Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  The third quarter proved to be a little better for us. However, Tyree and Shamar were now taking turns throwing the ball into the stands. “What are you doing?” an incredulous voice from the crowd asked. I was uncharacteristically taciturn. Usually, at this point I would have broken a clipboard, but since I had already picked up a technical foul in the first quarter I remained seated and calm. Thinking of Frankie with a broken foot, I felt dazed and nauseated.

  * * *

  —

  A Walfri three-pointer cut the lead to 34–31 with under four minutes to play in the third quarter. Morrisania’s 1–2–2 half-court zone was still giving us problems. On the next play they executed a textbook pick-and-roll.

  “If they keep doing this, we are in trouble,” I said to Gaby.

  We were running out of answers. A lively chant of “Panthers, Panthers, Panthers” arose from the otherwise-sober crowd. “Run Special for Shamar,” a baseline out-of-bounds play where Shamar splashed a three-pointer, put us up 43–35. Shamar now had more points in his first four games than he had all last season. This was his second 20-point game this season. The momentum wasn’t enough. The pendulum swung back with a few miscues, and we were up only three, 43–40, at the end of the third.

  To start the fourth quarter, the Morrisania point guard swished a three-pointer to tie the game. Shamar deftly, and now more confidently, drove the lane and found Walfri for a layup. The intensity of the game increased.

  “Get that shit out of here!” Charles yelled after a block.

  Technical fouls, even though blown on the same black whistle, always sound a little different than regular ones. Harsh. Authoritarian.

  Shamar peeled the ball away for another steal and layup. He reminded me tonight of Dennis Johnson, the great Celtics point guard who could pilfer the ball from an opponent almost at will. Walfri and Shamar ran a pick-and-pop that unfolded in slow motion. Shamar used the screen to pass to Walfri, who then was blitzed by two defenders. Charles knowingly flashed to the free-throw line, caught Walfri’s pass, pivoted, and found Shamar open on the other side for a three-pointer. Up seven: 50–43. We were playing team basketball.

  Tyree forced a Morrisania player left, and the ball squirted and squiggled and eventually strolled alone toward our basket. Tyree dove for the ball, but it eluded him like a squid on ice. He bounced off the ball onto his back. Charles scooped up the slick, sweaty ball at half-court and with two lightning-fast dribbles skywalked toward the rim. His sneakers were now at his defender’s chin.

  “Bang!” The sweet sound of a dunk in the fourth quarter.

  Charles turned, stone-faced, always unimpressed with himself, and got back on defense.

  This dunk put the crowd into a frenzy. Kenneth, Kaleb, Bryant, and Cris, the remaining members on the bench, did what all great teams do: they cheered for their mates on the floor. Remember, the bench becomes the window into a team’s soul.

  Dunks late in the game have a sort of finality to them—they can evaporate any hope the other team has of winning. It was 54–46 with two and a half minutes remaining. After another Morrisania time-out, I heard the slam of a clipboard on the ground. Clang—the sound of a missed opportunity. Then play resumed and the whistle blew. “Foul on number thirty-four.” Walfri.

  “That’s his fifth,” Gaby said.

  Walfri was disqualified. A dejected Walfri walked slowly to the end of the bench, where Frankie had sat earlier, and buried himself in towels. Those towels were rewards for hard work; not unlike in the Stakhanovite movement, coaches love rewarding kids with material objects in the hope that it will create even more hard work. Still, I hate to see the sulk on the bench. I know that inimical sulking on the bench destroys team spirit. It’s a wet blanket even on the forty-point win, but in a close game it can be fatal. The pubescent kick of the folding chair is timeless; it’s the product of the competitive emotion that drives us to be disappointed most of the time in our own performance.

  With Walfri upset and Frankie on his way to the hospital, winning a championship was the furthest thing from my mind. We were having trouble just beating Morrisania. The game wasn’t even over yet, but our season might be. A disgruntled, underperforming senior, Walfri ended the game with 5 points. He had only 2 points against Annex last week. He was not happy. The magnificent victory over Clinton had vanished. Now everyone was rudderless. Against Hyde, it was scorched-earth basketball. No apologies. But not tonight. Not this team. The tide of the young season was pushing us out to sea.

