Washington believes that the lie he told about where he lived may have saved his life. A lot of the kids he went to junior high with died before they ever got out of high school or shortly thereafter. Some joined the gangs; some didn’t. Kermit never joined a gang.
“I can still see a lot of those kids I grew up with in my mind’s eye,” he said. “I remember playing ball with them, being in school with them. They all started out as nice little kids, innocent kids. I could name you a dozen or more who never made it to twenty-one. Killed in gang fights, killed by drugs, killed by police. I was one of the lucky ones.”
By the time he got to high school, he was beginning to have some success as an athlete. He was a string bean, over 6 feet tall but weighing less than 140 pounds. He actually played some tennis, in part because his father liked to play, in part because there was so little competition in the D.C. public schools that he could be a star just by getting the ball over the net. “Then at the end of the year we’d be in a tournament with the kids from the suburban schools and I’d get killed,” he said.
Chris was emerging as a football star at McKinley Tech, and Kermit played football too. He was a wide receiver and made the Coolidge varsity as a junior. By that point he had grown to 6-4 and was playing some junior varsity basketball, although he didn’t start very often. He stuck with basketball for one reason: one of his best friends in school was Glenn Price, the team’s best player. Playing basketball gave Kermit the chance to hang out with Price—and it meant he got a ride home every night after practice.
“I wasn’t any good at all,” he said. “The one thing I could do was jump a little. But I couldn’t shoot, I was skinny, I was weak. Occasionally I’d get a rebound or a basket off a rebound because of my jumping, but that was about it.”
He continued to struggle in school but was, if nothing else, a determined student. Every summer he would go to summer school, retaking courses to get his grades up. A lot of D’s during the year became B’s and C’s in the summer. In a twisted way, Kermit credits his stepmother with inspiring him to do better in school.
“She was always telling Chris and me that we were worthless,” he said. “She would say we would never become anything, that our mother was crazy and stupid. She made Chris angry, very angry. But she made me determined. I was going to prove her wrong. I was going to show her that I wasn’t worthless, I wasn’t a fool, and I was going to become something.”
Like most boys, Chris and Kermit dreamed of becoming star athletes. Their father subscribed to Sports Illustrated, and every week the boys would read the magazine cover to cover, then tear the front cover off and put it on the wall of their room. Every wall in the room and the ceiling were eventually plastered with Sports Illustrated covers. “It was wonderful to wake up in that room every morning,” Kermit said. “In that room, Chris and I were happy. We’d talk all the time about the day when we would be in that magazine. I came from a world where there were no heroes. The people in that magazine became my heroes.”
During Kermit’s junior year Chris emerged as a star quarterback at McKinley Tech. He still wasn’t doing a lot of schoolwork, but he scored 1150 on the SATs, a remarkable score for an athlete coming out of a D.C. public school. That score got him recruited by a number of schools, and he decided finally to enroll at Texas Western. Both Kermit and Chris were familiar with the school because two years earlier Texas Western had played in the Final Four at the University of Maryland.
With five blacks in the starting lineup, the Miners had stunned all-white Kentucky in the national championship game. That game is regarded by most as the Brown v. Board of Education of college basketball. Within two years Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp had signed his first black player, and it wasn’t long before all the major colleges in the once segregated South were signing black players. The Washington brothers had pulled hard for Texas Western in that championship game, and when Chris had the chance to go there he jumped at it.
Kermit was also starting to do better in school. He had been encouraged and inspired by a biology teacher, Barbara Thomas. Early in the semester during his junior year, Kermit turned in a sloppy assignment, figuring that if he worked hard he might turn his usual D into a D-plus or a C-minus. Miss Thomas was having none of it. She told him that she knew he had it in him to do better if he would just be a little more patient and believe in himself. Kermit began taking more time on assignments, not only in Miss Thomas’s class, but in his other classes too. His grades jumped. Not to A’s, not even all B’s, but mostly B’s with a sprinkling of C’s.
When Chris got into college, Kermit decided that was what he wanted to do too. “Since Barbara had told both of us to turn in our house keys as soon as we were out of high school, I certainly had to find something to do,” he said. “The problem was, I wasn’t as good a student as Chris, I didn’t test as well, and I wasn’t as good a football player.”
He wasn’t a bad football player, alternating between wide receiver and quarterback as a senior. Whenever Coolidge needed to throw the ball downfield, he would move to quarterback because of his strong arm. The team was 8–2 that fall and made the D.C. city playoffs. But there were no offers of scholarships from any football schools. There were no offers of any kind.
Things got worse during basketball season. After beginning the year as a starter and getting 16 rebounds in a game, Kermit went backward. He produced less and less as the season wore on and played less and less. By season’s end he wasn’t playing at all. “And I didn’t deserve to be playing either,” he said. “I was awful. I had no confidence and no game at all. All I did the last few games was sit on the bench. I was a senior and I couldn’t get in a game. My best friend [Price] was being recruited by all these schools and I wasn’t even one of the seven or eight best players in my own high school. I was embarrassed.”
