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The Hustle

Page 8

by Doug Merlino


  Some African-American athletes also began to question the assumption that achievement in sports would lead to full acceptance in American life. The most prominent was heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay, who, with the encouragement of Malcolm X, joined the Nation of Islam in 1964 and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Ali refused to report when he was drafted into the army in 1966 and shunned the idea of the black athlete as an integrationist role model. Robinson, whose son fought in Vietnam, said at the time, “He’s hurting, I think, the morale of a lot of young soldiers over in Vietnam.” Ali simply said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

  In essence, Jackie Robinson’s integrationist position began to seem passé to many blacks as the 1960s advanced. When he questioned the wisdom of the black separatism of people such as Stokely Carmichael, militants labeled Robinson an “Uncle Tom.” In a much-publicized spat, Malcolm X accused Robinson of simply working for his “white boss,” Branch Rickey. Malcolm noted that in 1949, Robinson had agreed, if reluctantly, to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee to refute Paul Robeson’s statement that African Americans, because of their treatment in the United States, would not fight the Soviet Union if a war started. “You let yourself be used by whites,” Malcolm X told Robinson.

  Robinson kept up his fight, starting a construction company to build housing for the working class in New York City and continuing to speak out on the discrimination and poverty faced by blacks. But by the late 1960s he was increasingly disenchanted by what he saw as a lack of progress toward equality and the failure of the country to address it. By 1972, at age fifty-three, Robinson was suffering from diabetes, his hair had gone white, and he was nearly blind. He died of a heart attack that October.

  In his autobiography, published the year of his death, Robinson remembered the optimism he felt during the singing of the national anthem at the opening of the 1947 World Series, and said it was long gone. “Today as I look back on that opening game of my first World Series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor,” he wrote. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.” Robinson questioned what his achievements on the baseball diamond had translated to in American society at large. While he had integrated the field of play, he was incensed that the positions of power in baseball were still all white. “It is not terribly difficult for the black man as an individual to enter the white man’s world and be partially accepted. However, if that individual black man is, in the eyes of the white world, an ‘uppity nigger,’ he is in for a very hard time indeed.”

  Robinson knew he’d been chosen for the major leagues not only for his talents, but also for his ability to control his temper. He recognized that there were many other black players who could have excelled at the highest levels had they gotten the chance. The playwright August Wilson took up this theme in Fences, the story of Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues power hitter who was too old to play in the major leagues by the time Robinson had integrated them. The play is set in 1957, and Troy is embittered, working as a garbageman in Pittsburgh. When his wife and a friend suggest that Jackie Robinson had changed things for blacks in baseball, that Troy just came along too early, he explodes: “There ought not never have been no time called too early! … I done seen a hundred niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson. Hell, I know some teams Jackie Robinson couldn’t even make! … Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody. I’m talking about if you could play ball then they ought to have let you play.”

  Always aware of his own good fortune, Robinson found that America feted him for his athletic skills but was much less interested in hearing him talk about lack of opportunity, the hundreds of Troy Maxsons who languished behind one Jackie Robinson. “I can’t believe that I have it made while so many of my black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity, live in slums or barely exist on welfare,” he wrote. “There was a time when I deeply believed in America. I have become bitterly disillusioned.”

  Randy Finley, born in 1942, was a decade older than Willie McClain and had in almost every way grown up on the opposite side of the racial and cultural divide. As a kid in the late 1940s, he had moved with his family to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, into a house that was only a few blocks from the East Madison neighborhood of the Central Area, which at the time was swelling with new black migrants from the South. Just as Willie McClain’s mom warned him never to cross the railroad tracks in Gulfport, Mississippi, Randy’s parents told him to stay away from the Central Area, which, of course, just made it more alluring. “I can remember it being one hundred percent black down there on Twenty-third and Madison,” he says. “Riding my bicycle, I was scared to death, but I was always very curious.”

  Finley, like McClain, had roots in the South. His father had grown up in Asheville, North Carolina, where a black woman had wet-nursed him. When Finley’s father enrolled in college at Duke, she went along to wash his clothes and take care of him. After the family moved from Washington, D.C., to Seattle—Finley’s mother had grown up in Washington State—Finley’s father hired black laborers to work around their house. “We had some contact,” Finley says. “There was a very comfortable relationship.”

  In 1951, his father, a lawyer, was elected to the Washington State Supreme Court, and the family moved to Olympia, sixty miles southwest of Seattle. Finley soon discovered a love of sports and joined the basketball, football, and swim teams in high school. “I loved competition,” he says. “I really was a basketball player trapped in a football player’s body. I never could jump very much, but I loved the sport of basketball.” Finley struggled in his classes, though, especially with writing. Outside of school, he tooled around in his ’48 hot rod and generally raised hell. “I was drunk probably five nights a week,” he says. “We’d take hypodermics and squirt vodka into oranges and then eat them at lunch at school.”

