by Scott Brown
I was angry, angry all the time. I was angry at everybody, but especially at my mom and dad and at the games they played with me and my emotions. I was angry that I couldn’t even count on them to hold it together for a simple basketball game. It was embarrassing always to have to make excuses, excuses as to why my parents weren’t together, why my dad wasn’t coming, why I didn’t have nicer clothes or any extra cash. I had to make excuses or apologize when my dad or mom didn’t show up at a school event or function, at something for fathers or for families. I had them all in my head: my dad got caught at work, or I forgot to tell him, or he’s away, or he’s moving. Or sometimes when he wouldn’t show up, I said nothing. I refused to be a whiner. But while I could run to Bobby and Jay’s house, or to Audrey’s, or Judy Vining’s, or get a job at Dunkin’ Donuts making doughnuts or cleaning the toilets and the grease traps in the fryer, or work at a liquor store, I couldn’t see a way out. I was the kid looking for a fight, and if I wasn’t looking, I certainly wouldn’t shrink from one. And I was going on to high school. I was leaving the cocoon of Brad and Judy on the court and in the classroom.
That was, of course, the summer when I ended up in a car with a trunkful of boosted records that I had stuffed in my overalls, earning me a summons to Judge Samuel Zoll’s courtroom.
I could have ended up in so many other spots. If I had been caught at the Square One Mall in Saugus, I would have been sent to the Middlesex County Courthouse. It just so happened that Liberty Tree was over the line in Essex County, so I was sent to Salem. If the timing were different, I could have ended up with someone other than Judge Zoll. He had been appointed to the bench only that year. Prior to that, he had been the mayor of Salem, a state representative, a city councilman, and a high school teacher. A Korean War veteran, he had worked his way through law school at nights to get a degree. If I was going to get busted, it was, in retrospect, perfect timing.
Judge Zoll’s chambers were magnificent, a reminder of the grand riches of seafaring Salem. But his six-foot-four frame almost seemed to dwarf the chambers. I stood when he stood, and I felt the size of him. I looked at him, but I cowered too, keeping my eyes down. It was as if at that moment he was deciding far more than the adjudication of my Salem District Court summons. He motioned to me with his oversize hands, and I sat in my stolen suit, and my shirt and tie. Thinking back now, I’m amazed my mother never asked where the suit came from or how it magically appeared on me that morning.
I tried to look the judge in the eye, to be respectful, to use all the manners that my grandmother had taught me, as he studied my file. I had no way of knowing that Judge Zoll had a houseful of kids at home, that he knew the names of every artist and album that I had stolen. And Judge Zoll was a basketball junkie.
He began by asking me questions. He asked me about music, about sports, about my studies. “I know you live in Wakefield,” he said. “Tell me about yourself. You obviously like music. What kind of music do you like?” Each time I answered, I tried to look him in the eye, as Gram and Gramps had taught me back when I still listened, and as my coaches demanded I do whenever they were speaking. I tried to be respectful.
He began asking me more about sports, and I began to relax. These were questions I could handle, questions I loved. I could talk about sports for hours in the cool of his chambers. Then the judge asked me if I was a good basketball player. I looked straight at him and said, “Judge, I’m an excellent basketball player.” Almost forty years later it sounds cocky, but in that moment, I sounded confident, and I caught the judge’s attention. He said, “Wow. That’s fantastic. How many points do you average a game?” “Twenty to thirty,” I told him.
Years later, when I spoke to him about our first meeting, he recalled that he had seen kids come through who were disrespectful and slovenly, who mumbled their answers and were ready to game the system. But I didn’t even know there was a system.
He asked me about my studies, “Scott, are you a good student?” I told him I was, adding, “I’m really good in some areas, and in other areas I need a lot of work. And I always try to do better.” Then he started asking about my family: Did I have brothers or sisters? And I told him about Leeann and Robyn and Bruce. It was too complicated to explain that Leeann was a half sister, since she had the same name and lived with me, but I told him that Robyn and Bruce were half siblings and that I didn’t see them too much. And he asked more questions, and he did something few adults ever seemed to do. He listened. Aside from my coach and my grandparents and Judy Patterson, he was the first person who seemed genuinely interested in who I was and what I was doing. Had he been distracted, rushed, or perfunctory, there is no telling what would have happened. Had it been a decade later, he probably could never have spoken to me in his chambers, alone. But on that particular morning, he looked down at me with his massive frame in that big leather chair and threw me a lifeline. He wound his way back to basketball and asked me if my sister and my half brother and sister came to see me play. “Yeah,” I answered. “A lot of times they try to.”
