The Best American Sports Writing 2015

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The Best American Sports Writing 2015 Page 26

by Wright Thompson


  Kayla said, “There was a time I believed you to be a man of high morals and integrity. That time is long gone. Now, a little over two years later, I have a better view of who you really are. You are a manipulator and a perpetual liar.”

  Kayla’s father said, “You used her devout faith against her. You blasphemed. Your self-serving actions included using God as your shield, allowing you to garner support from other Christians.”

  Alexis said, “You know what you did, but you let us girls be put through the embarrassment of a trial and be humiliated on the stand. We didn’t ask for this. You chose to put us through this. We shouldn’t be treated like outcasts because of your selfish actions.”

  Finally, it was Curtis’s turn. He had been sitting in the Barry County Jail for the previous several weeks after his conviction. Whatever denial mechanisms had cracked during his interview with Olejniczak had sealed back up. He spoke for 55 minutes. During this time, he became lightheaded and asked for a glass of water before continuing. Nakfoor-Pratt would tell reporters afterward that it was “the most selfish, self-serving, victim-blaming statement I’ve heard in my career as a prosecutor.”

  He said he prayed for the girls, the prosecutor, and the judge. He said he was “a servant as opposed to a selfish person.” He said he wakes up every day and asks, “‘God, what would you have me do? And God, how can I be a positive influence on others and be about building your kingdom?’”

  He began to address his victims’ claims one by one. He said Jessica invented “fake-type injuries” and added, “I didn’t touch Jessica for my sexual purposes. I tried to touch Jessica mentally and emotionally for her benefit and physically for her benefit.”

  Jessica left the courtroom at hearing this. Curtis said after her, “I hope that’s hard for her, and I hope that from that hardness she says what is true.”

  “I hope it’s hard for you, you ass!” an onlooker shouted back, who was then escorted from the courtroom.

  Curtis continued. When he began to address Alexis, she left the courtroom too, and was followed by her mother, and Kayla, and Brittany.

  When Kayla returned, Curtis said that in order to maintain proper boundaries between the two of them, he had recruited her older brother to coach a sixth-grade football team with him. “Having [him] around a little bit more would be good accountability for her and myself,” he said. “It was something that needed to be controlled. We came to the conclusion that we needed to stay out of a situation where we could be tempted to fall into a situation that wouldn’t be good for either one of us.”

  Curtis continued, saying he hoped he and Kayla “could write a book together some day, and it would be to the positive benefit of millions of people.”

  It was this statement, in the context of the 55-minute speech, that most people point to as the signature moment of this sad episode: Curtis was delusional, and still sought connection with his accuser.

  Was he aware that people thought he was crazy? I asked him several months later.

  Of course he was, he said, smiling. The judge had told him so. His lawyer even told him so. But he was proudly unfazed: to be the only one in the room who believed in what he did was a familiar role for him, a role he relished.

  “That’s what people told me when I said I would make the big leagues,” he said.

  FLINDER BOYD

  Run and Gun

  FROM FOX SPORTS

  Prologue

  I STAND IN the center of a busy strip mall parking lot just off Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, wiping the sweat from my brow. It is unseasonably hot for February, and my pulse is racing. How do you address a gang leader?

  Soon a flashy, late-model car pulls up and he gets out slowly. He can’t be more than an inch taller than me, but his presence radiates across the parking lot. He wears designer jeans and a well-fitted gray polo shirt that struggles to contain his muscular shoulders.

  He recognizes me by the notebook under my arm. We slap hands, then exchange tense small talk about mutual friends.

  His phone vibrates in his hand, he glances down, then back up. “I know you got a story to write,” he says in a distinct L.A. drawl. “So tell me what you want to know.”

  What I want to know is why Javaris Crittenton, the former first-round pick of the Los Angeles Lakers, a quiet Bible-touting honor roll student and much-loved son of Atlanta, is now in jail facing charges of murdering a 22-year-old woman, attempting to murder two others, running huge quantities of drugs across state lines, and being a member of the Mansfield Family Gangster Crips—the street gang that is the pulsating heart of this three-square-mile area.

