Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  I started following basketball in 1983, the year Bird scored 53 points in a single game, and now in 1993, our careers, mine and Bird’s, were done. It was a marvelous decade: the eighties and a couple of years into the nineties were about winning and losing championships, and also a time to think about what happens after basketball. A seed was planted when Boston was swept from the playoffs that May night in 1989, and it grew in tandem with my basketball dreams. What arrived after the state championship loss was reality or life after basketball. The spaceship landed.

  The game in March 1993 would be my last. Occasionally I look at photographs of the game. There was a VHS tape floating around years ago, but I don’t know where it went. I would never watch the second half anyway. After the game, I remember the West High School coach coming up to me and saying, “You’re one tough son-of-a-bitch. I would want you on my team any day.” I felt more embarrassed than complimented. My coup de grâce had come against them a year earlier when we lost to West by a bucket. I blessed the opposing fans, team, and coaching staff with a double middle-finger salute. I wanted to tell him off again, but I was too heartbroken. We all were. What we didn’t know at the time was that would be Coach Carnovale’s last championship game. The game of basketball is a mysterious force, its future as cloudy as a crystal ball in a muddy field. I grew up dribbling on gravel, where the ball behaves unpredictably. I should have known better than to try to harness the game.

  The other four starters on the team, Gregg, Jeremy, Michael, and Chris Hunt, would go on to play college basketball. Off the bench, Mike Jean would also go on to play at the next level, graduate from Saint Anselm College with a degree in history, and move to San Diego. Chip Allen would get a degree in graphic design. John Drelick went to Hofstra University with a degree in finance and is now a public accountant. Chris Hunt is now a principal at a middle school in New Hampshire. Gregg Brander has a degree in mathematics. Jeremy Thissell is a lawyer in Maryland. Some of the other guys I have lost touch with. The majority of us went to college, graduated, and are now entering middle age with children of our own. Over those four years in high school, a few of us on the team didn’t have fathers. But most of the guys on the team had great parents, and those parents always helped me out: rides to the games and rides home, meals, a place to stay, encouraging words after a tough loss, advice on how to improve my game.

  Objectively, Coach C had an extra ticket and he thought of me. I know it wasn’t his intention that I would begin examining basketball existentially that night in May 1989. With Bird sitting there having to watch the team that kicked his ass more than any other team—Bill Laimbeer’s strangleholds, Dennis Rodman’s hip checks—I wondered what he was thinking. Bird would endure more injuries for a couple more years and finally retire in 1992. I felt edified by Bird’s bone spurs. Bird was not going to play forever, and neither was I. What would I do when I stopped playing basketball? It was a question I never wanted to answer. The answer was bleak. Basketball was pointless; in the end it breaks you, and worse, you might have to wear a protective boot.

  Larry sat there in street clothes with a protective boot on. I sat there underwhelmed. Here I was at my first Celtics game, high in the hallowed Garden seats, and I was bored. I didn’t pay much attention to the game. The Pistons manhandled the Celtics that night. Detroit would go on to win the NBA championship that year and the following year.

  When people asked me if I played college ball, I would hesitate and then want to say, “I could have, but…” But then I would sound like that guy. I could have continued playing in college, but I saw it as postponing the inevitable more than continuing something that I loved. So we broke up. It was an imperfect split. I probably broke up with her too early. I didn’t want to be part of that couple that doesn’t know how to finish the relationship, and so continues it long after its death. We left each other after I graduated from high school. I moved to Boston and college, she stayed in New Hampshire. Like most high school relationships, we left things open just in case. I was unable to stop loving her. It didn’t end the way I had imagined. In 1993, I was supposed to be named New Hampshire’s Mr. Basketball. I was also supposed to win a state championship my senior year. I was supposed to play college basketball. Basketball had meant so much—it had kept me in school, it forced me to be a better student—but I needed to pivot away. I needed to break the jock shell that basketball had encased me in.

  I blame John Updike for scaring the poop out of me. One day in the library, I picked up a book. Truthfully, I was attracted to it only because it had a basketball on the cover. Rabbit, Run.

  It was the line “If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price” that turned my world upside down. If the passion of basketball transcends time, then one moment of pain could cancel an eternity of happiness. That last game hurt. I had worked hard over the four years to be the best player in New Hampshire. It didn’t happen. Everyone knows high school love stories do not last long. (Except teenagers.) Logic and reason are useless against love. Who has the ability to extinguish the fire of a hoop dream? John Updike does, that’s who.

  Of course, I still love basketball. Yet it made me very unsophisticated; it prevented me from discovering the larger world we live in. Too much time was spent perfecting an imperfect jump shot. When you play too much basketball, you live in an underworld, a circle constructed of social and racial stratifications, political realities, and economic circumstances. It is inhabited by insipid journalists, sebaceous recruiters, corrupt officials, selfish players, diabolical agents, pedestrian parents, nefarious administrators, blind referees, vacuous fans, and washed-up former players. Maybe it’s basketball’s fatal charm that allures us like a mouse to a mousetrap. The desire to improve your handle or left hand engenders hunger for more cheese, and in the end we all get snared. Traveling through basketball’s sphere of influence illuminates its tragedies, but unfortunately those cautionary tales do nothing to pry us from its sweet embrace. As soon as I was finished playing high school basketball, I became deeply concerned I would turn into another Rabbit Angstrom: cursed to be defined by my limited basketball prowess and to live the rest of my life selling vegetable peelers and bragging about what I accomplished on the hardwood when I was eighteen. I fought against that sealed fate and gave up the game. Now I’ve come full circle, and because of Coach C I’m back coaching the game I ran away from.

