Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  In the summer Pro City, Rucker, Inwood, Dyckman, West Fourth, Watson, and Gersh leagues take over the playgrounds. However, the real prize of New York City is not college hoops or the summer blacktop games, but high school basketball. The colossal talent of the Catholic League, the whiteness and privilege of the Independent League (read: private schools), and the hoi polloi of the Public Schools Athletic League.

  In the old days before the collapse of the Mecca of basketball, before the YouTube sensations, before traffic cones were defenders, before dime-store AAU teams, in those days when centers were central and point guards were prophets of the asphalt, when the scholarship players were plentiful, when players played in the park because that was where the competition was, when everyone was a Knicks fan because they competed, when everyone hated the Chicago Bulls for ruining Ewing’s dynasty, coaches enjoyed respect in the city because they were seen as defenders or saviors, keeping kids off the streets. Then a few of them went to jail for molesting kids. Basketball’s holy reverence in New York City was crushed by the misdeeds of a few false legends.

  The game shifted away from experienced coaches teaching the game and moved to anyone with a whistle around their neck. Basketball requires learning and coaching, along with the idea of teamwork and discipline. There was a total shift from people who knew the game to people who thought they knew the game. This democratization of coaching has pioneered a whole new style of basketball and the sort of player who plays it; one who is concerned only about how he plays, not whether his team wins or loses.

  When I first arrived here, it was intoxicating just to be in New York City. Basketball players from across the world know the parks, the courts, the players, the coaches, the legends. In 1988, a grainy VHS tape of Kenny Anderson somehow made it to New Hampshire, and it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. He was undeniably unguardable. Nobody could stop him. He moved like hand sanitizer. He just killed defenders.

  In New York City, the appreciation of the dribble is something akin to worship or a civic duty, like standing for the national anthem. When somebody is about to work someone, the crowd rises, phones quickly become cameras waiting to capture the poor victim. The crowd laughs and smiles; it is unadulterated schadenfreude on the blacktop. Spectators bask in the glow of the awkward defender’s imbalance or the poor dude whose shot was just pasted off the backboard.

  Before I was a coach, there was a disconnection between the city and me. I would get this strange feeling walking into a gym. I remember I would walk by Lou Carnesecca or Jack Curran and think they looked familiar, just not sure how I knew them. When I became a coach I would be chastised for not recognizing Lloyd Daniels in the corner, or Tom Konchalski and his yellow legal pad perched in the stands. I felt the same way walking the streets of Jerusalem. I didn’t know that I was walking one of the Stations of the Cross until a horde of tourists almost trampled me. I was too embarrassed to ask where to find King David’s tomb. The history can be overwhelming.

  And that’s just it. Every gate in Jerusalem has stories. Every gym in New York City has stories. I remember coaching a preseason game at the Gauchos Gym in the Bronx, genuflecting on the hardwood, drinking tap water from the same pipes that quenched the thirsts of Jamal Mashburn and Ed Pinckney. New York City has a mystique like Jerusalem; there’s no other city like it. Glass backboards stand in for the religious iconography. Gyms serve as our temples and cathedrals. Pilgrims are the fanatics. The keen appreciation of basketball and food in New York City is as real as worship. Every New Yorker is either a food critic or a basketball fan. There are few ascetics in the city. Most imbibe either the hardwood or the neighborhood Indian joint. Some of us partake of both.

  THE GRAND ARMADA

  The PSAL Class B playoffs have grown pharaonic in size with the growth of small high schools throughout the city. To qualify for the playoffs, a team just needs to be at .500. This year fifty-seven teams made the playoffs. As with any tournament this size, it is a winner’s world. Lose and you are out, done, finished.

  I stood in the middle of the court with Gaby and Kyheem during practice. We’ve created this panopticon where we can see everything: charting missed layups and unresolved bad habits—Charles keeps lifting his pivot foot before he dribbles. Cris’s left thumb pushed the ball and produced this strange elliptical spin. Tyree was not low enough on his cuts, he needed to push off the inside leg. Kaleb avoided attacking the basketball and moved east–west instead of north–south. Frankie dribbled two basketballs in concert up and down the court, staring at his sneakers instead of looking ahead. All their basketball sins were confessed before us, and their transgressions washed away in fountains of sweat. Their practice jerseys were stiff as a priest’s collar with seasoned perspiration. Months of hard work, eighty-something practices, and all I could surmise was…“We need to organize our feet.”

