Role of a Lifetime

by James Brown

  Those early years laid the foundation for all of us in becoming engaged members of society. And looking back, I can see that I was beginning to be shaped in what was truly important, in what it really meant to be successful by using your role, whatever that was, to impact those around you—for good.

  There are so many memories. Thank God.

  CHAPTER 3

  HALL OF FAME INFLUENCE

  Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

  Napoleon Hill

  I was not an overnight success in sports. I was a good athlete, and a basic level of proficiency in sports came fairly easily, but not stardom. Before high school, I made my basketball team in eighth grade not because I was a great player, but because I was a good listener and the coach loved the fact that I paid attention and he knew I was going to be a hard worker. I was a role player, even then. Unfortunately for me, my role in those days was to set a good example of being a good listener and being coachable—not anything that I did on the court. In fact, on the day when we were introduced to the student body, we dribbled down the court to make a layup—and I blew the wide-open, uncontested layup. I still remember the gymnasium full of my peers, laughing. I was looking for a place to hide. Not the way you play it out in your fantasies.

  In fact, before I ever became serious about my basketball, my first love was baseball. I still have a picture of me playing Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) baseball when I was fifteen years of age. The picture captures me perfectly at that time, long and lanky, my uniform hanging off me, highlighted by the unique and very prominent nose that is still undeniably mine.

  I looked like a human coat hanger.

  I hit a substantial number of home runs in the CYO playoffs that summer, and Morgan Wootten, the famed basketball coach from DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, was in attendance. He was there to see a pitcher on our team, a blond-haired guy named Steve Garrett, who threw gas, and was headed to DeMatha to begin the ninth grade the next year. Steve was an exceptional three-sport athlete in football, baseball, and basketball and, to cap it all off, Steve was also a great student. Coach was there to watch the three games in the playoffs, and Steve threw all three of them—a perfect game, a one-hitter and a no-hitter. Coach Wootten felt pretty good about the decision to have Steve attend DeMatha. After the weekend, when Steve’s leverage with DeMatha couldn’t have been any higher, Steve brought Coach Wootten over to meet me. “Coach, this is our left fielder, James Brown.” Coach greeted me and asked if I played basketball also, since I was such a big kid. I did, I told him. “I scored one point last season for my eighth grade team.”

  He was so impressed that he offered, “I’ll talk with the baseball coach for you.”

  My parents were ecstatic, as it was a private school that I was able to attend for the princely sum of $400 a year, a very stiff price tag back then! And although it was in Maryland, it was located only a few miles outside of DC. Before I arrived at DeMatha, though, I attended Coach Wootten’s summer basketball camp because I knew I needed help with my skills to progress on the basketball court. I so took everything he said to heart about spending time on sharpening my skills that I quit playing baseball and focused exclusively on basketball from that time forward.

  I’m sure my dad was crushed, although he never said anything to me. Family legend maintains that my father stood over my crib with his brother, my uncle, admiring my right arm and dreaming of the day that I would be an ace pitcher. I hated to disappoint him, but I found that, even during that summer of hitting home run upon home run in CYO baseball, I had no future. Steve Garrett and his heat-seeking missile of a fastball helped me come to that realization. I was sure his fastball was truly “heat-seeking,” anyway. And to make matters worse, he had a big, sharp breaking curve ball.

  I remember vividly standing in the batter’s box during an intra-squad game, waiting for him to throw to me the pitches I’d seen him throw to opposing batters so many times. He threw me a breaking ball—I read the spin of the pitch coming out of his hand. As usual, he started the pitch inside, coming at the hitter—in this case, me. I was talking myself through it. “It’s gonna break. Wait for it, it’s about to break. It’s gonna break. Isn’t it going to break? Is it going to break? IT’S NOT GOING TO BREAK!” my brain screamed, as I hit the dirt, skinny arms and legs flying in every direction.

  It broke over the plate for a strike.

  That’s when I realized that I didn’t have the heart to stand in the batter’s box as I got bigger and guys started throwing harder and harder. Steve and his breaking ball—they conspired to get me out of the game.

  But basketball summer camp was different. I soaked up every pearl of wisdom from Coach Wootten during that camp, every drill he taught, every axiom he conveyed. My becoming one of the best leapers in the District was because I was compulsive about doing the exercises that I had been told would improve my jumping ability—and they did.

  My ninth grade year I started on the JV team at DeMatha as Coach felt that even though I had the talent, I needed more refinement before I would be a contributing member of the squad. I kept practicing. My sophomore year I played regularly on the varsity at DeMatha, which was, as far as I was concerned, a huge deal. This was national powerhouse DeMatha! As Coach Wootten pointed out, that didn’t happen very often. Even Kenny Carr, who played in the NBA for ten years, played junior varsity his sophomore year at DeMatha. I kept working and improving, always striving to get better and better and was becoming a complete player. I worked hard on defense, was a shot blocker, great rebounder and leaper, and a good scorer. Coach Wootten has said that my hard work resulted in my being “the total package.”

