“I’m Leon,” he says. “Where did you come from?”
“Hempstead. We just moved in up here.”
“I came from Manhattan,” Leon says. He’s already been here a few months.
There is some grumbling from the players on the court. They’ve all been playing ball together for years, and just like Archie and Al and my teammates from the Salvation Army were planning to play together at Hempstead High, these guys were planning to play together at Roosevelt High.
“This guy ain’t taking my spot!” says a little guy named Ronnie. Poor Ronnie doesn’t have much game. He’s stiff and has an erratic line-drive set shot.
There are a few murmurs from around the court. Ronnie is already sizing me up as a threat.
I shrug. “We’ll see.”
I like this cat Leon, though he slows the game down by arguing every out-of-bounds and foul call. He comes up with crazy versions of what we all just saw with our own eyes. “I was pushed. So technically, it’s not off me, it’s a foul on you. So it’s skins ball out-of-bounds.”
Basketball is how I fit in to my new neighborhood. I meet up with the guys who will be playing for Roosevelt High: there’s Leon, Nick Marshall, Ralph Burgess, Robert Mayrant, Lenny Carter, Odelle Cureton. And every day the guys get together at a different park to play, at Roosevelt, Washington, or Centennial. No matter how hot it is, we’re out there, usually in the early evening, in a pair of gym shorts and some Converse, playing these ferocious games, pushing each other and fighting to hold the court lest we have to wait for a game in the crazy heat. In the evenings, the older guys come down, grown men finished with their earning day, and we match up with them for some rough games to 11 or 15. But even against the older guys, I am always able to control the boards, gather rebounds. I have to be wary of showing them up too much or they’ll try to undercut me.
Some nights this older black man is hanging around by the fence, taking in the action. Leon and the guys nod to him and go over and pay respects and then they tell me, “That’s Earl Mosley, the freshman coach.”
He was already scouting for his prospective team.
Those of us going into ninth grade are going to play for Mr. Mosley. One evening, he introduces himself.
“Let me see your hands. Hold them up.”
I show him my hands. I’m already a men’s size 11. It’s hard to find gloves that fit me.
“It’s nice to meet you, Julius. Now you’re coming out for basketball this year?”
I tell him I am.
“Are you a kid who makes his grades, or should I count on you not playing?” Mr. Mosley is also the assistant principal at Roosevelt.
I tell him I make grades. Or my mom will hit me with a strap.
He nods. Only later will I realize that Mr. Mosley shares a similar idea of stern discipline.
14.
I’m in ninth grade and Marky is in sixth. The move is hardest on Freda. She’s had to start her senior year in a new school. Instead of feeling comfortable with her old friends and arriving at school every morning to familiar faces, she has to start over, where she doesn’t know anybody. I make friends quickly, primarily through basketball and football. I know the guys who play with me at the parks, and my skill at playing ball has paved the way for me socially. Marky is young enough that the change doesn’t matter much.
Freda struggles, and after a few months she quits school and moves in with George Bookhard, a college graduate a few years older than she is. George works at a religious book publishing company, on the business side of the firm. He was a Hempstead Tiger, a good basketball player who used his game to get to college. But despite his success, Mom and all of us are unhappy that Freda is choosing him over her degree.
Mom tells Freda this isn’t right, to leave school for an older man. Why can’t she wait? Why now? Freda was always so smart, and now she’s just throwing—
“I’m pregnant with George’s baby. He wants to marry me and I said yes.”
“Marky, June, go upstairs,” Mom says to us.
We climb the stairs. Marky looks like he’s gonna cry.
“Freda’s moving out?” he asks.
I nod. “Looks that way.”
“Then we’ll be only three. Just Mom, you, and me.”
“And Mr. Dan,” I say.
Marky shrugs and I know what he means. We like Mr. Dan, he’s a good man, but he knows that he can’t overstep his bounds and get too involved in our family business. Even in this drama over Freda becoming pregnant, Dan just sits there silent, chewing one of his short cigars.
