I want to look better.
But now I can only dream. I can’t play.
8.
Finally, we go back to the doctor and he saws off my cast and I cry when I see my right leg: shrunken, pale, scarred.
“It has atrophied,” the doctor says. “It’s natural.”
I can barely walk. With the doctor’s assistance, I hobble across the linoleum floor while holding on to the medical bench.
The doctors are pleased by the surgery, proclaiming it a success.
“But I can’t walk,” I say.
“It takes time. Twelve weeks in a cast, the body now has to adjust.”
There is no recovery plan, no physical therapy. Just a follow-up appointment two weeks later for another X-ray.
I grow so tired walking from the doctor’s office to the car that Freda has to help me. At home, looking at myself in a mirror, my spindly leg next to my good one, I start to cry.
But Marky won’t let me feel any self-pity.
“June, come on, we’ll take a walk. I got a dime. Let’s go to Miss Pete’s, get some Mike and Ikes.”
I can’t run, I can’t jump. All I can do is walk, and climb steps, and Marky walks me back to strength, telling me he needs me because if I’m not on the court then he doesn’t get picked for any games.
Marky walks with me until I can run. Then I begin jumping the steps again, two steps, then three, then four, but I don’t feel the same spring, the same sense that every jump will be farther than the last. I jump from the swings. I can still land with both feet stuck, but I am reluctant to jump as high as before. I hesitate. I am cautious. Whereas before I never could imagine being hurt, now all I can imagine are the many ways I can injure myself. My knee wobbles when I land, my right leg bows when I come down hard on it.
I had been the fastest kid on the block. I had been proud of that fact, boasted of it to whoever would listen, and now I’m not even fast enough for the pickup games in the park.
Marky prodding me, I limp over to the basketball court and take my place in the line, a captain no more. First pick no more. Archie takes a chance and chooses me and I begin running, but the game doesn’t feel the same to me. I am wary, reluctant. I try to imagine myself going up for a ball the way Elgin Baylor does, but I don’t have the spring off my right foot so I have to switch and rise from my left.
I think about my playing style, about Elgin Baylor. I do everything with two hands, he does everything with one. But look at my hands. If I hold them up to Archie’s, Freda’s, even Mom’s, mine dwarf theirs. I have big hands, not yet big enough to play with one hand.
Every day I’m playing, I’m getting stronger. And running up and down those steps. I used to be able to jump down all seven steps, but now, with my weak right leg, I’m afraid to take flight, but after just two weeks without the cast, I do it, I jump down, taking off from my left leg, and I turn, and I jump again. The real goal is to rise up, to jump up the seven steps, and I couldn’t even do that before my injury.
I ride the swings again. I jump. I land. Both legs, firmly planted. Most of the other kids, I notice, don’t know how to land. They fall forward, tip over sideways.
When I go back to Dr. Richards, he bends my right knee, twists it, and nods. “Julius, we put a spring in there. You’re going to be stronger than ever.”
I smile. A spring!
My scar runs up and down my right knee, a pale puff of skin that goes against the grain of the darker flesh.
Dr. Richards smiles. “Your right knee will never be as strong as your left.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“But you can be just as strong.”
I nod. I can be stronger! Jump higher!
At Prospect Elementary, I’m playing on the basketball team, for coach Bill Zaruka. We play in a low-ceilinged gym on eight-foot rims, in a converted coal bin, so even though I’m still just five foot and a few inches, I can time the ball coming off the rim and go up and grab it with two hands. I play effectively, my right knee hardly a hindrance. My teachers and classmates seem to acknowledge that I’m a good athlete, chosen first for most sports, and, just a few months out of my cast, I’m the best high jumper in the school on field day.
9.
In school after lunch one afternoon, they shuffle us into the auditorium and show us The Jackie Robinson Story, and I am able to make the connection between what he did and where I am right now. He was the first “Negro” to play major league baseball, which before Jackie was as segregated as South Carolina, with black players and white players in different leagues. And because of Jackie, we now have black players in every professional sport and at most colleges. He becomes our hero, and I tell Archie about going south, about how they have different drinking fountains, bathrooms, about separate but not equal. We are black. For the first time, the burden of that identity settles on us, and we understand that this means the path is a little harder for us, but if Jackie could do it, then so can we.
When we play ball in the park that afternoon, as we do every afternoon, the three best players are Archie, Juanita, and me. My knee is healing. I am strong. I can back my way down close to the basket where I wait for Juanita—perhaps the only child in the playground who thinks about passing before shooting—who can put the ball into my hands in such a way that I am ready to turn and shoot. Nobody else can do what Juanita can: make the game seem simple.
We hold the court all afternoon.
A white man stands behind the fence, watching us. He wears a cloth coat and a wool cap. When we are done and slipping on our jackets, he approaches Archie and me.
“Would you boys like to play for the Salvation Army?”
We’ve heard of the Sal. It’s like an all-star team for kids. Some of the better white athletes at the school play there.