“Do they look up to you?” he asked. “Yeah, they look up to me. I’m the guy who tries to keep everybody together.” And he said, “Wow. That’s great. How do you think they will like seeing you play basketball at the local house of correction? Because that’s where you’re going. You’re on your way to jail right now as evidenced by the way you went in and stole these records. You really didn’t care about the businesses that had to work hard to pay their employees and the fact that you took something that wasn’t yours.” It was as simple as that.
I know now how I seemed to Judge Zoll on that morning: lost, poised to go horribly wrong, but with potential. And in those moments he decided that I was worthy of help. My sentence, as he handed it down, was “to write a 1,500 word essay on ‘How I disappointed my brother and sisters and how I think they would like to see me play basketball in jail.’ ”
He turned to the probation officer—Mr. Burke, I think his name was—and added a warning. “Scott, Mr. Burke is going to be my English teacher here. He’s going to check that essay for grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation, to make sure that it’s a thoughtful piece of work. And if it’s not good, you’re going to be in serious trouble.” I looked him straight in the eye and promised, “Judge, don’t worry. It’ll be good. I’ll make sure it’s good. I won’t let you down.”
I slaved over that essay with the same determination that I pounded my baseball into the concrete wall or my basketball against the backboard. I sat in my room on Salem Street and wrote and recopied, wrote and recopied; it was hard for me to write cursive with a pen because I’m left-handed. It gave me time too to think about my coaches, about Brad and Judy, and how I had disappointed them. I called the probation officer a couple of times with questions, asking if it should be pen or pencil—should it be double-spaced, and how many pages was 1,500 words? A week later I came back, essay in hand. I never showed it to anyone. The only people who read it were Judge Zoll and me. We spent half an hour reviewing it in his chambers and then he said, “This is very, very good. And I’m going to give you a break.” And then his voice turned stern. “This is the only break you’ll get from me in your life. And I don’t want you to steal anything ever again. Because if you do, I’ll hear about it.” He warned me that if I did anything wrong, anything, he would know about it. He verbally kicked my butt. And I believed him.
I took my mother’s car out a few more times, and I drank again, even though I was underage, but I never stole another thing, not even food, no matter how hungry I was. If I ever so much as thought about it, I heard the words that Judge Zoll had spoken. I could hear him saying, “I know where you are. Don’t steal. Don’t steal.” Years later, when I began my U.S. Senate campaign, I bought a huge shopping cart of items at Staples. When I got to my truck, I found that there was a stapler buried at the bottom. I hadn’t paid for it. And I thought of Judge Zoll. I walked back into the store; the clerks tol
d me to keep it, but I insisted that they ring it up. I told them that I wasn’t taking anything.
And after Judge Zoll’s chambers, I cut off all of my long hair, for good.
Chapter Eight
Basketball
We always knew that Wakefield was old. At the town boundary limits were signs that read, “Wakefield, founded 1644.” But it began even earlier than that, in 1639, when the General Court gave a four-mile-square grant of land to the town of Lynn for a new village. Its first buildings were erected at a time when the only way to travel west was along the worn remnants of Indian paths. In 1644, the town had seven families living in seven houses, as well as a “humble church edifice,” and it had taken the name of Reading. Reading had no great role in the American Revolution, and the town was bitterly divided in 1812 over whether to side with James Madison and fight the British for insulting our sailors and our flag. The Old Parish, which would become Wakefield, was wildly supportive of Madison and ferociously against England, while the rest of the area was violently opposed to any war and also to President Madison. The passions ran so deep that supporters of the war were excluded from town offices, and within months the town broke apart, with the pro-Madison residents petitioning for their own charter for a new town, which they now called South Reading.