Freda is gone.
15.
I’m lucky to be coached by Mr. Mosley, who takes a liking to me. I respond well to his teaching. He recognizes something in me, some promise or potential that no one else has yet noticed. I’ve been regarded as a good player, a fine athlete, but Mr. Mosley is the first to see that the combination of my basketball abilities and academic success might be enough to win me a college scholarship.
That’s my mother’s dream, for me to somehow go to college. Freda was supposed to be the one to go on, but now she’s living down the block with George. I know without asking that we don’t have the money for college. An athletic scholarship is the only way I’ll be able to go.
Mr. Mosley tells me to enroll in the college-preparatory program, which means I’ll be taking a full academic load in addition to playing basketball and football. He is always after me about my homework, my grades, and now I do my homework every night as much to please Mr. Mosley as my mom.
To help out and earn some money, I get a job working at a bakery in Freeport, riding my bike over at five thirty a.m., slipping on an apron and a hairnet and filling doughnuts with custard and jelly and shaking on the confectioners’ sugar. We prepare the jelly doughnuts, the custard-filled, the old-fashioneds, the eclairs, the long johns. We put the cream into the napoleons, a layer of cream and then a layer of cookie, and I eat a lot of them, taking home pink boxes full of doughnuts. Some mornings, I can barely make it to school because my stomach hurts so much from eating so many sweets. And I get a whole mess of cavities. I am paid $1.20 an hour, and give my mom and stepdad $12 a week and keep the rest so I have some spending money. My mom pays my dentist bills for all those cavities.
I want to look sharp at my new school. They don’t allow jeans at Roosevelt High. I take the bus to the Abraham & Straus back down in Hempstead and choose a long wool coat, some sweaters, dress slacks, leather shoes, and put them on layaway, paying them off with my doughnut money.
But I’m thinking about moving on to some serious suede. That’s a look I admire. And around me, among my peers but also in the community, I’m seeing the new styles emerging, the different looks, with a few brothers wearing dashikis or some dressing in the black jacket, white shirt, and black tie of the Nation of Islam. I am stunned when I hear that Malcolm X has been assassinated. I don’t understand precisely what he stands for, but I know that I am a Christian, a Baptist, and not a Muslim. I also know that I don’t hate white people. Don Ryan and Andy Hagerty are like fathers to me, and those are white men. The Salvation Army program was the best thing that ever happened to me and that was because of Don and Andy and Don’s mom. So Malcolm’s blanket condemnation of whites as devils does not make sense to me. Huey Newton and the Black Panthers’ message of revolution doesn’t appeal to me. Even Angela Davis, her fine self, and her message of communism and critical resistance I find alienating.
I prefer order, or to look for order, and all this portends a chaos that I find uncomfortable.
I’m with Dr. King. I hear his message. I’m looking at Coretta Scott King and she could be my mom’s sister. Mom is a deaconess in our church, and she preaches love for all. We can’t hate whites, she says, any more than we can hate blacks. But also, it’s something else, it’s a sense I have that this system, as it is currently constructed, might work out for me.
At the basketball courts during that period, we talk about what we are seeing and hearing. When the Watts ri
ots are televised in the summer of 1965, we gather in silence around the RCA in the living room, but very soon the images of smoking neighborhoods and massed police in riot gear spark a conversation that we can no longer put off. I’m confused but also fascinated. I understand, from driving south, from being called nigger on the basketball court, what causes this kind of anger. I can relate to it, but I don’t share in that anger. I don’t feel the same as those who are setting fire to their own communities.
Some of the guys say we should be joining the Nation of Islam or the Five Percenters or the Panthers. They’re talking about going to see Bobby Seale speak in Manhattan. There are meetings we should attend. We shouldn’t stand by while our brothers in Watts are dying. Some of the guys—Keith Carpenter, Leon—flirt with militancy, with changing their names and wardrobes and attending rallies. They start reading the Koran.
