He nods, shakes our hands, and goes back to unpacking.
Mom looks at the knives, obviously concerned.
“I’m fine, Mom. Now you got a long drive home.”
As a scholarship athlete, I arrive on campus a few days before most of my fellow incoming freshmen. I’m to meet with my tutors and get familiar with the athletic facilities and my new environment. With practice every day and a full academic course load, Jack Leaman and my freshman coach, Pete Broaca, want us to become familiar with the campus and our new routines.
I feel for the first time how alone I am. Leon hasn’t arrived on campus yet. We have another friend on her way to UMass, Coach Wilson’s daughter Carmen. But for now, I am alone, and as I walk down a brick path between lawns, I search the faces of my incoming classmates and the upperclassmen, those who are already on campus and those who perhaps never left for the summer, and I notice that, for this evening, at least, there are no other black faces, or Hispanic or Asian for that matter. I knew there were just 125 black students in the incoming 4,000-plus-student freshman class, but I hadn’t considered what that would actually feel like.
Hempstead and Roosevelt were both integrated communities, with whites and blacks in equal measure. Now, I realize, going on to a big state school like UMass means going into, to some degree, the white world. I feel I am prepared but I am also, for the first time, intimidated. We have a telephone in our room, and when I get back, I plan to call Coach Wilson, just to check in, tell him I’ve arrived.
My roommate, Tim, has unpacked even more knives, and spring traps and snares.
“What are you going to do with all those knives?” I ask.
He smiles. “I’ll show you. We’re gonna have some fun.”
“What do you mean?”
I’ve never seen these kinds of traps before, they’re like mousetraps only larger, and the snares are made of some kind of synthetic material, the white nylon-like rope looking like little bones against the wood veneer of the desk.
Tim grew up on a farm in the vicinity of North Adams, and like me he is the first in his family to go to college.
I explain where I’m from, Roosevelt, Long Island, and I try to describe my suburban upbringing. I tell him that I feel like I grew up somewhere between the city and the country. We had trees, and a lake over in Roosevelt Park, and in the summer, of course, there was the beach.
Tim nods, thinking over what I’m telling him.
“Did you have indoor plumbing?” he asks.
I don’t know what that means. “You mean a bathroom?”
He nods.
“Well, yeah, of course.”
Tim shakes his head. “Then you’re city folks.”
He goes back to work looking over his nooses and snares.
I think about calling Coach Wilson but then decide to go out for a walk instead.
2.
Every morning, before the heat makes the gym stifling, I go over to the Boyden Building, where I shoot a few hundred jump shots, foul shots, and layups and then do my leaping drills and finally, after about two hours, I’ll take off my shirt and count out my steps and then throw down a few dunks. By the time I’m finished, it’s so hot that I’m drinking about a gallon of water from the fountain and then lying back on one of the benches. I meet a few of my future teammates over at Boyden, and after my workouts, we’ll play some two-on-two or three-on-three or even get a pickup game going with other students. There’s a couple of freshman five-foot-ten shooters named Mike Pagliara and John Betancourt, both white kids, and a six-foot-five forward named Rick Vogeley. Among the upperclassmen working out at Boyden that late summer are Ken Mathias, our tallest player at six foot six, and the senior captain, Ray Ellerbrook. I’d met Betancourt and Pagliara before, when I came up to visit the campus, but both of them size me up.
“Julius, man, you’ve grown,” they tell me.
They’re not the first to point that out. I played my senior year at six foot three, and right now I’m just an inch and a half shorter than Mathias.
My first taste of college-level ball comes at Boyden, during these summer pickup games, which introduces us to our teammates and establishes a basketball pecking order. Most of us, having been the best players at our respective high schools, don’t trust another player unless he’s staring down a layup. This is especially true of Betancourt and Pagliara, two gunners who always think they’re open, and every time I get an offensive rebound, they are looking at me, wiggling their fingers and nodding with their eyes wide. The basket always looks gigantic to them.
But very soon, my teammates, especially the guards, recognize that if they get me the ball in my spots, on the left baseline or down low, then I will not only shoot a very high percentage shot, but if I miss, there is a good chance I will get a rebound and if I don’t put that back up, I will kick it out for an open jumper.
After a few mornings of workouts and then afternoons of pickup ball, I arrive at the gym to find about sixty people sitting up in the bleachers. I’d noticed small crowds coming to watch me work out, but this is the first time I realize that these crowds are growing, and they don’t stay to watch the pickup games, they come to watch me dunk the ball. Because of Lew Alcindor’s dominance at UCLA, the NCAA has made the slam dunk illegal in college games, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it during warm-ups or practices. Just like back home, the dunk remains the ultimate crowd-pleasing shot. I showboat a little for my new classmates, throwing in some reverses and then rock-the-cradles and make sure they will leave talking about this new player they’ve seen over at Boyden.
Betancourt and I quickly become friends. He’s from Westwood, New Jersey, which I tell him must be the middle of nowhere because I’ve never barnstormed a game out there. But I like John, and those first few weeks of school we start to hang out, and he takes me to a few fraternity parties. He and Pagliara have decided to pledge a frat, and they are urging me to join them as Kappa Alphas.