  I grew up not far from here, and in the past three weeks I had contacted old high school friends with loose connections to the Mansfield Crips to see if anyone would talk to me. Each response was similar.

  “Stay away from this.”

  “They know you’re asking questions.”

  “Leave it alone.”

  And I did, initially. I wasn’t naive about gang culture. But then a couple days before our meeting, I got a text from T-Locc,1 a Mansfield OG, who owed a friend a favor.

  Now, T-Locc stands looking at me, awaiting my response, his lip partially curled. The sun fights through the lone cloud in the sky and I cup my hand over my eyes. Cars drive around us, curiously staring back as they pass. “I was hoping you could tell me something about . . .”—I pause, avoid his eyes and take a deep breath—“Tell me about Javaris.”

  Part 1

  Once upon a time there was a factory for tiny basketball players—a place on the Westside of Atlanta where boys would bring their short attention spans and passion for basketball, a haven from the harsh world around them that seven- and eight-year-olds shouldn’t yet know about. It was run by Tommy Slaughter, although his disciples called him PJ. He was brash and energetic, and would pull up to practice in a new shiny SUV with music blaring out of the windows and a smile laden with gold teeth sparkling in the sun. When practice started he would jump on the court with his mini players to demonstrate the right way to play, the PJ way.

  When Sonya Dixon, Javaris’s mother, was looking for a place to drop off her rambunctious eight-year-old son, she was told about this program at the old, run-down Adamsville Recreation Center, just a 15-minute drive from their home in the Cleveland Avenue area in Southeast Atlanta. She had given birth when she was a junior in high school, and with Javaris’s father rarely around and suffering from acute liver disease, the parenting was left to her. In many ways, she and Javaris were growing up together.

  In PJ, she found someone who could harness Javaris’s bursts of boyish anger. PJ saw talent and pushed him harder than any of his other players. If he asked someone to make five layups in a row, Javaris would have to make every single shot without touching the rim. The discipline appealed to Javaris, and over time they established such a tight bond that PJ began referring to him as his son.

  In small-time, local youth tournaments, little Javaris was making a name for himself and soon word reached Wallace Prather Jr., known to many as the godfather of Atlanta hoops. A quiet but stern man with sharp eyes and a graying goatee who oversaw the development of nearly the entire area, Prather valued mentorship and coaching for its own benefit and enlisted others with the same philosophy. He then streamlined the most talented and respectful players into one organization: the Atlanta Celtics.

  With various summer teams made up of players ranging in age from nine to 18, the Celtics were the pride of the local youth sports scene and were run with the efficiency of a city-state. Practices were crisp and diligent and coaches taught life skills as much as they taught fundamentals. By the early 2000s, Prather was presiding over the golden age of Atlanta basketball. Never before, or since, has there been so much talent or so much local attention paid to high school basketball in the area.

  In the summer after Javaris’s eighth-grade year, Prather, who admired his young protégé’s fierce competitive streak, asked Javaris to join his top traveling team that
included future NBA stars Josh Smith and Dwight Howard, in the hopes they would help mentor him. But from Javaris’s first game with the Atlanta Celtics, a marquee matchup against LeBron James’s summer team in a tournament in Houston, Javaris refused to be a sideshow.

  PJ, meanwhile, had been diagnosed with colon and rectal cancer, and for weeks he had kept it secret, embarrassed by his decaying appearance. Knowing it might be the last chance he’d get to see Javaris in action, PJ traveled to Houston to see his disciple play.

  Late in the game, as the story goes, LeBron James switched onto Javaris, who had just been inserted into the lineup. LeBron had been decimating the Celtics players, but Javaris demanded the ball when he saw LeBron guarding him. Javaris cleared out his teammates, faked left, and paused. LeBron, who was already touted as the greatest high school player of all time, bit on the fake. Javaris dribbled toward the hoop, then as he rose up, LeBron, his 17-year-old arms ripped with muscles, came from behind intent on not just blocking the shot but exploding it off the face of the glass. At the last moment, the lanky Javaris switched hands and reversed it in off the other side of the backboard while LeBron flew by. The crowd erupted, college scouts scribbled in their notebooks, and PJ grinned, clenching his fist.