  The next day in practice, we worked on simply catching the ball, pivoting, and passing. No grand strategies. No giant overhaul. No remodeling. Simple footwork drills.

  I have this haunting premonition or fear that if we lose tomorrow, that means today was our last practice of the season. That means Walfri and Shamar’s last time practicing with their high school team.

  Tonight didn’t feel like it was going to be our last practice of the season. It was March and the playoffs finally started tomorrow. I thought of a line from the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: “A thick fog swirls in front of me, and behind me there’s an empty cage.” The regular season was behind us. There is the certain uncertainty of the playoffs waiting for us. More questions to answer: How would we play after all this time off? Did the time off help Frankie’s foot mend? Will the time off mess with Ty’s timing? Is Charles exhausted? One thing was clear. Walfri’s and Shamar’s careers would end soon. Just how soon we didn’t know.

  WAGNER

  When the Robert F. Wagner Panthers finally entered the Fannie Lou gym, I was feverish. “This is going to be my flu game tonight,” I told Gaby.

  Wagner was led by their coach, a young man in khaki cargo shorts. I was worn down. The last few sleepless nights, combined with biking in the cold and eating poorly, had done me in. Nina helped me get dressed this morning. She picked a blue tie with small orange, yellow, and red fish on it for me to wear. “The fishies will make you feel better, Daddy,” she said.

  Coach Andrew Pultz walked over to me and Gaby. I looked past him, as I was trying to examine the young men who looked like trees that followed him.

  “They are huge,” I said.

  A massif of teenagers started to warm up. Two players were around six-eight, and another looked to be around six-five. Inches of opposing players are magnified in our little gym.

  “I told you.” Gaby had scouted them in Queens.

  “Hey, Coach! Great season,” the Wagner coach said.

  As if our season was to end tonight. It smelled of false civility and had a hint that he wanted to upset us. We had been waiting twenty days to play, and I felt dizzy. What am I supposed to say after this encounter? I could say, Yeah, and if you beat us tonight it will be the worst night of my life.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “I heard you also have a new baby at home,” the Wagner coach said. This is the oldest trick in the book: disarm the opposing coach with dad talk.

  “Well, they are over there in the stands.” I pointed to my family.

  I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t put up a fake front of civility with harmless chitchat. Coach Pultz was firmly planted in the catalog of young coaches who balance family and work. He coached girls’ volleyball in the fall, basketball in the winter. While he was trying to disarm me, I watched his team warming up. They wore pine green T-shirts that read “No Gym—No Problem.”

  I admired them for embracing their spartan success without a home court, but it wasn’t like Fannie Lou had it made. I was being cold to Coach Pultz as the fever wreaked havoc on me. I
guess it’s just who I am. I drag my feet on paperwork, I swear too much, and I have a difficult time turning the sarcasm spigot off. Before games I really don’t want to talk to the other coach. Doesn’t he know I want to drink his blood?

  “Let’s Go Panthers!” The crowd was already into the game. They too had been waiting almost three weeks for basketball.

  From the start it was clear Wagner wouldn’t be able to handle our pressure. In the end, no matter what else, New York City basketball is a guard’s game. Frankie and Shamar were tandem thieves robbing the Wagner guards of everything they owned. It wasn’t only that they had a difficult time getting the ball over half-court. It was as if nobody wanted to try to break the press. And when they did, their moderately talented big men were no match for the much smaller Charles and Walfri. In the second quarter, I sat there feverishly, watching in admiration as Charles coiled up like a snake and pounced on the two big men, drowning their hope of an upset with a two-handed dunk plus the foul. This was his trademark: a dunk that simply deflates teams.

