I Beat the Odds
Page 8
Having a dream can be the first and most important step in making it out of the system. It’s got to be something more specific than just, “I want a lot of money” or “I want to be famous.” You’ve got to know not just what you want, but why you want it. A goal of being rich isn’t enough to make you put in the work day after day; you have to know why you want money—to buy a house, to take care of your family, to be able to always put food on the table, to make sure your spouse and kids aren’t stuck in the projects—whatever it is that is your dream beyond just the surface of what sounds like an easy life.
You also have to have a sense of what you are naturally good at. For example, if you have trouble with numbers, you should work on that, but you probably shouldn’t look for a career as an accountant. If you are a terrible singer, that probably isn’t the best road to go down. If you’re very shy in front of people, you probably should look for a different career from being an actor, even if you like movies. But maybe you’re good in science class and like studying it—then becoming a science teacher might be just the right job for you. If you always get good grades on writing homework in school, then maybe you should make your dream to be an author or a journalist.
Of course it’s great to dream about doing all kinds of different things, even if no one else thinks you can. I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t dream big, but if you are fighting against odds that say you’re going to fail, you should make sure you know what your talents are, what makes you stand out, so that you can work on developing those things that make you different; because just by recognizing what it is that you’re already pretty good at can give you a head start on working to make your dream something real.
For me, that dream came to me when I was seven years old.
THE TIMING COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BETTER. Right around the same time that the social workers came for us and took the littlest kids away, I saw something on TV that would change my life. It would give me something to hold on to over the next few years as I bounced around to different foster care homes and hospitals. It would give me something to keep in front of me after I returned home to live with my mother and the old patterns and bad habits came into play again. It would change the way I thought about everything else I was facing, because it gave me a goal to work toward when I started feeling hopeless that my life would never get me anywhere away from the ’hood. I watched the NBA finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Phoenix Suns and I knew—I knew—that sports were going to be my way out.
Even at seven years old, I was a big kid. I was taller and broader than the other kids in my class. I was bigger than most of my foster brothers, even though I was usually the youngest. I was almost as tall as some of my brothers who were four or five years older than me. But I wasn’t an obese kid. I was carrying a little extra weight, but I was athletic and fast on my feet with my reflexes—and I was tough. I’m sure having five big brothers had something to do with my toughness. If you wanted to play with the older kids, you had to keep up and you couldn’t be a crier. I had never played any organized sports, but people always seemed to think I should, so I realized pretty early on that I had a unique combination of build and talents.
I remember watching the NBA playoffs at my cousin’s house. There were a bunch of us there—most of my brothers, some cousins—everyone was just packed around the TV as the Bulls tore through the Hawks, the Cavaliers, and the Knicks before making it to the finals against the Suns. I didn’t know where any of those cities were: Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, Phoenix. I didn’t even know where Chicago was, even though I was cheering for them like they were my hometown team. All I knew was that Michael Jordan was the most incredible athlete I had seen in my life, and the way he played ball just blew my mind.
It was late spring, which meant it was already hot in Memphis. I don’t know if the air-conditioning was broken or if it was just because there were so many people in such a small room watching the game, but I felt like I was sweating as much as if I’d been out there playing with the Bulls, a feeling that probably helped to make my new dream seem that much more real to me.
The series against Phoenix had been crazy. Chicago was looking to win its third championship in a row—something that hadn’t happened since the Celtics were on their streak in the 1960s—but Phoenix kept fighting back. In the first five games, Chicago scored 100 points or more, and in Game Three, Phoenix ended up winning after taking the game into triple overtime, with a final score of 129 to 121. It was nonstop action on the court and probably the most exciting thing I’d ever watched. The Bulls won the first two games, lost the third, won the fourth, and lost the fifth. I was completely hooked by how intense it was to watch these two unbelievable teams fight it out.
Then in Game Six, all of the drama came to a head. Chicago was determined not to let the series go to Game Seven, and they were leading by 11 points in the second quarter, 10 in the third, and 8 going into the fourth; but Phoenix turned up the heat and pulled ahead 98 to 94. In the last minute of the game, Michael Jordan got the rebound, drove it down the court, and scored to make it 96 to 98. There were 38.1 seconds left on the clock. Dan Majerle missed the shot for the Suns and the Bulls got the ball back at 14.1 seconds. In the best show of teamwork I had ever witnessed to this day, Jordan passed to Scottie Pippen, who passed to Horace Grant, who shot it over to John Paxson, who had hung back in the three-point zone. It was a perfect shot—nothing but net—and the buzzer sounded. The Bulls had just won the championship for the third year in a row, Michael Jordan was named the series MVP for the third time in a row, and I was now hooked on sports.