As soon as the season was over, Kermit headed to the local schoolyards—to play basketball. “I was just so embarrassed by the way I played that I had to do something to try to get better,” he said. “It had nothing to do with thinking about my future or anything else like that. I just wanted to get better so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself playing ball in the schoolyard.”
One of the people he encountered in his schoolyard forays was James Brown, who had been the best player in the city that winter. Brown, now a TV star on Fox’s NFL pregame show, had gone to junior high school with Washington before attending DeMatha Catholic High School in nearby Hyattsville, Maryland, to play for the legendary Morgan Wootten. Brown had everything going for him that Washington did not: he was graduating from DeMatha, the high school program in the area, if not the country. His grades were so good that he had turned down several top basketball schools— including the University of North Carolina—to accept an academic scholarship at Harvard. Washington was awed by everything his old schoolmate had become. When he noticed that Brown skipped rope before and after playing, he asked him about it.
“It’s the main reason I can run up and down the court forever,” Brown told him. “Jump rope and you’ll always have all the stamina you need.”
Washington went out and bought a jump rope that day. He began jumping rope every afternoon. His stamina grew and grew. Playing every afternoon on the playground against good players, his game improved. For the first time in his life, he was obsessed with a sport.
“I was better,” he said. “But I still wasn’t any good. I had so far to go to get good that by improving I just became mediocre as opposed to awful.”
Even so, when he heard about citywide tryouts for a D.C. all star team that would travel to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the spring to play in an all-star tournament, he decided to go. “To this day I can’t tell you why I went,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t make the team, I wasn’t at that level. But they had to let me try out. The rule was, any senior in the city who had played high school basketball was eligible to try out for the team. I just wanted to go and find out how far behind the real players I was.”
The tr
youts were at St. John’s High School in upper Northwest. Washington hitched a ride there for the first day, arriving just in time. The coaches were Wootten and Joe Gallagher. There were a number of college coaches in the stands. Some were just there so that players who had already committed to them would see them there. Some were there because many of the stars were still uncommitted since, in those days, most players didn’t make a college decision until late in the spring. And a few were there just hoping to find the proverbial diamond in the rough, the kid who had gone unnoticed and might help a struggling program.
No one was looking harder for an unknown that day than Tom Young and Tom Davis. Young had just become the head coach at American University, a small private school in northwest Washington that wasn’t very far from St. John’s. He had left the University of Maryland, where he had been an assistant to Frank Fellows, to take the AU job and had brought Tom Davis, Maryland’s freshman coach, with him as his number one assistant. American was coming off a 4–19 season, so Young and Davis knew they were starting with a bare cupboard.
Since St. John’s was close to AU, Young and Davis decided to go to the tryouts on the off chance that there was a player who hadn’t chosen a school yet and wasn’t being recruited by the big-name schools. “We weren’t expecting very much,” Davis said. “It was more about our need to check out anything we could and not having anyplace else to go that day than anything else.”
Sitting on the bleachers with the other coaches and a few fans who had drifted in to watch the tryouts, Young and Davis noticed one kid who kept diving on the floor after loose balls. It didn’t matter where the ball was or who else was going after it or if he had any reasonable chance to get the ball, the kid would just run and dive, run and dive. He had floor burns all over him.
“He had no idea, I mean absolutely no idea how to play,” Young said. “But he could really run and he could really jump. And he was the most eager kid out there.”
“He was wearing a white T-shirt, white tennis shorts, white socks, and white tennis shoes,” Davis remembered, laughing. “He absolutely looked out of place, in part because of his clothes, in part because he really didn’t have any idea what he was supposed to do.”
He also seemed to have a small fan club sitting a few rows up from where Young and Davis were sitting, some kids who would get very excited whenever the skinny lunatic would throw his body through the air in pursuit of a ball. Davis moved up a few rows to sit with the skinny kid’s friends.
“Who’s your friend down there?” he asked.
“You mean Bird?” one of them asked.
Washington’s nickname in the neighborhood was Bird because of his long, skinny legs. He had grown to 6-4 by then but still weighed 160 pounds dripping wet.
“Yeah, Bird,” Davis said. “Where’d he play this year?”
The kids laughed and told Davis it would be more accurate to say he hadn’t played at Coolidge High School. The only reason Davis knew anything about Coolidge was because it was where Glenn Price went to school. Price was being recruited by most of the top programs in the East. He went back and told Young they might be on to something, that maybe they had discovered a player no one knew about.
Of course Young and Davis weren’t the only ones who had noticed Washington’s athleticism. One coach, who told Washington he was from Western New England College, gave him a card after the workout was over and told him if he didn’t come back to the second day of tryouts, he would guarantee him a scholarship. Washington was stunned. A scholarship to college—me? To play basketball? Maybe they had him confused with his buddy Price.