  In the coming months, every high school in Atlanta with a decent program was after Javaris. He was set to enroll at Douglass High, the trendy school where many of his friends were going, until he got a call from Dwight Howard Sr., the athletic director at tiny Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy. He offered Javaris a scholarship and believed he could team up with his son to form a nationally recognized program.

  Under head coach Courtney Brooks, Javaris was taught the importance of details, both during games and in his everyday life. Together with PJ, who had begun to slowly recover, and Prather, Javaris was encircled by mentors and father figures who fenced off outside influences. As a result, Javaris flourished. He had a singular goal of playing in the NBA, and he absorbed everything they taught him.

  He transformed from a kid with baggage into an intensely focused young man in everything he did. He was the class president in school, had a 3.5 GPA, and scored almost 1400 the first time he took the SAT. If there was Bible study, Javaris had to memorize more and know more than anyone else, and even his school tie and jacket had to be pristine.

  Nowhere was his drive more evident than on the court. His exploits became the stuff of legend. There was his performance in the state championship his sophomore year (and Dwight Howard’s senior year) when he single-handedly took over the game despite playing alongside the best high school player in the country. There was the time he scored 30 against O. J. Mayo in a double-overtime loss and couldn’t eat after the game.

  The stories abound, but no game encapsulates Javaris more than the Wallace Prather Jr. memorial game before his senior season.

  On June 17, 2005, 51-year-old Wallace Prather Jr. stepped in the shower and collapsed, dying of a heart attack. The tight-knit Atlanta basketball world was devastated and did the only thing they knew would honor the man who had done so much for the community. They organized a basketball game in nearby Suwanee with many of the nation’s best players. For most of the participants, it was a glorified all-star game, a chance to show off their dunking skills in front of a packed gym full of scouts and fans. Javaris, however, would never disrespect Prather by treating the game as a showcase. He picked up full court on defense and dove on the floor for loose balls. His passion bounced off the walls of the stuffy gym; he attacked the basket with the full force of his pain, and called out his teammates if they didn’t hustle. He was unguardable and sensational and was named the MVP of the game.

  By the end of his senior year in high school, Javaris was considered one of the top players in the country, but it was inside Atlanta, within the interstate highway, 285, that encircles the city and separates it from the suburbs, where he was most revered.

  “He was the symbol for the original Atlanta area,” says Jonathan Mandeldove, his teammate with the Atlanta Celtics. “He was the backbone and the entire city was behind him.”

  When it came time to choose a college, Javaris bypassed the recruiting process entirely. He never even thought of leaving his city, or his people. He enrolled at Georgia Tech, leading the Yellow Jackets to the NCAA tournament his freshman year. At six-foot-five and with the rare combination of power and speed, Javaris was a pro scout’s dream. He immediately applied for the NBA Draft, and true to his loyal nature, hired Wallace Prather Jr.’s son, Wallace III, as his agent.

  On June 28, 2007, over 200 people, including the chief of Atlanta Police, fought through a torrential downpour and packed into a private room at the FOX Sports Grill in downtown Atlanta to experience the moment their local hero wrapped his arms around a childhood dream.

  As each pick in the draft was called, the tension inside the room increased. Greg Oden went first, then Kevin Durant to Seattle, then Al Horford to Javaris’s hometown Hawks, later Joakim Noah to the Bulls. When the Hawks, desperately in need of a point guard, were on the clock again with the 11th pick, everyone in the room held their breath. The moment seemed too perfect.

  Atlanta, however, selected Acie Law from Texas A&M.

  Perhaps, in retrospect, that was it—the first twist down the spiral. But at the time, it was only a momentary lull. Eight picks later, all eyes looked up at the giant screen as David Stern stepped to the podium: With the 19th pick in the 2007 NBA Draft, the Los Angeles Lakers select . . . Javaris Crittenton from Georgia Tech.

