Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  “What are you waiting for?” I screamed as the seconds ticked away.

  Mack answered me by hitting a three on the right wing at the buzzer. We were down only four, 32–28, at halftime.

  Frankie, wearing a red Panthers T-shirt, clapped loudly as we headed to the locker room. He had the look in his eye that he wanted to play. At some point during the game, he had put his jersey on over his street clothes. Whatever happened today, Frankie’s absence on the court was an ominous asterisk sitting next to me. Nonetheless, we had a good start to the third quarter. Shamar short-rimmed a quick three, but Walfri, our Al Horford/Kevin McHale/Kurt Rambis/Horace Grant, the bluest-collar guy we have, picked it up and put it back in to cut the lead to 35–32. We were doing a great job of slowing down SBP’s hyper-explosive offense. Ty finally hit a three-pointer from the right corner to make it 37–35.

  Charles drove down the lane and passed it to Ty for what would have been our first lead since the first quarter, but Ty air-balled it. He got a haircut a few days ago and hasn’t been the same since. I wish his barber would go on vacation for the rest of the season.

  Each team was battling. On consecutive possessions Rucker came down and got a hoop plus the foul, and Charles returned the favor with his own fiery “and-one” dunk above a storm of arms and elbows. Down by only one point. The crowd knew they were watching a classic.

  “Yeah, Charles! We got this! They can’t stop you!” Frankie yelled.

  Trash talking can have the inverse effect. It can motivate your opponent. On the very next possession, Rucker came down and nailed a three. He scanned the bench, made eye contact with Frankie, and put his finger to his lip: “Shh.” At that moment Rucker reminded me of a young Sugar Ray Leonard: an angelic butcher of the hardwood. He was small and fierce and one heck of a player.

  “Defense! Defense! Defense!” A chant of encouragement came from our corner.

  Rucker plowed right into Walfri.

  “That’s an offensive foul!” I yelled. For once the ref and I agreed.

  “Shoot the ball, Ty, shoot the ball!” I barked at Ty on the next possession.

  He dribbled to his right to create a little bit more space. Swish. Great shooters are an obsessive bunch. They have a wolflike approach to basketball: they spend a lot of time alone. I have watched Tyree shoot with the lights off in the gym. On solitary mornings he would shoot hundreds of shots with an oversize basketball. A normal basketball has a circumference of 29.5 inches. Tyree shoots with a ball that has a circumference of 33 inches every day. His shot starts from his toes and ends at his fingers; great shooters prepare their feet as the ball approaches them. Some step into the pass, others will take a bunny hop as the ball meets their fingertips. Basketball is a palmless game: the ball never touches the middle part of your hand, the part where fortunes are told. Fingers and the bony part of your hand do all the work. As Ty catches the ball and springs upward, twisting slightly to his left, his feet swing in front of him. His elbow is near his eyebrow, and his hand now looks like a goose neck or as if he’s holding a dead mackerel. He is the greatest shooter I have ever coached. It’s uncanny for a sophomore to shoot this well. It looks as if every shot he takes is going in.

  The game was tied 45–45. Time-out SBP. Two back-to-back layups by Ali and the lead went back up to four, 49–45. The crowd refused to sit and the gym slowly became standing-room-only. SBP stalled for the last shot of the third quarter, and here came Mark “The Hitman” Morgan, the senior guard, running baseline behind our zone.

  “Ty, close out, you are giving him too much space,” Frankie warned.

  Swish.

  The score was 54–48 at the end of three. That shot gave them the momentum. In between quarters, both teams looked exhausted.

  “E-One coming out to start the fourth,” I said.

  I wanted to get Shamar going, and this backdoor play usually would help him gain some confidence. At times last season he would panic and forget some of the structured offense. Any parent of a teenager knows they forget to put away their clothes, headphones occasionally are misplaced, and absentmindedness is a rite of passage. Mistakes are mistakes. But this year Shamar had been excellent. Just not today. Shamar froze. He was supposed to go backdoor, but he just stood there. Charles waited and then waited a little bit longer for Shamar to cut, until he couldn’t wait any longer. He sprung ahead, took one dribble, and punched another dunk over everyone.