Archie and I both nod. “We have to ask our parents.”
“I’m Don, Don Ryan.” He holds his hands out. “You’re Julius. And Archie.”
He says that Andy Hagerty, who manages the park clubhouse, told him there were a couple of promising kids playing in the park. He’s been watching us and he thinks we could help the team.
“But the Sal is for white kids,” Archie says.
“Not anymore,” says Don.
We’re going to be the first black kids to play for the Hempstead Salvation Army Team.
Juanita is sliding on her hooded sweatshirt beside us, quiet.
I run home, I jump, and, springing from my left leg, I rise up the seven steps.
I’m excited. I want to tell my mom about the white man, about how Archie and I are going to play for the Sal. All she has to do is take me down to the Salvation Army after school to tell Don it’s all right and then I can practice with—
When I run inside, Mom is sitting at the table, holding a telegram.
“We have to go south,” she says. “Your father, he passed.”
I go into my room and notice that some of my pencils and pens are messed up. I try to put things in order.
Photographic Insert 1
Me, my cousin Ricardo, and my sister, Alexis, around 1954.
My mother, Callie, in 1946.
Left to right: Alexis, my brother, Marvin, my cousins Ricardo and Charles, and me, 1958.
Marvin in 1967.
My nephew Barry, my cousins Charles and Janice, and Marvin in 1968.
My high school basketball portrait in 1968.
These guys hadn’t seen the likes of me. (University of Massachusetts–Amherst)
I had to bide my time to play varsity. (UMass/Getty)
Representing the United States in Estonia for the Olympic Development team.
People went into the trees and onto the roof of a nearby school to see me at Rucker Park in 1971. (The Rucker Pro Legends)
The Doctor is operating.
Ripping the ball down on my way up with the Virginia Squires. (The Virginian-Pilot)
Jamming one over my future Nets teammate Billy “the Whopper” Paultz. (John D. Hanlong/Getty/Spo
rts Illustrated)
At home and on the sidelines with my two loves, Turquoise and my Afro, in 1975.
In 1968, my sister, Alexis, and her children, Barry and Keith, lived with me in Virginia and made my house a home.
A rare photo of me during the forgotten 1972 preseason, when I played with Pistol Pete and the Hawks.
Dunking over Nuggets player Dan Issel. (Manny Millan/Getty/Sports Illustrated)
Cracking up with Wendell Ladner (with crutches) in 1974. (New York Daily News/Getty)
That’s me in the front row between Paultz and Larry “Kat” Keenan in our first post-championship team photo. (Larry Berman/BermanSports.com)
This is what celebrating an ABA title in 1974 looked like. (New York Daily News/Getty)
My family in 1980. From left: Jazmin, Julius III, and Cheo.
At home with my mom in Roosevelt, Long Island. (New York Daily News/Getty)
I always admired the style of Walt “Clyde” Frazier (bottom), and here, at the 1974 New York versus New York game, he admired mine. (Ron Koch/Getty/NBA)
1.
Tonk had been hit by a car, his leg broken and set in a cast like mine. He was living with Uncle Al and then in an apartment in Queens.
According to Uncle Al, he cut the cast off himself before the wound was properly healed. The leg became infected and soon gangrene set in. He said the gangrene caused a heart attack. Did Tonk go to the hospital? Was he alone when he died? Who found him? Nobody tells me. The body has already been shipped south to his family, the Ervings, and we make the long drive down to pay our last respects. When Mom inquires about the will and Tonk’s life insurance, she is met with shrugs and silence. He leaves us nothing but a hole. A hole that was already there. A hole where a daddy should have been. He never took me out and taught me how to fish or how to play catch with a couple of gloves and a ball. He never grabbed my hand and walked me through a parking lot or taught me how to ride a bike. He never stood behind me when I was getting bullied so I could say I’m going to tell my dad. I never even knew that’s what dads did.
But I feel sorry for him, not for myself. There are so many kids in the projects who don’t even know who their daddy is, so at least I knew mine. And with his passing, I say to Marky, even had Daddy been raising us, he wouldn’t be raising us anymore. So his passing isn’t anything we should feel sorry for.
Marky frowns and thinks this over. He remembers Tonk even less than I do, since Tonk was gone within months of Marky being born.
“I’m the man of the house,” I tell Marky.
“Me, too,” Marky says, a cough coming on so that he doubles over.
We’re watching television, President Kennedy on the screen, and they are replaying the inspiring words about asking not what our country can do for us.
It’s always just us, I tell Marky, always us.
We’re growing, we’re all growing. Beautiful Freda is almost in high school, a young woman, pale skinned, like Lana Turner in a movie we watch at the Rivoli, Imitation of Life, about a black girl who can pass and who starts dating a white boy. Marky has a long chin, thick lips, broad nose, sharp brown eyes, and parted brown hair. He’s always observing, watching, and I am already aware of how he looks up to me, but also of how he is different from me. He is not an athlete, and even in his style of dress, he has a more formal manner, preferring leather lace-up shoes to sneakers and wearing his Easter jacket to school whenever Mom will let him. He shuns some of the more physical games we play, the tackle football on the sandlot or the roller hockey that can rip up knees. But despite his sickliness, his wheezing and coughing, he will run out after me when I head to the courts or the football field.
