by Doug Merlino
In 1970, when Helen was sixteen, she went to a house party and met Arthur Sullivan, who had come out from Illinois to study for a teaching degree at Eastern Washington University. They started dating, and after about a year, Helen became pregnant. When Damian was born, in December 1972, Arthur was finishing up at Eastern. He told Helen he wanted to do the right thing, get married, and have her move back with him to Illinois. “He said if I didn’t marry him he didn’t really want anything to do with me,” Helen says. “That’s basically how it was.” Helen didn’t want to leave her family, so she declined. Arthur left and effectively disappeared from Damian’s life.
Helen finished high school at an alternative school. After graduation there wasn’t much to do except learn how to look after Damian. As far as social life, Spokane didn’t have a lot going on—kids hung out at a local tavern and at the racetrack. There were house parties, and sometimes the youth center put on a dance. Helen started to date a construction worker named Stanley. They moved in together, and three years after Damian, his sister, Toya, was born. Stanley was a nice guy, but he also could turn mean and speak down to Helen in public. Another man noticed this and concertedly wooed Helen. The new suitor eventually won out. He had a brother in Seattle and convinced Helen that it was time to leave Spokane. So, in 1977, when Damian was almost five, they all packed up and headed to Seattle. “It was a culture shock for me,” Helen says of her arrival in the city. “I wasn’t used to seeing a lot of black people, I mean that many.”
Helen’s cousin, who lived in Seattle, invited them to come to her church—the Harvest Time Church of God in Christ, in the Central Area at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cherry. To Helen’s shock, her boyfriend, who was a bit of a hustler, embraced the idea. The first Sunday they went, Helen was saved during the service. She immediately broke up with her boyfriend. The pastor of the church and his wife invited the family to stay with them. Helen, Damian, and Toya lived there, in a two-story house in South Seattle, for more than a year. It was a revelation for Helen. “They were my mentors, my true mentors,” she says. “Every single day she would cook a full-course meal and dessert and we ate off plates and drank out of glasses, and ate with forks and knives, not plastic. I didn’t know people did that.”
With the support and encouragement of the pastor and his wife, Helen began to develop more confidence. “When I was saved, it helped me to realize that I was somebody,” she says. “I didn’t like being on welfare because I knew that I had more in me.” She landed a string of low-paying jobs, such as working as a cashier at a combination gas station-convenience store-car wash, and the family moved into an apartment in the Central Area. For a while Helen worked at an ice cream plant. She was the only black on her shift, and one of her coworkers, a young white woman, barraged her with racial slurs. “No one had ever treated me like that before,” Helen says. “Honestly, had I not been saved and my mind was like it was before I got saved, I probably would have beat her up. That’s how I knew I was changed, because I wouldn’t have taken that otherwise.”
By this time, Damian had started to play basketball on Willie McClain’s CAYA team, and his poverty became the subject of mockery. “I was the underclass of that underclass,” he says with a laugh. The other guys called him “Goo Goo Cluster” for the caramel, chocolate, and nut ice cream treats his mom brought home from work. His limited wardrobe earned him the nickname “Purple Pants Boy.” No one ever came to his house, where he and his sister slept on the floor because the family couldn’t afford beds.
Helen kept applying for jobs. In the mid-1980s she landed a position as an office assistant for the Seattle School District, a full-time job that allowed her to finally get off welfare, though she still took public assistance to support her family—Section 8 housing aid, Medicaid, food stamps. She gradually worked her way up in the school system and became a classroom assistant in a special education class for autistic kids.
Helen now lives in a town house in a mixed-income public-housing development in South Seattle. One day, as we sit on the couch in her living room, I ask what she thought of the welfare queen talk of the 1980s. When she asks what I mean, I give her a capsule description of the rhetoric. “I don’t remember,” she says. “It evidently didn’t affect me.” I’m shocked for a moment, until it strikes me that the welfare queen idea was more of a political dog whistle aimed only at certain groups.
Helen tells me what really bothers her is that she never had a chance to get a decent education. She tries to put it out of her mind, but she can’t help thinking how her life might be different. “When I go and see the white people living in nice homes, I have to tell myself, you know, they worked for that, a lot of them worked for what they got. And so had that been passed on to me, maybe I would have been in a nicer home. And then I also realize that that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that I have love and we have togetherness in our home, and we get along … I go back and forth, because sometimes I trip and I say, ‘They got everything!’ ” Helen laughs at the last thought.
Damian dismisses the welfare queen talk as nonsense. His mom, he points out, works as hard as anyone. Welfare was just a way for her to support her family while she was trying to get her life together. “You have to live in somebody’s shoes, you have to be close to them and know them before you make those kind of comments,” he says. “I don’t give that any credence anyways, that’s just people’s thought process. They don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.”
