The Hustle (7 page)

It turned out that both of us, quite separately, found the school basketball team to be a space somewhat removed from the rest of the school. For one, most of the “elite” kids at Lakeside didn't play basketball—their sports were tennis, golf, skiing, and swimming (and later, lacrosse, crew, and even, in at least one case, polo). Then there was also just the nature of the sport. Stepping onto the court simplified life down to a few variables: You grabbed the ball, ran the pebbled leather against your hand, turned it to find the seam, squared up to the basket, propelled yourself up off the ground, lifted the ball above your head, and let it fly. Then, instant resolution: The ball goes in or it doesn't.

After our school team started in the seventh grade, Eric established himself as the star from about the first practice. His incredible lateral speed allowed him to make steal after steal on defense and blow by defenders when he had the ball. He scored more than twenty points a game and always seemed to be everywhere on the court. In one tournament championship game, we had played poorly and were down by five points with one minute left. Then Eric decided to drop the pretense that we were a team of equals. In the last minute, he stole the ball every time their guards touched it and scored nine points in a row. When time ran out, the rest of us rushed around him and jumped up and down while he pointed his index finger in the air, let his head drop back, and screamed.

Two of my closest friends at the school also were starters on the basketball team. Maitland Finley, tall and skinny with sleepy blue eyes and shaggy brown hair, was one of the only kids in the class who spoke less than Eric. His family lived way out in the rural suburbs north of Seattle. In public school, before he enrolled at Lakeside, he'd get so far ahead of his classmates that he often ended up to the side reading alone while the teacher attended to everyone else.

Maitland was completely straightforward. If you asked him if he wanted to do something—say, play basketball during lunch period—and he didn't want to, he just answered, with a shrug of his shoulders, “No.” As we grew older, Maitland seemed to remain above the fray as other boys became more obnoxious. When a kid made a comment about a girl in our class, something like, “She's a carpenter's dream—flat as a board and never been nailed,” Maitland's face flushed and he turned away. He also never seemed to notice or care about the shifting social hierarchy within the school, who was in, who was out.

Sean O'Donnell was, besides Eric, our other weapon, solely because, at more than six feet, he was taller than any other kid in the league. Simply standing near the basket with his arms in the air made him a presence. On the court, unfortunately, Sean resembled a human version of C-3PO, the gold robot in
Star Wars
. He moved in herky-jerky starts and stops and had hands of stone.

The son of a stockbroker from Bellevue, a suburb east of Seattle across Lake Washington, Sean had been sent to Lakeside after his fourth-grade public school teacher told his parents that he was a “calming influence” on the other kids. His parents wondered why the other kids weren't calm. Sean, who had straight blond hair that fell across his forehead at an angle, was more socially malleable than Eric, Maitland, or me, able to fit in across Lakeside's various cliques. He didn't take school all that seriously, more likely to break out his impression of Bill Murray's golf course groundskeeper in
Caddyshack
than to please our teachers. He also was the first person to tell me the urban legend about Richard Gere and the gerbil, delighting in the reaction that spread across my face.

Eric's, Sean's, and Maitland's fathers made up the Lakeside Middle School basketball team's Greek chorus. Sean's dad, the stockbroker, was a constant presence at our games, a talkative man with a balding head, a beer belly, and a bellowing voice, he always seemed like he should be chewing on a cigar and cradling a tumbler of scotch. Eric's father, Charlie, equally loquacious, sat beside him. The last member of the trio, Maitland's dad, Randy, was the most outsized personality of all, yelling encouragement from the sidelines and giving pointers to our coach after the game.

Randy Finley was watching our opposition as well. As we began our eighth-grade season, he made note of two of the best players we faced. He would recruit them onto the separate, integrated basketball team he was about to form.

Dino Christofilis, who went to a Christian school in the North End, was a whirlwind at forward who went after every loose ball like his life depended on it. He had a beautiful jump shot, and valiantly hustled and rallied his teammates. He also was hard to dislike—if you made a good play, he'd come up, slap you on the back, and tell you so.

Chris Dickinson attended the Bush School, another elite private school in Seattle, and was Dino's only rival in intensity. Tall and strapping, he walked like a gunfighter, as if his muscles bulged so much that it was impossible for his arms to fall flush. At power forward he swung his elbows around with a velocity that made you fear for your head.

