by Doug Merlino
There are alternative endings that don’t make for feel-good cinema. After championship seasons, teams can fall apart. What worked one year does not work the next. Runaway egos throw the team chemistry out of balance. Key players get injured; others enter inexplicable slumps. Some athletes simply peak one year and never again regain their form. The championship moments are fleeting. The flip side is how fast a career in organized sports can simply come to an end, disappearing before a player even realizes exactly what happened. At that point, the lessons learned playing the game might not apply to life away from it at all.
On the court and the field, a good player is the center of attention, lauded for the skills he’s developed since early childhood. The rules are clear, and the team plays for the same goal. The coach, if he’s good, makes sure that everyone pulls in a mutual direction. It takes discipline to succeed, but the steps to success—running through drills, lifting weights, learning plays—are simple to grasp. It’s a matter of applying yourself and having the necessary talent. The rewards can be quick and tangible.
Life away from the playing field also rewards discipline and hard work, but the rules can be difficult to learn, unevenly applied, and sometimes totally contradictory. As with grasping the nuances of basketball, it can take years to pick up the techniques and tricks necessary to succeed in school or land a decent job. Connections are sometimes more valuable than talent. The simple strictures of the game give way to a bewildering array of choices and options that require careful navigation. This transition out of sports can land on those who aren’t prepared for it like a blind-side hit from a blitzing linebacker.
For Tyrell, Myran, and JT, it’s all just about over at the time we win the championship. Myran has a little bit of stardom left. Right after our season, he moves up to the suburbs north of the city’s boundaries to be with his mom while she stays in a residential drug-treatment program. While he’s there, he plays running back on a local football team, the only black kid on the squad. The other players joke that they only need three plays: Myran to the right, Myran up the middle, and Myran to the left. Myran leads them to the league championship and is named MVP. He’s so dominant that people who see him play—years later, I happen to run into people who remember Myran on the field—speculate that he’ll go on to play college ball, maybe even at the University of Washington. But after his mom gets out of the program and they move back into the city, Myran never lasts long enough in one school to play sports at the high school level, something he will later bitterly regret.
JT is one of the only black kids in his class at the Catholic school where Randy Finley enrolls him. His laid-back demeanor wins him friends, but he struggles academically. At public school, he’d been placed in special classes and had tutors who worked with him on his reading. At his new school, the teachers make students read out loud, which JT dreads. “I knew my turn was coming and I didn’t want to mess up and have all the kids looking at me like I was this dummy,” he says. “My history teacher, after class we would practice the paragraph I was supposed to read.”
JT joins the freshman basketball team and scrapes by in school. Then his mom, who has always been the center of his life, starts to use cocaine, and things quickly go south from there. Often when JT comes home, the shades are drawn and all the lights are off. There’s no food in the house. People stop by at all hours, laughing and talking while JT tries to sleep. One guy passes out in the living room with a stack of money piled on his belly. JT stops going to school, runs away from home, and takes to the streets, sleeping in bus shelters when he can’t find any other place. He never plays organized basketball again.
Tyrell plays freshman basketball at Garfield, but he does poorly in his classes. He starts to smoke weed every day after school. The plan among the players on Willie McClain’s basketball team had always been that they would all go to Garfield and win four state basketball championships in a row. Randy Finley’s placement of several guys in private schools nixes that idea. “When Tyrell stayed at Garfield, he had no backbone to lean on,” Willie McClain Jr. says. “It was tough for him. And of course he went his way and everybody kind of broke apart from there, but that’s how that worked.” With abysmal grades and attendance, Tyrell gets transferred to a last-chance alternative high school. He soon drops out. His basketball days over, he begins to get caught up in what’s happening in the streets outside his front door.
Damian and Willie Jr. take the route rejected by Tyrell, enrolling at Seattle Prep after Randy Finley gets them admitted—Damian as a freshman, Will as a sophomore. Will burrows in and becomes a standout on the football, basketball, and baseball teams. “I took it as, I’m going to give them what they need”—athletic performance—“and they’re going to give me what I need, and that’s education,” he says. The social scene is strange—when his black friends have parties, they all gather at a house, have some drinks, put on some music, and dance. It gets a little sweaty. The white kids at Prep, in contrast, like to go to places where they stand outside in the cold, drinking plastic cups of beer from a keg. As it is, Will finds he needs to focus on his classwork and doesn’t socialize much. “Prep was tough enough,” he says. “I didn’t need any help in screwing myself up. Senior year they started talking about college and I was, ‘Wow, I do have an opportunity to go to college.’ ” Fulfilling his dad’s hopes when he agreed to coach our team, Will gets recruited by college football coaches and accepts a scholarship to play cornerback at Boise State University.