No, that wasn’t the case. Washington was also approached by Joe Harrington, who was now an assistant coach at Maryland on new coach Lefty Driesell’s staff. We might be interested in you, Harrington told him. What’s your SAT score? Washington told him 780. “Take it again, get it to 800, and we can offer you a scholarship,” Harrington said.
Young and Davis weren’t in a position to offer anything. They needed more information. American wasn’t governed by the Atlantic Coast Conference’s 800 rule, which required any athlete receiving a scholarship to have scored 800 on the SATs. But it was a good academic school, and getting someone with 780 on his boards past admissions would not be easy. But after watching Washington at the second day of tryouts, they were convinced he was worth the risk.
When Wootten and Gallagher selected the team for Allentown that day, Washington didn’t make it. “Which was the right thing to do,” Washington said. “I couldn’t play with those guys. They were better than me.”
Young laughs now at the notion of Washington not making that team. “Morgan and Joe have spent the last thirty years arguing about who decided to cut him,” Young said. “But he really was so raw. You could see potential, but Morgan and Joe weren’t choosing a team for a couple years down the road, they were choosing a team for next week.”
Young and Davis decided to do whatever they could to get Washington into school. “We weren’t going to be very good the next year, we knew that,” Young said. “Players were not knocking our doors down to come and play. Remember, in those days everyone had to play freshman ball, so we knew he’d have a year to learn to play before he had to play with the varsity. Was it a risk? Sure. But when we talked to him, it was so apparent that this was a quality kid. He looked you in the eye when he talked. He was confident, clearly smart.”
“A lot of times high school kids, especially ballplayers who have been spoiled, have trouble giving up more than two or three words to people,” Davis said. “Kermit was just the opposite. He was positively loquacious.”
Still, Young and Davis needed to get his transcript. What they saw was encouraging: the SATs were low, but the grades were pretty good—mostly B’s and C’s. “Not spectacular,” Young said. “But worth a shot.”
Washington is convinced that if all the D’s he had made as a freshman and sophomore had been on his record, he never would have gotten into AU. “Those summer school classes I took to get my grades up probably saved me,” he said.
His father was pushing him to reconsider Maryland’s offer, take the SATs again, and try to get 800. Maryland was a name he was familiar with; American University was not, even though it was not that far away from where the Washingtons lived. “Not that far, but a million miles,” Washington said. “It was on the other side of Rock Creek Park. That was our version of the railroad tracks. I had never been on the other side of the park in my life.”
Except for those two days when he had hitched to St. John’s. Urged by his father, Washington went out to College Park to meet Driesell. He liked the tall, bald, blustery coach, who had arrived at Maryland vowing to make the school “the UCLA of the East.” Driesell was honest with Washington: they had a couple of extra scholarships and they needed to fill out the roster of the freshman team. He might have a chance to play on the varsity as a junior or a senior, but he would have to improve a lot, because Driesell was planning to recruit the best high school players in the country.
“I didn’t feel needed at Maryland,” he said. “Lefty was very honest, and I appreciated that. But Coach Young and Coach Davis made me feel needed.”
The admissions office at AU was far from certain that the school needed a student with Washington’s transcript—especially on a full ride. Young and Davis didn’t have the advantage of having been at the school long enough to have developed relationships with the admissions people. “We ended up basically saying, ‘Look, you have to trust us, we’ve talked to the kid and we think he can make it here,’” Young said. “At one point, Tom and I walked out of a meeting and I said to him, ‘Do you realize we’re in there begging for a kid who averaged four points a game and didn’t even start as a senior in high school?’ But something told both of us it was the right thing to do.”
Admissions finally relented and told Young and Davis that Washington would be accepted. They were elated. Joe Boylan, the newly hired freshman coach who would be Washington’s coac
h in the fall, was dispatched to Farragut Street to bring Washington to campus, show him around, help him find a dorm, and buy him dinner. “Coach Boylan took me to a restaurant for dinner and told me to order anything I wanted,” Washington said. “I ordered a steak. I think that was the first time in my life I’d had a steak in a restaurant.”
Very few of his friends had any idea what American was, but Washington didn’t care. He was going to college and he had a scholarship. In that sense at least he had matched Chris, who was completing his freshman year at Texas Western and had already been told he was no longer a quarterback but a defensive back. Even at the school that had started five black basketball players in the national championship game in 1966, there was no call, three years later, for a black quarterback.
Washington felt as if he had been given a new life. He would be out of the house, away from Barbara and all the talk about what a loser he was. He had gotten away from the gangs and he had lived through the schoolyard beatings and the threats. He had seen others knifed to death and shot to death. Now he was leaving. He was going to the other side of the park, where there were no gangs, no shootings, and no Barbara. He would eat steak in restaurants and he would play basketball and go to college.
“When I played, or didn’t play, my last high school basketball game, if you had told me I’d be getting a scholarship to play basketball in college a couple of months later, I would have told you that you were crazy,” he said. “It really was like a dream. All those nights when Chris and I would sit in our room and tell each other we were going to get out, that the way out was going to be sports and we were going to be in Sports Illustrated someday.
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