The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  As we sit in the living room, the TV game show Deal or No Deal heats up. The contestant, an African-American woman from Fort Worth, Texas, named Wynetta, eventually takes the deal from Howie Mandel, settling for $115,000. Will, Cheryl, and I groan when we see that she would have won $1 million if she had held out. Cheryl scoops up Imani and heads upstairs to bed. In the dining room, the three other kids keep chattering as they begin a game of Monopoly.

  Will tells me that he loves having so many kids in the house. It reminds him of his own childhood, when guys like Damian, JT, and Myran would often stay overnight, or, in some cases, live with the McClains for weeks at a time. “If you had a situation and they could help you, and it wasn’t going to put none of us out, then it was, ‘Hey, we’ll work with it,’ ” he says of his parents.

  Will shares his dad’s love of sports and coaching. In the summers, he plays right field for a semipro softball team. The team’s sponsor, a local Hooter’s, pays for the players to compete in tournaments in places such as St. Louis and Las Vegas. Every spring, Will coaches girls’ fast-pitch softball at Garfield High School. This year, he tells me, he’s going to coach Kelia’s fourth- and fifth-grade basketball team. “Last year they were running buck wild and I was sitting on the sideline and I made up my mind, ‘I’m coaching,’ ” he says, laughing. “I think my wife is going to help me, so it’s going to be fun.”

  When we were kids, everyone called Willie McClain Sr. “Big Willie” and Will Jr. “Little Willie.” The close identification between the two has continued. Both have worked at Zion Prep and are known for their involvement in coaching. Willie Sr.’s profile has increased over the years. He’s been a sports star at Garfield High School, vice principal of Zion Prep, an ordained minister, and now pastor of his own church.

  I ask Will if it’s been hard to step out of his dad’s shadow. “You know what?” he says. “I’m still in his shadow, to this day. I am still in his shadow. I have the name, I have the same look, I have the same persona. And you know what? I have accepted it. I am still Little Willie. June Bug’s son. And to this day, I’m grown, at Garfield coaching fast pitch, people say, ‘Hey, you June Bug’s son?’ And then they’ll tell me a story about when he was in high school.”

  In 2004, Cheryl was offered a teaching position at a U.S. military base in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Will and Cheryl, who had applied through the State Department, were eager to live overseas for a few years. They thought it would be a great opportunity to see the world and to expose the kids to life outside of the United States. In the end, Cheryl had to turn the job down because she was pregnant with Imani. Though they have submitted an application every year since, nothing has come through.

  To add some money to the family budget, Will worked for several years as a bartender at a nearby Indian reservation casino. He made good money—up to $700 in tips on a Friday or Saturday night—but had to quit after he developed health problems, including high blood pressure. Going from teaching to bartending meant spending up to sixteen hours a day on his feet, which was exhausting. It also took him away from the family too much.

  When I ask if it’s hard to build up much savings on the salaries of two teachers, Will nods. “Exactly. But we live comfortable, the kids live comfortable, we don’t want for much. Just a couple hours here and there away from the kids is what we want most of all,” he says, breaking into laughter. “I think we’d take a two-day getaway from the kids over three thousand dollars any day of the week!”

  A little bit after eleven o’clock, the kids are still playing Monopoly. One of the last questions I ask Will before I go is what he thinks about being a father. In the several conversations we’ve had, Will has always been lighthearted, genial, and quick with a joke. I’m surprised at the abrupt change that overcomes him. His face turns serious, his body stiffens, and his voice drops a notch.

  “You live for your kids,” he tells me. “When you don’t have any kids, you do what you want, even if it’s harmful to yourself, or if it’s unsafe, or you know it’s dangerous. It’s that adrenaline to do it anyway. But once you have your kids you no longer live for you. You have to live for your child, because if anything happens to you, who takes care of your child? If anything happened to you, how is your child’s mental state going to be knowing something happened to their father? You have to make that conscious decision and it has to be the right one, because you want to be around—no, you must be around—to see your children grow up and live life.

  “I can’t wait to see my son’s first dunk in high school, I can’t wait to see my daughter, who I don’t know if she’s going to be a linebacker or a catcher in fast pitch, but I can’t wait to see her hit the ball or tackle somebody. Or whatever they want to do, whatever their accomplishments. My younger stepdaughter is a phenomenal soccer player, she has skills that she doesn’t know she has—I can’t wait to see her score her first goal in high school, can’t wait. The older one wants to be a writer. These are things you live for, and you can’t go out and drink all night and drive home. You can’t do those things no more, because you have people depending on you to see these events happen, to be there to make sure they’re safe, to be there to make sure they do their homework. That’s what papahood’s about. Fatherhood is being a father to your household, it’s being a father to your children. So that’s what I do.”

  …

  One morning over breakfast at a South End IHOP, JT pinpoints where his childhood took a turn. “Right after our team—right after we hooked up with you guys—that’s when it all went downhill,” he says. “I wish we could’ve spent more time playing ball together, you know, kept it going for a few more years.”

