Got to Give the People What They Want: True Stories and Flagrant Opinions from Center Court

by Jalen Rose

  Before all that, Detroit’s neighborhoods were stable. Perry’s parents were just like my family, and like so many other black folks in Detroit: Everyone worked in the factory, and a lot of them became first-time home owners. Detroit represented the American dream to them. In the ’60s, Detroit had the highest rate of home ownership among blacks in the country. They took pride in their neighborhoods and in supporting the young people there. Perry benefited from that upbringing, was a basketball star at Southwestern, and went to college, getting his teaching degree as well as a master’s degree in guidance counseling. Then he went right back where he started: to work as a teacher, first in a local elementary school, and eventually, in 1979, as the basketball coach at Southwestern.

  Through the ’80s, Coach Watson built Southwestern into one of the city’s best programs and one of the best programs in the entire country. The ingredients were simple: the best players wanted to play for him because they knew he was going to make them as great as their potential allowed. Then, from there, like any successful program, it was a cycle: winning bred more winning. More and more kids like me in Detroit wanted to join up, like a club. Coach Watson’s club was a whole lot cooler than hotwiring cars, or smoking crack, or getting into whatever trouble was waiting for you on the street. The program was hard to get into, and it was not much easier to maintain membership.

  At Southwestern, you couldn’t just show up and join the team; you had to first play junior varsity. In addition, Coach Watson wasn’t just running the varsity, he doubled as every player’s guidance counselor. That was how he kept an eye on you in class, to make sure you weren’t messing around. Even though we were just teenagers, we all bought in, because we wanted to play for the team, and we wanted to win. It’s not much different in the NBA, to be quite honest. On bad teams, guys don’t buy in. But trade a player to San Antonio, suddenly he’s a different guy in practice, in games, in everything.

  When I came in as a freshman, Coach Watson’s teams had been great, but not the best. The details are still painful to recount. They’d lost seven straight state championship games. Seven straight to stars like Glen Rice, Andre Rison, and Jeff Grayer. They were like Jerry West’s Lakers teams in the 1960s. The losses gave every new player who came in a goal: to be part of the team that won the first state title. There was another stat, too, that drew us in (and impressed our parents): In his twelve years as coach, 96 percent of Coach Watson’s players went to college. And not just the national recruits, the All-Americans, and the All-State players, but the reserves, too. Perry used his connections to get guys scholarships to have at least a shot at an education, and a different kind of future than they would have if they stayed in the city.

  Why’d he do it? Why’d he care so much? Because as a child of 1960s Detroit, he’d been taught to care about the neighborhood, help nurture the community, and most of all, make a difference.

  My education at Southwestern started the summer before freshman year. To play basketball in the program, you had to run cross-country in the fall and, even before that, prove you were in shape by participating in a forty-day boot camp workout supervised by Tony Jones, the JV coach. Conditioning was key if you were going to play at Southwestern, since Coach Watson ran a run-and-jump press that was akin to Nolan Richardson’s “40 Minutes of Hell” at Arkansas and the “amoeba defense” at UNLV. Before that boot camp prior to my freshman year, all my conditioning work had been, to put it mildly, improvised. I used to wake up on Saturdays, watch cartoons, and alternate doing push-ups and sit-ups during the commercials. And then there was the time my buddy Mike Ham and I ran the three miles from his house on Virginia Park all the way to St. Cecilia’s—with ankle weights on. Our thought was that when we took the ankle weights off, we’d feel lighter and be able to jump through the gym. It didn’t work; it just made our feet sore.

  The Southwestern camp, by contrast, was actually run similar to the way a lot of European clubs train today, with all of the players doing the same skills—centers working on crossover dribbles, power forwards practicing jump shots. Another freshman, Voshon Lenard, and a sophomore, Howard Eisley, were right next to me, all of us working on different skills than we were used to.