Damian tells me he didn’t pay attention to what people outside his direct sphere might have thought of his family’s poverty when he was a kid. What made a lasting impression was the taunting he took from those closest to him, including his teammates on Willie McClain’s basketball team. “I was laughed at, talked about, and treated horribly by my own race because of my economic status,” he says. He tells me he would rather have had the white side of our team come to his house than his black friends. “It would have been better you than them, because you guys wouldn’t have said anything about me not having food,” he says. “You would have kept it in your mind: ‘All he has is Goo Goo Clusters.’ ”
He hated being poor. It meant never owning the place where they lived, and that the landlords could stop in for housing inspections or whatever they needed to do. It meant going with his mom to the Department of Health and Human Services office, where they waited to hand over the necessary paperwork for programs such as food stamps. It meant that you never had complete control over your own life; other people always had power over you.
When both sides of our team came together, it might have been a chance to talk on a level deeper than political sound bites. But we simply didn’t have the language or the structure to discuss such things. In fact, it probably was best to leave it alone—if I had spoken about some of the assumptions that came up during my extended family’s holiday dinners, the black side of the team would have been, at best, insulted. Had we gone to the Central Area to visit our teammates’ homes, would we have remembered anything other than the poverty in the area? And if poverty is tied to laziness—via the welfare queen trope—then what would we have taken away? Even years later, the type of interaction we should or could have had remains open to question.
Coach McClain sees the basketball court as a special place where the standard set of rules allowed us to play together as equals, without the baggage we may have had off the court. The idea, he says, was that after learning we could work together on the floor, the cooperation would then move off of it. Sean, also, sees the game as the “great equalizer,” an area where we were able to forget the economic differences. “I just remember looking up and admiring these kids that Randy had brought in from the Central Area because of their great talent. They were talented beyond any players that I had ever hooped it up with, and that was very cool.”
Damian, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a completely different take. He says that underlying assumptions prevalent throughout the United States mea
nt that the team had to remain a “surface integration.” In America, he says, even the black person with the least amount of self-knowledge knows by default something about white America—he simply couldn’t survive if he didn’t. White people, especially those with money and privilege, can remain ignorant of blacks and other minorities. “You just don’t have to know,” he says. It would be almost impossible for this not to seep into the formation of the team. “It was all done from the beginning,” he says. “I just think the whole attitude from the Caucasian point of view was, ‘Let’s help these guys and give them experience,’ more of a superior-type, ‘We’re here to help you, you can’t help us,’ that kind of thing.”
…
As Randy and Willie had hoped, basketball is a language we can all speak, though with wildly different levels of fluency. Over the course of the season we win one tournament, up north in Ferndale, near the Canadian border. In others, our play is erratic, a mix of blowing out other teams and then getting blown out by them. Much of that is due to the fact that we’ve only formed this season while some AAU squads have played together for years. Going into the 1986 Western Washington AAU league championship tournament—which is to be played in Redmond, east of Seattle across Lake Washington—our chances don’t look great.
By this point, Coach McClain has narrowed down playing time to the best players. I know I have no chance of getting in the game unless there’s an unprecedented rash of injuries. I reluctantly suck up my pride. Instead of playing, I take to manning Randy Finley’s video camera on the sidelines. Myran—whose playing time has slid to zero as well—doesn’t even show up for the tournament. Maitland plays a few minutes to spell Sean. Tyrell’s minutes shrink as well. Chris, Eric, and Dino take the spotlight.
And for a weekend, everything clicks. Rebounds drop right into Chris and Sean’s hands. Dino nails his jumpers from twenty feet out. On Tyrell’s drives, his arcing shots make it over the outstretched arms of defenders a head taller than he is and glide down through the hoop. Eric dogs the other teams’ guards, stripping the ball when they try to drive past him.
We win four games in a row. By the end of the day on Sunday, we’ve taken the Western Washington championship. Our team runs onto the court to celebrate. The league president presents McClain and Finley with a plaque that has a gold plastic figurine of a player dribbling a basketball attached to it. Eric and Chris grab it and hoist it above their heads. Chris, soaked in sweat, grins widely while a sly smile crosses Eric’s face. They pose for a picture, and Tyrell crouches in front of them, his arms spread wide. His smile is the biggest of all.
Left to right: Chris Dickinson, Tyrell Johnson (crouching), and Eric Hampton. To the right is Bryce Kisker, recruited late in the season by Randy Finley to add height to the team.
Part Two
Transitions
Just as white college basketball was patterned and regimented like the lives awaiting its players, the black schoolyard game demanded all the flash, guile, and individual reckless brilliance each man would need in the world facing him.
—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Moving On
In the 1986 film Hoosiers, now considered a classic of the sports movie genre, Gene Hackman plays Norman Dale, a big-time college basketball coach who is fired after hitting one of his players. Disgraced, he takes a job coaching the high school team in Hickory, a tiny Indiana town obsessed with basketball.
The film, set in the early 1950s, follows the course of one season. Coach Dale slowly earns the respect of the townsfolk, falls in love, and becomes a surrogate father to his star player, Jimmy Chitwood, a quiet kid with a flawless outside shot whose own dad has died. Doubling down on the father-son theme, Dennis Hopper plays the shack-dwelling alcoholic dad of another player, who finds redemption and a connection with his son after Hackman names him the team’s assistant coach.