  I had never seen Charles like this. Remember when R2-D2 got his memory wiped clean when Darth Vader hit Luke’s X-wing fighter? Luke had to do everything on his own. Charles was Luke today.

  We were down four in the fourth, just like at Clinton in November.

  “We got this!” Frankie yelled.

  Charles picked up his fourth foul with seven minutes to go in the fourth. It was a kidney shot. He had to endure an energy-sapping stint on the bench. Without Charles, you could expect things to stagnate. Yet Mack found Shamar, in what can only be called an accidental offensive play, for a fast-break layup. Another miscue on offense, where the ball was fumbled and dropped, then poked and bounced away, was rescued when Walfri picked it up and splashed a beautiful mid-range jumper that cut the lead to two, 56–54. We got two consecutive defensive stops, and then, mysteriously, we threw the outlet back to SBP twice.

  When we could get the ball over half-court, we were scoring, haphazardly and with not quite perfect execution, but we were getting the job done. Walfri had a beautiful spin move from the high post.

  Charles reentered the game with 4:43 to go with four fouls, and we were down only three, 59–56. He was fouled going to the basket. He made one, missed the second one. If there was one weakness today, it was his free throws.

  On offense the Cougars just stood around and watched Rucker miss another contested jumper. Ty gathered the rebound and nonchalantly threw it back to Mack. Out of nowhere the Cougars senior Danny Ramos, the Roberto Duran of this game, instinctively intercepted the pass. He tripped over Mack’s foot, spun around as if he was in a cyclonic swirl, and flung the ball up toward the hoop. As he landed, the whistle blew; he scored a heartbreaking layup plus the foul. Knockout. Experience, traditionally overvalued in high school sports, was raised to an art form on that play—an incredible play only a senior could make.

  We would not get off the canvas this time. Danny’s play was like getting hit by those manos de piedra. It stove our boat. Sure, there was 3:38 remaining in the game, but we were dazed and swimming without our ship. We’d been swimming with sharks all along. Although with 1:20 remaining we cut the lead to four, a Rucker assist to Ramos for a three felt like a shark biting our leg off.

  The classic purpose of a coach is always to appear calm, but I am rarely ever calm while on the sidelines. With a minute remaining, the game was slipping out of reach. Yelling at my seated crew, in the midst of some nonsensical basketball gibberish, I saw Ali clapping his hands at my madness. This was an intolerable provocation. We were already dead. Why dance on our corpse?

  We lost 69–63.

  “We were scared of serious competition,” Charles said. This was one of the first times he had spoken critically of the team all season. Charles refused to spin the game. He knew and I knew there was something we could learn from today about ball security, toughness, competition, the big stage, free throws, life. It was important to learn from the loss and move on.

  * * *

  —

  And that’s what we did. We kept moving. But first we had to sit through the awards ceremony. Ty’s, Shamar’s, and Mack’s jerseys hid their tears, Walfri’s head was buried in a towel, Charles was stoic like a statue: all unambiguous images of defeat. This was a new form of torture: we were forced to watch our opponent celebrate with trophies and smiles at half-court.

  “Look at them. Watch them get the awards. We will get them in March,” I said.

  Frankie sat, nodding. The
rest were too teary-eyed to look up. A teenage girl in the stands seemed to be laughing at us at our most vulnerable. It was like in Troilus and Cressida when Cassandra’s prophecy seemed to come true. She was a raving Cassandra, yelling,

  “CRY, PANTHERS, CRY!”

  Finally, we were freed from the shackles of the postgame celebration. In the locker room I may have punched a few lockers and promised again to beat SBP in March. I couldn’t stop punching things: clipboards, my thigh, the locker, the red cushioned folding chair, the air. There’s a scene in Raging Bull when Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, will not stop punching the wall. That was me. I wanted to punch my way out of this game the way De Niro punches the wall, yelling, “Why? Why? Why?”

