Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  Jamaal Lampkin, even with a scar the size of a large hermit crab on his ankle, readily admits basketball saved his life. Tarif Brown lived with his brother his senior year and says that if it wasn’t for the team, he might not have graduated and gone to college. In 2017, Tarif was training to become a principal and Jamaal is an IT specialist for Barclays. Winning is its own sweet reward, but Tarif and Jamaal showed me that the rewards they reaped later in their lives are tremendous and incalculable and reach far beyond basketball.

  PRINCE DON’T MISS

  Werner Herzog was able to finish his film because of a close friend, the actor Klaus Kinski, who played the role of Fitzcarraldo when Mick Jagger bailed. (Even though Kinski did threaten to kill him.) Charles was my Klaus Kinski. He had the leading role in our 2016–17 film. But I was worried about Charles. He said he felt betrayed by Latrell. They were best friends. They attended the same middle school, decided to come to the same high school together, and now their bond was breaking over a girl or lies or an injury. Charles had had enough heartbreak.

  Once, after practice, he shared a story with me: One day, just like any other morning, Charles woke up to the sound of oil popping in the pan. He could smell fried eggs. There would be hardo bread with butter, okra, and some fried sole from last night’s dinner on the table. There also would be sugarless tea that Charles wanted to add sweetener to.

  “Prince, you have a game today?” Gramma asked.

  “Mmmmm.” Charles shook his head yes with a mouthful of food.

  “I don’t know what that means, but use words when you talk to me.”

  “Yes, Gramma.” Charles laughed, knowing that was going to be her response.

  He quickly ate his breakfast; even at ten, he wanted to be on time. First he needed to call his teammate, his best friend, one of those best friends who when you’re ten feel like your brother.

  “Prince going now?” Gramma asked.

  “Yes,” Charles responded.

  “I know you’re good and there are more shots you’ll have to take in life, not only basketball,” Gramma advised.

  “Yes, Gramma, I know,” Charles said. Charles was almost out the door when he heard her say, “Prince don’t miss.”

  On the way to his best friend’s, also named Prince, Charles spotted the neighborhood kids who were always getting in trouble.

  “They were always messing with the neighbor, this middle-aged white guy,” Charles told me.

  That day the neighborhood kids were throwing rocks onto the white guy’s porch.

  Charles didn’t want to do delinquent stuff with those kids. He also didn’t feel like getting a beating from his grandmother.

  * * *

  —

  Prince was five-eleven and Charles was five-nine; at eleven and ten, respectively, they were quite tall for their age. After the basketball game, they went back to Prince’s parents’ house. They couldn’t sleep. They had permission to stay out in the yard.

  They saw that “the boys who do dumb stuff” were outside also. “Hey, come with us?” they said. “You two soft?”

  Charles and Prince knew it was way too late and that if they left the yard, there would be consequences. They watched as the boys ran onto the white guy’s yard and started to throw rocks. One rock shattered a window. The white guy ran out of the house and started chasing them. They scattered. Charles and Prince were laughing until four of the boys ran toward them. The man stopped running, pulled a gun, and fired.

  “All I heard was Boom, boom, boom!!” Charles said. The sound ripped open the silence of the night.

  “The whole block was silent, nothing but the stench of the devil and a smoking gun were left,” Charles said.

  Charles and Prince froze with fear.

  Boom. The gun fired again.

  “I saw an angel get his wings clipped that day,” Charles recalled Prince had said.

  Boom. Another shot. This one hit Charles.

  Charles remembered lights and commotion. He was put into an ambulance, where he fell asleep. His friend Prince died on the way to the hospital.

  Charles wrote about this incident for an English class assignment:

  I woke up from the worst nightmare. Nothing but dizzy headaches and a numb pain along the right side of my body. I take my shots for Prince, the ghost that haunts me to do better and he’s my giant that I stand on. I took the time to become a good student. I put more time into becoming a great basketball player. I’ve been teaching kids to play basketball since I left middle school. I’m in a fight, not with hands, but with the mind. I am mentally tough. I felt empty inside and might never walk, and I had to play basketball for me because I still have Prince with me.

  Charles worked for almost a year just trying to walk again. Finally, he managed to walk without the aid of crutches. As he wrote:

  I had to run not only in sports but in life. Martin Luther King has been one of my most inspiring leaders that I was infatuated with. He said, “If you can’t fly then run, and if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you always have to keep moving forward.”

  He was moved by Dr. King’s words. “I couldn’t fly so I fought till I could run.” Now Charles was dunking nightly. He was flying all over the city.

  THE CASTAWAY

  I spent five unremarkable years at Northeastern, where I made few acquaintances, studied too much, spent too much money on punk rock shows at the Middle East and movies at the Brattle. I graduated with a degree in biology, with one eye on medical school, the other on plane fares. I looked cross-eyed at my first job with a college degree: a lab tech at Harvard Medical School. It was 1999, and the United States was dropping bombs on Serbia and I kept injecting insects with the wrong DNA. I injected Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, the geneticists’ Frankenstein with wings, with different DNA strands, hoping these traits would be expressed in the next generation. Fruit flies die and reproduce incredibly quickly. I hated looking at them under a microscope. To this day, after I buy bananas from the grocery store I put them under cold water and wipe them down with a paper towel to prevent fruit flies from entering my apartment. Everything about the laboratory was dissatisfying—the repetitiveness of the day, the vibration of the vortex mixer, the people I worked with, the dismal paycheck, the dry scientific language we spoke, the pipettes, and of course the flies.

