man, a spark off the bench. At least Xavier had his seniority; that is, until I graffitied all over it. The hierarchy doesn’t function well if the underclassmen are better, and everyone knows it. It’s a fallacy. And of course we still had Xavier penciled in as our starting shooting guard. He had added a lot of muscle in the off-season. He had once scored 53 points in eighth grade. We hoped he could add some of his experience and strength to this relatively young team.

  “X, do you have your paperwork?” I now asked calmly.

  “Here it is,” he said, sounding wounded but respectful at the same time.

  The glass ceiling of high school sports can be cruel. Xavier’s entrance into the gym reminded me we needed to elect captains. Some years I have the team vote, and other years Gaby, Kyheem, Luis, and I will talk it over and decide. Another, more important election cast a shadow on who would be our leader on and off the court.

  With the ashram destroyed, we needed to step outside, not just for some fresh air, but also because the gym was starting to smell worse than a Bikram studio. Someone forgot to put deodorant on. New team. New smells.

  We exited the gym to Boone Avenue. For the past two decades, the area around the school has been surrounded by car-repair garages and wholesale tire stores where signs hang that simultaneously want to run diagnostics on your muffler and praise Jesus. A few years ago, construction began to bring mammoth apartment buildings to the neighborhood. For the past two years as I biked along 161st Street and Boston Post Road to work each day, I inspected the progress of the future. Adjacent to Fannie Lou, the power brokers were building a gigantic fifteen-story apartment complex. There was a set of staircases that were perfect for preseason conditioning.

  “Grab a partner about the same size as you. Put them on your shoulders and carry them up the stairs,” I ordered.

  Running up the stairs with another person on your back has nothing to do with basketball. Perhaps only Walfri, the senior forward, understood what I was doing. I wasn’t inflicting a new tool of sadistic tyranny; I genuinely believed that running up a staircase with another human on your back, your potential teammate, would mold the team. If they balked, they would never trust me, or I them. I’m in love with the idea of hope. Coaching, teaching, parenting, living: we all struggle, and we all need someone to love us. The game rarely loves us back. In tryouts I was looking for someone who had the strength to carry on, even with another human tied to his back.

  The leading candidate for captain was Walfri. He had the best grades and best post moves on the team. He was vertically challenged, but his rebounding skills were all technique. He would use his body to move people in what coaches call a box-out. He was also the best dressed. The guy with the best fashion sense was also our blue-collar, hard-hat, lunch-box guy. He was always the first one at practice and would be the first one in his family to go to college. He had a 100 percent attendance record at practice. Over the past three years, he had emerged as a quiet leader who avoided confrontations. He was the obvious choice to be captain.

  After tryouts I felt something was missing. I’ll admit, it was strange not to see the cast from last season; gone were Jorge, Tim, Shateek, Jeider, Kobe, and Travis. The three seniors, Walfri, Xavier, and Shamar, were not the best players on the team. We needed to fill new roles, and I was unsure whom to cast. The forecast was murky and uncertain if the younger guys were more talented than the upperclassmen. Could Frankie, only a sophomore and the most talented guard, lead us, along with Walfri, without alienating Shamar and Xavier?

  We were too young to win it all this year, I thought, but maybe we could win it next year. We had other roles to fill: Who was going to be the glue guy—the player who leads the team in high fives, in charges taken, and makes winning plays? The defensive stopper—the kid who sacrifices all his energy on the defensive end? We needed a hype man—the guy who was always in a good mood, regardless of playing time or the score. At the end of the bench would be the 30–30 guy—the kid who doesn’t play unless we are up 30, down 30, or with 30 seconds to play. Who would that be? I had more questions than answers.

  There’s no junior varsity or freshman team at Fannie Lou Freedom High School. Of the five hundred students, fewer than two hundred are boys. The twenty-odd boys who were trying out impressed me, but the gym was crowded. The intensity of tryouts can wilt the enthusiasm of a few, while the undeterred become managers, shot-clock operators, statisticians, and camera operators. All are a vital part of the team.

  After tryouts I was riding home and I realized that today, October 5, was the thirty-ninth anniversary to the day that President Jimmy Carter visited the Bronx. I rode up Charlotte Street. It was a sunny and windless evening. Not a lot going on at six p.m. in this pocket of middle-class single-family homes. Cars parked in their driveways. A menacing blue jay stood near a pile of leaves waiting to be carried off somewhere. In my mind there’s a suburban feel to Charlotte Street in the middle of the Bronx that is unique. It would be picturesque to say nobody was going to get cut, but that was not the case.