I had an uncomfortable run-in with Chris shortly before we became teammates. Our Lakeside basketball team was scheduled to play Bush. On a Saturday night, the week before the game, a couple of girls from my German class called me at home. They brought up Chris, whose physique, square jaw, and well-coiffed head of brown hair made him the object of many crushes among girls on the Seattle private-school circuit. Before long, fueled by jealousy, I was elaborating on how Chris was an overrated basketball player. This information quickly made it back to him. I was told on Monday that he hadn't received my comments well.

Over the next week, a fight was rumored for the postgame dance. I wasn't looking forward to any kind of conflict—Chris had at least four inches of height and a lot of muscle on me. We won the game. At the dance, I tried to avoid him while pretending that I wasn't, but the two of us were herded together.

“I heard you been talkin' shit about me,” Chris said, puffing out his chest in his polo shirt. I noticed that his hair was damp and neatly parted. It looked like he'd put mousse in it. I was impressed that he'd taken a shower after the game. No one on my team ever did that. It made him seem more mature.

“Not really,” I answered, trying to toe the line between confrontation and capitulation.

We stared at each other in hard-guy poses. And we kept staring at each other—neither of us made a step forward or said a thing. Finally, the tension fizzled. I walked away, trying to mask the relief that was washing through my body. I knew the situation had ended about as well as it could have—we had both saved face, and we hadn't had to fight. After we became teammates, neither Chris nor I ever brought up our showdown—it was as if it never happened.

Randy Finley also took notice when a bunch of black kids showed up to watch one of our games during a Christmas tournament, sitting in a group in the bleachers. Every time Eric touched the ball, they began to yell, clap, and holler. Charlie Hampton told Randy that the kids were Eric's teammates from Willie McClain's CAYA team. Randy eyed our two teams—one all white, besides Eric Hampton; the other all black—and asked Charlie Hampton for an introduction to Willie McClain.

More Than Just Running
Up and Down the Floor

The first night of practice, Willie McClain leads his players into the gym. McClain and Randy Finley shake hands. We grab some basketballs and shoot around until McClain calls us to center court.

“I want everyone to introduce themselves,” he says, getting his first look at Sean, Maitland, and me, the white kids who are his new charges. Any bluster fades as we go around the circle. Kids look down at the floor and say their names in soft voices. I remember to hold my head up and make eye contact when it comes to my turn. Though I'm as shy as anyone, four years of Lakeside have taught me that.

McClain looks at Randy Finley and then back at us. “OK, let's get started. We're going to jump right into things.”

McClain calls out Eric, Tyrell, and Willie Jr. to help demonstrate his full-court press, a “two-two-one.” After we score, two of our players stay near the basket to defend the in-bounds pass and try to pick it off or trap the opponent who gets the ball. Two more lurk near midcourt to grab any errant passes. One goes to the opposite end in case the other team gets by our defenders.

There is no standing around. McClain's defense is designed to throttle the other team with constant pressure. That means a lot of running and scrambling. The aim is to rattle the other team into coughing up the ball.

This game plan perfectly fits McClain's team. His players are short but very, very quick, both laterally across the court and vertically toward the hoop. Damian and I, for example, are both about five-foot-eight, but while I can barely jump high enough to touch the bottom of the backboard, he can get his hand up over the rim, falling an inch or two short of dunking.

It doesn't take very long to see that McClain's players can cover the distance between the sidelines faster than I can even swivel around and figure out what's going on. If I get a good position on Damian for a rebound, he compensates with his superior leap, rising and snatching the ball off my fingertips. JT has an incredible ability to analyze spatial relationships on the court—after someone shoots and the ball is in the air, he takes in where everyone is positioning and the trajectory of the shot, and somehow always seems to place himself exactly where the ball drops. It's as if someone has taken our sleepy little team—which is really just a bunch of average players arranged around Eric Hampton—and decided that we need to do everything at double speed.

As the practice wears on, Randy Finley stands off to the side, his arms crossed and a smile of enjoyment on his face.

McClain walks up and down the sideline, yelling instructions: “Get across the floor! Cut him off! Front up on him! Do not let your man get behind you!”