As the first in his family to go to college, he has high expectations. He is quickly disappointed. First, there’s the issue of being a black athlete in Idaho, an overwhelmingly white state. “We never left campus,” Will says. Will also finds that school is not expected to be a priority for scholarship athletes. “It’s not education first,” he says. “It’s football first, get your studies in when you can.” After he’s spent two cold winters in Idaho, the head coach quits and a new one arrives with a slate of players recruited out of community colleges. The coach announces that everyone will have to compete for his position. “We’d busted our butts for two years, getting beat up by varsity, waiting for our turn,” Will says. “I couldn’t take it. College football is like a job. I just didn’t want to do it.” He calls his dad and tells him he’s coming home. Upon his return, he will drift for several years, searching for direction.
Damian nearly flunks out in his first year at Seattle Prep. He only gets a reprieve after his mom and Randy Finley attend an emergency meeting with the school administration. Damian—who, like Willie Jr., becomes a star on the basketball team—finds the culture at Prep “night and day” from his South Seattle middle school. “You had kids coming to school in drop-top BMWs with heated seats, parents expecting them to take over the business,” he says. When he gets his first homework assignment, he simply ignores it. He’s amazed the next day to find that he’s the only kid who didn’t complete it. “You’re taught to be on time,” he says. “You’re taught to be professional.”
The years that Damian and Will attend the school are difficult ones for the few African-American kids enrolled there; though the school has started to recruit more black students, many of them simply drop out after a while. One black classmate tells Damian, “I just can’t do it.” One day, when Damian passes a classmate in the hall, he tries to make a friendly joke about the kid being on the computer all the time. The kid responds by muttering “nigger” under his breath. Damian tries to look past the race difference, but the money gap is persistent. Damian and a few other African-American students begin to steal cash from wallets left in the locker room during sports practices. “We had lookouts and everything, we had it all set up,” he says. “That’s how we were eating during the week, because there’s no free lunch at Seattle Prep. I guess that we felt that their parents had money, so it’s not a big deal.” Though his performance at school has its ups and downs, his mom—always aware of the limitations she feels due to her own lack of education—steadily encour
ages him to stick it out. Damian makes it to graduation.
Eric Hampton’s fortunes begin to change at Lakeside during his freshman year, when Randy Finley helps to recruit a white kid, another point guard, to the school. The kid plays a textbook game of crisp passes and pretty jump shots. Unlike the laconic Eric, he is vocal, running around the court to pump his teammates up. Lakeside’s varsity basketball coach leaves Eric on the freshman team and moves the other kid up to the junior varsity squad, signaling that Eric will be the backup for the next four years.
Football is what finally does it. Junior year, the varsity coach has Eric split time at safety with a kid who is nowhere near as good as he is. Eric figures it’s a case of a rich white kid getting preferential treatment, and it gnaws at him. “I lost my confidence,” Eric says. “I felt I was treated better at Lakeside than some of the other black students because I was an athlete. That’s what everybody knew me as. That’s why everybody liked me.” After the season he drops out of Lakeside and enrolls at a public school in the South End. He plays basketball his senior year, but he never gets back to the level he’d been at a few years earlier.
After graduation, Eric attends the University of Washington for a few quarters but makes a mistake when he drops a class and falls below the minimum number of credits the university requires to maintain financial aid. He loses his aid package but doesn’t want to tell his dad about it. As Eric tries to sort out what to do next, Randy Finley reappears and helps him and Damian get scholarships to play for a community college about thirty minutes up the freeway from Seattle. They commute together every day in Damian’s mom’s Hyundai. Neither of them is happy with the situation, playing basketball way out the middle of nowhere. Eric soon decides it isn’t for him and quits the team. He gets a job driving a shuttle van in Seattle and eventually reenrolls at the University of Washington. Though Eric had showed as much promise as anyone on our team when we were in the eighth grade, his sports career never really blossomed. After he returns to the University of Washington, he focuses on his studies and starts to get on with his life.
Damian doesn’t last long at community college, either. One day in the locker room before basketball practice, a white teammate accuses him of using the phone in his apartment to make long-distance calls. Damian tells him he didn’t do it—he had no reason to be calling anyone—but the guy keeps on him. Damian snaps. He leaves the locker room, hurries out to the parking lot, and grabs a baseball bat from the trunk of his car. When he returns, the guy sees him and bends over to protect himself. Damian, who is a broad-shouldered, athletic, and powerful man, slams the bat into his back once and then feels the rage dissipate. “After I hit him, I was like, ‘Damn, what am I doing?’ ” he says. Before things can get any worse, their teammates jump in and break it up. Damian gets kicked off the team.
The outburst hints at underlying pressures Damian is feeling. But showing a remarkable ability for pulling opportunity out of what could be disaster, Damian discovers that the academic program he followed at Seattle Prep, a Catholic school, has gained him automatic admission to Seattle University, a Jesuit school on the western edge of the Central Area. Damian enrolls, walks on to the basketball team, becomes the starting shooting guard, and lands a scholarship. He plays for two seasons, but his life, which for several years has bridged a gulf between South Seattle and his attendance at elite schools, begins to unravel. When his grades fall below the eligibility level, the basketball coach cuts him loose. Damian is barely hanging on. Without a drastic change of direction, he’s heading toward flunking out.
