I Beat the Odds (12 page)

Other coaches used to say to Big Tony, “Why do you even bother with that kid? He’s just a waste of your time.” Some even said things right to my face like, “You’ll never amount to anything. Stop kidding yourself.” I’m sure Ms. Spivey heard things like that more than once, too, from people who were too fed up to see past the challenges to the potential I had.

I was lucky to have Tony at that time in my life, and it probably helped that he was from my neighborhood. I think that helped me stay open to listening to him. It was a big struggle for me to learn how to trust, and as I’ve gotten older and read more about it, that seems to be a pretty common problem for kids from challenging backgrounds. In my case, it seemed like just about everyone in my life who was supposed to take care of me had failed me. My birth parents failed me; some of my foster families failed me; the broken system at Child Protective Services had failed me; the judges who kept sending me back to bad situations failed me. Because of that, it was tough to think anyone could have good motives. I mean, just look at how my brothers and I saw Ms. Spivey. We thought she was a horrible woman who was trying to break up our family. We didn’t realize that she was trying to get us into more stable, safer homes than what we had. It was a big deal to find someone I felt I could really trust.

From talking with other kids who grew up in neighborhoods like mine, I have found out that very often, even the coaches can’t be trusted. A lot of times there are guys who coach inner-city teams just because they want to “discover” the next big pro athlete who will be their meal ticket in a few years. They aren’t coaching the kid because they care about him but because they want to be able to hang around when he gets rich and famous; they call him up or come by his house for money. The kid gets used for his talent, and there is an expected “payback” for the coach. It’s disgusting and pathetic, but it happens all the time.

Tony seemed to be concerned with helping me develop as a player as well as looking out for my well-being. I needed that kind of support, and I was very grateful for it. He tried to help me adjust my attitude and start thinking differently so that I would be ready for whatever opportunities high school varsity sports might bring my way.

G
reat opportunities might occasionally fall in someone’s lap, but I believe you are much more likely to find one when you go out and chase the opportunity down. That’s exactly what I did as I prepared for my sophomore year of high school. It seemed like there was a great opportunity for me to get a better education and to have access to better sports programs, and I was determined to jump on it.

I’d already stopped pretending that a normal life for me at home was possible. I had a place to sleep at my mother’s house, but it was just a mattress on the floor. My mother was doing a pretty good job of staying clean at that point, but she wasn’t especially interested in me or what I was up to and pretty much just left me alone entirely. I just knew I didn’t want the kind of life she had. I wanted something better, even if I didn’t know what it was or how to get it. I loved her and my brothers so much, but home felt like a hole I was stuck in and couldn’t climb out of. I didn’t want to stay trapped.

So instead of staying with my mother, most of the time I was moving from house to house, sleeping with whoever would let me stay and eating whatever food they’d let me have. I finally settled on staying with Big Tony’s family because they were the best example of what I wanted my own family life to be like.

Steve was one of those kids who was working, instead of just wishing, his way out of the projects—good grades, good athlete, no trouble. That’s one reason why I liked staying at their house. The other reason was that they lived in a neighborhood outside of the projects. Just the fact that they were a family that had made it out—and stayed out—was a big deal to me. My mother moved us to places that weren’t public housing several times, but we always eventually ended up back in the ’hood, like it was some big magnet that kept pulling us back, no matter how far away we got from it. But Tony’s family was an example to me that the ghetto doesn’t have to have an iron grip on a family. They weren’t rich by any means, but that wasn’t the point. Tony escaped the mind-set that affected many people around us. He was self-sufficient and knew he didn’t have to stay in the projects just because he was born there.

Big Tony was a good coach and Steve had become a good friend of mine. I knew that if I stayed close to them, I’d have a better chance of making something out of myself than if I stuck with the thugs who seemed to be everywhere in my own neighborhood. So I started staying over at their house whenever I could. I just went home with Tony one day after practice and I ended up staying for a couple days. Pretty soon, I just stayed there all the time. Steve didn’t seem to mind, although I think he was a little surprised at first that his dad let me stay over on a weeknight, but it soon just became a normal thing for us. They put some sheets on the sofa and that became my bed. I’d usually remember to take them off each morning so people could use the sofa during the day, and then I’d just spread them out again at night. Tony’s family opened up their home to me, and even though it was only a temporary solution, what came out of it changed my life forever.

 

 

BIG TONY AND HIS MOTHER, Miss Betty, had kept after Steve and his brother, Tristan, so Steve’s academic record was solid and his grades were good. Before she died, Miss Betty asked Big Tony to be sure to get his boys a Christian education. Tony wanted to make good on that promise, so he started looking around to see what Christian schools Steve might be able to attend for high school. Steve was a grade behind me, but I was determined to go wherever he went. If he was leaving Westwood, then I wanted to leave, too. The Henderson family seemed to understand the importance of going after opportunities, and I wanted to be a part of that.

The summer before my sophomore year, Big Tony got serious about finding a private school. One day in July, he loaded us up into his old Ford Taurus and we drove across town to the University of Memphis High School. I had never seen a school that looked as neat and clean as that campus. I couldn’t believe that any school could look that nice. If I had known better, I probably would have felt out of place walking around in my basketball shorts and T-shirt.

Tony, it turned out, didn’t call ahead for an appointment. He just rolled up to the school and walked confidently into the front office with Steve’s records under one arm and mine—or what he could get of them—under the other. Steve and I waited in the hallway while he talked with someone inside. I don’t remember how long we were waiting before Tony came back out and said we’d have to try somewhere else.

