Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  I see the contradiction in coaching. We mold and shape young minds and then scream at them for a mistake or a temporary lapse in judgment. Isn’t it necessary to correct someone? I yell not in order to embarrass, but to recalibrate. My displeasure is a form of discipline and a sharp reminder to get back on defense. Sometimes it is for show. I know I need to help my players focus on the next play and not dwell on some lost moment like a dropped pass or an ill-timed cut. But there is also the key concept of mindfulness: I want them to be aware not to make the same mistake again. So I may look apoplectic on the sideline as I try to amplify our talent in the middle of a fierce competition.

  Sometimes it is the cumulative casualties of the game that make me look like a certified madman. The errors add up until I spill over in a cascade of screams. I’ve searched for more congenial ways of coaching. I haven’t found one.

  I hear all the time, “Why are you yelling when you are up by thirty points?” But don’t conflate yelling with degrading. It’s like a cognitive awakening. An alarm clock. Great basketball teams talk on defense and offense. When they forget to talk, I remind them, sometimes loudly.

  I have been given medical advice: “Watch your blood pressure.” Or even a prognosis: “You’re going to have an aneurysm.” People have commented on the colors of my face: from warm pink after a turnover, to tomato red after an egregiously poor shot, and finally badly sunburned after a loss.

  When the San Antonio Spurs held Tim Duncan’s retirement ceremony, his coach Gregg Popovich said, “If your superstar can take a little hit now and then, everybody else can shut the hell up and fall in line.” The sentence really struck me, because this season Charles, Tyree, Walfri, Shamar, and Frankie can all take what Popovich called a “hit.” Popovich continued by saying, “Thank you for letting me coach you, Timmy. I’m really thankful because you allowed me to coach the team.” I couldn’t have said it better. Charles, Tyree, and Frankie walked into the building allowing me to coach them. Walfri and Shamar took some time, but by senior year they were ready. Popovich’s words reminded me to thank my team for allowing me to coach them. I am deeply grateful to have a team as committed as they are.

  For me, coaching has always felt cathartic. It becomes a relief to pace about theatrically up and down the sidelines. When things go our way it feels good, but it can be stressful and exhausting when they don’t. We all should be more pliable in life; things are not going to go our way all the time. However, sometimes in the midst of a game, it is as if I can see the play before it happens: No. Don’t throw that pass!

  There may be no good answers to the question of anger. My coaching is fueled by a deep desire to win and also to achieve the precision to execute a play where the optimal time, a blink of an eye, lasts half a second. It all depends on the angle of the screen, the velocity and location of the pass, the speed of the cut, the spin off the glass. After we miss four straight layups, it isn’t out of character for me to stomp my feet on the ground, vexed by the weird breaks of this game. Or to blame the refs, their flawed and faulty interpretations of the game, sending me into a fit of internal combustion.

  Coaching is not just about yelling. We are after all just a team, built not on talent alone, but on a committed brotherhood. Each team is constructed on a harshly complex system of plays. Each year we have players who are brand-new, and it takes them months and sometimes years to understand what is going on at Fannie Lou.

  I know I fail to give a satisfying answer about my own inability to quietly coach, but please know I am trying. Truth be told, I would like to stay calm. It’s the goal of every committed, passionate coach trying to get the best out of his or her players at every moment of the game. So the final thing I want to say about anger while coaching hoops is this: I don’t want to lose.

  THE SHARK MASSACRE: SOUTH BRONX PREP, GAME NUMBER ONE

  In the second week of January, for the first time in school history Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School was ranked number one in the state in Class B. I was afraid to let the team know. We had four games scheduled that week, and it felt more like a distraction than a reward. Nonetheless, we easily cruised through the games that week. Monday we beat the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice by 27. Shamar had a triple-double, and Charles had 27 points and 21 rebounds. Wednesday was a 51-point victory over Bronx Leadership Academy in which we unearthed Cris Reyes and he hit four consecutive three-pointers. Could Cris be ready to get into the rotation before the playoffs? Gaby loved Cris’s relentlessness on offense. I loved his wolverine’s instinct on defense.

