Life Is Not an Accident (4 page)

It's an ongoing process for me. I still have moments of frustration when I see my mother's reaction to something that triggers those dark memories. But all I can do is continue to pray for her to never feel that pain again. I still don't know if my dad has ever sincerely apologized to my mom, or if he has, whether she ever fully forgave him.

My parents have lived apart for many years now. My dad still lives in the house I was raised in, while my mother is down in Durham, in a house that I bought when I was 21 years old. They've never gotten divorced, and they talk on the phone every day. I often wondered why my mom stayed with him through all the chaos. Maybe she felt it was what was best for me at the time. She told me on more than one occasion that she “signed up for marriage, not divorce.” I think the whole situation is difficult,
but it's their lives and I try not to judge. I just want them to be happy.

When I was at Duke, I heard a lot of writers and broadcasters go on about my family; Dick Vitale would be on ESPN extolling the virtues of my parents, this perfect college-educated black couple like the Huxtables. Duke was often criticized for bringing in only kids from that kind of family and avoiding the much larger population of athletes from broken homes or more modest backgrounds. Those critics usually mentioned Grant Hill and Shane Battier. And me.

I let them talk, knowing that the truth was more complicated than the narrative.

Sometimes when my parents fought, I just had to get out of the house, and do the one thing that was always my outlet.

Basketball.

Three times a week, my mother and I would drive down the Garden State Parkway to see my grandma in East Orange, whom I'd always called Grarock, a combination of “Grandma” and “Fraggle Rock” that was the best I could do as a small child. Every time we came to the tollbooth, my mother would have me shoot a quarter and a dime from the passenger seat into the toll basket. It became part of our road trip routine. One day, we pulled up to the booth and I missed a shot. The cars were lining up behind us, honking and cursing like typical Jersey people when there is a delay. My mother just calmly searched for another quarter and dime—for at least five minutes—and she then told me that we weren't going anywhere until I hit the basket.

By fourth grade, basketball had become my main focus. I had just gotten a brand-new ball, and like an idiot I left it outside in the rain one evening. The next day when I picked the ball up,
it was pretty much flat. When I tried to dribble, the ball barely bounced to my mid-shin. But asking for another ball was out of the question, so I just made do with a flat one. I did all the drills I had learned from going to basketball camps, all the while bouncing this underinflated ball. I really had to pound it to get it to bounce back up where I wanted it, which helped me develop an even faster handle in the long run.

I was always playing against kids who were older than me. In fourth grade I made it through those “shoot-outs” and played junior varsity with all fifth- and sixth-graders. My coach, Mr. Morgan, was an older guy who wore Crocodile Dundee hats and rocked a white beard. He was a creative guy, so during one of the first weeks of practice he assigned everyone nicknames, wrote them down on tape, and stuck the tape on our lockers. Striker. Criminal. Cool, right? Of course, the nickname he gave me was Sweetness, which was clearly not as cool as the others. So I asked Coach Morgan, “Hey, Coach, why the name ‘Sweetness'?”

“Because your game is sweet,” he said.

I just stared at him with this look that said “Really?”

At the park, though, “sweet” wasn't going to cut it. I had brought my underinflated ball one day and got involved in an intense three-on-three game with a bunch of older kids. There was one kid in particular on the other team named Corey whom I didn't care for. He and his friends were about five years older than me, and they ran the court—the neighborhood, too. I had gotten jumped a couple of times by his crew, but that never stopped me from going to the courts to hoop.

During the game, he threw elbows to my face, sometimes even punches while going up for rebounds. He was physically so much stronger that there was nothing I could really do except
take the abuse and play on. My team found a way to win the game, and afterwards everyone just started shooting around with my ball. When Corey grabbed the rebound, he looked at us and said, “I'm out of here,” and he and his boys just took my ball and started walking away. I called after them, “Hey, that's my ball!” They just laughed and said, “If it's your ball, why don't you come and get it.” And when I did, I most definitely “got it,” all right. They jumped me again, knocking me down to the pavement while kicking me for added measure.