  * * *

  —

  The day of the second tryout, we walked over to 174th Street. In the shade it was a little chilly for October. I found a warm spot on the corner of 174th and Bryant Avenue. Part of the preseason package is to run outside when the girls’ volleyball team is using the gym. Xavier and Shamar complained of back pain. A couple of new guys tapped out and said their asthma was acting up. Without inhalers or pumps, we made them stop running. Were they simply out of breath, out of shape, asphyxiating, or telling the truth? Always better to be safe. I also knew after a few days of training like this that most kids quit.

  “Is this a gym class?” A short, middle-aged Latina with golden hair approached the corner.

  Nope. A basketball team.

  “I us
ed to live on this block. I went to school at P.S. 66.” Her sunglasses reminded me that I never wear mine. “When I was a little girl, we moved here from Puerto Rico. The slumlords used to set that building on fire all the time. Till this day, if I smell smoke I get scared.”

  These boys should be grateful it is not like this anymore. Wow. This block has really changed. Those houses weren’t there. “It was buildings like those,” she said, pointing to the five-story walk-ups, “that used to burn.”

  The guys ran up and down the hill. I moved out of the way, and she snapped a photo of the street signs and disappeared.

  Charles, Frankie, and Tyree were in the lead. The returning juniors were next: Jaquan Mack, Bryant Gillard, and Latrell Anderson ran next to Walfri. Just shortly behind them were some newcomers: Cris Reyes, Kenneth Castro, Jaelen Bennett, Bari Higinio, and Kaleb Stobbs.

  Later, a large black man in gray sweatpants with an incredibly painful gait stopped us. It looked like there was an invisible horse between his legs. He straddled the sidewalk with his grade-school daughter.

  “Your guys sure can run!”

  “Thanks. Hope to put some points on the board this year,” I said.

  “I’m sure you will. Best of luck.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  At the third tryout, there were a few new faces, but I still counted twenty-eight kids. The old moved swiftly and the new awkwardly, their bodies quickly approaching manhood, their minds burdened with the prospect of getting cut, their muscles aflame, and their lungs wheezing as they ran up and down the court. Sweat dripped from their temples like a leaky faucet. They would pause and try to catch their breath. “Keep your hands off your knees. We don’t show other teams we are tired,” Walfri demanded respectfully. “We want to see other teams grab their knees.”

  It reminded me of the scene from Star Wars when Han Solo warns C-3PO to let the Wookie win or he might lose a limb. I felt like I should have warned the freshmen: Don’t upset the Wookie. Freshmen don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose. Seniors do!

  Walfri was like our Chewbacca. He was the ultimate best friend: loyal, dependable, and bright. The exhausted newcomers stared at him respectfully. The new guys looked like broken parentheses, bent at the hip, eyes pinched, craning their necks to listen. They had just enough time to correct their posture before the next drill started.

  “Two versus six,” I called out. For ten minutes we look like a rugby team. The objective is to move the ball the length of the court against six defenders placed in pairs every fifteen feet. The offense can only pass in order to move the ball down the court. They are not allowed to dribble. This was everyone’s least favorite drill, except for Frankie. When he was on defense, the offensive player would wilt like a flower. When he was on offense, he zipped passes and cut sharply.

  I love this drill. It makes us better. It forces guys to cut sharp and correctly. The defense has a huge advantage, and it helps us make fewer turnovers. Frankie clapped his hands.

  At that moment I knew Frankie and Walfri should lead this team. Frankie had a fluent and intelligent game. He was a smart, confident young man who had acquired those invisible, indispensable skills that never show up in the box score, but that all winning coaches know when they see them. He wore black mesh shorts and last year’s red and white practice jersey. Frankie is a unicorn. While his talent is rare, his attitude may be extinct. This wasn’t some bull. He plays without an ego with only one objective: to win. Like most of the returning team, Frankie struggled to score in the playoffs last year. He had shown flashes that he was capable of scoring a lot of points, but I wasn’t sure he could sustain it the whole season. It would be a heavy burden to be a captain and a starting point guard as a sophomore, but I believed in Frankie.

  COACH C

  Tryouts were always difficult. They have to be for several reasons. I’m not making decisions weighed over time. I’m watching to see: Who can fight through cramps? Who is going to help us win? Who can stick it out? (Our whole program is a formula to help improve lives, disguised as intense basketball immersion.) Where did I learn to coach like this? From Anthony Salvatore Carnovale, or as everyone called him, Coach C, my high school basketball coach. Tryouts were always brutal. In high school I threw up during the first tryout four straight years.

  In eighth grade Coach C took me to my first Celtics game. Before my seat belt was buckled, I asked, “Is Larry going to play?”