  The team, he tells me, was like family, with Randy and Willie as father figures and us players as brothers. “Even if a guy on that team wasn’t very good, we still supported him,” he says. “If he messes up, or he blew the last shot, you still support him, you know? And I think that’s what we did.”

  After many conversations with JT, I realize that our team was the last point in his life when he had been involved in a group that he felt wholly positive about. This sense of contributing his talents to a larger effort was important to him, just as it was to every other guy. As we got older, each player moved through a series of institutions and structures, some consciously chosen, some by default. These structures provided the space within which each guy would form his own personal meaning of manhood. On our team, the boundary, drawn along class lines, was stark.

  When Sean, for example, decided he wanted to leave Washington, D.C., where he was a staffer for a Republican senator, he landed a job back in Seattle as a spokesman for Boeing. He found it wasn’t for him. “It was so big and so bureaucratic and stifled independent thought,” he says of working at the company. “You had to have ten people lined up with you in a row agreeing with any new idea to get that new idea advanced.” The company did pick up the tab for Sean to go to law school at night, and he found a better fit at the prosecutor’s office upon graduation. “What I do now, it’s competitive but structured. In court there are rules you have to follow. You rise and fall on your intellectual ability to work with your case within those rules,” he says. “You’re engaging a part of our society. You’re doing something that has great meaning.”

  After Eric found it hard to settle in at Deloitte & Touche, a corporate accounting firm, he moved on to work for the city. “I think it’s a little tougher as an African American in a corporate culture,” he says. “It’s not impossible. A lot of things have to line up for you and you have to have a certain type of personality.” Eric jokes he’s thought about going back to get an M.B.A. or law degree “to keep up a little bit” with his wife, a professor. Overall, though, he says he’s found his meaning outside of the workplace. “I have my family and my friends and that’s what I need. Work is just what it is, it’s just a way to pay for things. I’m not all super career-oriented, like my wife. I just, you know, I got bills to pay, s
o this is what I gotta do.”

  Of all my teammates, Chris is the most outspoken on trying to find a healthy masculinity—he wants to enjoy competition without letting it turn into a desire to puff himself up by beating other people. A few years ago, he left his job brokering health insurance plans and joined a start-up founded by another Lakeside grad. The firm has developed “wellness” software that companies pay to access. Employees go online and enter personal information about health issues such as how much they exercise, their mental well-being, and nutrition (the data on each individual are not shared with the employer). The software then comes up with programs that guide people toward leading healthier lives in general, or progress toward specific goals, such as quitting smoking. The payoff for companies is lower health insurance costs. Chris has found the new job invigorating—though there is more financial instability at the start-up, he deeply believes in the mission of helping people find ways to live healthier lives. As a company principal, he has a personal involvement in the firm’s planning and success.

  One afternoon, when we are in Oregon for a wedding, my wife and I stop in and surprise Maitland at the winery where he works. He takes us on an extensive tour through the vineyard and the production area, precisely explaining the winemaking process. It’s clear that when it comes to wine, Maitland is exacting in how he wants the product to come out.

  We end up in Mait’s basement office, where he works at a desk laid out with the beakers, flasks, and chemistry tools he uses to monitor the composition of his wines. Mait quietly jokes with the two other winemakers who share the space. The job, I see, gives Mait the opportunity to follow something through from start to finish, make a tangible product, and work within a group of like-minded people who all have the same goal. It is, in a way, a corrective to some of his earlier experiences, such as the pressure he felt to compete in high school basketball. “You know, when I manage people on the job, I’m more concerned that we work as a team, and there’s no winner and loser other than everybody,” Mait says. “I don’t need to prove to anybody that I know anything at all.”

  As we entered early adulthood in the 1990s, what had been seen as the traditional economic path to manhood for many—get a job and work at it until you retired—was no longer a possibility for most people. When my mom was a girl in the 1950s, for example, my grandfather came home every day from his job as an engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation at five. He went upstairs and changed out of his shirt and tie into his leisure clothes. He then came back downstairs and read the paper until six, which was when my grandmother was expected to have dinner on the table. The gender roles in the family were very clear—for example, my grandfather mowed the lawn on the weekends while my grandmother pulled weeds. One was men’s work, one was women’s. When my grandmother talked about getting a part-time job, my grandfather would have none of it—he already earned enough, so why would she need to work?

  For middle-class people, this had been the model for decades—men went off to the office or factory, worked as part of a team within a formalized structure (the corporation or the state), played their part, and came home to the women and children. This had been the pattern since industrialization in the mid- and late 1800s, when youth sports leagues such as the YMCA and the AAU had been established. With men leaving farms to work in offices and factories, the idea of Muscular Christianity was that boys needed organized structures in which they could develop physically and enter into competition to avoid becoming too feminized. The skills learned on the field—stamina, discipline, sacrificing for the good of the team—were supposed to translate later into success in the working world. This was still the model when we were boys, and Coach McClain picked up on its tenets, drilling into us that we needed to think about the good of the group, not our own individual statistics. Anyone who began to showboat to the detriment of the team would be rewarded with a seat on the bench.