Marky even tags along on the afternoon when Mom takes me to the Hempstead Salvation Army on Atlantic Avenue to meet with Don Ryan, the young man who oversees the Salvation Army sports programs. Archie and his mom, Daisy, join us, too. We pass through the brick chapel and then into the gym, and I look around and then at Marky who smiles because this is a real gym, with shiny wood floors and the Salvation Army shield painted at half-court. The baskets hang from fan-shaped metal backboards and the rims have nets. The ceiling is high enough to shoot an arcing jump shot, not the line drives we have to shoot at Prospect Elementary.
Don, who wears a wool jacket, khakis, and white tennis shoes, explains to Mom that he thinks we’ll be good additions to the team sports program. He’s old. He’s nineteen. He also coaches football and baseball, but basketball is his passion.
“It’s not just their size and athleticism,” Don says. “It’s their character.”
And by character he means that he thinks we are mentally tough enough to handle this fraught opportunity of being the first black kids on the team. The Sal charges a twenty-dollar facility and equipment fee, which Don says he’ll pay.
It is a real team, with uniforms and a schedule of games all around Long Island. First, we have to make the travel squad, which takes a few practices before it becomes clear that Archie and I are two of the best players out there. The Sal has some good ones: the Conroy boys, tough Irish brothers named Jackie, Terry, Jo-Jo, and Davey, a smooth shooter named Tommy Brethal, and scrappy defenders Craig and Gary Black. Archie and I are about five foot six, so we’re among the taller players on the team. The main adjustment is playing according to Don’s system. He likes for Archie and me to go down low and sweep the boards, passing the ball out to Terry and Tommy and then running up the floor to rebound on the offensive end. Archie is a better ball handler than I am, so sometimes he catches the ball on the break and gets the layup. I’m still a step slower, recovering from my knee injury, but what I lack in speed I make up for with my ups. I can outjump anyone in that gym, as becomes clear from the first practice. I discover that I have a knack for finding the ball, for predicting from the arc of a shot whether it will hit the front of the eight-foot rim or the back and then going up and getting it as it falls. And even more important, I discover that as long as I can get the ball, gather rebounds, Don will leave me in the game. Every team needs a rebounder. Maybe that’s why the white kids accept Archie and me so quickly, because we make them better.
Don whistles if he wants our attention. He uses hand signals to call out plays, holding up a few fingers or touching his nose and then ears like a baseball manager. In practice, we’re doing layup drills, jumping drills, passing drills; we’re doing the weave. He tells us if he puts both hands to his neck as if choking himself that he’s calling a press. The whistle, the hand signals, the set plays, the positions, and the different roles each of us plays on the team appeal to my sense of order. I like to know my role, get down low, establish my position, either take an entry pass and look for my shot or watch Archie or Tommy put it up and then go get that ball. I like the plays being called by the coach, the defensive schemes, the 2–2–1 zones we play, the clean white uniform with the red Salvation Army logo and the number 42 on the back. Don and I immediately form a bond. I may be his most coachable kid, one who rarely puts up an ill-advised shot or loses his temper when not getting passed the ball.
2.
Archie and I walk two miles to the Sal every day after school. We have to bring our progress reports every five weeks for Don’s mom to approve. Don told us if his mom saw we weren’t making our grades, we couldn’t play for the Sal. If I come in there with too many Cs, she holds her glasses out to point at me and says, “Julius, you’re spending too much time playing ball. Maybe you need to—”
“Mrs. Ryan, please! Please! I’ll do better.”
“You do that, Julius, you do that.”
The twelve best players make the traveling squad, and we travel in two white station wagons with the red shields on the side, Don driving one and Andy Hagerty the other. We ride in those wagons all over Long Island, up to Glen Cove, out to Locust Valley and Huntington, over to Levittown, down to Freeport. We play against elementary schools and boys’ clubs and church teams, and few of them offer much competition. The combination of Archie and me, along w
ith the Conroy boys and the Black brothers, overwhelms other elementary school kids. Our offense is the most sophisticated I’ve ever played in, and for Biddy Basketball—what Don calls our age group—it’s disciplined, with Don urging us to move the ball around until we can get it inside to Archie or to me on the wing where I can drive for a layup or pass back out to the Conroys, who are good shooters. Of course, we can’t resist hoisting up some bad shots and listening to Don shout at us, “Pass the ball, PASS the ball.”
But we are having fun, more fun that I’ve ever had playing basketball at Prospect Elementary or at Campbell Park. I like the structure of organized ball, the referees and coaches, the score kept on flip cards, and the precise timing of the six-minute quarters, and my team sitting on one side of the gym and the other team sitting on the other. The plays.
Dr. J Page 4