  He started college in the 1960s, taking eight years to earn a degree from the University of Washington. In the meantime, he served in the army reserve, worked as a night guard at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, spent months at a time in Mexico City learning Spanish, and sold trinkets at rock shows. While Willie McClain was taking to the streets, Finley was actually living in a house in the Central Area that he’d rented with a white roommate. “We knew there were dangers, but we were also very sympathetic,” Finley says. “I wanted to contribute to what we thought was happening. We thought our generation was changing the world”—Finley laughs at the statement—“and we were just trying to be a small part of it in Seattle. It sounds kind of dreamy, but it was a couple young men interested in being better citizens and helping other people be better citizens.”

  In 1969, Finley was thinking about going to graduate school when he saw a double feature of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Afterward, while smoking a joint with his wife and some friends, he had an epiphany—instead of grad school, he was going to get into the film business, deciding, “I’m going to open a theater just like one of those porno, skin-flick theaters on First Avenue. I’m going to build a little small theater and play nothing but films based on literature.”

  His first place, near the University of Washington, was a cramped room with only ninety-three seats. Finley discovered that the idea of showing only films based on books wasn’t realistic, but he soon became known around Seattle for his oversize personality: He wore an army jacket with his name sewn on, had a beard down to his chest, a wild head of hair topped with a Russian Cossack hat, and greeted customers by serving them tea and coffee. He expanded throughout the 1970s and eventually owned sixteen theaters, located in quirky places such as old American Legion halls. In the early 1980s, though, he found he was having a hard time getting the rights to show popular first-run movies. He filed an antitrust suit against several big theater chains, charging them with colluding
to block him out. Finley was far from the type to shy away from a fight, but as the lawyers stacked up billable hours, the battle began to burn him out. In 1986 he decided to sell his theaters. He’d already begun to rustle around for somewhere else to invest his considerable energy.

  Finley had mixed feelings about sending Maitland to Lakeside. He appreciated the education but found the other students to be “too rich and too spoiled,” and worried that Maitland would become a “snob.” (“It’s amazing they let a few plebeians like us in with their young captains of industry,” he says of our families the first time I interview him.) When he spied Willie McClain’s team, he saw a chance to open the minds of the Lakeside kids a bit. He wanted us to learn something about black people and perhaps form some friendships. “That was the hope—that as a unit we could all begin to think of each other as just people,” he says. “Basketball was a vehicle to do a lot more than just play basketball.”

  Willie McClain was cautious when Finley approached him—taking his players out of the Central Area to play basketball with a bunch of rich white kids would open him to the charge that he was letting them be exploited. But McClain quickly grasped the possibility in Finley’s offer: “What was so attractive when Randy talked about bringing the teams together—and we talked about it a lot—was the idea of these kids going on to private schools, and that really kind of blew up in my head. I said ‘Really, do they have an opportunity to do this?’ ”

  …

  On weekends, we pile into McClain’s van. Randy Finley has signed us up to play in the Amateur Athletic Union, a nationwide youth-sports organization. Anyone can form an AAU team, and you can recruit any player you want as long as he is within the age limits. The AAU league is a netherworld of games in dimly lit gyms against players none of us have faced before. McClain and Finley drive us to tournaments around Western Washington—from Bellingham and Mount Vernon up north to Redmond, the suburban home of the Microsoft “campus,” just east of Seattle across Lake Washington.

  From the stands, players are numbers and statistics. You identify them by their traits: The short kid with the fade cut into his hair can dribble right or left; the big one who sweats a lot is a tough rebounder; that kid who’s hustling after the ball has a deadly jump shot. The game’s immersive world, the beautiful geometry, the shifting angles, players jostling for position, the ball floating toward the hoop make it possible to forget that anything exists off the court, outside the moment.

  From the bench, where I usually sit with Damian, Myran, and JT, I take in every move my teammates make on the court. I know all their tics as players, but almost nothing about their lives away from the court.

  For example, I have no idea that JT, who is sitting next to me and cheering on Tyrell, has been observing Tyrell from a distance since they were little kids. Back then, Tyrell and Donnico, his brother, used to go out with their dad on the playground at Garfield. Tyrell and Donnico shot baskets while their dad grabbed the ball and whipped it back to them. Seeing them out there, JT felt envious of how tight they were, how much fun they were having. He wished he could run onto the court and join them, but it wouldn’t have seemed right—it was a father-and-son thing. JT didn’t want to intrude.

  JT cherishes the few moments of paternal-type guidance he’s had out on the playground—he’s learned his defense and rebounding skills from Dennis Johnson, the starting point guard for the Seattle SuperSonics when they won the 1979 NBA championship. JT’s mom, Sharon, was best friends with Johnson’s girlfriend, and the three of them went to games together, young “John-John” sitting on Sharon’s lap at courtside. During the week, Sharon was a clerk at Blue Shield. Away from work, she was so fun and pretty that she’d been nicknamed “Hollywood Sharon”—JT found her totally glamorous. Dennis Johnson took a liking to JT and decided to teach him how to play. JT hardly sees his own dad, except at his grandfather’s house at holidays. When they do meet, they’re polite to each other but nothing more. JT finds substitutes for the father and brothers he is missing through playing on Willie McClain’s team. “I loved being able to go over to people’s houses to eat dinner, spending the night all the time, doing things with them, like with the McClains,” he says. “They had brothers, and a mother and a father, not a single parent, doing family things, and I’m able to be involved. So I think just growing up I was just looking for a family, looking up to Willie McClain.”