  What happened before the dunk may have looked ordinary to the casual observer, but it was actually another trademark of Fannie Lou basketball. Frankie passed to Shamar at the top of the key. Shamar ball-faked. This was an indicator to set Walfri and Tyree in motion from the opposite sides. Walfri and Tyree ran by each other. We know teams come in trying to defend Tyree three-pointers, so movement on his part usually causes a lot of attention from the defense. This is what coaches call gravity. He pulls the defense closer to him, and that leaves other players with more space to attack. Walfri screened the middle of the zone. Shamar whipped the ball back to Frankie as the defense shifted to Tyree. Frankie found a wide-open Charles, who had enough space to wind up and dunk it.

  Above all else, my team always impresses me because at their age they know ball movement is paramount. We hadn’t played in twenty days, yet our discipline, timing, and passion were all on display. It was 28–15 at the end of the first half. As we walked to Room 103, Nina ran up and handed me a bag of cough drops. I grabbed a handful.

  “We need a run to bury them. In the playoffs you cannot keep teams around. There are way too many things that can happen.” I paused and unwrapped a cough drop. The cherry cough drops rescued me. My voice was faltering.

  “Keep the pressure on and push the ball.”

  Now in the playoffs, we started a new Latin chapter: Divide et impera. Divide and conquer. In the third quarter we went on a 15–0 run to bury them. We won 65–38. After the game Nina ran up to me.

  “Momma was cheering for the other team,” Nina said.

  “Jess?” I asked.

  “She kept cheering, ‘Let’s Go Panthers!’ ”

  Mascot duality is a fact of life in New York City. There just aren’t enough animals to fill the halls of all the schools without some overlap.

  “I didn’t know they were also the Panthers,” Jessica confessed. “Who do you play next?”

  Behind every good coach is a great wife. None of the success I have had on the court would be possible without Jessica.

  TOWNSEND HARRIS

  Next up was another school from Queens, this time the elite Townsend Harris Hawks, the eighteenth seed. Within the New York City public high school system are specialized schools for each borough: The Bronx has Bronx Science High School. Manhattan has Stuyvesant. Brooklyn has Brooklyn Tech. Staten Island has Staten Island Technical High School. And Queens has Townsend Harris. The Hawks had already beat two Bronx teams, Grace Dodge and Bronx School of Law, Government and Justice High School. Townsend Harris was led by Jonathan Mea, a talented lefty point guard, Andi Rustani, a six-three sharpshooter, and their leading scorer and rebounder, Justin Miller. Justin was a small mountain of a young man. He had 33 points and 23 rebounds in their win over Bronx Law.

  This would be our final home game; after this round the playoffs move to a neutral site. I fished in my pocket for a cough drop as I looked over at the Hawks coach. He held a desultory, crumpled piece of paper close to his nose, maybe a scouting report or a printout of our stats. He was bowing ever so slightly at the hips, and his lips were moving like he was quoting midrash. He was trying to figure out who we were when we knew everything about them. Coach Bitis from Maspeth gave us film. He knew he didn’t have a chance. I didn’t disturb his prayers.

  I gave some last-minute instructions: “Force the point guard to use his right hand.”

  “Walfri, do not help off number thirty-five. Just lean on Justin all night. No space.”

  It was 25–6 at the end of the first quarter. We won 82–48.

  This was our most Soviet performance. Walfri delivered like a Stakhanovite: he held Justin Miller to 16 points and 12 rebounds. We had five guys in double digits in scoring, led by Shamar with 23. Nothing can stop an egalitarian offense. Frankie had a career-high 10 rebounds. Charles was once again unbelievable, with 18 rebounds.

  THE GREAT TRANSITION

  In 2012, I found myself wondering if coaching could get more painful than this: My team and I stood stunned. Some fans were arguing time had expired before the last shot, but the refs ignored them and briskly left the gym. In front of us, the young men from NEST+m, a gifted and talented high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, were celebrating their improbable last-second playoff victory, a half-court buzzer beater. If every loss is shattering, this one was unforgettable. I always felt I could keep coaching after a loss. I was pliable. Unbreakable. Until now.