  The place exploded. It was delirium—high fives, hugging, embracing. Someone screamed, “He’s going to Hollywood!”

  “There was so much joy around that,” Atlanta Celtics coach Horace Neysmith said. “Everybody expected Josh, Dwight, Randolph [Morris] to be pros. Javaris, they knew he was good, but when he got there and got to that point, it was like, ‘Wow, this is really happening for the kid.’”

  Twenty minutes later, Javaris, dressed in a newly tailored brown suit, walked in with his tall and beautiful high school sweetheart Mia. He hugged his mom tight, then worked his way around the room, looking each person in the eye, smiling as he shook hands, and thanking each of them for their support.

  PJ stood back, allowing Javaris to soak up the moment and admiring the man he had become. When the restaurant closed, PJ walked into the stormy night struggling to fight back tears.

  “To be a parent, because Javaris was like my son, to be a parent and see your son drafted, it’s like the biggest thing going. It’s a life changer,” he said.

  Part 2

  For a kid from Atlanta, Los Angeles had a mystique—like a newly polished Ferrari glittering under the sun. Before the season, Javaris settled into an apartment a half a mile from Venice Beach and was the guest of honor at a Hollywood nightclub welcoming him to L.A. He was new royalty in a town that worshiped the Lakers. Not even a week after his introductory party, though, he caught a glimpse of the corrosion just below the sheen.

  While leaving to head home after a night out, according to Mia, Javaris was walking to his parked car—he never paid for valet, if he could avoid it—when two men approached him and snatched off the chain around his neck at gunpoint, then calmly walked back into the network of alleyways that surround Hollywood Boulevard.

  Over the next few months, Javaris rarely ventured out as he put all his focus into basketball. Yet during games in the first few months of the season, he was becoming increasingly frustrated with his lack of meaningful minutes. The same quality that got him to the NBA—his relentless competitive streak—was now restricting him. In practice, Javaris would not only try to match up against the all-world Kobe Bryant but he would also try to take some of his minutes.

  “The best player on the planet is Kobe, and [still Javaris] thought he should be playing,” PJ said.

  Javaris was drafted as a long-term project, a prototypical Phil Jackson point guard, tall, intelligent, and defensive-minded, who could contribute down the road.

  “
He’s got to be patient and he’s not a patient young man,” Jackson told the Los Angeles Times in January 2008.

  By the time Javaris turned 20, on New Year’s Eve 2007, he had only appeared in 12 games. Despite his frustrations over the last few weeks, he had rebuilt his community in L.A. and slowly had begun to settle in. Mia had moved in, two of his cousins, Scooter and Woody, came to stay for long stretches, while teammate Kwame Brown, who grew up not far from Atlanta, lived across the street. Together in one tiny corner of L.A., they reconstructed Georgia.

  To celebrate his 20th, Javaris and Mia went to a nearby bowling alley, as the clock neared midnight. It was quiet and simple, and for a moment he could look back and see just how far he’d come.

  “It was beautiful,” Mia remembers. “He was happy, and things were beginning to work out.”

  In the next game, Javaris led the Lakers with 19 points, his career high. But less than a month later, the Lakers decided to strengthen their frontcourt and so shipped Javaris, along with Brown, to the Memphis Grizzlies for Pau Gasol. Javaris was surprised by the news, but he immediately packed up his belongings and left his apartment. As he got on the plane to Memphis, he handed Mia a Bible and a handwritten note that read: You can’t make plans, only God can.

  Part 3

  “You see all this,” T-Locc says, waving his open hand out in front of him as cars pull in and out of the parking lot around us. “From Olympic to Pico to Venice on down. That’s all Mansfield.” His gruff voice fills with pride.

  The rigid boundary of the Mansfield Crips sits along the Pico corridor where the conflux of Korea Town, South Central, Hollywood, and the outer reaches of Beverly Hills flow together into a basin that’s colloquially called the Deep West Side. It’s a neighborhood that both geographically and historically connects the various subcultures of the city. Everything you need to understand L.A. is written into these streets. It’s where the utopia and the dystopia collide.

 

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