  My favorite story about Cris was one Gaby kept telling me over and over again during tryouts: “In middle school this kid hit him with a nasty crossover. Made Cris touch the floor. He didn’t care. He bounced right back up like nothing happened.” I’m a fan of this type of determination and toughness. Cris deserved effusive praise, as the whole team did for their commitment and hard work. At this point in the season we adapted the Latin phrase Per angusta ad augusta—“Through difficulty to greatness”—as our motto. Cris was an embodiment of this phrase. He had worked very hard over the last few months. In an era when everyone uses social media as a platform to let the world know how hard they are working, Cris’s determination to get on the court was admirably demonstrated in silence. Which fits his personality. He was an almost silent kid. He rarely spoke. When Cris was in the eighth grade, his father died of a heart attack. At times I felt as if Cris was silent because he was in mourning.

  Friday night we knocked out Frederick Douglass Academy III by thirty-five. All five starters scored in double digits. The winning streak had extended to sixteen. Pardon my literary license for a minute, but consider what Leo Tolstoy meant when he wrote, “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.” We were a perfect 16–0 and very happy. Kids in the school were comparing us to the Golden State Warriors. There was a palpable excitement about our streak. We weren’t chasing perfection. We were here to work; we knew perfection would always be out of our grasp. The excitement even went beyond the walls of the school. It traveled across the city. This was not artificial. It was real. Everyone knew. When I picked up Nina from school, there was an excited dad who wanted to brag and make me laugh that his daughter was also undefeated in chess. He wished us good luck, and I reciprocated.

  It was Saturday’s game that we were thinking about all week. The battle of the last two unbeaten teams in New York State, Fannie Lou and South Bronx Prep. It felt like a once-in-a-decade game. I woke up early on Saturday. In the dark, I slalomed gracefully, avoiding vagabond Legos and the creaky spots in the floor. The wood floor gives us splinters, sometimes splinters so big we have to make visits to the emergency room to get them removed. I made a cup of coffee and watched last year’s South Bronx Prep game.

  They were a different team this year. They were on a different planet. They had also cruised this week, winning games by scores of 121–18, 129–76, and 110–29! Those scores were meant to intimidate. They were menacing.

  The Martin Luther King, Jr. Tournament at Monroe High School—yes, the same Monroe that helped give birth to Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School—was hosting one of the premier games of the 2016–17 basketball season. Last year we’d beaten SBP in overtime. This year, with a glitch in the scheduling, we weren’t scheduled to play each other in conference play. We had beaten SBP thirteen times and lost twice, but those two losses had come within the last four years. So something was brewing.

  The winner would be the top seed in the citywide playoffs and enjoy bragging rights. The gym was filled with students, alumni, reporters, coaches, and a few people who did not necessarily love Fannie Lou. I spotted Steven, the school custodian, with his children. My friend Chris and his son Emile were in attendance, and my buddy Brent even drove down from Boston to catch the game. And Molly Shabica was there.

  Molly, our ultra-talented science teacher, brought her family to this tournament each year
. I owe a lot to Molly. She was directly responsible for getting me the job at Fannie Lou. We were classmates in graduate school, and she mentioned that her school needed a teacher. In the summer of 2003 I got the job. With her husband, Tank, and their two sons in tow, I greeted them and thanked them for coming.

  “This team scores a lot of points,” I said. “I hope to slow them down.”

  Our defensive hallmark was to keep teams under 40 points a game. Our pace and scoring had increased this year, but the numbers that South Bronx Prep was putting up were prodigious. They were unblinkingly running up the score on a bunch of glass-jaw victims. How does a team average almost 105 points in a thirty-two-minute game? Could we slow them down?