  I was also trying to make everyone else better. I was still a good listener, would hit the open man and not worry about my statistics or points, but try to do whatever was requested.

  And Coach Wootten was unusual in his method of teaching. He never demanded or yelled to get us to do something. Instead, he always requested. He spoke with authority and conviction in a fashion that you knew what he spoke about was right—period. In the four years that I played for him, I never once heard him curse. He is such an outstanding communicator that he is able to find the right vocabulary and inflection to his voice to make his point. He never cursed. He made it clear when you were wrong and he corrected you, he exhorted and encouraged, never yelled or demeaned. He figured out how to motivate each player and what buttons to push, without bringing down his own standards for himself in the process.

  Coach simply didn’t think that it was possible to antagonize and be productive at the same time. That by the mere fact of assaulting and belittling someone, you were not able to positively influence them and be a productive teacher. He had both a short- and long-term view of his players—as players and citizens. And he viewed himself first and foremost as a teacher. In fact, he taught me World History in ninth grade. If he didn’t think that cursing was an appropriate way to teach his students in the classroom, he likewise didn’t think that cursing at his players was an appropriate way to communicate what he wanted to teach us about basketball. He always told us that he would never knowingly embarrass us, and that if he ever did so, we were to go to him and tell him. Just as he expected us never to embarrass him.

  His methods worked. We were good.

  We won the Catholic League Championship every year that I was on the varsity, and my junior year we were named National Champions. And as the seasons progressed it was encouraging to know I played a valuable role in that success. In my sophomore year I began to get more and more playing time over the course of the season. I suppose I owe part of the credit for that to my friends. I have always tried to be friendly with a ready smile and kind word—that’s how I’m wired. Coach Wootten describes me as “overwhelmingly” the most popular student of the four hundred boys at DeMatha while I was in attendance. He may be exaggerating, but the one thin
g that I’m sure of is that whatever popularity I had worked in my favor on the basketball court. Students would help me gain playing time with the occasional chant of “We want James!” until I was put in the game.

  Coach Wootten made certain that he taught us much more than basketball. He would always ask us if we had worked hard enough over the summer to improve our game. Who-ever he asked invariably answered yes, and he would lean in, and ensure that he had their attention.

  “Did you really?” A nod would follow, but with a little less affirmation.

  “Well, just think about this. Somehow, somewhere out there, there’s another player in the city who was paying the price to get better, working two or three or four or five hours per day on the basketball court to sharpen their game, all summer. And if you weren’t, and you two meet on the court this season… who do you think is going to win?”

  “Basketball players are made over the summer.”

  Once I was in high school, I always came and helped at Coach’s summer camps. I was helping out, but also doing whatever I could to improve my game. Coach remembers setting the baskets to eleven feet and that I could still dunk on them. One summer, I had a broken bone in my foot and a cast covering my foot, all the way to my upper shin. I could still dunk, even with the cast. I’m less than certain that’s what the doctor recommended.

  In fact, Coach often used me to help demonstrate to the campers that they should be very confident about becoming good shooters because the basket was as wide as the ocean. He would then have me take two basketballs and dunk them simultaneously—of course, back then I was only carrying about 185 pounds into flight versus two hundred… and… well… uh… just a bit more weight now…

  Coach’s big emphasis, as I noted, was that the great players were made in the off-season. That’s when you have time to focus on the fundamentals, have a chance to improve your shooting, work on ball handling, become a better defensive player. I was relentless about my off-season preparation, spending several hours every day working on my game, and that contributed greatly to the player that I ultimately became.

  Depth before height, once again. Build the foundation. I learned that lesson without realizing it, working hard whether school was in session or out, working to stay ahead of others around the city that I was sure were working just as hard as I was. While others were relaxing, we could be getting better to get ahead. If they were getting ahead, then we’d better be keeping pace by paying the price and sharpening our skills. It was what you did when no one was watching that made all the difference in basketball. Coach made certain we knew that that didn’t just apply to what we did on the basketball court. He made it clear that success was much more perspiration than inspiration—and he drilled that home until we realized that he was talking about life, too, not just basketball.

  “If one guy works hard all summer to improve and one guy is haphazard in his off-season approach, when they meet on the court of battle the next fall, who is going to win?” I think Coach Wootten may have told me that once or twice during my career. Or maybe a hundred times.

  “Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent. Therefore, make sure that you are practicing the right way, the right things. Making those right things permanent.”

  He gave us the four priorities in life that he stressed were crucial if we were going to take the court for him at DeMatha High School: God first, family second, our academics next, and finally basketball. Those were our four priorities, in order, if we were to play for him. He made it clear that he required those things because they led to success.