  Walfri was in complete sulk mode on the bench. He could have been cheering for his teammates on the floor, but he chose to sit there like a defeated boxer. With under a minute remaining, Charles took the ball out of bounds (something Walfri usually did for us), and he and Bryant, the center and the forward, passed it back and forth until a Morrisania player caught on to their little game and tipped it loose. A couple of collisions occurred, and the somnolent referee ran over to inspect the damage. Three or four players now tugged for the right to hold the ball, like teenage ladybugs on their backs, rocking the ball back and forth. The whistle sound interrupted the joust between Bryant and a Knight. Foul on Morrisania.

  The biggest Knight on the court slapped the floor with his right palm, disagreeing with the call. Again the familiar sound of the whistle. This time the technical was on Morrisania.

  Amid the confusion, Tyree walked up to the free-throw stripe. The septuagenarian refs were unable to agree on who got fouled, so Tyree shot the four free throws to push the lead back up to seven. Ball game.

  WERNER HERZOG GETS ME THROUGH

  We won without Frankie that night the way restaurants can stay open even if the executive chef is sick. But what kind of restaurant are we going to run without the top chef the rest of this season? Before our pursuit of the championship could even get under way, we’d lost our captain, our point guard, the oracle.

  During a basketball season there are always plenty of headwinds: suspensions, injuries, unhappy players. Frankie’s injury, a small fracture in his right foot, was a tornado. He was going to be out for the rest of the season. Something similar happened to us in 2014 when our leading scorer, Kenny Bonaparte, tore his ACL. That year I had five seniors who could handle the loss of Kenny, statistically and mentally. Sports are great, but injuries suck. Losing Kenny was the biggest blow I had experienced as a coach, up until now. Surely this year’s team, much younger, would be severely hobbled without Frankie.

  I turned to an unlikely source for comfort: the German film auteur Werner Herzog. Herzog had made Fitzcarraldo in 1982. The movie is not one of his best, I think, but the documentary of the making of Fitzcarraldo has become one of my favorites. Burden of Dreams captures what happens when a man with a camera and an idea attempts to make a movie in the middle of the Amazon. Mick Jagger, set to play the title character’s assistant, quits. It’s a lesson on what do you do when your big star bails halfway through the movie. Herzog has said that the Fitzcarraldo story represents “the victory of the weightlessness of dreams over the heaviness of reality.” There are some real questions: Why doesn’t Herzog just quit filming when he realizes the actors are getting sick, or when a small war between indigenous tribes breaks out? At one point Herzog admits the jungle is winning, but in the end he makes the movie. Herzog inspires me. If he could make that movie, I can coach under any conditions. Herzog said, “The real achievement of the film is that I finished it—that I would not stop, that I would not be scared away.”

  How the hell am I and these kids going to haul this boat over an isthmus in December? Faith. Conviction. Confidence. Hope. I kept repeating these words like a liturgical chant. Herzog said he would have climbed down to hell and wrestled the film out of the claws of the devil. My bags were packed and I was ready to do anything to win this title, except my team just lost its ladder, the zipper of my bag was broken, and I couldn’t find my MetroCard.

  GAME THE
ORY

  On a windswept Friday night in December 2006, Jamaal Lampkin, a freshman forward, my wife, Jessica, and I were crowded together in the emergency room at Lincoln Hospital. Green and silver garlands hung over the doorways. “Feliz Navidad” could be heard from a radio somewhere. Christmas was fast approaching, but nothing could raise our dampened spirits. Jamaal, still in his home uniform, lay on a stretcher. A white sheet covered his legs. We’d just witnessed our team get trounced by eighty points. We really couldn’t talk about anything. It was well past dinner. I offered Jamaal a Snickers bar from the vending machine to break the silence.

  “Yo, Coach, are you trying to kill me?”