  Time for the main event. Charles, in the black trunks, entered into the circle at half-court. The crowd reached for their phones. He was met in the circle by his nemesis, Ali Sumerah, wearing the white trunks. Their respective teammates surrounded them; there was electricity in the air: number 3 versus number 3. Eleventh grader versus eleventh grader. Charles and Ali stood toe to toe, nose to nose, pound for pound. In the tale of the tape, Ali may have had an inch or two over Charles.

  Countless cell phones recorded the jump ball. The court was so strangely photogenic—the sunlight honey-colored the gym, it was what photographers call the Golden Hour—that I could be forgiven for thinking that the spectators, if not the coaches, were really going to enjoy this game. The ball sailed upward and Ali tipped it to his point guard, Tilquan Rucker. Rucker led the PSAL in scoring at 38 points a game. He averaged a triple-double, even though he stood at five feet five inches in high-tops. Charles wasn’t even in the top ten in scoring in the PSAL, but he had become one of the best rebounders in the city because of his competitive fire. The fans shifted, now occupied with Instagramming their photos.

  Charles had a crown, a symbolic gesture for his friend Prince, sketched with a magic marker on the fleshy part of his hand between the thumb and index finger. He has been feasting on the competition all year, but tonight he had company at the table. He had to share those rebounds with Ali today. On this chilly Saturday in January, he was allowing Ali to seal him early, often, and deep in the paint. Rebounds he normally grabbed were being stolen by Ali.

  Charles picked up boxing when he was eleven to deal with his parents’ separation. He eventually stopped because he didn’t like to hurt people, but even though he doesn’t box anymore he continues to have a fighter’s mentality, as if every rebound belongs to him. Coming into the season, Charles began using the hashtag #HuntingSeason on his Twitter account.

  I asked him what it meant. “We are hunting for a championship,” he said.

  Charles first dunked a basketball when he was eleven. He made the varsity basketball team when he was fourteen, his freshman year. His first year in high school he had several impressive dunks, but had a difficult time doing the other important things in basketball, like dribbling, shooting, pivoting, and passing. Over the years I have had a lot of players rely on an athleticism that allowed them to ignore the subtleties of the game. Charles was an exception. He was blossoming in real time. By the end of his freshman season, he had become a serious student of the game of basketball, and in his first-ever playoff game he recorded a double-double. Each season he steadily improved. His sophomore season he averaged 12 points and 7 rebounds a game. This year he was averaging 20 points and 14 rebounds a game. No team had had an answer for Charles this season. Until now.

  On the opposite sideline stood the South Bronx Prep coach, Paul Campbell. Paul grew up not too far from James Monroe High School in the Bronx River Houses complex. He looked pleased, like he had invited everyone and they all showed up. He was an articulate, intelligent young man who some thought suffered from a certain self-aggrandizement. And why not? His team was really, really good. Coach Paul was otherwise known as Radar, in my opinion the coolest nickname ever. (For a coach, at least.) He needed a car to fit his nickname. It wasn’t like a guy named Radar could drive a minivan or a bicycle to school. Paul drove around in a white Mercedes. He was by far the best-dressed coach in the PSAL. (Today, though, he and his coaching staff were dressed in matching blue tracksuits.) His Instagram posts were a hive of hashtags—#ontheRadar, #ChipChasing—and emojis of a basketball and a trophy, a bull’s-eye, a red “100” symbol, and a flexing black bicep. He typed, “You can’t rewrite what’s already been written” in his latest Instagram post of himself wearing a union blue T-shirt saying “Talent Wins Games, Teamwork Wins Chips.” I thought of a line from Jean-Luc Godard: “Europeans have memories, Americans have T-shirts.”

  The Monroe High School gym wasn’t decorated with the typical bric-a-brac. The walls were white and yellow. The court was the kind of generic high school court that we rarely play on. By the size of the crowd, it looked like everyone wanted to see the battle of the last two undefeated teams in the Empire State. I haven’t ever seen a crowd this large for a Fannie Lou regular-season game. The gym was loud. A friend’s dad after the game would comment that it had a strange smell: a combination of marijuana and sweat.