  One of my biggest issues at that time was jumping off my left foot to make a right-handed layup. (Remember, I’m a lefty.) I worked on it for a week, and then one day, finally, just as I got it, we went outside for a break to get some air. I remember that day because it was right when KFC had come out with Chicken Littles, those little chicken burgers you could eat twenty of at a time. And outside was a guy who I’d never met, but who I liked instantly because in the open trunk of his car there were at least ten boxes of Chicken Littles. He’d brought them for all the players to chow down on during their break.

  The guy’s name was Ed Martin.

  —

  IN A place like northwest Detroit, it took a village. A lot of people looking out for a lot of other people, a lot of people working in the gray areas and the margins of the system to make sure everyone could pay their rent, pay their heating bills, their car bills, or anything else they might have needed. Ed Martin was one of those helpers. Like almost everyone else, he started out working in a factory, but then got injured on the job, which forced him to go on disability. So he got involved in a few other things, including a little bit of gambling (nothing unfamiliar in Detroit) and a little bit of loaning money to people who needed it. And then there was another thing that made Ed a lot like plenty of other people we all knew: He was a big high school basketball fan.

  Ed had a big smile and an infectious personality and knew a lot of people, including Perry Watson. And like me, Ed was a big Southwestern fan. Hence he showed up that day—and lots of others—to bring us some Chicken Littles, or doughnuts, or whatever. I remember the first time I had seafood pizza—pizza with crab on it—was from a pie Ed Martin brought us from Pizza Papalis after an AAU game. Ed did other things, too—for young players all across the city, playing for all different schools and programs. If a kid was playing on old, torn sneakers and couldn’t afford new ones, Ed would buy him a new pair at the old Blackburn Sporting Goods on Michigan Avenue. If he heard a mom had lost her job and he saw her son without a winter coat in January, he’d buy the kid a coat from Burlington Coat Factory. That kind of thing. Ed had some money in his pocket, and he wanted to spread it around the neighborhood. Basketball was how he got to know the kids, and basketball players were young people who had shots of getting college scholarships and doing great things with their lives. It made sense to invest in the future of the city.

  We called Ed the Godfather—me, everyone on Southwestern, and plenty of others, including a tall kid who had joined the Superfriends named Chris Webber. I actually remember the first time Chris came in the gym. He had on this crazy outfit with all these layers, because it was freezing cold in the middle of winter in Detroit, and that’s what you did to stay warm. But once all those sweats came off, and this gangly dude was in his short shorts, it was pretty clear how good he was. I think Chris was born at more than ten pounds and was always supertall for his age, but he was also superathletic. By eighth grade, every coach in the city was salivating for the chance to have him on their team. His mom had other ideas, deciding Chris would go to a private school, Detroit Country Day. It was in a whole different world from ours and would give Chris an entirely different high school experience than any of the rest of us had. We still played together in AAU ball on the Superfriends, though, and that included a lot of long rides to travel tournaments with Better Made chips, Faygo Pop, Run-DMC tapes playing on the bus. And a lot of nights in motels drinking Olde English and Wild Irish Rose and Mad Dog 20/20. We had our fun, and through it all, Chris and I became better and better friends.

  —

  WHEN I was young, I never focused on what we didn’t have, because I didn’t know what else was out there. If we didn’t have heat, well, down the block they’ve got ten foreclosure notices posted on the front door. Though one of the
things unique about my block on Appoline Street in particular was how stable it was. The Holmes family was across the street. My friend Trent lived there. His grandfather, Mr. Holmes, had lost his leg in the armed forces, but he still went to work every day and was another guy to look up to and talk to once in a while on the porch. The Robinsons were next door to them. Willie “Vedo” Robinson and I were the Dream Team whenever we played ball on the virtual full court we’d set up on the street with two hoops. Both those families, plus the Eubankses, the Greens, the Warrens—they all still live on the block today. They’re good people who created what seemed to me like our own little nongated gated community.

