by Doug Merlino
“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 t
heir 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.
At the end of World War II, American race relations were primed for change: Thousands of black servicemen had gone overseas, fought for the country, and were in no mood to be treated as inferior when they got back. The war and the jobs it created had pulled another wave of black migrants from the South to cities in the North and the West Coast, and the invention of the mechanical cotton picker meant that many more were soon to make the move. Like the rest of American society, major-league sports were segregated, but it didn’t take much to see that there was an amazing talent pool in the Negro Leagues—if a major-league baseball team were to integrate and bring in some of the country’s best black players, it would gain a huge competitive advantage. In 1945, Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, took that step and signed Robinson to a minor-league contract. Two years later, on April 15, 1947, Robinson stepped onto the field for his first major-league game.
That season has been recounted in dozens of books and films: how Rickey and Robinson agreed that Robinson would turn the other cheek to provocation; the threats, taunts, and slurs Robinson endured from fans, opposing players, and even his own teammates; Robinson’s intensely competitive personality and his excellence on the field, where he helped the Dodgers make it to the World Series; and the overwhelming support of African Americans, who turned out by the thousands to see him play.
Back then, baseball was still the most popular sport in the country and considered the national pastime. Robinson’s presence on the field was a step toward visibility for all African Americans. The African-American essayist Gerald Early writes: “Robinson was arguably the person who launched the American era of racial integration after World War II,” preceding Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and everything that followed. “Robinson became a public spectacle in a way that no other African American had quite been before, and he subdued Western culture through his sheer will to win.”
After Robinson’s pioneering season, the segregation of other sports quickly ended. In 1950, twenty-two-year-o
ld Earl Lloyd entered a game for the Washington Capitols, becoming the first African American to play in the National Basketball Association. He preceded an explosion of black talent in the sport during the following decades: Bill Russell, a six-foot-ten shot blocker and rebounder, led the University of San Francisco to college championships in 1955 and 1956 before going on to join the Boston Celtics, who won eleven titles during his thirteen-year career; the seven-foot-tall Wilt Chamberlain in 1962 became the only player ever to score a hundred points in an NBA game; and Elgin Baylor, who could seemingly suspend himself in the air, brought unprecedented athletic virtuosity to the court.
Jackie Robinson’s ten seasons in the major leagues are by far the most-told part of his story, though not the end. After his retirement in 1956, Robinson became deeply involved in civil rights, pushing for legal remedies such as voting rights as well as economic power through black business ownership. An outspoken advocate for Black Capitalism, he helped to found and then chaired a black-run savings and loan in Harlem. He took a position as a corporate vice president with the restaurant chain Chock full o’ Nuts, and instead of just cashing in on his fame, actively worked to improve conditions for black employees. His belief in business as the way forward for African Americans led him to campaign for Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential election—a position he later renounced—and become an aide to Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s moderate Republican governor. “I was fighting a last-ditch battle to keep the Republicans from becoming completely white,” Robinson wrote later.
Robinson, in effect, tried to bridge the early philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: He wanted black economic empowerment in tandem with legal victories and advancement toward equality. By the 1960s, though, many African-American leaders thought it would be impossible for blacks to ever gain equality under the capitalist system that had once enslaved them. For example, Du Bois joined the Communist Party later in life; he died in exile in Ghana in 1963 at age ninety-five.