  We knew the South Bronx Prep Cougars would use a full-court press, and we planned to attack. On our first possession Ty went up, and their power forward, sophomore Jordan Agyemang, inhaled the ball out of Ty’s hands. On the next possession JB tried attacking the paint, and Rucker spiked it out of bounds with two hands. They had set the stage. We were just going up and shooting contested layups—no moves, no fakes, no jukes, no hesitations. We were like the inept dancers at the wedding doing the same move over and over again all night.

  Ty drove the ball and kicked it to a wide-open JB for a three. He nailed it. It was a big shot from the freshman, but teams like SBP aren’t knocked out in the first quarter. “Great shot, JB,” I said.

  JB got caught dreaming about his bucket and left Rucker open for a three five feet behind the line.

  “He leads the city in scoring, you cannot lose him!” I screamed at JB as if I were an alarm clock.

  Rucker was the kind of player who had unlimited range plus unlimited confidence, an intoxicating combination. Like Charles, Rucker also improved each season. Like Charles, Rucker (five-five!) could also dunk. Unlike Charles, Rucker would shoot from anywhere on the court, anytime. We were down at the end of the first quarter, 16–14. We had given up 13 points on layups alone. Our offensive mistakes allowed them easy points.

  There was a great pass from Ty to Walfri on a nicely executed sideline out-of-bounds play. But today Ty had trouble holding on to the ball. He looked nervous. He was 0-for-4 from the field. Nonetheless, with a couple of put-backs by the indefatigable Charles, we were able to tie the game at 18.

  But every time we were about to get some momentum, we lost our footing. Walfri picked up his third foul midway through the second quarter, and in a flash we were down ten, 28–18. This is how South Bronx Prep killed teams, because other teams could not take care of the ball, because other teams could not play transition defense. They kept picking off our passes in the half-court sets. This was Blitzkrieg Basketball. Vernichtungsschlacht. They were about to annihilate us.

  * * *

  —

  Bryant, Walfri’s substitution, wasn’t sure of the play and missed setting a screen for Tyree. Bryant’s hair was meticulous and his defense was usually stellar, but today he too seemed a little tentative. On the next possession we had a chance to run the same sidelines out-of-bounds play that has become quite efficient for us over the years. I subbed Bryant out and went smaller with Mack. Mack, the backup point guard now converted to our backup power forward, also forgot to set the screen. We needed to execute if we were going to win. Or at least put up a fight. It was as if Charles with a miss and a put-back was our best offense so far.

  I cursed as Tyree just threw it to a SBP defender with one minute and forty-six seconds left in the half. I wanted to deliver a soliloquy on unforced turnovers. Now we are still down ten, in dang
er of being pummeled. It didn’t look good. This was what the Cougars have done to every team they have played this year.

  We needed a time-out. As the team jogged to our bench, I didn’t need to look at the stats. I had seen all our turnovers with my eyes. We had fifteen turnovers already. I started punching the blue three-ring binder into submission. I erupted into a vortex of advice, threats, and supplication.

  “On every pass you have to meet the damned ball!”

  “You have to set screens on people, not air.”

  My right hand was slapping my left palm, making the same sound a beaver’s tail does when it smacks a tranquil lake.

  “Every pass, you meet it.”

  “That’s it!”

  I stomp on the floor to exaggerate what we need to do. The gym went silent. I try to coach without being angry, but we weren’t fighting and I wanted to fight the whole gym.

  Coming out of the time-out, Shamar hit a three on a smart pass from Tyree. Then a defensive stop and Ty grabbed the rebound and found JB for a driving layup. His shot wasn’t falling today, but he was making things easier for his teammates. Only down five. We had survived a few haymakers.

  The end of the first half was coming to a close, yet nobody on our team wanted to shoot. We must have made twenty passes, exhausting the seconds and the South Bronx Prep defense simultaneously.