I got home, bruised and bleeding, and went straight up to my room to sulk. The next day, my dad asked me where my ball was and I told him I'd lost it. Naturally, he started questioning me about the last place I had it. He then suggested we go out looking for it, expressing the value of taking care of our things. I knew I couldn't keep up the lie, so I finally told him that some guys from the park had taken it from me. And I remember him saying, “What did I tell you about letting somebody take something that's yours? You don't let that happen. You go get your damn ball back.”

I didn't know how I was going to do that. I went down to the park to scope out the situation; they weren't there that day, but the next day was Sunday, and sure enough, there they were, shooting around with my ball. I knew I needed to do something, to make it a little painful for them, but it had to be quick, in and out, before they knew what was coming.

I ran home and darted into the garage, where all I could find was this little kid-size wooden baseball bat. I went back to the park, biding my time until there was an opening. When Corey and the rest of his crew weren't looking, I snuck up on his weak side, took the bat, and hit him in the calf almost as hard as I could.
He went down, and I grabbed the ball and took off like Usain Bolt. A couple of the guys chased after me, but I had a good head start. I didn't want them to follow me to my house, so I tore into the woods, then circled back and made it home without anyone being the wiser.

My heart beating through my chest, I kept looking out my living room window, wondering if they had spotted me. Once I realized I was safe, I felt this surge of pride:
I got my damn ball back!
It was the first time I'd really taken ownership of something.
This ball is MINE
. I fought for something that meant a lot to me.

It set the tone for how I viewed basketball for a long time. I played my best when I was angry. If there was a loose ball, it was going to be
mine.
Even if the ref called a jump ball, I held on to it just to make sure you understood that the ball was mine.

I saw Corey several times after I pulled that Tonya Harding stunt. We definitely had a few more scuffles, but as I advanced as a player, I went to the park less often. And when I did return years later at around 16, I was already one of the top players in the area. The sport had begun to give me street credibility. Some of those same kids who had jumped me years earlier were now giving me serious respect, to the point where they were protective of me.

By sixth grade I was starting on the middle school varsity squad with seventh and eighth graders, even though I still had a two-handed, double-pump jump shot. I began playing on Amateur Athletic Union teams when I was 10 and found myself up against 13-year-olds, and at that age three years is a huge gap. Around eighth grade, I met a guy named Rich Leary, who coached an AAU team called the New Jersey Demons. I worked out with his team and got knocked around by better players, including future Villanova point guard John Celestand. The Lakers ended
up drafting him with the 30th pick back in '99. Rich would pit us against each other every day, which was an uphill battle, to say the least. It was also exactly what I needed. I learned some valuable lessons from the experience: never taking a play off, not harping on mistakes, and refusing to back down.

I'll never forget when Rich brought us to play against Riverside Church at the famous Gauchos Gym in New York City. I was the youngest kid on our team and was in awe watching the other team warm up. They were 17-year-old kids with the bodies of 28-year-olds: Elton Brand, Lavor Postell, Erick Barkley, Ron Artest—or whatever he renamed himself recently. They were doing 360s, windmills, taking off from outside the paint, while we were barely able to slap the backboard in our layup line.

We got destroyed that day, but Rich played me the entire game. Turnover after turnover, Rich wouldn't let me quit, no matter how much I begged him to take me out. Each time-out he would pull me to the side and say, “This is a learning experience, Jason. Eyes . . . Eyes . . . You stay in the fight. You hear me? You don't quit.” He always demanded eye contact when he spoke to us. As a broadcaster today, I can't help but notice how many players refuse to look their coaches in the eye when being spoken to, which I find infuriating.

That same year, my eighth-grade team went 42–0, since we were going up against kids our own age for once. We called ourselves the UN because of all our different ethnicities. Pete was white, Dre was Filipino, Brian was so black we nicknamed him Darkness. I saw color, but I didn't “see” race. As I said, my “aunts” and “uncles” came from all walks of life. And although Plainfield was mostly black and Hispanic, New York was just an hour's drive north, so I was constantly exposed to the melting pot.