  Somehow it had slipped my mind that Jamaal was allergic to peanuts. I meant no harm. He was already in rough shape. Sometime in the second quarter, Jamaal had jumped for a ball and come down on someone’s foot, rolling his ankle. A painful but common basketball injury. Jamaal couldn’t get up. He had trouble putting weight on his foot. Tarif Brown, a senior forward, and I carried Jamaal off the court toward the bench.

  “Are you good, kid?” Tarif asked.

  “I want to go back in, Coach,” Jamaal requested.

  Filled with teenage bravado but still in a lot of pain, Jamaal kept asking me to go back in, fighting back the tide of despair that was approaching. Noah Adler, an Oregonian and my trusty assistant coach at the time, ran to the nurse’s office and grabbed a few ice packs. Jamaal sat at the end of the bench. Was he grimacing from the coldness of the ice pack or from ankle pain or from the agony emanating from the scoreboard? I was unsure. Nonetheless, he still tried to cheer for his beleaguered teammates.

  * * *

  —

  No amount of cheering or goodwill could have stopped the carnage. As the score ballooned, the impropriety on the bench was unleashed. The guys on my bench removed their shoes while the game was in progress, signaling that they, like Jamaal, were also done for the night. Our opponents continued to apply a full-court press with their starting five until the final buzzer. What did we do to deserve that kind of beating? It was the ultimate comeuppance for a rookie coach who had won his first game two nights ago. Both teams had thrown out the rules that should govern blowout basketball. Was I coaching from a different era? This was definitely not New Hampshire high school hoops. Did I have a sepia-toned vision of basketball propriety and gamesmanship? Our opponent had all the height and athleticism that we didn’t have, but did they have to win by eighty points?

  Even in my embryonic stage of coaching I felt bench behavior was not just inextricably linked to winning, but also to a higher ideal of class and professionalism. I told myself that I had a lot left to learn. If I could teach myself Russian in Moldova, I could teach myself to coach basketball in New York City. Nonetheless, I was brand-new to coaching. We were all new to this. We had a lot of work to do, both on the court and off. At that moment we needed to get Jamaal to a hospital.

  After the game I called his mom and we agreed to meet at the hospital. Here I was, a rookie coach, and I couldn’t have dreamed of a worse beginning. Tonight was my home coaching debut, and not only did we lose by almost triple digits, but a promising freshman needed to be rescued by an ambulance. My head was spinning. I probably would have offered Jamaal strychnine if it was available in the vending machine.

  When I took the job, I never imagined there would be nights like this. I thought coaching high school basketball would be easy. I wasn’t prepared to cultivate leadership, to have players be mindful and most importantly enjoy playing the game we both loved. I had no experience managing egos, assessing injuries, building mind-sets where we don’t quit if things aren’t going well. I couldn’t lead them to a path of self-discovery when I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. I didn’t understand it was all about the relationships I would someday form. I was overwhelmed. In fact, I was like the Grinch: my heart was “two sizes too small” to coach.

  Two days earlier, I was a coaching genius who had taken a winless team and won the first game I ever coached. As I left the court and headed toward the locker room, I had paused. I could hear the guys celebrating. Suddenly, I felt tears choking me. Something new and pleasurable had stirred in me. Why was I crying? Was it hope for the future of the team? Pride? I did something. They did something. We did it together. We conquered some limitations that the universe had put on us. Sure, it was only a win, but it felt a lot more important.

  “I like this winning thing. Let’s try it again on Friday,” I had yelled.

  Two nights later we were overwhelmed. I was clearly not prepared for what happened. I let my team get eaten by wolves. An impious coach just kept running up the score. The loss paralyzed our self-esteem. What happened that night was something that would never happen again. I was never going to get beat by eighty points again.

  Sorrow, I discovered, doesn’t let go of you after a loss. It sticks around like arthritis. When I found out Jamaal had broken his ankle, sorrow returned. Before his high school basketball career could even set sail, he was crippled with a serious leg injury. Jamaal wanted someday to play professional basketball. Now he thought his career was over before it even began. Injured chasing a dream; an Ahabian injury.

  “Do you think I’ll ever play again, Coach?” Jamaal asked.

  “You will,” I said.