  I remembered Ali clapping a little too close to the bench. I’ve lost all decorum, I thought.

  Shakespeare and Scorsese may have captured the essence of the game of the decade, but I returned to Melville to help me with the loss. In Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” after a few hundred pages we discover what happened to Ahab’s leg: “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby-Dick—but it was not Moby-Dick that took off thy leg?” South Bronx Prep had bitten off my leg, and I wanted revenge.

  As we exited the locker room, a few local reporters asked us some questions. I felt like Ahab answering questions from his crew: “You were the number-one team in the state? Was it not South Bronx Prep that broke your jaw that ended your undefeated season? Hey, great game. You guys slowed them down. At least they didn’t score a hundred on you.” News reporters called it the game of the year.

  The battle of the undefeateds left me exhausted and my jaw unhinged. It wasn’t that the perfect season was ruined, it was the thought that South Bronx Prep might never lose a game that stayed with me. They were unbeatable. I thought I knew how to beat them, and I was wrong. The feeling of helplessness or of being wrong stung. The guys played their hearts out and more or less executed what I asked them to do. This wasn’t a mutiny; the crew fought fiercely against these pirates of the hardwood, but to use another metaphor, I wasn’t a surgeon carving up defenses, I was a dermatologist prescribing witch hazel for a ruptured gallbladder. I thought Frankie’s injury was the nadir. I was wrong, twice.

  A few hours after the game, I was still angry. Still, I could barely shut my mouth. I think my jaw was dislocated. I have this terrible habit of clenching my teeth during games. It’s as if I am forcing my mandibles to fuse. I felt horrible after any loss, but this one hurt doubly.

  The story of our loss was everywhere on social media. I wanted to tweet out, “Sure, we lost, but wait until we get Frankie back.” Somehow I didn’t. It was crucial the team understand this: we don’t know if Frankie is coming back. I sat alone at home and thought about the game. How can we beat the Cougars? These Panthers have endured evictions, fear of getting jumped, absentee fathers, shootings, doubts about their immigrant status, an aggressive stop-and-frisk policy, drug-filled blocks, educational neglect, hunger, and domestic violence. In the grand scheme of things, this loss was minor. We’ll get over this. Per angusta ad augusta.

  We just needed a few days to heal. There’s also something powerful about having Fannie Lou Hamer’s name on our jerseys. It’s like, Fine, you won the game, but you really can’t beat us because we are all Fannie Lou. We have her fighting spirit.

  FANNIE LOU HAMER

  I have a strange and twisted relationship with South Bronx Prep. In December 2006 I won my first game ever as a head coach against them. There were lots of milestones that night. It was my first win and the school’s first win in over two years. I don’t remember any game details. What sticks with me from that night has nothing to do with the game itself. I can still hear the students in the stands, led by a young teacher, chanting, “Fannie Who? Fannie Who?” It was an attempt to intimidate us and mock the school, but in reality they were mocking a civil rights icon. I was reminded of what Nina Simone once said: “There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and the heroines are or were.” I wished those students had listened to her or even the talented Gil Scott-Heron. Gil’s song “95 South” is an immensely moving song about Fannie Lou Hamer. My favorite line is: “Placed on this mountain with a rare chance to see. Dreams once envisioned by folks much braver than me.”

  Once you are done listening to Gil’s song, you can listen to Fannie Lou Hamer herself on YouTube tell her own stories about what life was like in Mississippi. One such story I would like to share is when she was arrested in 1963. “We going to make you wish you were dead,” the police said to her. Fannie Lou Hamer was escorted to a jail cell that was already occupied by two men. “I laid on my face and the first negro began to beat me…I was beat by the first negro until I was exhausted. The state highway patrolman ordered the second negro to take the blackjack.” There are times when I can’t tell if Americans purposely ignore history or if it is simply forgotten. But how can you forget about Mississippi?

  Young adults from all over the United States went to Mississippi in 1964. It was the Freedom Summer movement, which Fannie Lou Hamer helped organize. The plan was to reveal to the world the hardships of Mississippi: the bigotry, the violence, the systematic exclusion of the black residents from schools and the voting booth, and the virulent fear of integration.