For the next few days, and then the next few weeks, I kept replaying those games (especially the final one) over and over in my head. There was Jordan, scoring at least 40 points in four consecutive games—even scoring 55 points in Game Four—and averaging 41 points per game for the series. It was unreal. No one seemed to be talking about anything else except what an amazing player Jordan was. It seemed like he was starring in every commercial and was on every piece of sports gear out there. Even in my neighborhood, where no one seemed to have money for good food or to pay bills, any kind of fancy brand-name stuff with his name or his face or that famous silhouette of him jumping was something you just had to have. His name was money.
The message was pretty clear to me: MJ was never going to go hungry. If sports could make you so famous that you could always pay rent, then that was what I was going to do. After all, I didn’t see many people in my neighborhood headed to regular jobs each morning, so athletics was kind of the first real career I recognized that interested me.
Of course, it turned out that every other little boy around me seemed to have the same dream—they were all going to be either professional athletes or rappers. Some wanted to be both. Rap was a popular option because rap stars were all over TV with the fancy cars and pretty girls. There seemed to be a lot of stories about kids from the projects making it big in the rap world and shaking things up with the establishment, but I knew that wasn’t really my personality. Sports was the road for me.
When I first came up with that idea, to become the next Michael Jordan, I just figured it would be something that would happen to me when I grew up. But as I got older—especially as I hit my teenage years—I started to see a difference between myself and the other kids who had my same dream. There were the kids who wanted to become something, and there were the kids who were working to become something. The ones who wanted it ended up getting involved in drugs and gangs—the easy way to some quick cash and the most common route to take. The kids who were working toward it were the ones who were showing up to school, trying to be responsible, and studying players instead of just watching sports. It was a much smaller group.
Even though it wasn’t the easier way, I decided that I wanted to be one of the kids who was actually working toward the goal, prepping myself for the kind of life I wanted. For me, it wasn’t about the money or the flashy lifestyle or the power. If I had wanted that, I cou
ld have easily joined the Vice Lords or Gangster Disciples, and with my size, I probably would have climbed up the ranks as a bodyguard and started bringing in the money quickly. But it was a whole different way of living that I was after, so I chose to take the other route.
I took that personality quirk I’ve always had of being an observer, and I focused it on sports. I didn’t just watch games to enjoy them; I paid attention to the way the athletes moved and what the different plays were. I really studied the way the game was played and the players themselves. I learned everything I could about how they got to the pros, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I knew that I would have to go to college if I ever wanted a shot at playing basketball or football. But by the time I got to the ninth grade, I knew that college was not going to be an option for me.
That was when I decided to learn about junior colleges, where a lot of these players went before going to a big-name school. If I could figure out how to make that happen, maybe I would have a chance. First, though, I had to figure out how to get through high school.
Yeah, it’s true that I slacked off sometimes, going to school just for the free lunch and sports practice. It is tough to show up every day with your homework done when the kids around you don’t do it and encourage you to just hang out with them. It’s also tough to do what you’re supposed to do when you feel like no grown-ups—not even most of the teachers—even care if you do it or not. In the end, I realized any success I might have would come down to two things: 1) finding good people to surround myself with; and 2) taking responsibility for myself.
Not long after I moved back home after foster care, I met a kid in my neighborhood who was just a year younger than me and who felt all the same things I did about getting out of Hurt Village. That kid was Craig Vail.
Craig’s dad had moved away from his family not long before my family moved into the neighborhood, but I think it helped that he’d had a male role model for at least the first ten years of his life. Craig was the middle child of five living with his mother (plus two more half-sisters), so we were similar in that we weren’t old enough to be counted with the big kids but we weren’t so young that we were still the family babies, either. We were both kind of quiet, and I think that’s why we first started hanging out; but as we got older, I could see that there was a reason Craig and I stuck together, and it was because we needed each other. Craig didn’t think the drug dealers or gang members were cool. He didn’t drink or swear or do any of the stuff that was just normal for everyone else around us. He wanted to have a steady job to support a nice family when he grew up, so he was determined to do whatever it took to make that happen.
That was exactly the kind of friend I needed—someone who didn’t laugh at me when I said I was going to have a different kind of life. Being with Craig reminded me that I wasn’t wasting my time by studying sports, practicing my game, and trying to figure out what it would take to get me to junior college. He wasn’t into sports as seriously as I was, but he was definitely focused on making a good future and responsible life for himself. I needed that kind of solid friendship to help keep me in line and my mind in the right place as I steered through the challenges of middle school and becoming a teenager in the ghetto.