  By 1986, though, it also was clear that individual stardom could pay off very well, even if you ditched the team. That April, Michael Jordan, then in his second year in the NBA and playing guard for the mediocre Chicago Bulls, scored an astounding sixty-three points against Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics in a playoff game. At our next practice, Tyrell and Will Jr. relived Jordan’s exploits, imitating his moves as the rest of us formed an appreciative peanut gallery. “Bird didn’t know what to do!” Tyrell said, making us all laugh by miming a flat-footed and confused Larry Bird getting juked by Jordan. (Despite Jordan’s bravura performance, the Bulls were still swept by the Celtics in the series, three games to zero.)

  At that point, Jordan was simply a preternaturally talented basketball player, not a global brand. The seeds had been planted, though—before his rookie year, Nike paid Jordan an unprecedented $500,000 to endorse its shoes. With their bold black-and-red design and maverick image—the sneakers had been banned by the NBA for violating its uniform regulations—Air Jordans were snapped up by both suburban white kids and black kids from the city. Nike (another Pacific Northwest company) offshored production to countries such as Vietnam, China, Mexico, and Indonesia, where workers earned dollars a day making sneakers that sold for more than $100 in the United States. Nike’s payout to Jordan soon rose to $20 million annually; by 2008, the Air Jordan line was banking more than $800 million a year in sales.

  Outspoken sports stars such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, and Jackie Robinson had all come up in an age when blacks were routinely excluded from the economic riches their labor produced, and corporations were hardly throwing money at them to endorse their products. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, got a cut. In addition to Nike, he did ads for McDonald’s, Hanes, Gatorade, Coca-Cola, MCI, and Chevrolet, among others. With so much money at stake, Jordan studiously avoided making any political statements in a vein similar to his predecessors—he was, in fact, sometimes said to have “transcended” race. In an age where images of athletic virtuosity could be beamed everywhere, Jordan rose above not only his teammates—whom he once called his “supporting cast”—but also his sport. As one of the most famous people in the world, his shoes and apparel sold to people who knew little to nothing about basketball or Chicago—I once saw a billboard of Jordan soaring for a dunk next to the central plaza in Dakar, Senegal, not exactly a hotbed of basketball. The lesson was that the rewards went to the superstar floating over the court, not the teammates below rebounding for him.

  This tension between the ideals of working as a team and the demands of the individual star wasn’t lost on Willie McClain Sr. A passionate believer in using basketball as a vehicle through which to connect to young men and teach them life skills, McClain continued to coach at both public and private high schools in Seattle after our team disbanded. In 2001 he traveled to Las Vegas as an assistant coach with a team of local high school basketball all-stars who were set to play in a tournament completely funded by Nike. McClain was there to teach defense, but he found that the stars of the team weren’t interested in what he had to say. There were about two hundred college coaches at the tournament to recruit. Though the coaches weren’t allowed to approach players, they could speak to them if spoken to. So when sought-after players went to the bathroom, college coaches would follow them in and stand at neighboring urinals, just to give the players the opportunity to start a conversation. McClain left the tournament disillusioned. “It was just a meat factory,” he says. “It doesn’t give kids a sense of anything but money. There was no value system.”

  In the late 1960s, my grandfather took a position as a corporate vice president for ARCO, leaving Hanford to work in New York and then Los Angeles. A staunch Republican, Catholic, and member of the Elks Club, he was blindsided when he was laid off in a corporate restructuring in the 1970s. Then in his midfifties, he swallowed his ego and returned to Eastern Washington, where he went back to work at Hanford at a much reduced salary. He was probably lucky to have a job. As the 1980s arrived, corporate restructuring and downsizing increased pace. Between 1979 and 1995, about 43
million American jobs were eliminated. Although the economy was creating new employment, by the mid-1990s only an estimated 35 percent of those jobs paid as well as the ones that were lost. The reconfiguring of corporate America was joined by the movement of women into the workforce as well as vocal calls by minorities such as African Americans for inclusion. This shifting economic landscape ushered in what was labeled in the media a “crisis in masculinity,” or, as Newsweek put it, “white male paranoia.”

  The feeling was vividly expressed by the 1993 movie Falling Down, in which Michael Douglas plays a laid-off Los Angeles defense industry worker known for most of the film by his vanity license plate, D-FENS. When his car breaks down in a traffic jam on the freeway, D-FENS abandons it. In an effort to retake his place at the head of the family he’s lost, he begins to walk toward Venice Beach, where his ex-wife and daughter live. As he passes through the multiethnic L.A. that lives on ground level in sight of the skyscrapers downtown, he goes on an increasingly violent rampage, trashing a Korean-owned grocery store and tangling with Mexican gangbangers (adding to the mix, he also kills the neo-Nazi owner of an army supply store and destroys the golf cart of two white golfers on a private course). At the end of the movie, before he is shot by the detective who’s been tracking him, D-FENS says, “I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I help to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. But instead they give it to the plastic surgeons. You know, they lied to me.”