A day or two later we drove over to Christian Brothers High School, a huge campus off a very busy road near Baptist Hospital. It was the same routine: Tony just walked in unannounced, completely confident, and Steve and I waited for him to make his pitch to the administrators. Christian Brothers had one of the best football stadiums I had ever seen, and the school itself felt huge and clean and new. But the same thing happened: Tony came out of the office after a while and said we’d have to try somewhere else.

The next day we were off to Evangelical Christian School, which was out in Cordova, east of Memphis. For as big a city as it is, you can get just about anywhere in Memphis in roughly thirty minutes, and it’s pretty much impossible to tell where Memphis ends and Cordova begins. But that drive felt like the longest one that we took. I had no idea where we were headed as we drove down some roads that looked like they were taking us out into the middle of the country. Finally, when we arrived at ECS, I relaxed a little bit because it seemed a bit smaller than the other two schools we’d visited, and it had a nice campus with some woods around it. At the time, it was also one of the powerhouses of private high school football for the state of Tennessee. But once again, after Tony left the front office, he said we’d have to find another place.

It turned out that what he was hearing over and over again was that Steve’s grades looked promising, but mine were just too low and my records too incomplete for me to be considered. And since Steve and I were determined to be at the same school, it meant we had to keep looking.

My school records were a mess. I can’t even remember how many different schools I attended. I often changed schools when my mom moved, and I went to different schools when I was in the foster care system. Sometimes I’d just be in a class for a few weeks and then it would be off to another house and another school. My mother had never made me do homework or helped me read a book. My mother had never made me get up and go on the mornings I was feeling lazy. No one had ever bothered to take the time to find out what I did and didn’t know. I did just enough work to let them know I was still alive and they passed me along because I was a good athlete, and especially in high school, they wanted to keep me eligible to play.

Finally, after a long, hot week of driving all over Memphis to visit different schools, we arrived at Briarcrest. It was a long drive out to the campus—it felt almost as long as to ECS. And when we reached it, my jaw nearly hit the floor of the car. I had never seen anything at all like that school. It was actually still under construction at the time—classes wouldn’t start there until the next school year—but the administration offices had already moved over from the old campus, so that was where we headed.

Everything about it, from the buildings to the stadium, was cleaner and newer than any school I’d ever seen. I don’t think I realized there was such a thing as a nicely paved parking lot without potholes and huge cracks running every direction with weeds popping through. Tony seemed excited about Briarcrest, because he’d just found out that a basketball coach he respected a lot had recently been hired there and he hoped that Steve would have a chance to play for him.

While Tony went into the office to make his pitch, Steve and I stood out in the sparklingly clean hallway. We didn’t say much, we just sort of looked around at the beautiful new building, afraid to touch anything, and then looked back at each other every now and then and shook our heads, as if we were both thinking, “Who in the world has this much money?”

Tony’s meeting took a little longer than it had at the other schools, so it seemed like that might be good news. But as the three of us walked back to his old Taurus, he told us that the answer from Briarcrest was pretty much the same as everywhere else: that Steve seemed like he could succeed there, but my grades were too much of a problem to let me in. What was different, though, was that Briarcrest offered us a possible solution.

There is an alternative school in Memphis called Gateway Academy, which is run by a local church and offers programs for kids in trouble or struggling badly in school to get their grades up. The Briarcrest administrators agreed that if I went there for a year and showed real improvement, it might be possible for me to start at Briarcrest the following year. It was a good enough deal for all of us. Steve could go to the new private school and I would get my grades up through the alternative school and be on track to join him at Briarcrest after a year.

That fall, we started a new routine: Tony drove Steve out to school in the mornings and I worked in Tony’s body shop and studied with the Gateway materials during the day. Once a week on Wednesdays, I would go over to the Gateway campus for one-on-one instruction and to take tests on the material I was supposed to have studied on my own the week before. Their curriculum was set up this way to help students adjust to the discipline of regular school. The only problem was that I’d never even learned how to study, so I found myself looking at the books and trying to make sense of them, but feeling totally lost.

Steve was also having to work hard to stay on pace with his classes. He has always been a really smart guy, especially in math, but the level of academic instruction at Briarcrest was so much higher than at the city schools we’d both been attending that he needed a little extra help to keep his grades high. So his cousin, who was a schoolteacher in Memphis, came and tutored us in the evenings until Steve got used to the faster pace and tougher subjects and until I got my grades high enough to be considered at Briarcrest. It didn’t take Steve long to get the hang of things, but I just wasn’t making any progress.

I watched jealously as Steve was making friends and getting ready for basketball season. I wanted so badly to be a part of that, but no matter how much I tried to learn the Gateway materials, the more lost I got. I was overwhelmed because everyone just assumed that I’d had at least some kind of normal schooling up to that point, so they jumped right into the material and expected that I would be able to catch up quickly. I’ve always liked numbers, so the math courses weren’t as big of a challenge as the other subjects. But the worst subject of all for me was Spanish. That was where I really had no idea what I was supposed to be learning. I’d never learned the different parts of speech in English, or how to identify different tenses or verb conjugation—or what those things even meant. And all of a sudden, I was trying to learn how to do it in another language. It was impossible. Overwhelming. Hopeless.

It was probably the most frustrating situation I had ever found myself in. I knew that this was likely going to be my one chance for a real education. What was even more important to me, though, was that Briarcrest was going to be a chance to play sports in a setting that would not only get me good coaching but also open up doors for other opportunities, like getting into a junior college. As tempting as it was to go back to my old school in my old neighborhood and just hang out, I also knew that if I did go back I would never leave. I knew I would never make it out of that part of the city and that way of living. But how does a sophomore in high school learn everything he is supposed to learn with no formal instruction—especially if he’s never been taught any of the basic techniques for how to succeed?