  In June 1963, a year earlier, Mrs. Hamer had been detained at a rest stop in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Back at the jailhouse, she was beaten with a blackjack. I didn’t know what a “blackjack” was when I first heard that. I Googled “blackjack,” and the irony of its name and its function as an instrument of the state were sickening. She was beaten over and over again almost fatally with a piece of wood simply because she wanted to register people to vote. The police and racist state of Mississippi tried to tear the spirit of resistance away from her. They could jail her, beat her, take away her job, but they couldn’t intimidate her. She once said, “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared [to register to vote] but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kind of seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” Sick of apartheid in the Magnolia State, the intrepid Fannie Lou Hamer continued to try to register blacks to vote.

  It’s important to remember it wasn’t just the act of voting they wanted. As Bob Moses reminded us, with voting comes the enormous privilege of jury duty. Those who battled extreme prejudice saw that the ultimate honor was to be called for jury duty. The voter registration movement wanted the exclusionary stamp of disenfranchisement, keeping blacks off juries, erased, but the ink of racial hatred is difficult to eradicate. It was an attempt to upset the all-white jury system. This makes me look at jury duty as what it is, a duty rather than a burden. It is a privilege a lot of people didn’t have in the country; some people were killed trying to achieve it.

  “I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered,” Mrs. Hamer said. The significance of Medgar Evers’s murder so closely tied to her own arrest and beating by police officers in a Mississippi jailhouse is frightening. She knew she was almost killed that same night. She was a field officer for the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, just like Medgar Evers was.

  She challenged President Johnson by cofounding the breakaway Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She questioned America. She was damn right to question America. Fannie Lou Hamer reminds us, “Nobody is free until everyone is free.” I was told early in my teaching career that teaching in a public school in the Bronx is a political act. Even though I get caught up in scouting reports and player development, I recognize, daily, that teaching where I teach is a hard-fought battle. Systemic inequality and institutional racism are the staunchest opponents. Within an educational world of insipid exams and mindless policies, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School’s stratagems run upstream from the traditional model of teaching and high-stakes testing factories. The school questioned that model and found it to be h
ighly ineffective for a large portion of the Bronx. I have come to believe every kid deserves a great school with great teachers with great coaches and great teams. I also believe in the concept found in the Mishnah, tikkun olam: any effort to try to repair the world is good because the world is broken. That’s what Mrs. Hamer wanted to do. Fannie Who?

  That’s “Fannie Who.”

  SEVEN TO GO

  We clinched our playoff berth way back in December. We had seven games left in the regular season. Seven stages before the playoffs. Morrisania and Archimedes were in second and third place, respectively. Up first were reunions with Annex and Hyde, two divisional teams we’d met in December. As with all reunions, people change. We were a different team since the loss to South Bronx Prep. We offered up a bizarre impression of ourselves to the basketball gods. We won both games, but they were not pleased with us: We were losing at halftime against Annex. Tyree went 0-for-8 from three-point land against Hyde. The well was empty. The SBP loss had clearly punctured our spirit.

  At each practice I wanted to cure the pain by telling them how we could beat South Bronx Prep in the playoffs, but I didn’t know how. The reasons why we lost and how we might not lose again have escaped me. My mouth was full of sour grapes. I had become undone. There were things to be said to the team, but I didn’t know how to say them without destroying their fragile egos, and with the playoffs around the corner I wanted to build them up, not tear them down.

  Kenneth, always reliable with a bicep flex after an exciting play, looked like he needed a new go-to move. The bench celebrations weren’t working. They were perfunctory at best, and meaningless at worst.

  Anything I could offer would be empty words, and players know when coaches are mumbling insincerities or meaningless phraseology picked up from a soundbite from last night’s NBA game. And I don’t have Brad Stevens’s demeanor or acumen. On the other hand, Brad Stevens doesn’t coach in the Bronx. Plus, I don’t think even he would have an answer to South Bronx Prep.