In Power at Play, a book based on interviews with men who had competed in organized sports, sociologist Michael Messner examines what boys get from athletics and how they feel when their careers in competitive team sports end. The book is based on Messner’s interviews with white, black, and Latino athletes from a range of income levels. He finds a lot of similarities among the men: They report that as boys they got into sports with the encouragement of older men, such as brothers and uncles, but generally used athletics to forge emotional connections with their dads; many of them say that sports were the only area where their fathers entered their lives with enthusiasm, and playing and being good at sports became a way to keep the bond that had been made when they were little boys.
Across the board, boys who were very involved with sports tended to be shy and socially uncomfortable. The men tell Messner that sports offered them a way to connect, that their teams became “family,” places where they could find acceptance. “The most important thing was being out there with the rest of the guys—being friends,” one man says. The clearly defined rules and structure of athletics allowed the boys to form attachments with others, but within boundaries that let them retain a bit of distance and separation. Boys who could play sports well found they got attention for it, which drove them harder to excel. Wearing the uniform and being out on the field, where people would watch and talk about them, felt good. But even though the main competition was against other teams, there was always rivalry among teammates to be the best—the men noted that if another teammate beat them out for playing time, the coach would bench them and they’d lose the attention they had worked to gain.
A stark divergence emerges among the men when the time comes to leave organized sports. Messner finds that the men from poor and working-class families tend to describe their sports experiences in the context of the communities in which they lived—lacking equipment at home, they often had grown up playing in public parks, so were known as athletes. That identity gave them a “cloak” to avoid other problems. As long as a kid was identified as a basketball or football player, gangs and other forms of trouble gave him a pass.
The middle-class boys in the study realized much sooner than the poorer ones that their sports careers were going to end. In response, they began to shift their interests to other pursuits. Sports for them was a way to “bolster” their identities, not the main part of their lives. When the time came, they transitioned into other options, such as college and careers. Poor and working-class boys did not. Commenting on the men in his interview study, Messner writes, “A few athletes from lower-class backgrounds … do manage to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them through athletic scholarships and get a college degree that moves them into a profession. The majority of athletes from lower-class backgrounds, however, end up with a difficult, sometimes traumatic period of disengagement, which is commonly characterized by identity crises, interpersonal problems and financial instability.”
While every player on our team reacts differently to the end of his time in organized sports, Messner’s conclusions fit us pretty well. The transition, overall, is much smoother for the players from Lakeside.
Sean goes to college in Washington, D.C., at Georgetown, which is known for the bruising basketball teams under its famous black coach, John Thompson. Even though he’s grown to about six-foot-eight, there’s no way Sean is going to make the team. “I wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t good enough. Couldn’t shoot, couldn’t jump,” he says with a laugh. He redirects his energy toward politics, interning first for a congressman from the suburbs of Seattle and later for Republican senator Bob Dole of Kansas. “It was kind of turn you loose and open letters and write mail to constituents and do little research projects here and there,” Sean says. “Internships are unglamorous and sort of tedious, but I loved it.”
After he gains admission to Lakeside in tenth grade, Dino plays on the basketball team but begins to develop other interests. In the summer, he works downtown at his family’s diner. After their shifts end, he and his dad head down to a racetrack south of Seattle, where Dino finds an interest in handicapping the horses and figuring out which one has the edge. At Lakeside he discovers the Economist magazine and begins to learn about the global financial system. He scours the stock charts in the newspaper, thinking about how he can handicap individual companies. “I really got excited about understanding different businesses and wh
at makes this world go, what makes the economy go,” he says.
Chris Dickinson, already tall and muscular when he joined our team in eighth grade, becomes a star football and basketball player at Lakeside. He enrolls at Princeton, where he joins the football team, playing tight end. During his sophomore season he suffers a string of injuries, including a torn hamstring and several ankle sprains. He also decides to take the next year off and come back to Seattle to think things over.
That year, he takes an internship with the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team, helping with game operations, doing things like making sure the cheerleaders have their pom-poms. “It was an utter waste of time other than helping me understand what I didn’t want to do,” Chris says. He also begins to seriously rethink the role of athletics and competition in his life. He joins a conversation group for young men called “Heart of the Athlete,” founded by a former Olympic track-and-field competitor. “His whole idea was to think about athletics not as an end in itself but a way to investigate together, in the context of athletics, about what it means to be a man,” Chris says. “It was about talking about your family and you and your insecurities, it wasn’t really about sports.” Through that group, Chris meets a man who teaches courses on Native American spirituality—every few weeks, he leads groups into the woods, where they perform sweat-lodge rituals, tie prayer beads, and do vision cries. Chris begins to participate in the retreats. “I think I was just searching on a lot of different levels,” he says.
When Chris returns to Princeton the next year, he rejoins the football team. In a big preseason scrimmage, he drops a pass. Normally, he would beat himself up about it. It surprises him when he finds that he just doesn’t care. He quits the team the next day. “I just realized I just didn’t like it,” he says. “To spend five hours a day doing something that you don’t even like when you have so much opportunity to engage in other things seemed foolish.”