My new roommate, Tim, is turning out to be a difficult guy to get comfortable with. He’s almost always in the room, except for a few hours just before dawn when he slips out with some of his strange trapping gear. I’ve never met anyone like him, but then, besides my cousins down in South Carolina, I don’t know too many people who grew up on a farm. Maybe he’s used to getting up before sunup to milk cows or something, so it’s just a habit he can’t shake.
I join Betancourt and Pags at a few frat parties. The music at these parties is always good: they play some Motown, some Aretha Franklin, and plenty of Beatles. While I don’t share in the alcohol, I do enjoy the camaraderie with my teammates and their friends. Being a highly recruited athlete does make it easier to slide into a social life on campus, and plenty of the fraternities make it clear they would like me to rush. The Kappas have a reputation as the frat for jocks, and John and Pags have already decided to pledge. They tell me again that I should join, that Rick Vogeley is also pledging.
“Come on,” John is telling me. “You join a frat and you have people looking out for you.”
I don’t need anyone looking out for me.
There is something about the pledging process that turns me off. I don’t like the ritual humiliation, the paddling, the secret vows, and it seems that the social life of a fraternity revolves around drinking. Also, I would have to give up a lot of my personal life if I join a fraternity. I tell the brothers I’m not rushing and head back to my dorm.
When I get back, I find that Tim is seated at his desk, wearing thick gloves and carefully scrutinizing what appear to be little brown mittens.
I look closer and realize they are dead chipmunks. He has laid them out on a cutting board. This is what he’s been doing every morning, going out to trap chipmunks.
He looks up at me, a strange smile on his face.
“Julius, would you like to cut the head off?”
“What?”
He nods. “Here, watch.”
And he takes one of his large hunting knives, turns the chipmunk over, and adjust
s it on the board, sort of probing the animal with the point of the knife. When he has found the spot he is looking for, he presses down with the handle, and the animal’s neck is cut with a crunching noise that reminds me of a knuckle cracking.
He slides the head to the edge of the board and then pulls over another chipmunk and gets to work severing that head.
I’m terrified. “Why are you doing that to chipmunks?”
He nods. “I have some squirrels, too.”
After that, I feel like I’m stuck between this crazy animal vivisectionist and the endless keg parties of fraternity row. And I don’t want either. I just want a place where I can sleep without listening to the arteries and spinal columns of small mammals being severed.
3.
Finally, after a few nights of this, I go see Jack Leaman and tell him that they have me in a room with a madman.
I explain what Tim has been doing.
Coach Leaman shakes his head. “He does what?”
I tell him again.
Coach sits back behind his desk. “This is a first.”
I tell Jack that he has to either get me a new roommate or give me a single, because I can’t live with Tim.
“Let me see what I can do.”
Jack arranges for Tim to be moved to another floor, to a single of his own. I stay in our room, which gives me among the most spacious singles in the dorm. Now, I’m thinking, now I can enjoy college life.
I sign up for a full schedule: psych, soc, English 101, History 101, mathematics. I don’t have to declare a major yet but I’m taking all the prerequisites for a business major.
Freshmen aren’t allowed to play varsity basketball, so instead of playing for Jack Leaman, I’m playing for Pete Broaca, our freshman coach. A medium-height, well-built man with slicked-back black hair, he seems to have a complete lack of empathy for his charges. He runs our practices as if determined to break us and make us quit school and surrender our scholarships to tougher kids who are more worthy of playing for UMass.
He has this one drill where we all stand on the baseline and he rolls the ball out, and two of us are supposed to sprint and fight for the ball. It’s like going after a fumble on the football field, only on a hardwood basketball court. Broaca rolls the ball out and I dive for it and I get it first, but when I come up, my right hand doesn’t feel right. I can’t bend my thumb or squeeze my fist with any strength.
“Coach, my hand is killing me.”
“You’re soft, Erving,” Broaca says. “Now get back in line.”
After practice I go to see the trainer who sends me to get an X-ray. The doctor comes back and tells me I have a fractured thumb. He sets it in a cast and says I’m done practicing for a few weeks.
When I show the cast to Broaca in his office, he shakes his head.
“Candy ass,” he mutters.
So I miss the last few weeks of practice recovering from my injury. I have nothing to do but work on my left-handed dribbling and shooting. I develop as many lefty moves around the basket as I have right-handed moves, and I am able to tip and then control the ball entirely with my left hand, which will allow me to keep another player off me with the right. I also spend that time working on my running and leaping. And I have to make sure I know the plays, which I do by studying them on my own.
For all of Broaca’s complaining about my supposed goldbricking, once my cast is off and the season begins, he has me playing more minutes than anyone else. As usual, it is my rebounding that keeps me on the floor. Because I’m more of an “amphibian” than I was before, a two-handed player who can use either hand to tip a ball or block a shot, I’m more effective at pulling down rebounds. I find that even though we’re in college, and the competition is supposed to be tougher than back in Roosevelt, I’m still able to exert my will upon the game.