The town that they built was a place where the houses huddled close together, not quite as close as in Malden or Revere, which were older and nearer to Boston, but close enough, as if they were seeking warmth from each other when the winter sky turned gray and heavy and the sun set, enveloping the streets in darkness, by late afternoon. South Reading occupied one of the last bands of the old towns fanning out from Boston, each one marking a new notch in the western push of migration, of people laying claim to the virgin space beyond the crowded, noisy city. In the 1600s, the original town of Cambridge, across the water from Boston, stretched for thirty-five miles from the Charles River to the Merrimack and took an entire day’s journey to cross.
South Reading was hardly as grand. But it was beautiful. Unlike the steep, sheer cliffs of Malden, South Reading was a collection of wavy hills and winding streets, of green, leafy trees and the remnants of woods where deer and other small game once roamed. The only wide-open vistas were down by the lake; the rest of the town rose and fell like the bumps of a weathered, prehistoric spine.
Its name was officially changed in 1868, twenty-four years after the Boston–Maine railroad extension was laid, when Cyrus Wakefield, who was the owner of the highly successful Wakefield Rattan Company and whose family had been residents of South Reading for generations, offered to donate the funds to build a new town hall. Residents assembled in a town meeting and decided to rename South Reading with “the new and significant name of Wakefield.” The vote was taken on July 1, and the official renaming took place three days later, on July 4, a day of “excessive heat,” accompanied by pealing bells, firing cannons, band concerts, a procession, and a special commemorative poem, which concluded:
No soft Italian scenes we boast,
Our summer skies less clear;
But prized the grandeur of our coast,
Our rocky hillsides dear.
No notes of foreign praise we swell,
Not, “Naples view, and rest!”
Our invitation is, “Come, dwell
In Wakefield, and be blest!”
The celebration was complete only after a full historical address, a grand celebration dinner held beneath a tent on the common, and an evening capped off by fireworks. It was still the same spot where, each Fourth of July, we watched fireworks and the town gathered for a concert and a parade. And we never thought of it as anything other than Wakefield. To us, that was what it was and what it had always been.
My personal geography of Wakefield was defined by the locations of blacktop courts and metal rims, by the places where I could play basketball. There was the court at J.J. Round, a strip of park one block down from the Oosterman Rest Home, or the basket up against the wall by the Franklin school, or Nasella field on Water Street. I would rotate among all the courts, looking for games like a sloop searching for a port of call. They were my destinations. In the summer, I would ride my bike up to J.J. Round Park, arrive at nine in the morning, and stay until nine at night, just hanging around, waiting for pickup games. If I got hungry, I would go buy a slice of pizza. The parks were where the basketball stars would go, high school and junior high stars, like Bob and Jay Moore, and if I waited, I could play with them. “Hey, Brownie,” they’d say, “you’re on our team.” I was good enough to hold my own on the court with them, and I always wanted to beat them. I would also go up and play with my friends who were my own age, like Bob Najarian, Bill Cole, the Gonnella brothers, Jim Healy, Bill Squires, and Don Flanagan.
If no one came, I would practice drills—quickness drills, wind sprints—and moves to improve my footwork like crossover running, crisscrossing my feet as I moved over the court. I practiced shuffling and speed. I threw rebounds, scooping the ball as it ricocheted off the backboard. I practiced boxing out opponents and form shooting. I’d start at the foul line and move around the entire box; when I had made the close shots, I took two steps back, and shot again in another ring formation. I’d finish with five foul shots. Every one had to be a swish shot, straight in the basket, no ball rolling around the rim.
I would ride there many days in the dead of winter, even when there was a foot of snow on the ground. I’d balance a shovel in my right hand or tie it to the rattrap on the back and steer my bike with my left hand, my ball tucked under my arm. I’d shovel the snow off the court, my breath puffing ice in the air. And then I’d stand on the blacktop and shoot. The ball wouldn’t bounce in the cold—it died on the ground as soon as it dropped through the net—but I didn’t care. I’d shoot for two or even three hours at a stretch, until my hands were so numb that I could no longer feel the pebbly surface at the tips of my fingers.