  * * *

  —

  In 1998, after graduating from college, I traveled around Europe alone. Coach C had retired and was living in Geneva with his girlfriend. We were both starting something new. In 2003, when I started teaching, he sent me lesson plan outlines. In 2006, when I started coaching, Coach C sent me packages stuffed with hundreds of drills. In 2009, when my daughter Nina was born, he called to invite us to his house in Florida. Years after I had stopped playing, he was still in my life.

  On March 27, 2014, I took my family to my high school alumni game. Coach C was there, and before him was his basketball diaspora. There were more than fifty of his former players. Teams were divided up by year of graduation: odd years to the left, even years to the right. It was a little confusing at first because both teams wore red T-shirts that read “Coach C’s Alumni Game.” Some of us ran, some of us trotted, a few walked up and down the court. We all had one eye on the ball and the other on the man who enhanced our adolescence and altered our lives.

  Coach C transformed a lot of lives in southern New Hampshire, and no exhibition game, no eulogy, can begin to explain what he did. I went to the bench exhausted. My eyes were fixed on a kid in his twenties. He was faster and quicker than anyone else on the court, but I realized we all kind of played the same. It was as if we had Coach C in our basketball DNA. We had absorbed his fundamentals into our genes. We all had the same defensive stance, our follow-throughs looked eerily similar, we threw bounce passes that were mirror images of each other.

  We had changed. A f
ew of us were bald, many were gray, others I simply didn’t recognize. I heard names that meant something once upon a time. It was one of those moments in basketball that transcend mere sport. We were there to play in front of Coach one last time as cancer ate at him. He sat, wheelchair bound, with a Red Sox jacket and a black-striped heather scarf wrapped around him. He would die only a few short weeks later. In some grand way, it was better than a funeral. He was alive. We joked, smiled, and cried at the same time. He patted Nina on her head and said, “You look like your dad.” Laughing, with tears in our eyes, we wished he would yell at us and make us run suicides until we puked. We would have. His world was disappearing and ours was expanding. The bleachers were filled with our wives and kids watching their dads play.

  I spoke to his longtime girlfriend, Ludmilla. The sight of her wheeling a man she had had a relationship with for almost two decades was painful. She stood there in deep sadness with her exhausted beauty. In Russian she said to me, “This has been so difficult for me.” The last time I had seen the two of them was in Geneva in 1998. We spoke occasionally. We didn’t speak enough.

  Coach C was a teacher, a basketball coach, the father of two daughters. He loved Russian history and literature, and he was an author. I wondered if he knew how much we had in common. I wanted him to know this prima donna had become a primo uomo. I am now the man he hoped I would become when he brought me to the Celtics game when I was fifteen. I had created my own championship teams in New York City. I borrowed his effective full-court press and allegiance to team basketball. (I left behind some of the torture techniques and name-calling.) I am raising my daughters to be altruistic and urbane because of him. I think of him often. Coach C died, but he did what all great coaches are supposed to do: make sure his legacy lives inside his players.

  THE BRONX

  Derry, New Hampshire, is about 225 miles from the Bronx. You can say they are worlds apart, yet the game remains the same: five on five, four eight-minute quarters, ten-foot hoops, same rules. In gyms across New York City, similar tryouts like ours were unfolding, and you would never know that the Bronx is where one-quarter of the adults are obese, 10 percent have diabetes, and the rates of mental illness hospitalization and asthma deaths are some of the highest in the nation.

  The Bronx is surrounded by and separated from its wealthy neighbors in Riverdale, Westchester County, and Manhattan. We are within the jurisdiction of the 42nd Police Precinct; to the south, the 40th Police Precinct, where a lot of our students live, has the second-highest homicide rate in New York City. Basketball is a sanctuary that allows us to forget about the issues outside. It’s a lot more fun to think about how to beat a full-court press than it is to think about getting mugged going home from tryouts. This is the reality of living in the Bronx.

  When was this Maginot Line formed? It is quite easy to diagnose when the Bronx started to change. It was in 1946, when Robert Moses proposed to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, a seven-mile highway that scythed a borough in half and screwed up the Bronx like no other urban planner could. This is well-known history, yet almost seventy years after Moses reshaped the Bronx, it still suffers colossally. Thanks in part to Moses’s myopic vision and the institutional racism it engendered, the borough has long suffered from poverty, crime, and ill health, though in recent years there have been numerous efforts to correct this injustice.

  The Bronx has the vastness of the Grand Concourse. On one corner I can see the hordes of abuelas, with their rickety shopping carts waiting in line in front of churches or food pantries. I see an abuelo still hurting after last night’s loss at dominoes. The eye-catching belt buckles suggest the inverse of John Kenneth Galbraith’s idea of public wealth and private squalor. I spot guys in their twenties smoking marijuana way too early in the day. Vacant synagogues of an ancient Bronx stand next to storefront masjids, projecting a new future.