  I left the gym thinking this was my last game. I was broken. A cloud of unrequited hopelessness hung in the gym. I couldn’t deal with the pain, and neither could my team. My team had the kind of apathy you’d find in a Buffalo Bills locker room. We had collapsed. These early playoff games owned me. Despite our stellar regular-season efforts, we were missing something in March; something mysterious.

  My first six seasons we won more than we lost. In fact, in 2012 we won twenty-five games, a school record. We had a margin of victory somewhere around thirty points a game. We weren’t just winning, we were destroying teams. We possessed an unshakable faith during the regular season that somehow came undone easily during the playoffs. Did we press too much? Did we peak too early? The narrative had shifted. Winning in the regular season was no longer an achievement; it was starting to resemble pre-failure. Here was another late-season catastrophe after an admirable regular season.

  Before the game I thought I was a good coach. After the game I knew I wasn’t good enough.

  When I got home after the loss, I left the duffel bag full of wet jerseys in a corner. I didn’t feel like washing them. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. Then Nina, who was almost three years old, hugged my leg.

  “Daddy?” Nina asked. “Can you read me a book?”

  “Of course,” I mustered.

  The season was over. I was devastated. Yet what little girl has time for adult disappointment? Nina pulled The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge off the shelf. If you are a parent, you know that, as with any favorite bedtime books, your mind can wander as you’re reading the words both you and your child have memorized. Nonetheless, I love rereading. Especially this book, because I can see the George Washington Bridge from my apartment.

  Even writing about the view feels like sharing a family secret. I know if I ever move I will never again have a view like this. It is like a portrait on the wall changing before me. The seasons change: chunks of floating ice in February contrasted with the greenness of June is surpassed only by the foliage in the Palisades across the river in New Jersey in the fall. When I look out the window, the little red house remains just out of sight.

  “Daddy,” Nina asked. “What’s your favorite book?

  When I first read Moby-Dick I was traveling in Uzbekistan, unmarried and restless. I thought it was all about a young man and his adventure. When I reread it years later, I thought it was about the pursuit of
something unattainable. The last time I reread Moby-Dick, married and domesticated, it felt like spiritual coaching instructions. Sometimes I’m Ahab. Sometimes I think I am Ishmael. I have never thought I was the whale until tonight.

  Was coaching more like Ahab’s blind obsession than Ishmael’s ability to navigate total ruin? We are all Melville’s Ahab in pursuit. We are all Melville’s whale when we are harassed. We may try to avoid a conflict, but force us into a corner or hit us with a harpoon, and we are likely to send your crew into the depths. We are all Melville’s Ishmael: observing, listening, composing a narrative, hoping to survive to tell the tale. Moby-Dick is still a powerful guiding force in my life. After a loss like this is when we confront our own Ahab. The one who lives in us.

  I coach for personal reasons. I coach for societal reasons. I coach to live. If I tell you that I want to coach for personal reasons—the wins, the banners, the trophies—I come off as vain. If I tell you about the societal reasons, you may think that at best I am naive, or at worst I am morally superior. When I admit that I coach to live, I want you to think of a coach as you would a painter or a writer. Someone who works on their craft and extracts pain and pleasure from the process. Coaching is about precisely that. It is an art.

  I now know that in my first six years of coaching, the conditions were unripe. I think we needed time to implement and bring everything into alignment. There were two freshmen on the 2010 team, Michael Castillo and Jimeek Conyers, and they witnessed firsthand how a talented bunch of seniors who didn’t share the ball, took bad shots, and blamed each other for defensive mistakes would always fail in the playoffs. At the time, I didn’t know the central art to coaching was controlling the passion. The ego is such a powerful force. Feed it too much and it becomes fat and lazy. Ignore it and it fades away. But it never dies. When I tried to deconstruct my first years of coaching, I encountered a lot of resistance. It was because I didn’t embrace everyone all the time. Our egos were not balanced. If the game is equally distributed, then come playoff time the pressure of the game doesn’t fall on the shoulders of one or two players; the pressure needs to be equally distributed throughout the players on the floor throughout the season. The same way tension is spread throughout a bridge. A bridge to a better team.