“OK, stop!” McClain hurries out onto midcourt and positions himself next to Sean. “This is how you square up on defense.” McClain demonstrates, bending at the knees like he's sitting in a chair, keeping his legs far apart, both arms spread out with hands open as Sean, a head taller than the coach, mimics his stance, extending his long, gangly arms and waving them around.

Every basketball coach I've had before McClain has structured practices around a series of drills meant to teach certain skills. We might run through give-and-go passes for half an hour, every player going through the drill as the rest of the team watches. Practices are in effect somewhat like classes, where the coach demonstrates one particular concept that the players then repeat.

McClain, on the other hand, is more for trial by fire. He shows us what he wants, and then we begin a full-court scrimmage. He doesn't know my name, so when he wants me to move to a position on the floor he just makes eye contact, points, and shouts, “Over here! Quick now!” Even from the first practice, I notice a tinge of exasperation in his voice when he's giving me instructions.

We spend forty minutes sprinting back and forth, McClain's exhortations nipping behind us. When someone screws up, McClain makes everyone run lines—the court is divided into fourths and you have to run from the baseline to each line, touch it, return to the baseline, and then progress to the next one until you make it all the way to the opposite side and back.

I'm exhausted by the end, soaked in sweat. McClain tells us that he will see us in two days as his players pull on their sweatpants and sweatshirts. Before they file out into the parking lot, Tyrell walks over to Maitland, slaps him five, and says, “Good practice.”

…

That night, as he drove the van south on the freeway back to the Central Area, his guys chattering in the back, Willie McClain felt relieved. He'd been nervous before the practice. He knew that if the team didn't work out, there'd be plenty of people back in the Central Area who would be ready to tell him it was all a mistake from the start. He had his own doubts, too: What if the white parents didn't want their sons coached by a black man? Would these white kids listen to him? How would his guys act? He dealt with it by going straight into a full-speed practice. He'd always found that as long as he was out on the floor, immersed in the game, he could block out all the chatter from the sidelines.

McClain's agreement to coach the team had stemmed from two strongly felt ideas about sports and their usefulness. The first, simply put, was that participation in athletics, when done right, instills values in boys that will help turn them into productive, successful adults. This concept has been part of basketball's DNA since James Naismith, a robust, thirty-year-old Canadian with a doctorate in theology, invented the game in 1891 at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Naismith was an adherent of “Muscular Christianity”—the idea, roughly, that a healthy body leads to a healthy, Christian mind—a movement that developed in the mid-1800s as industrialization transformed the United States from a rural to an urban country. Instead of working together with their sons on their farms, men were laboring in factories and offices, leaving their boys under the feminizing influences of their mothers and other women. It was thought that boys who spent too much time in female company grew soft, or worse, turned gay. Until then, sports in the United States had been seen as games for kids to play in their free time. The rise of industrialization encouraged a shift toward team sports, where boys could be supervised and guided by coaches. The YMCA network provided the necessary facilities. Luther Gulick, Naismith's boss as the head of the Springfield YMCA and one of the leading proponents of Muscular Christianity, wrote, “Bodily vigor is a moral agent, it enables us to live on higher levels, to keep up to the top of our achievement.”

Team sports came to be viewed not only as a proving ground for boys—by the early 1900s, college football games had become vicious bouts with injured players removed from the field—but also as an area to instill “American values” such as discipline and teamwork. In East Coast cities then burgeoning with southern and eastern European immigrants, social reformers saw basketball as a vehicle for teaching these skills, which is why some of the best teams in the early days of the game included the Detroit Pulaskis (Polish), the New York Celtics, and the South Philadelphia Hebrews. African Americans had their own clubs, the most successful during the 1920s being the Harlem Renaissance Big Five, a black-owned team that played its home games on Saturday nights in the ballroom of the Renaissance Casino on West 138th Street, usually as a break during an evening of entertainment by performers such as Louis Armstrong. These were part of a larger shift in which participation in team sports came to be seen as a quintessentially American activity.