  Still, as I got older, I started learning a little bit more about how the world worked, with regards to rich people and poor people and the reality that what was available to some wasn’t available to others. Eventually, once you overhear your folks talking enough, you figure out that the reason it took ten years for Uncle Len to get a mechanic’s job at the actual Pontiac plant, rather than a dealership, was because they weren’t looking to hire any black mechanics. And the reason Uncle Paramore never had a prayer at getting a job in the art department at Ford, rather than the part of the factory where they worked with raw coke fuel, was because black people weren’t hired to work in the art department at Ford. When the things in front of you in life reveal how messed up the system is, you lose faith in the system pretty quickly. As a young kid, that could mean getting into a lot of fights. As you get older, it’s more about how you think. You don’t trust what people say just because they sound like they know what they’re talking about. You develop a contrarian attitude. Your instinct is to disagree with the status quo, and then, if you can, to try and shake it up.

  This informed who I grew into as a young man and as a basketball player. I was the kind of leader who wasn’t going to stay quiet in the locker room. I had learned early that if you don’t say what’s on your mind to improve a situation, you’re a fool. Part of the reason I was always competitive was, everywhere I looked, I saw things that I didn’t have. Things I wanted.

  Figuring out how to channel that competitiveness the right way was a long process. For example, when the Superfriends went to nationals in St. Louis, we came up against a team from Reston, Virginia, which included a player named Grant Hill. This team had new shoes, nice uniforms and bags; they had fans in the crowd who had had the means to travel to the tournament with the kids, and they had these cheesy organized cheers—stuff that was totally foreign to us. I pegged them as phonies and told all my teammates how this was going to be the easiest game all year. Well, we got on the court, and couldn’t get the ball past the midline. They were much more organized, much more disciplined, and we got crushed by twenty-five points. Maybe those guys had more than us, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t play ball.

  Losses like that taught me how to value winning, whoever the opponent. I eventually hung three jerseys in my locker at Michigan. Lawrence Taylor and Deion Sanders embodied the kind of rebels that I embraced, but Magic Johnson out of East Lansing, Michigan, was my ultimate favorite. Because of where he was from, yes. Because he was a tall point guard like me, yes. But more than anything, because he was all about winning. (Okay, that twenty-five-year $25 million contract he signed after his rookie season didn’t hurt either.)

  Playing for Southwestern we were, for whatever reason, to certain people in the city, the villains. High school basketball got a lot of coverage in the local paper, the Detroit Free Press, and one of the main writers about high school hoops was a guy named Mick McCabe. He’s actually still there today—probably looking for ways to bash Southwestern High even though the school closed down. (This chapter will give you the opportunity. You’re welcome, Mick.) McCabe didn’t like Perry Watson. According to Perry, it was a conflict that went back years, and had to do with McCabe trying to influence where Antoine “The Judge” Joubert, who played at Southwestern and was Michigan’s Mr. Basketball in 1983, went to college. (The Judge ended up going to Michigan and winning two Big Ten titles.) McCabe used to write negative things about us all the time, and once I got big enough, he wrote negative things about me, too—before he even ever met me.

  The team McCabe embraced was our archrival, Cooley, coached by Ben Kelso, featuring a Michigan Mr. Basketball in Mike Talley and a six-foot-eight, 280-pound brick of a young man with hops named Daniel Lyton. My sophomore year, my first on varsity, we beat Cooley in the PSL championship at Cobo Hall, and then they beat us in the state championship. The rivalry continued from there. The games we played against them every year are still, to this day, as intense as any games I’ve ever played. They didn’t play music during games back then, so the chants from the fans were huge. I’ll never stop hearing them in my head: “C-O-O-L-E-Y—Cool-AY, Cool-ay, Cool-ay High!” for them; and, for us, “South West, South South West,” a takeoff on the song “South Bronx” by Boogie Down Productions. One time, when I was a junior, in a game against Cooley on our home floor, I went up for a dunk and got clotheslined by a player named Ken Conley, slammed to the ground, head first. Ask anyone who was there—I literally started convulsing on the floor. They had to put a stick in my mouth to make sure I didn’t swallow my tongue. I was unconscious all the way until they wheeled me to the ambulance outside, the cold air waking me up. I woke up with my mom right there, crying because she was so nervous, looking at her son in a neck brace, people thinking I might be paralyzed and never play again.