  There is a fundamental doubleness to the game: joy and pain. Jamaal and I were not able to take in these contradictions; the injuries and the losses were not what we wanted. To see the game in its entirety is what all coaches and players must learn to do. A rookie coach and a freshman were not ready to see that totality of the game.

  I thought I knew just what to do after the loss: I made the next couple of practices unbearable. In fact, after every loss that season we ran and ran until they couldn’t run anymore. They needed more discipline, I thought. Punishment for losing would make us a better team. I was uncompromising my first season. I wouldn’t wash their practice uniforms until we won.

  * * *

  —

  There are many paths to becoming a coach. In my fourth year of teaching at Fannie Lou, the fall of 2006, the former coach had stepped down and I became the head coach. I was a onetime bike messenger, a failed lab tech, a former Peace Corps volunteer who was looking to move abroad again. I had no business coaching a high school basketball team in New York City. I didn’t want to invent myself again. I had left the sporting life behind me. It had served its purpose. I hung up the varsity jacket in 1993 after high school. Now, thirteen years later, I was back on the bench wearing a shirt and tie. Life is strange. Coaching was something I had never thought about before. Nor was it something I thought I would be doing for a long time. I was wrong.

  After months of anticipation, we opened up the season in October 2006. I was struck by what the guys couldn’t do on the court and ignored what they could do. Knowingly, they shot and dribbled with their palms. The game of basketball is performed on the fingertips for maximum control of the ball. Their footwork, essential in a game where once you stop dribbling your only move is to pretend one leg is glued to the floor and the other leg is free, was careless. I was a twenty-nine-year-old whose only qualification for coaching was that I played high school basketball in suburban New Hampshire.

  Our first season, as you can imagine, was difficult. I inherited a winless team, clearly the worst team in New York City, where expectations were about as low as possible. But we would go on to win thirteen games and even make the playoffs. I still question my performance that year. Did I push my players too hard? Was I too demanding? Maybe. But later in the season, when we played the same opponent who had beat us by eighty, we lost by only nine! We won eighteen games my second year. The simple fact is that in my eleven years of coaching, we have never lost by eighty points again or anywhere close to it. You can’t quibble with the results. We were winning.

  * * *

  —

  A
fter all these years, I still ask myself why I started coaching. Why would anyone get involved in it? At first you and your players will be stuck in the mire of overwhelmingness: overwhelming speed of the game. Overwhelming size of your opponent. Overwhelming attention to detail. Overwhelming number of offensive plays. Overwhelming number of hours committed to basketball. Overwhelming number of hours looking at film. Overwhelming number of days lifting weights, dribbling, shooting, hollering, pleading. Your players will be overwhelmed by the attention of girls, the media, the teachers, and eventually the attention becomes too much.

  That night in December 2006, I was overwhelmed as I absentmindedly tried to hand the Snickers bar to Jamaal in the emergency room. I knew I had to prepare my team better. I grew into manhood with my first team. I squeezed every idea I could into the experience. At the end of the season I was sapped, hamstrung, saddled with an undisciplined style of basketball and a lovable team who were starved for positive attention. They returned the next year with renewed devotion, and that team would win a playoff game. I felt like we were building something special.

  Four years later, Tarif Brown, the senior on the 2006 team, came back from college to visit me. We spoke about college, life outside the Bronx, what it felt like to come back.

  “You know, Coach,” Tarif said, “I would have never graduated high school without basketball.”

  Speaking with Tarif made me realize that coaching was a longitudinal enterprise.

  Fortuitously, Tarif and I bumped into Jamaal in the hallway. He was now a senior, his ankle fully healed. He had had a fantastic basketball career, becoming Fannie Lou’s first 1,000-point scorer. In his senior year we were 25-5; we’d come a long way. But toward the end of his senior year, Jamaal was still unsure what to do after high school. I left Tarif to talk to Jamaal, give him some advice. It was then that I felt like the Grinch again. You know the part, near the end of the story—where his heart grows three sizes bigger. I felt my heart grow warm. When I started coaching, I never imagined there would be days like this.