  It felt like I had failed adulthood before it even started. Where was the life a college degree promised me? I couldn’t believe this was it. I couldn’t keep up with the work. I wasn’t mixing the solutions correctly. One-molar solutions quickly became dilutions that clogged up the lab. My calculations were wrong. The microinjections were unsuccessful. The DNA wandered as if in a daydream away from its intended target. I wasn’t precise enough, nor did I care enough. The flies weren’t expressing the phenotypes they needed. They were failing me.

  The job was supposed to help me get a letter of recommendation for medical school. Instead I was fired after a few months. For the next few years I’d work random jobs and travel to random countries. Hiked in Guatemala, visited a dude who took care of penguins in Patagonia, worked on a kibbutz in Israel, pretended to be down and out in Paris like George Orwell, except I couldn’t even find a café to let me wash dishes and spit in the soup. Finally, when I was twenty-seven, it was time for a serious adventure, a full-on transformation. I had never been to the former Soviet Union. My undergraduate education had left me feeling incomplete, and traveling patched those holes. My mind still wandered to the old stone bridges I’d seen in the former Yugoslavia. I wanted to run away. I did what anyone who was in debt, jobless, and filled with bravado would do: I enlisted in the Peace Corps. Basically, though, when I left Boston in the early summer of 2001 with an ambitious reading list, a yellow tent, and a notebook, I was running away again. I told people I was chasing the ghost of Alexander Pushkin. Th
e Pushkin who was exiled to Moldova and fell in love with a Gypsy girl.

  It was easy to leave Boston. I didn’t have a girlfriend or a career or even a pet. Joining the Peace Corps felt mandatory. I would learn to speak Russian, like Pushkin—that was how I thought of it. I could postpone my student loans, erase the embarrassment of being fired, fix the overwhelming feeling that I had still just finished college and my life wasn’t working out the way I planned. I would spend two years in Moldova and return to America and finally become a doctor—that was the plan. Operation Bessarabia.

  On the flight to Moldova, I sat next to a very attractive young woman. She held a copy of The Ugly American on her lap. Full of chutzpah and a passport equally overflowing with stamps, I attempted to impress her with my past travels and the blueprint of my future. We talked for hours.

  “Why did you join the Peace Corps?” she inquired.

  “Three reasons. One, to learn Russian. Two, to improve my résumé for medical school. Three, to change the world.”

  “Oh, you want to become a doctor?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Doctors live difficult lives. They don’t make good husbands or dads.” I was losing her somewhere over the Carpathians.

  “Or a teacher,” I stumbled.

  “Teachers make good husbands and dads. They have respectable hours, summers off,” she said.

  “I’m Marc. What’s your name?”

  “Jessica.”

  It was a good recovery. Until then I had never actually thought about being a teacher. Hmm. Once I got to Moldova I buried the thought.

  When we landed in Moldova and were situated in our hotel, I was able to write a few things down in my journal. I wrote about flying on a Yak, a Russian-made plane, and the tasteless and colorless airplane food. My final note was “I think I met my future wife today.”

  I spent two remarkable years in the poorest country in Europe. Unintentionally, Moldova trained me to survive on a peasant’s diet. And, unintentionally, how to drink like my mom. I guess I could have abstained from drinking in Moldova, but that would be like jumping into the pool with your jeans on. Sure you’re wet and you’re having fun, but you look like an ass.

  I changed my three goals after a few months in the Peace Corps. I still wanted to learn Russian, I now began to write, and I still wanted to change the world. I’ve done all right in the first two; the third is something I am still tinkering with. And then, in 2006, I married that young woman who had been sitting next to me thirty thousand feet in the sky.

  THE DEATH STAR

  It’s now mid-December and the Panthers are 8-0. Gaby and I check the PSAL website daily. We share text messages about different teams. But really we were watching one team and one team only: the Cougars from South Bronx Prep.

  “They scored 120 points last night.”

  “Against whom?”

  “Bronx Early College, 120–43.”

  “Damn.” I had the same feeling when the Death Star blew up Alderaan.

  “Let’s go see them. They play tomorrow night.”

  “Then get some Ecuadorian food?”

  “Ceviche de pescado?”

  South Bronx Prep was not only destroying teams, they had developed their own scorched-planet policy, a particular strategy General Sherman or even Darth Vader would have been proud of. This was “shock and awe” basketball. The box scores were mind-blowing and unnerving. South Bronx Prep was clearly becoming my “bitterest foe.” I was impressed, annoyed, and scared.

  * * *

  —

  Gaby, twenty-six, the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, is a loyal and dependable assistant coach, as well as a former player, which makes him invaluable. He tells everyone on the team, “I know what it is like to have Marc as a coach. Believe me, you have it easy.” He has been with me since day one. Ten years ago, I never would have guessed Gaby would become the man I trust the most with my team. He was a decent player. He was easygoing and coachable. And now he was developing into a dedicated coach and dad.