  It was a Tuesday, a school night, in May 1989, and we were driving south on Route 93 to the Boston Garden. The muffler on his Toyota pickup truck rattled louder and louder. Larry Bird had played only six games that season because of heel surgery to remove bone spurs. In my fifteen-year-old mind, he had to play. Bird was the one reliable adult in my life. The Celtics were playing the menacing Detroit Pistons in Game Three of the NBA playoffs. Detroit had knocked the Celtics out of the playoffs the previous season, ending a streak of four straight years the Boston Celtics were in the NBA Finals. I was having a difficult time comprehending how a year ago the Celtics were the number-one seed in the East, but now they were the eighth. Why wasn’t Bird playing? His ankle had to be better by now. Detroit had won the first two games easily. And tonight, Game Three, at a time when the first round of the playoffs was the best of five, I expected Larry Bird to do what he had always done: rescue the Celtics against the Bad Boys of Detroit. Two years earlier, Bird had stolen the ball late in Game Five against Detroit, in one of the most incredible plays in basketball history, and I wanted him to do it tonight again.

  “Probably not,” said Coach Carnovale.

  With Bird unable to play, I realized the Pistons had started digging the grave for the Celtics a year ago in 1988. I wasn’t going to my first Celtics game—I was going to their funeral. It was over. Danny Ainge had been traded earlier that season, breaking up one of the best starting fives in basketball history.

  Nineteen eighty-nine was a pivotal year: I was headed to high school, my favorite basketball team was falling apart, before the year was finished the Berlin Wall would be destroyed, and I would be living with a different family. The winds of change were definitely blowing.

  * * *

  —

  “How’s school going? How’s your mom doing? How’s your brother and sister?” Coach C asked.

  Those were the first three questions he would pepper me with every time I saw him. He had called me a few days earlier, asking me if I wanted to go to the game. I don’t think he knew that I had never seen the Celtics play. I’m sure he knew I led my Boys Club team to a championship in March. In retrospect, this may have seemed like some sort of recruiting violation; high school coach takes promising eighth-grade prospect to a Celtics playoff game. It wasn’t. I had attended Coach C’s basketball camp since I was seven. He also knew I played at the Boys Club because I was ineligible to play for my middle school team. Nominally, the Boys Club team competed against other Boys and Girls Clubs around New Hampshire. But it was really a team of flunkies like me, or kids who got cut from the middle school team. I wasn’t in school much that year. At one point, I added up my in-school and out-of-school suspension days and it was easily over seventy days. Now there were a few weeks left in eighth grade, and in the fall I would be headed to the high school where this guy coached.

  Here was a coach who saw a kid at risk. He also knew what basketball meant to a kid who didn’t have a lot. Coach C was born in Italy in 1946, a year after the war, and moved to the United States in 1955. I never realized what that really meant until one day, in my early twenties, I had just sat through a double feature at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves made me think about Anthony Salvatore Carnovale as a toddler in postwar Italy. I don’t think he had a lot either, but he knew the power of sports. He taught us about loyalty and standards. We w
ould joke after three-hour practices that he must have inherited his policy of cruelty from Il Duce. He referred to me as a “prima donna.” He was a shrewd tactician. He outworked other coaches. He had a scouting report on officials. He knew which refs he could torture and which ones to leave alone. He called Taco Bell “Taco King.” He loved the positive side of sports, and the negative side ate him up. He thought the bar should be raised within the coaching profession. He felt like there were some very bad people who were also poor coaches and had too much influence on the game. He was right. I was a prima donna.

  “Larry Bird is out indefinitely,” he added.

  The words hung in the air. The phrase reminded me how in the movies an alien spaceship always hovers close to earth, but never lands. Because it was indefinite, it might land tonight, or tomorrow. It could not mean never again.

  Coach C’s wave of success was a few years behind the Celtics. His team had won a state championship in 1988 but failed to repeat in the championship game in 1989. My freshman year, 1990, I would be on the bench for his second championship. I didn’t play a second, but I was there and that was enough. I was hooked on winning. My own basketball career would be set on one thing and one thing only: winning a state championship. After two years of disappointment, finally, my senior year, we made it back to the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gym for the state championship game. The gym, as most gyms are in March, was filled to capacity, with almost three thousand people in attendance. We were expected to win the state championship that year. Four out of the five starters—Gregg Brander, Jeremy Thissell, Michael Catizone, and I—had been playing together on the playground since third grade. We were up three, 14–11, at halftime. We were napalmed in the second half and lost 61–41. The thought of that loss still hurts.