  Myran, like JT, has found a refuge on Willie McClain’s team. He was seven the last time he saw his dad. They’d been out in the middle of the street, with Myran hiking a football to his father, who then passed it to him. His dad was a charismatic guy who loved to dress sharp. He also sold drugs. Not long after that game on the street, Myran’s father went down to Seattle’s Chinatown to play cards in a gambling den and was shot dead. In the years since, Myran’s mom has been mired in her own struggles, and Myran has spent most of his childhood with his grandma, who works as a nurse. Myran’s predilection toward acting out is a trait Willie McClain keeps a close eye on. Of all the players on the team, McClain knows that Myran is the most likely to say something that might cause a problem, and that he’s the least likely to know how to handle himself in a new social situation. But the McClains have often had Myran stay over at their house. If anyone needs to be exposed to an opportunity that might broaden his horizons, it’s Myran. So McClain decided to take a chance and put him on the team. “Myran, he was just special to me,” he says. “You know things, and you know he needs to be there.”

  Damian lives with his mom and younger sister, Toya, and is fiercely protective of both. When his sister gets teased, Damian steps in to defend her. “Damian always took up for me,” Toya says. “I don’t recall him ever losing a fight. He would beat up the biggest of big guys.” On the team, Damian, like JT and Myran, finds surrogate father figures in both Willie McClain and Charlie Hampton. Sometimes he goes over to the Hampton house and just studies Charlie—his tone of voice, his bearing, how he interacts with his wife and kids—trying to learn everything he can.

  Tyrell, for his part, loves sports. He’s brash and seems born for the public eye, shining in the spotlight ever since he began break dancing and pop-locking at church events, which got him showcased on the local cable-access station. With his array of behind-the-back moves, head fakes, and infectious smile, he is the flashiest player on the team.

  Willie Jr. both enjoys and feels pressure in his position as the son of the coach. “I had to earn my spot more than anybody else,” he says. “God forbid, if I would’ve had no skills, I would’ve been in trouble.” His role on the court, he realizes, is to help his dad keep order, which means holding his own ego in line. As a point guard, his focus is on distributing the ball and feeding the player with the hot hand. With the integrated team, he feels a responsibility to make sure things go smoothly, that everyone feels part of the group.

  Maitland, as the son of the team’s organizer, also has a special status. His feelings on that situation are mixed. He has no choice but to play—his dad thinks that sports are a good way for Maitland to make friends and to combat his shyness. But Maitland also feels an innate social awkwardness. He finds it hard to meet the expectations at Lakeside, where it seems like everyone is expected to be perfect. He enjoys being part of the team, but starring on the court means nothing to him. “I’m one of those people who much preferred practice. I don’t really have fun in games. I don’t thrive on the pressure,” he says. “I tended to like not getting playing time because then I didn’t have to worry about anything.”

  Sean’s dad, the cigar-chewing stockbroker, had encouraged his son to play sports, even signing him up for boxing when he was in first grade. “I hated it,” Sean says. “I remember one of the first boxing practices, we had gloves on and had to pick sparring partners. I picked this dorky kid with big frizzy hair because I thought he’d be easy to fight. He whipped me so bad.”

  With his height, basketball was the most natural fit for Sean. “I was never very good, just ta
ll. I’d run around in circles, rebound here or there. I was never aggressive.… But it was always fun, I always liked the people I played with. And you do sports as a kid, right?”

  Dino, along with Chris, gets recruited by Randy Finley midway into the AAU season to add height and talent lacking in some of the other white players, such as myself. Dino’s parents are both immigrants from Greece. His dad, whose first job in Seattle was as a cafeteria manager at a waterfront hotel on Elliott Bay, runs a twenty-four-hour diner downtown that he owns with his brothers. Dino’s mom ferries him to his practices and games. Though Dino already attends a Christian school, his mom hopes he can gain entrance to Lakeside. Dino, who doesn’t know anyone from either side, just jumps in and begins to play.

  Chris knows that he’s enrolling at Lakeside in the fall—his father is a prominent alum, and his older brother and sister are both already at the school. But coming from a competitive family has its pressures, and Chris has found that he can use athletics as an outlet. “A lot of people play sports because they’re fun, but for me the significance was that during seventh grade, over an eighteen-month period, I grew something like eight inches,” he says. “I wasn’t popular in school. I was kind of fat, and all of a sudden I went to being six-two and skinny. Sports transitioned from being the things that you just did to being my lifeline, my self-esteem.”

  For Eric, this team, mixing together his Central Area friends and private school classmates, means both sides of his life are finally coming together. Eric has never thought about why he plays sports. It’s just natural. He drops his usual reserve when he plays basketball. It’s as if he has a different personality that comes out, one that isn’t withdrawn or shy. “I was good at basketball,” he says. “What boy doesn’t want to be good at sports? That’s the way you could shine and get people to respect you.”

 

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