  He coached for forty-six years at DeMatha, and is the winningest coach in high school basketball history. With a career record of 1,274 wins and 192 losses, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 2000, the only coach in the Hall for work exclusively at the high school level. Red Auerbach, the Boston Celtics great coach and president, presented him for induction into the Hall, and I was blessed to attend his enshrinement, representing all of his former players at DeMatha. We won the mythical national championship in 1968, my junior year, and he won more than 30 conference championships in those forty-six seasons. He is truly a legend in coaching circles, and John Wooden has called him one of the best coaches he has ever seen at any level. He is an innovator, as was seen before I arrived, when his team broke Power Memorial Academy’s seventy-one-game winning streak in 1965. Trying to prepare his players to play against the sheer size of Power’s Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Coach Wootten, at the suggestion of the school principal, John Moylan, an avid tennis player, had all the players on defense hold tennis rackets over their heads to get those on offense accustomed to shooting over their rackets, simulating the wingspan of Lew Alcindor.

  * * *

  One of the more important things I received from Coach during my time at DeMatha was beyond the dimensions of the court. One of my main sources of learning—that I should seek to complement and support others’ gifts and abilities—came from Coach Wootten. He was a phenomenal coach and teacher of basketball, but even more than that, he understood how to build a team, and to communicate those things that we could apply in any setting. I, of course, didn’t realize that at the time, but have drawn on his lessons and axioms for living ever since I have been out of high school.

  He always underscored—always—the value of team. We were to be unselfish and put the team before our own interests. He made that very clear with me. Even though others might see me as the team star—a two-time high school All-American, and I would be named the Player of the Year in Washington, DC, for 1969—I had to toe the mark like everyone else. I was one member of the team. I recall having to leave campus one day after school to receive an award. I asked Coach Wootten for permission, because we had practice that afternoon a couple of hours after school ended.

  “You can go,” he said, “as long as you are back before practice starts.”

  I returned five minutes late for practice, as I recall, but given that I had a good reason, Coach Wootten didn’t even acknowledge my tardiness. We practiced as normal, and as the practice came to a close, I headed out of the gym with the others until I heard Coach’s whistle, along with his voice. “JB, you’re staying afterwards. You were five minutes late. Get on the line.” He then proceeded to have me run suicides, in which you start at the end line, sprint to the nearest free throw line, come back to the end line, then to half court and back to the end line, then to the farther free throw line and back, and finally to the far end line and back. At each turn, you’ve got to reach down and touch the court.

  After one of those, I had to run a lap around the gym. As I was running, I saw the other players taking notice as they headed into the locker room. His whistle communicated clearly: no one was above the team.

  He wasn’t finished with me. Then I had to do push-ups, twenty-five of them. At this point, I had gone through a full practice, then run sprints and a lap, and my arms were burning and shaking. And tight. But Coach Wootten offered me a way out of further discipline.

  “Go to the free throw line. If you can make five out of five, you’re done.”

  I could barely lift my arms to shoot—my arms felt flaccid. The first shot fell about ten feet short of the basket, and he directed me back to the end line. Sprints. Around the gym. Push-ups.

  “Back to the free throw line. Make five in a row and you’re outta here.”

  This shot was worse than the first.

  “Back on the [end] line!” Sprints, a lap, push-ups. After four circuits—and no, I didn’t make one free throw along the way—he told me that was enough, get a shower.

  There were two lessons that day. The first was that I was to be on time. I had a commitment to the team, and anything else—even awards—would have to come outside of the time dedicated to my team obligations. We were all to share his team philosophy and embody it. Be there. Mean what you say. Be accountable and responsible.

  The second lesson
was mercy. If it weren’t for Coach Wootten’s mercy, I would still be doing the circuit. There was no way in the world that I was ever going to make a free throw, let alone five in a row.

  While watching film, Coach Wootten would always make a big to-do over the pass that led to the great shot. He wouldn’t focus on the shot, but would stop the film and make sure that we’d all seen the pass that led to it—repeatedly. “The shot may be what the crowd cheered for and what the writers wrote about, but it was the pass that made it all possible.” Then, he would stop and compliment the guy who set the pick that allowed another to make the pass that, finally, led to the great shot. The pick and the pass were necessary—just as necessary as the shot. In fact, without them, there would have been no shot.

  It was all about team. The guy who scrambled all over the court and dived for a loose ball on the floor, knocking it out of bounds, would never make it into the box score for that play. However, Coach would stop the film—again, an example of what he believed was critical to our success as a team.

  We were each a significant and integral part of the team. Each of us brought certain gifts and abilities to the whole of the team. The team might be successful on the back of one player or another for a game or two—but over the long haul it was a collection of individuals joined for a common cause—each filling the roles which brought out the best of the team.

  It’s all about what we all bring to the table to make the other guys look good. He would compliment me as much for my position and effort on a rebound as he would for me tapping the ball back into the basket for a score. He taught me, and I truly began to believe, that you always do the little things, the things that the world may not recognize, but that those in the know—your teammates, your coaches, those who understand the game—would appreciate the importance of: fighting for the rebound, getting up in traffic to tap in a missed shot, getting to the free throw line, doing the tedious work that really set the tone for the team.