I’m still reading the Old Testament. No reason to change that I can see. I’m going to school. I want to graduate. Go to college. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what I need to be doing. Not starting a revolution.
But unlike some of the other guys, I have an identity: I’m not a Muslim or a Panther. I don’t have to be. I’m a basketball player. I’m a son. I’m a brother. Those are my priorities. They are enough, I think; they have to be enough.
16.
The freshman team includes many of the guys I already know from the park. Mr. Mosley is a physical coach, aggressive and tough. He grabs you, pushes you, and practically picks you up to move you to the right place on the floor. He hits you in the chest to get your attention and he’ll give you a knuckle sandwich right in the solar plexus if you get out of line. He’ll knock the breath right out of a kid if the kid won’t listen.
We have Ralph Burgess at forward, Lenny Carter at point guard, Leon from the playground at the two. I’m playing power forward. We have talent but lack size. Our games are played at four o’clock in the afternoon, in front of nearly empty gyms, before the JV and varsity games. But the freshman games don’t count. They aren’t covered by the local papers and our own student paper barely mentions us. And a good thing, too, because we are awful, going 2-12. But the basketball coaches at Roosevelt rightly see the freshman team as an entirely developmental program, preparing players to move on to eventually play varsity.
Still, I’m not used to losing. Back in Hempstead we never lost. At the Sal we won 47 straight, and here I am on a basketball team that manages to only win two games?
But Mr. Mosley has taken an interest in me, noticing that I’m still not all the way back from my knee injury and teaching me new leaping drills and leg-strengthening exercises so that I regain my speed. By the time the freshman season ends, Coach tells me they are moving me up to the junior varsity, the only player on the ninth-grade team to move up. I play three JV games that season, coming off the bench to rebound and score, and Mr. Mosley convinces Mr. Wilson, the varsity coach, to let me come up to varsity. Now this never happens, a freshman playing varsity. Years later, it might be more common, but on Long Island in the mid-’60s, you had to put in your time before they let you play with the upperclassmen. But Mr. Wilson puts me in a game, and I drive the baseline, manage to slip past two defenders, start my leap from one side of the hoop, and finish with a neat little reverse flip off the glass. The crowd in the gym loves the shot, and Mr. Mosley later calls me “Little Hawk,” saying the move reminds him of Globetrotter and prep legend Connie Hawkins.
I asked him, “Who’s that?”
The next day, in the Newsday recap of the game, in the box score for the Roosevelt–West Hempstead game it says that “Irving” scored 2 points.
Still, the next season I’m back with the junior varsity.
17.
But my game really takes off on the playgrounds and the parks of Roosevelt; I’m developing a game and a style that is very different from what we are doing inside the gym. I’m dunking backward on eight-foot and nine-foot baskets, able to dunk one-handed with ease on ten-foot rims. I’m jumping over guys ten years older and five inches taller on courts all over town. Some of the dunks are so spectacular that the games almost come to a halt after I throw down.
But I never stop or gloat. I just run back down the court.
Win without boasting.
The game developing on these playgrounds, and all over New York, is more free-flowing and improvisational than the one we play in organized ball. We borrow a little more from what we see Elgin Baylor doing on television. And Mr. Mosley tells me that Connie Hawkins integrated the slam dunk into his game, played the game above the rim, made these soaring leaps and then floated there, as if thinking about how he is going to finish his move. Indoors, the coaches tell us never to leave the ground without knowing what you are going to do with the ball.
Indoors, the coach always tells me to go up with two hands and secure the rebound, bringing the ball down to chest level before making an outlet pass to a guard.
Out here, I like to pluck the ball with one hand out of the air and hold it up, sometimes flinging it to Leon or Robert streaking downcourt, but often dribbling up court myself and looking for an angle to the basket, a sliver of daylight that will allow me to get to the rim. We seldom set up the offense to the extent our coaches in organized ball like. On the concrete, we are always looking for the fast-break finish. And I begin to leave the pavement unsure of how I will finish the move, with a little finger-roll flourish or, if I can see the opening, with a dunk—or, if the defense has collapsed around me, with a dish to Leon or Ralph.