Coach Dale takes his band of scrappy overachievers to the state playoffs. In the locker room before the semifinal game, Hackman tells his players: “Forget about the crowds, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals that we’ve gone over time and time again, and most important, don’t get caught up in winning or losing this game. If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential to be the best that you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game, in my book, we’re gonna be winners. OK?”
Hickory wins and moves on to the state finals, where Jimmy Chitwood sinks a last-second shot to clinch the title, beating a big-city, African-American team in the movie’s climax. In the film’s final scene, the camera pans from a young boy shooting a basketball in the Hickory gym in the present day up the wall to focus in on a black-and-white photo of the championship team. It zooms in on Coach Dale and his boys, lingers a few seconds, and then fades to black. The last words of the film come in a Hackman voice-over: “I love you guys.”
If our season were a film, the final reel would have ended in similar fashion, with Eric and Chris hoisting the championship trophy as Tyrell crouches below, freeze-framed as the credits begin to roll. It would be the climactic moment of a challenging season during which a group of kids from different backgrounds pulled together, overcame their shortcomings, learned something about each other and life, and triumphed against the odds.
The upset victory, though, means that our season isn’t actually over—it earns the team an invitation to play in the AAU national championships in Orlando. That’s when things really begin to change. For a few days, it seems like we will all get to go down to Florida in the summer, until Randy Finley announces that there will be tryouts for the national team. He begins to recruit more players—all of them white kids—to compete for slots (he’d begun that even before the championship, finding a tall white kid named Bryce to add height in the middle). Finley rounds up some of the best in the area to try out. It dawns on me—even before he calls my parents to tell them so—that I don’t have a chance of making the Orlando-bound team.
It turns out to be the end of the original incarnation of the team. Tyrell, Myran, and Damian don’t play on the new version either. Myran, like me, isn’t good enough to make the traveling squad. Damian is a year younger than everyone else, so he’s off. Tyrell, though, is slated to go to Florida. But before the championship game, he’d told Willie McClain that he was upset about his playing time, which had diminished during the season. With Finley’s new recruits, it’s sure to go down even more. As the team prepares for Florida, Tyrell just vanishes. Coach McClain will never really know what happened. “I remember talking to his dad to try and find him and get him interested,” he says. Although McClain will sometimes later run into Tyrell around the Central Area, they never again have a real conversation.
The trip wouldn’t have cost Tyrell anything. Sean’s dad, the stockbroker, gets his firm to put up some money, and Finley raises some more cash. In Florida, the team goes to Disney World, hangs out around the swimming pool at the hotel, and visits Gatorland, where the players watch as workers throw chicken carcasses into the waiting jaws of hungry alligators. On the court, though, the team kind of resembles the chickens—they get blown out in the three games they play. The other teams, from places including North Carolina and Michigan, are so much bigger and faster that Willie McClain, who has always prided himself on his ability to give pep talks, is simply at a loss for words during one halftime. “We got bombed!” McClain says. “The talent gap was like this”—he holds his hands about two feet apart—“these cats were dunking the ball! Eighth-graders. There was a little five-nine guy, he jumped the highest. There was just no way.”
Back in Seattle, Randy Finley starts a tutoring program for the black players, hiring a former Lakeside English teacher to give JT, Damian, and Willie Jr. remedial reading and writing lessons, assigning them books such as Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Finley and his sister, the host of a talk show on a Seattle television station, take the kids out for dinners at ethnic restaurants to
try new types of food. Finley also starts making the rounds to private schools around Seattle, looking to get them to enroll my black teammates. He places JT in a North End Catholic high school and eventually gets Willie Jr. and Damian into Seattle Prep, one of the top private schools in Seattle. When he’s in the Central Area, Finley sees Tyrell on the street a few times and stops to talk. Although Tyrell is always polite, he has no interest in Finley’s ideas about private school.
Chris Dickinson enrolls at Lakeside as a ninth-grader in September 1986, a few months after our team ends its run (Randy Finley takes up Dino’s cause and lobbies for him to get into the school; he starts the next year, as a sophomore). With Chris at power forward and Eric Hampton at guard, our freshman basketball team is the best in Seattle. Our big game that season comes against the Garfield team, on which Tyrell and Willie Jr. are the starting guards and the stars. The game is at Garfield, and Tyrell and Willie’s friends all come to check it out. Unfortunately for the two of them, it isn’t close. Lakeside controls the game. The defining moment comes when Willie Jr. drives to the hoop for a lay-in and Chris rejects his shot so hard that it smacks off the wall of the gym. A bunch of kids in the stands—friends of Willie and Tyrell’s—hide their faces inside their jackets and run outside in mock embarrassment. After the game is over, we all shake hands and joke around on the court for a few minutes. Tyrell and Willie are embarrassed by their loss, but we have three more seasons to play in high school. We figure there’ll be more games.
Most sports films end on a note of triumph, or perhaps run text over the final image, a few lines revealing what the players went on to do later. This tiny bit of information reassures the viewer that the lessons learned during the season were applied to life off the court.