The idea that playing on a sports team can transform a boy's life in a positive way has permeated American thought. The concept has been rehashed in countless sports movies, which tell variations of the same story: A group of undisciplined boys come together under the leadership of a tough but caring coach and learn important lessons about life. Examples run from
Knute Rockne, All American
(the story of the legendary football coach, with Ronald Reagan as star player George Gipp, requesting on his deathbed that his Notre Dame teammates “Win just one for the Gipper!”) to
Coach Carter
(with Samuel L. Jackson, playing a variation on his usual role, as the uncompromising, badass basketball coach who whips an inner-city high school basketball team into shape). In these films, the players learn not only how to work together, but how to be men. No matter their limitations when they come in—they may be soft, undisciplined, and spoiled rich kids, or poor, fatherless, and feeling the pull of the streets—the players step outside of their societal surroundings to enter the cocoon of the team. By the end of the movie, they're ready to return, steeled by their experiences together. It's as if the screenplays had been written by the most zealous adherents of Muscular Christianity.

Willie McClain had absorbed this tradition but also adapted it to the needs of his players—African American boys growing up in Seattle in the 1980s, many without fathers in their lives. McClain's own life had taught him that young men need male authority figures—without authority, boys will do whatever they want and make all kinds of wrong choices, just as he had once done. But to guide young men, you need to have structures, and for McClain, organized basketball was an obvious one—boys will turn out because they enjoy playing it, and in the meantime you can use it teach them other skills.

Showing up to practice and supporting your teammates instills responsibility and discipline. Learning to function within the group and to listen to authority—even when you may not agree with it—teaches you the skills you need to succeed in school and work. Learning to trust your teammates—that they will pick up for you on defense if you lose your man; that they will pass to you when you're open—creates fellowship. Committing to the team forms a habit that makes it easier to commit to other things, such as a career, later in life. “The goal is to teach you how to function in society, how to take care of a family,” McClain says of the game of basketball. “There are a lot of hidden things. It's more than just running up and down the floor.”

If the game could be used to teach those lessons, McClain reasoned, it also could provide a structure for the different sides of this team to find common cause. First, we all loved the game and knew the rules, so that meant we were at least meeting on shared ground. If we could learn to play together as a unit, to trust that our teammates would pass to us no matter our race, McClain thought that a natural bond would start to develop. Friendships would grow from there.

McClain's core motivation, though, was seeing that his son and his teammates got a chance to get into private schools. McClain regarded the situation of his players in simple terms: Society had allocated a certain number of scholarships for young black athletes at private schools. Compared to going to, say, Garfield, private school could be a launching pad out of the Central Area, toward a college education and a good job. He could live with that inequity as long as his guys were on the right side of those numbers. If basketball was a way to get there, and Randy Finley was to be the lever to pry the door open, so be it.

In this, McClain picked up on another American belief with a long lineage—that sports can be an avenue of advancement for African Americans into the mainstream. Edwin Henderson, who became known as the “father of black basketball” after starting the first African-American basketball league in the segregated Washington, D.C., school system in 1906, argued that on the court, where the rules were the same for everybody, whites would have to accept black competitors as equals. Successful black athletes could then serve as role models for other African Americans, playing the same role that W. E. B. Du Bois envisioned for the Talented Tenth. Henderson later said, “I doubt much whether the mere acquisition of hundreds of degrees or academic honors has influenced the mass mind of America as much as the soul appeal made in a thrilling run for a touchdown by a colored athlete.” In the 1930s, the boxer Joe Louis and the sprinter Jesse Owens both became national heroes by defeating German opponents during the Nazi era—Louis in a boxing match with Max Schmeling, and Owens with his triumphant four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The archetype of a black athlete crossing over into white America, though, is Jackie Robinson, who still is cited and celebrated as a black trailblazer. But the commemorations of Robinson's achievements tend to gloss over the conflicts and disillusionment he felt later in his life. The full story reveals a more complex view of the possibilities and limitations of using sports as a vehicle of integration.

Born the son of a Georgia sharecropper in 1919, Robinson soon moved—along with thousands of other blacks at the time—with his mother to Los Angeles. His mom got a job as a domestic servant; he grew up chafing against Jim Crow in Pasadena, but went on to become a football, basketball, track, and baseball star at UCLA. He joined the still-segregated army during World War II. While a lieutenant stationed in Texas, Robinson was court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of a military bus. Though he was acquitted, Robinson knew that if he hadn't enjoyed some celebrity as a former college sports star, the outcome probably would have been different. Upon his discharge, Robinson went to play baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues team.