  In the fall of 2012, Gaby started coaching at the Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School across the street. At first glance I looked at it as just an after-school program. But Gaby kept asking me for drills and diagrams. I wasn’t aware that a seed from my coaching tree had just blossomed. He used the same terminology: “Vermont” was our zone offense, and he stressed ball reversal on offense and help side on defense. In 2015 his team won the middle school championship. Frankie, Tyree, and Cris were on that team. Each one had certain adjustments to make to the high school game. Frankie was seamless and started as a freshman, Ty needed a year to grow, and Cris didn’t even try out his freshman year. He couldn’t get an appointment for a physical. We were disappointed that Cris didn’t play for us last year, but we understood. His father had recently died of a heart attack. It was a difficult period for Cris.

  * * *

  —

  This was what I had always wanted: kids entering high school cognizant of the fundamentals of basketball. Year after year, I would get kids who could dunk but couldn’t pivot. They would shoot with the palms of their hands instead of their fingertips. Gaby helped mold three very good players, and by sophomore year all three had a supporting role on the team.

  Gaby, fluent in Spanish and a Bronx native, was able to talk to Frankie’s, Ty’s, and Cris’s parents. They trusted him. His status as an alumnus and former player held a lot of stock. He is a guide. Sometimes the players feel overwhelmed, and he provides assistance to them.

  This year we had expected the three best players from Gaby’s team to join us at the high school, but then the Catholic schools stepped in and recruited them away. Funding for the middle school team also disappeared. Without coaching responsibilities, Gaby joined the bench as a full-time assistant coach for the first time this season.

  The market for talented middle school basketball players has always been closed to us. The schools with AAU connections and sneaker contracts attract most of the talented middle school stars. They are mosquitoes among bats—they get quickly gobbled up. Some schools collect player after player indiscriminately. It reminds me of when the Bronx legend Rod Strickland reportedly said he didn’t want to be another horse in University of North Carolina coach Dean Smith’s stable. Perception is everything.

  TYREE RISING

  Even without recruiting we were doing fine. Even without Frankie we were doing fine. Actually, we were doing fantastic. The next game, against Metropolitan High School, Tyree erupted for 27 points and 8 rebounds. Then he broke the school record for points, 43, in the next game against Archimedes. He had nine three-pointers, also a school record. Eureka! He had finally discovered his stroke.

  I tried to get us ready for Bathgate. I felt like we were heading for a trap. Tyree had just had one of the best shooting performances I had ever seen. We were due for a letdown.

  During warm-ups against Bathgate, Ty looked as confident as a kid who just scored 43 points would and was basking in his newfound confidence. I thought he was paying more attention to who was in the crowd than to what his teammates were doing, but then I noticed he was giving a pound and high five to every single one of his teammates.

  We beat Bathgate 76–48. Tyree dropped an impressive 27 points. He had worked his way back and excelled without Frankie. He became the glue the team needed after Frankie’s injury. Crazy thing was, he almost transferred last season. He was recruited by the same school that tried to get Charles to transfer two years ago. The bigger high schools in New York City are always recruiting. Imagine a gymnasium filled with a dozen of what my uncle Richie would call omadhauns, or fools. Sitting next to them would be several lapsed Catholics from Queens, a couple of AAU hucksters, and a few former hardwood titans wearing drawstring shorts. These older men had been recruited themselves to tell lies to naively optimistic young men, their fishbowl bellies floating around the gym, their p
olo shirts screaming their allegiance to their high school. These overlords are part of the industry. They hustled too much and worked too little, but there was always movement of talented kids between schools. The talent of New York City basketball is in the hands of a chosen few. You could call them oligarchs. All are filled with naglost, the Russian word describing arrogance, chutzpah, or the lack of civility.

  Gaby called Tyree’s mom in for a meeting. She was on our side. It was quite easy to convince him that Fannie Lou was his home. I also discovered that Tyree’s father was not a strong presence in his life. This left Ty feeling angry and vulnerable. There’s not a lot I can do with unsolicited confessions about missing dads, wayward moms, incarcerated older brothers, nieces without vaccinations, ACS cases, wrongdoings at the shelter. But I try.

  I don’t have a large window of time to work with these guys. Four years, at most, is not a lot of time. I like to take freshmen and put them on varsity. I want four-year players because it takes time to teach them the game of basketball and good habits like nutrition and sleep. In the summer, we go to basketball camp at local colleges. For most, it is the first time they are on a college campus for an extended period of time.

  One of the best ways I can help guys like Tyree and Shamar and Cris grow is through structured practices, in-depth film sessions, statistics. We can discuss how they are playing. Most freshmen think I am being cruel when I talk about what they can and cannot do. They usually adjust around their junior years to the criticism or feedback. It looks like Ty is ahead of the curve this year. He recognizes it not as criticism, but as help. Their relationship with feedback is in direct correlation with how much they trust me. Feedback can help them grow as players. Trust helps them grow as men. And that is why I coach: to build young men.