As well-intentioned as my mother was, she couldn't keep me entirely out of trouble. I had my crew from home in Plainfield—the brothers Alvin, Brent, and Collins, whom I called ABC. Not brothers because they were black, although they were, but because they were actually each other's siblings. We used to find ourselves in a ton of mischievous situations, from egging houses late at night to throwing rocks and breaking windows, and even some graffiti. I wasn't necessarily the best sketch artist, but I would always leave my mark, which was a small slash through a
W
. I guess you could say I thought of myself as a young Picasso.

We would often sneak out and cut through my neighbors' backyard to get to the other side of the block, using a pathway between my neighbors' garage and ours. One summer day, ABC and I were ripping and running like usual. We were playing a game of manhunt and using both my backyard and that of the neighbor directly behind my house. He quickly became agitated and screamed at us for tearing up his lawn.

As a result, he and his neighbor decided to put up a massive wooden wall between their garages to cut off our access to the other side of the block. Truth is, I'd probably been annoying him for a long time before that day. When I played basketball in the backyard, I would throw the ball against the back of his garage as hard as possible to use as a pass for my next shot.

One day he climbed to the top of his new fence, pointed at me, and cursed me out. Afterwards, I decided to take matters into my own hands; my next “masterpiece” would be on his fence. I gathered some spray-paint cans and got to work. I knew he was a Pistons fan, so I decided to write, in big, capital letters,
BULLS.
(Chicago and Jordan dominated the Pistons at the time.) Then I spray-painted the chalk outline of a dead body on the ground
with a sad face. And let's not leave out the little note I painted under it:
BOOM YOU'RE DEAD.
I also spray-painted my full last name instead of my personalized signature:
W
.

I wanted him to know, without a doubt, whose work this was.

The only issue was, my dumb ass didn't spray-paint
his
side of the fence; I spray-painted mine. The next day, my father saw what I had done and took me to task. Not my proudest moment, and unfortunately my dad has the pleasure of seeing my artwork to this day.

The irony from the piece is too much for either of us to handle. I end up getting drafted by the Bulls and came millimeters away from becoming a chalk outline myself.

Boom you're dead
.

I
N
P
LAINFIELD,
I struggled to fit in. I lived in between two very different worlds. At school, I was considered the athletic black kid. Classmates would say things like, “Jay you're so black, man. You're from the hood!” Meanwhile, after school I'd visit my mom at her job at Plainfield High School and get called out by the kids there for “acting white.” Their reasoning was that I spoke articulately, was involved in student council, and wore a school uniform. They'd say, “You're such a little white boy,” “You're so proper,” “You're soft.” I was very attuned to people's perceptions—and, in many cases, misperceptions—of me. I didn't know what more I had to do to prove myself.

This internal conflict continued through high school when I went to St. Joseph's, a Roman Catholic private school about nine miles away in Metuchen, instead of Plainfield High, which was
only a block from my house. It was the mid-nineties, when hip-hop was blowing up and sagging your pants was the look. And there I was in a shirt and tie, going to a school where you would get detention if your shirt was untucked.

There was this constant shift between two entirely different cultures. During the day I would speak with correct grammar, and after hours I would be hanging on a street corner talking in slang. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. This preoccupation of having to transition from “acting white” to “acting black” every day was exhausting and a huge source of anxiety.

It was a big part of the reason I felt lonely in the NBA. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be part of a family like I was at Duke. But we all know how black people all too often viewed players like me.

He's a sellout because he went to Duke. Duke recruits Uncle Toms—not real brothers.

After all this time, for this to
still
be an issue is absurd. Am I not supposed to educate myself? Should I choose to not be articulate? I remember trying to fit in by saying “nigga” a lot, and now I look back and wonder why I would ever use that term to refer to another black person, or anybody, for that matter.