For me, that means getting offensive rebounds and putbacks, and making low post moves that start between the left elbow and baseline. From there, I have plenty of options, almost all of them bad for my opponents. I can face up, jab step, and then surge toward the daylight, where I jump over a shorter opponent, or fake the defender so he leaves his feet, and I can go under him and lay it off the glass. I feel like if I can see the glass pane of the backboard, then I can find the right combination of angle and English to bank the ball into the hoop.
Broaca, once he’s done trying to break us, turns out to be serious about developing us for the varsity team, and he urges me to improve my jump shot, to extend my range so that my 15-footer becomes more of a weapon. In practice, he has me shoot thousands of jumpers from the left elbow, from the left baseline, telling me that if teams give me that shot, and I can’t make it, then they will be imposing their will upon me.
I won’t let that happen.
We start the freshman season burning through our conference schedule, easily beating Yankee Conference foes Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, and also handling out-of-conference teams like Rider, Boston University, and Syracuse. Ironically, our toughest game is against a nearby prep school, Rockwood Academy, where players who need to make up some academic credits do a sort of thirteenth grade before going on to a four-year program. Among their players is a pair of highly touted, future All-Americans named Henry Wilmore and Ron Rutledge. Wilmore will go on to play for Michigan where he will average nearly 24 points a game for the next three seasons. Rutledge will star at St. John’s.
Wilmore is from New York City, a Manhattan boy, and is already a playground legend. We’ve been hearing of each other for years. So this is like a game from Harlem somehow airlifted to the Curry Hicks Cage. It’s the only time all season that we’ll find ourselves behind at halftime. Wilmore’s got the kind of all-around game that Broaca is urging me to develop. He’s a big, beefy player, about six foot three, with a sweet shot that he can create off the dribble or on a catch and shoot. And he can battle inside for rebounds. He has these broad shoulders that are boxing me out. I’m still skinny, though not as much of a chicken-chest as I was back in Roosevelt, and so Wilmore is succeeding in pushing me off the block. He scores double figures in the first half, and at halftime Broaca lays into us, giving us the evil stare. Every aspect of our game, he tells us, is the pits.
He fixes his gaze on center Tommy Austin, who at six foot eight is our tallest player. “You’re letting a guy six foot three push you around. Tommy, you’re getting PUSHED AROUND.”
Broaca is a hands-on coach who is not shy about getting in our faces or jabbing a finger into our chests. “You need to wake up, Tommy!”
Then he does something I’ve never seen before. Broaca turns red, his forehead pulsing, and he comes over to where Tommy is standing and grabs him with two hands by the front of his jersey and starts pushing him back so that Tommy actually falls into his locker, his legs and arms sticking out. “Candy ass!”
Then he storms out of the locker room.
We go out and light up Rockwood in the second half. I finish with over 20 points and 20 rebounds. I figure if I can play with Wilmore, and impose my will on his team, then I should be okay when we move up to varsity. Our freshman squad goes 17-0.
At home, we often play in front of a few thousand spectators before the varsity game tips off. After our game, a bunch of us freshmen come back out to watch the varsity play. The funny thing is, I notice the stands usually empty out in the interim.
I’m sitting with John Betancourt when I point this out to him.
“Strange how the students seem to like freshman ball more than varsity,” I say.
John looks at me and laughs. “They only come out to watch us because of you, Julius.”
4.
UMass is certainly more challenging academically than athletically. Coach Leaman has made available a room in the athletic department where I meet with graduate student tutors who are helping me adjust to college-level work. I understand most of the material, but I find that we are required to prove our knowledge to a degree that I’ve never had to before. Wri
ting college papers is a very different proposition than high school homework. I realize that though I took college-prep courses at Roosevelt, I’m not as well prepared as the kids who come from better high schools or private schools. They have already been trained to function in this setting, the ways to organize and structure an essay or a précis. I’ve never even heard of a précis. There is a kind of code, I realize, of how to talk and write. In college, we are expected to show up already knowing this code. But for those of us from more modest backgrounds, these codes are mysterious. Even the diction of the academic paper is new to me. It’s one of the greatest adjustments black college athletes have to make; we almost have to relearn how to speak and write. It is an intimidating and often overlooked part of the journey, and we know of too many cases where an athlete can’t make that transition.
I struggle, first with accepting that my own diction and style will not work in a college course, and then with adapting to what is required of me. When I show my work to my tutors, they tell me that perhaps there is a better way to say what I want to say. They explain that it doesn’t sound, well, collegiate.
“But do you understand what I’m writing?”
Yes, they do, but they explain that sometimes, in college, you use different vocabulary, longer sentences.
“This looks all right to me,” I say.
My tutors proofread my work, rewriting some paragraphs to show me how they think I should write it. I tell them that I think my way is also correct.
They point out that this is about getting a good grade, staying eligible, remaining on track to graduate. Correct doesn’t enter into it.
“Look,” an English tutor tells me, “the best you’re going to get is a C. I’m going to change this, and you are going to get an A or a B. Isn’t that better?”
All right, that’s an okay deal.
This is how things are done in college. This is the form.
I like form. I like order. Okay, that makes sense. Grammar is a kind of order; it is making sense of language, putting words in their proper places so that they line up and meaning can be extracted. It should be efficient, I think; it should be clear.
Dr. J Page 12