But even before meeting Craig, I was determined to make sports my “thing.” Somehow I knew sports would give me discipline and help me grow my talent so that I could use it as a tool for a career. I was actually the only one of my brothers who was really into playing sports. I don’t mean I was the only one who liked to play—in the neighborhood, everyone plays basketball. But I was the only one who was involved with sports teams at school. It just seemed like a good way to work on my life skills, and I think I kind of knew, in the back of my head, that it would help keep me out of trouble, too. My older brothers each had their own talent. Some were good at singing, or at video games we played at other people’s houses. Marcus was artistic and was great at drawing. Carlos was athletic but never got excited about playing for school teams the way I did. Athletics just became the area where I stood out—and it wasn’t just because of my size.
A couple of my brothers are tall, too: Andrew is six feet six and Deljuan was six feet seven. My sister Denise is pretty tall, too. Just like my mother, she’s about five feet ten, so I am grateful to our mother for passing that height on to us. But while my size may not have made me stand out in my family so much, it definitely did with my friends. Craig used to tease me about fitting in with the men of the neighborhood when we’d play football on those empty lots. But I wasn’t just a huge guy—I was also very fast and coordinated. The teams I joined in junior high and high school helped me develop these abilities.
I made plenty of poor choices when it came to school. I missed far too many days and relied on my teachers and coaches not noticing or caring. What I was really doing was putting my eligibility at risk, which would have upended my dreams. But fortunately, I ended up making more good choices than bad choices.
CHAPTER NINE
Big Tony and Steve
As I hit my teenage years, I totally threw myself into sports. I was pitching for the baseball team at school and playing pick-up ball. In Hurt Village, the Greet Lot was where everyone got together to shoot hoops. I played there and at Morris Park, near where my mother had moved us as I was starting high school. There were a lot of talented players, plenty of guys who could have played college hoops, but they had no one who took an interest in them by getting them to buckle down and go to school or to learn to play with discipline.
Whatever sport I was playing at the time would be my favorite—if it was football season, then that was what I liked; if it was baseball season, then that was my number one. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to play on any serious teams. The middle school teams weren’t much of anything, so I also played for a local church team. But things really took off for me when Big Tony Henderson showed up at my door one day.
I’d been playing ball in one of the local parks when some kids in the neighborhood talked to their coach, Big Tony, about me. There was a tall guy named Zack who played for Tony. He was older than me, but everyone thought he was my big brother because he and I were built so much alike. Some of the other kids on the team told Tony that I might be good to have playing with them as well.
Tony didn’t know who my mother was, so he made some calls and a friend of his, Earl, said he’d take Tony over to our house. So one evening, Tony and Earl showed up at our door and talked to my mother about letting me play on the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball league Tony had going in Hurt Village. As it turned out, Tony had known my uncle Gerald, who they all called “Hawkeye,” after a character on the old TV show M*A*S*H. (No one seems to remember why they called him that; they just did.)
Since everyone had told Tony that my size and speed were unusual for a kid my age, he was determined to get me as part of his team, and my mother agreed. So starting in eighth grade, I began playing basketball with the Hurt Village team, which was for middle-school-age boys, roughly fourteen and under, and took on other neighborhood teams around the city.
Tony moved me around to every position, but I preferred to play a bit out of the fray where I could just shoot baskets without having to be in the mix of players so much. I was good at hitting the basket from a distance. Refs loved to call fouls on me—every time I would get a rebound or even get close to another player while trying to guard them, it seemed that the whistle would blow. When you’re as big as I was and you’re playing in a league full of normal-size eleven- and twelve-year-olds, it’s almost impossible not to foul. This was a challenge I would have to deal with all the way up to varsity basketball in high school.
Tony understood what it was like to be a big kid. He’d never actually played basketball himself—he’d boxed when he was younger—but he was a pretty big guy (hence the name). I think he understood some of the challenges of trying to move a huge body effectively in a game where I was literally double the size of everyone else.
I am pretty laid-back about most things, but when it comes to something I feel is a responsibility, I get very worked up about it. If practice was at 5:00 p.m., I showed up at the gym at 4:30 p.m. I don’t think I ever missed a practice or was even late. I might have been willing to slack off on some things, but sports was my future and I was fanatical about my practice and discipline.
Tony had pulled some strings to get me transferred from Manassas to Westwood High School, which was where his son Steve was going. Steve was a year younger than me, but it was a seventh- to twelfth-grade school, so we were together. Westwood technically wasn’t in my district or in theirs, but an uncle let Tony use his mailing address so that Steve could go there to take advantage of the better sports programs, and Tony let me use that as my address, too. I was so happy when Tony managed to get me into Westwood for my freshman year of high school that I started going much more regularly.
I loved Coach Johnson, who was my football coach my freshman year. He made us lift weights, ran us, and focused on conditioning and training. I loved all of it, even though summer practices were especially awful. But I knew what I was good at and I knew what I had to do to get better. Coach Johnson pushed us in order to make us understand the importance of discipline. He also helped us to take pride in ourselves and our team.