I began playing in leagues when I was still in elementary school. My first coach was Zach Boyages, Mr. Boyages, who ran the summer and winter youth basketball leagues. His sons, Mike and Ricky, played too, and he was known as Mr. Basketball; he had played and so had his brother. I spent hours over at his house, in front of his hoop, and he drove a group of us, six or seven kids piled into his station wagon, to invitational tournaments with other local leagues. He was grooming us like a farm team to move up to the seventh- and eighth-grade levels, where basketball was serious business. Mr. Boyages played a very important role in my life and that of many other young boys during those years in Wakefield. I still remember his warm smile and his love of the game.
Aside from football, basketball was the most competitive sport around in our section of Middlesex County, with hockey and baseball close behind. The rivalries, like Wakefield–Melrose, Wakefield–Woburn, or Wakefield–Lexington, were fierce, taking on the sheen of Yankees–Red Sox, and the games were packed. This was what a lot of people did on a Friday night or a weekend: they headed for a gym and watched sweat-soaked teenage boys locked in battle.
That year, as I did every year, I looked at our schedule before the start of the season. I pasted it into my scrapbook, and I kept my own private score. I’d write down how many rebounds I got, how many points I scored, whether we won or lost, and how many points my opponent scored on me. I got so that I could look at the schedule at the start of the season and say, “We’re going to win this one, this one, this one, and we’ll really have to work hard at this one.” Each week, I’d think about the game coming up and think about ways to be prepared.
Coaches motivated me by pushing my buttons, by driving me to be tougher, to work harder. We played a lot of our games in the high school, and I’d walk to and from there on Saturdays and Sundays, a good couple of miles each way, even when it was snowing. By eighth grade, we had scouting reports, and Coach Simpson would point out which one of our opponents was the high scorer or the best player
on the team. He’d say, “I don’t know if we’re good enough. I don’t know if we have a chance to win. I guess if everyone comes and plays, we have a fighting chance.” To me, each word was a challenge. I’d think: that guy from the other team isn’t out on the courts shoveling snow and playing hoops in the winter; he isn’t the one staying after, playing with the coaches one-on-one or two-on-two. It made me more determined to show him, to score the most points, to make my team better, to work harder. I’d get in the huddle and say, “We can do this, we can get it done.” But there were a few times when I was younger, when we were down in the fourth quarter of a game in one of the leagues, and I said to the coach, “Just give me the ball.” I was tall, I was quick, my favorite move was dribbling and driving straight to the basket, and I could be a scoring machine.
By eighth grade, though, we were a tight-knit team. Most of us had been playing together for years, in parks, in rec leagues, and with Mr. Boyages. In the chaos of becoming teenagers, on the court we had a sense of order. Basketball was something where we knew what the rules were; we knew what the time was, how to watch the clock, how long it took to tick off each quarter. More than school or family, basketball dominated our lives. We talked about the games, we sized up our opponents, and when they came to take us on, we treated it like war.
The kids from Woburn were the most daunting. A lot of them played football and were then recruited to play basketball because the team needed enforcers. They were guys with muscles, and we were scrawny little guys with narrow chicken arms. And we knew we would be playing these same guys right through high school and even into college. When we faced the Woburn Tanners, the Lexington Minutemen, or the Burlington Rockets, we knew that we would be repeating this same battle for years to come. We ran plays and we were competitive, diving for the ball and scrapping. I would dive for the ball and end up with scrapes on my knees and elbows, blood everywhere. Once, I said, “Coach, I’m thinking about wearing knee pads.” And he said, “You know what, you can wear knee pads, sure. You don’t want to get hurt. But do you know what the sign of a good player is? When you’re out there looking around at all the different players, the guy with the scrapes on his knees is always the best player on his team. He is the one that we have to watch out for. All the ones who wear knee pads and elbow pads and mouthpieces, those are the people you don’t need to worry about. It’s the guys who don’t care about their bodies—those are the kids you have to watch out for.” So I wore my bloodied knees and elbows like a badge of honor, and I never feared diving.