  I am a basketball junkie. There have been many times when I promised I would quit, but I can’t. That probably doesn’t mean anything to most people, but it means a lot to the young men I coach. I have committed the rules to heart, love the history, can diagram the swing offense, the Princeton offense, the flex, Frank Morris’s numbered fast break, and dozens of out-of-bounds plays. Basketball may be just a game to some, a meaningless sport, a waste of time, a dream unfulfilled, but it keeps New Yorkers occupied year-round. There are thousands of basketball courts in New York City. There is no city in the world that has more rims without nets and basketball dreams than New York City.

  It’s not difficult to understand how important basketball is in New York City. Its character is not determined by the status of the Knicks or the Nets, who play an ersatz version of basketball. It is painful to watch a lone man endlessly dribbling the ball until the shot clock dwindles, and then launch an impossible shot. This happens a lot. Once a Mecca, the city is now Constantinople, the sick man of basketball cities. This is our nightmare.

  My basketball sanctuary exists in that tiny gym in the Bronx. When I first started coaching, I wanted to know how I could be the best. It was a simple question. The game within the game is not about competition so much as it is how you can make your teammates better. Better cuts lead to better passing, more passing leads to more scoring, more scoring leads to more wins, more wins lead to better friendships. This is a longitudinal project. I believe I can text, email, or call anybody I played with in high school because we won together. I am not sure I could do that if we hadn’t won more than we lost. That’s why I love team ball and have no patience for anything else.

  Each season we try to be the paragon of playing basketball the right way. You get to see multiple guys scoring in double digits; that and a few other elements are central to our success. Years ago, I researched the past PSAL champions and discovered the majority of those teams had four guys in double digits. You also need a team that cuts hard to the basket and passes the ball on time and on target. Another overlooked part of any team is the bench. The bench claps and cheers the whole game. The bench is a window into a team’s soul. Kenneth, Bryant, Mack, Cris, and Kaleb do not stop clapping for their teammates, and when Frankie, Charles, Jaelen, Tyree, Shamar, and Walfri are on the bench they return the favor. We take good shots. We reverse the ball and find open teammates on kick-outs flawlessly. We get back on defense on every possession. In this city, in our time, the pro game and college game take a backseat to the high school games and players.

  FIRST YEAR: 2003

  When I began teaching at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in 2003, I was a flaneur. I didn’t understand what was needed to help the young people I taught. My path was purely functional at first; I needed a job. But what started as a job while I was in graduate school transformed into a personal journey. Coaching became my compass.

  One thing is clear to me now: get to know your students as best as you can. That wasn’t always the case. On my very first day of teaching, I announced I was going to give a test.

  “Mister, I don’t take tests,” a young girl told me.

  Now wait a minute. In grad school we were taught we needed to test children to know what they know. Tests were like taking vital signs. We needed to know the baseline. Well, what if the test actually doesn’t show you what the kid knows? Nobody had told me there are other ways for kids to show you what they know and how they think. My time in the Bronx has shown me over and over again that children learn from each other. Once a child trusts you, you can teach them anything from computer science to Russian literature. Teaching in the Bronx has become my Yale and my Harvard. Teachers need to be comedians, intellectuals, waiters, despots, psychologists, coaches in the classroom. We need to be empathetic and academically demanding. How does one motivate the unmotivated? How do we provide a challenging curriculum yet be careful not to crush the struggling students and to create independence in the classroom? As I was told by Nancy Mann, the former principal of Fannie Lou, “A teacher’s persistence must outlast a student
’s resistance.” You never give up.

  One of my first assignments as a high school teacher was to see where it all starts. Nancy sent me to observe a kindergarten class at Central Park East 1 Elementary School in Harlem. It altered me in ways I have trouble explaining. Watching five-year-olds work independently and cooperatively, I saw my ideal classroom. It would soon become my ideal basketball practice and later would affect the way I parent. Kids learn a lot from each other. To be honest, I’m horrible at collaborating, but I wanted my classroom to look like this, I wanted my team to look like this. I wanted my family someday to look like this classroom. I want society to work like this.

  THE TROJAN HORSE THEORY OF BASKETBALL

  As a coach, I have had some success on the hardwood, having won 199 games in eleven seasons, but my most important statistic comes in the classroom. In a city where the average graduation rate for black and Latino males is somewhere around 50 percent, 100 percent of my players have graduated, with 100 percent college placement. What’s the secret to our success on and off the court?

  It’s simple. It’s called trust.

  In coaching it is said over and over again that the players don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. There is only one way to get trust, and that is by spending time with someone. We all know time is the ultimate limited resource. The calculus goes something like this: time plus trust equals love.

  When I see Luis Kulan walking across the street, it makes me happy. I hadn’t seen Luis in a few years. He was a reserve on the 2013 championship team. Right away he tells me, “I still talk to Mike, Corey, and Jimeek all the time,” naming former players on the team. “I told my mom my son is going to come here. He’s in second grade now.”