  I missed one game, against Chadsey High. Must be my hard head or something.

  Still, that’s not why I tell you the story. The game, and the injury, were big news, and there was an article in the paper about it, with my picture and my name splashed all across it. A few days later, my mom got a call from a woman asking if she could talk to me.

  It was Jimmy Walker’s ex-wife.

  3. From Sitting at a Bar to the Sneaker Wars of the Twenty-first Century

  To the people around me it was never a secret who my father was. Everyone in my family knew, and a lot of folks in the basketball scene in Detroit knew long before Sam Washington decided he’d tell me.

  Nineteen seventy-two, when Jimmy Walker met my mom, was his last season with the Pistons. The team had drafted him as the top overall pick in 1967, after he’d led the country in scoring as a senior at Providence College. (That was actually the first draft after the NBA got rid of the territorial draft rights. If things had stayed the way they were for years before, then the Celtics probably would have grabbed Jimmy, and he never would have played for Detroit.) The bar where they met, the Chez Beau, was owned by a former Piston, Joe Strawder, which meant a lot of pros hung out there. It was no coincidence that my mom worked there for her second job. She’s a huge basketball fan. Huge. To this day, if I call her on any given night, she’s likely to be flipping around between games with the league package.

  By the ’72 season, Jimmy had fallen off somewhat from his college career but still made two All-Star teams for the Pistons. In August of that year, he was traded to the Rockets, which meant he wasn’t around when I was born the following January. He did, however, have other family back in Detroit and came back through once in a while when the Rockets played the Pistons. One time in 1973 or ’74, when he happened to be in town and came by the Chez Beau, my Uncle Paramore was sitting at the bar. And Uncle P., as you might guess, went right up to Walker and asked him when he was going to come around and see his boy. The answer—“I’m going to”—was far too noncommittal for Paramore. He got in his car, drove to my mom’s house, picked me up, and brought me right back to the Chez Beau. I was just a baby, so I fit right on top of the bar, right next to Walker. “That’s your little man,” Uncle P. said. “You should go and hook up with him.” He wasn’t too interested, so my uncle took me home a little while after that.

  —

  ONCE I found out who my father was years later I didn’t bother my mom with it. I definitely didn’t come straight home when Sam told me and ask her about it. Or, for tha
t matter, my brothers or sister. I had grown up fast, and I was savvy enough to know that the topic wasn’t a place to go with my mom. She was working hard to support us all on her own, and hammering her with questions seemed like another burden.

  By the way, the wind blew in both directions. My mom would never bring a man home to the house. Sure, I met a few boyfriends over the years—there was one guy who owned the All-Seasons Party Shop, another who I remember drove a Lincoln—but they were never in the house at night or hanging around our family. She was totally focused on us, making sure we had what we needed.

  Outside of our home was a different story. It was pretty cool to be able to say my father was an NBA player, particularly on the street when someone wasn’t going to let me in their game. Like a show-off, I’d brag about being the son of Jimmy Walker, and, sometimes, that would get me in.

  More privately, I was a huge card collector. Baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, you name it. And at some point I ended up with a Jimmy Walker card, and for a long time I carried it in my pocket rather than leave it in the shoeboxes with the rest of the cards back in my room. On occasion, I’d have the card when bigger kids wouldn’t let me into a game on a playground, and flashing it was another way to get me into the game. It was my driver’s license, my basketball ID. And it worked.

  But I never mentioned any of this to my mom.

  By the time I got to high school, I had my own subtle ways of reminding myself who I was. Jimmy Walker wore number 24. So I wore 42. Little things like that, things other people might not have noticed, meant something to me. I decided that someday he’d know my name. I came close after that Cooley game in high school when his ex-wife called my house looking for me. (She actually first called Coach Watson, who asked my mom if it was okay to call.) She was very nice and sweet, and wanted to meet me. My mom said, “You should do it.” So she ended up picking me up at my house with her daughter, and taking me shopping. She bought me a dress shirt and some dress clothes. For some reason, that was what she wanted to do. It was a nice day, and I thanked her, but after that day I never reached out again.