The game out here is always on the verge of chaos. It threatens to fall apart, both in terms of guys getting into fights or storming off the court and in terms of the individual moves we’re making. I’m trying new things constantly, figuring out different ways to get to the rim, trying to fake left, go right, shoot left, dunk lefty, I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go along.
Leon tells me that watching me go up for a shot is exciting because he never knows how I’m going to finish or even if I’m going to finish. That’s because I don’t know. I often have no idea how a move will end or where it will end. That kind of improvisation on the basketball court is a form of expression and I come to see it as a response to what is going on in the world around us, where the politics of race, the turmoil of riots, the drug culture, and rock music are transforming how everyone looks and dresses and acts. Off the court, I’m a conservative kid. I don’t mess with drugs. I’ve seen plenty of guys stoned and I’m not interested in that kind of chaos or disorder.
But I do feel some need to express myself, to rebel, and the only place I can do it is on the basketball court. I like order in the world, and even inside the gym when I’m playing organized ball, I prefer to play in a system, but out here, on the concrete courts, I decide to get a little freaky with my game.
When the games are over at Washington or Roosevelt or Centennial Park, I always try to get one of my friends to stay and play one-on-one or even H-O-R-S-E. Playing one-on-one is like a laboratory for new experiments in scoring. Going up with the ball palmed in my left hand and then switching hands and dunking with my right? Did that in a game of one-on-one. Going up and holding the ball up high in my right hand and finishing with a soft left-hand layup off the glass? Another one-on-one move. A reverse layup that starts on the baseline and finishes as a left-hand jam? That’s from H-O-R-S-E.
Leon Saunders, my best friend and fellow teammate, is my regular opponent, and my lifetime record against him must be around 25,546–1. And that one win he secures by his usual method of loudly arguing any call. But Leon stays out there in the darkening evenings at the parks and plays ball with me night after night.
One evening we’re at Roosevelt Park and Leon is arguing tirelessly about how a ball he knocked out-of-bounds didn’t go off him.
“Here, it went under my arm, and then over my leg,” Leon is saying, “like this. And, anyway, you pushed me, and that’s a violation right there. Man, you must have, what, like seven fouls? Yo
u should have fouled out.”
“Fouled out,” I say, “of a one-on-one?”
“At least I should be taking some free throws. Man, here, I’ll take two foul shots, and then it should be my ball because that’s a technical, actually, because away from the ball like that—”
“Okay, okay,” I tell Leon. “Your ball. Man, I should call you the Professor. Everything becomes a lecture with you.”
Leon nods. “If I’m the Professor . . . then you’re the Doctor.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause you got more moves than Dr. Carter has liver pills.”
Dr. Carter’s Little Liver Pills are a popular patent medicine frequently bought for back pain and other aches.
And from then on, Leon calls me the Doctor.
18.
That summer, I’m working at the doughnut shop and playing summer league ball over at Roosevelt Park. Ray Wilson, the varsity coach at Roosevelt, is watching from behind a chain-link fence. I’m playing inside, putting moves on this big guy who is guarding me, and frustrating him because I keep blocking his shot. He and I get in a little scuffle, shoving each other, and we both pick up technical fouls and I see this big guy sort of grinning at me. I’m furious and I tell him, “Hey, after the game, it’s gonna be me and you.”
But as soon as we’re done, Mr. Wilson comes over and grabs me and says, “Listen, if you get in a fight on the basketball court, all you’re going to do is hurt your team because you are not the type of player who should be an enforcer. Let somebody else do that.” He goes on, “I don’t want to see you fighting. I don’t want to see you running away from a fight, but I don’t want to see you looking for a fight because that is not who you are and that is not the best role for you.”
He tells me that when I make varsity, he needs me to play smart, not get drawn into stupid technical fouls and dumb fights.
I never forget that.
Dr. J Page 7
