Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Years later, I said the same thing to both my daughters. And when Ayla and Arianna played hoop, they always had bruised knees.

  Before I went on to high school, Brad and Judy invited me to their August wedding. I came to the church and brought the entire eighth-grade team. When the ceremony was over, I took the team to the reception. Never mind that I hadn’t been invited to the reception, or that the entire team hadn’t been invited to the wedding. They had invited me alone, as the captain and one of their favorite kids, but I brought everyone along. I never knew that my coach and his new bride scrambled to add another table at the hall and that the caterers now had to feed a group of hungry teens. Afterward, all Brad said was, “When you get married, you owe us an invitation.”

  In high school I played freshman basketball for coach Bob Gesing—I wasn’t allowed on the varsity team. But I never left the Simpsons. They lived near the high school and many nights, before or after basketball practice, I would drop by to visit, or for dinner, and Judy always managed to put together an extra plate of whatever she had been making. We’d talk about sports or how I was doing in school. Sometimes I’d tell them about Leeann. I wanted to be like Brad, so full of life and enthusiasm, so happy in his home with his beautiful wife. I was like a big, lost puppy loping around after them. That summer and the next I was asked to go to basketball camp in Maine, where all the Wakefield players went to hone their skills, and there was no money at home to pay for it. Then at the last second, miraculously, I was told that a slot had opened up, a scholarship slot. Except there was no such thing. Brad and Judy had paid out of their own pockets for me to attend. Later, when I learned about it, Judy called it “an investment in my future.” I could repay them, she said, by sticking with sports and getting good grades. And that was all. They didn’t want my money, she said. They wanted me to do well.

  In high school, I had to play freshman hoop, where I averaged 25 or 30 points a game. Coach Gesing was a great coach and let us play exciting ball. But I kept asking him, “Can I move up? Can I move up and play?” And the varsity coaches kept saying that I wasn’t ready. When we finally finished our season, the coach agreed to let me come up and play junior varsity, with the sophomores and juniors and a couple of seniors. A lot of the guys were players I had played with in the summer leagues. There was one game left in the season, against Melrose, one of our biggest rivals. I was sitting on the bench in the JV uniform, the only ninth-grader to come up and play in a very long time or perhaps ever. The first quarter went by, and I didn’t play. The second quarter passed, and I didn’t play. The third quarter went by, and I didn’t play. Finally, the coach looked at me in the huddle and said, “Brown, you’re in.” He started me in the fourth quarter and we were down. I raced up the court and hit my first four or five shots in a row. I was taking hook shots from the foul line. I wasn’t missing anything. And about halfway through, the coach said, “Get the ball to Scott.” There I was in my first game, the youngest kid, the first time I had played with these guys on a school team, and the coach is saying, “Get the ball to Scott.” We won, and it was about the happiest I had ever felt in my life.

  I wasn’t just a basketball guy. I had played baseball, each fall I ran cross-country, and in the spring I ran track. I still have a row of dark cinders in my knees from where I fell racing the 330-yard hurdles and missed clearing a couple. I got up and finished the race anyway, blood running down my shin. I threw the javelin and ran my events, the quarter mile, the half mile, the mile, and the 330-yard relay hurdles. I was a three-miler on the cross-country team, snaking up through the hills. My teammates, John Bowman, Brian Doherty, Rich Hansen, Bill Squires, and I had a lot of laughs when we were out running. Most of the kids on the squad weren’t physically big, they weren’t football or basketball or hockey players, but they were tough runners and good, nice kids. And in cross-country, we could be goofy, always cracking on each other, pranks that today would have gotten us suspended from school in less than a heartbeat. Sometimes, we’d sneak up on a guy running in the line, pull his shorts down, and race away. Or we’d rub Bengay arthritis ointment on his clothes in the locker room. I remember we pulled a prank on one guy, Billy Solomene, a hotshot freshman, when I was a junior or a senior. Back then, he was a scrawny little kid, but he grew up to be six foot three and one of the best triathletes in New England. Fortunately, he took it pretty well, and we still joke about it today.

  I loved running. As a freshman, I won almost all the meets and all the invitationals. I ran varsity as a sophomore and as a junior, but then I quit. I thought I would try out for football. The coach hated me for that. I was the team’s best runner as a junior, and he had an undefeated record for almost his entire career. But when the fall of my senior year came and I saw my cross-country buddies getting ready for our first meet of the season, all my friends lining up to wait for the signal, I changed my mind. I loved our meets, and this one was against Melrose. I hadn’t practiced at all and hadn’t run much during the summer. I just threw on a team uniform and raced for the starting line. I came in second on my team in the race and might have won if I had trained. I rejoined the team, and was a top runner by the end of the season, but the cross-country coach never forgave me for failing him in the beginning.

  The biggest problem for me with cross-country was that it made me too skinny for basketball. When I was running, I was six foot one and barely 140 pounds. I was so skinny and worn-out that during a state meet in my junior year, I was one hundred yards from the finish line when I passed out cold. I was in the top ten of cross-country runners out of hundreds. But I was just too skinny, and this made me particularly vulnerable for the heavy muscle play of basketball.

  And I lived for basketball.

  In the years 1971–1972, there were twelve suspicious fires across Wakefield, at the movie theater and the Armor Fence Company, some empty houses, and even the industrial park that had housed Cyrus Wakefield’s original rattan company. It got so that residents would wait for the wail of the fire alarm, wondering what would be the latest place to go up in flames. One of the worst fires, in December 1971, destroyed part of Wakefield High School, including the gymnasium. The students had to split classes, part of the school starting at the crack of dawn, and then leaving early, while the next round of students came in for the afternoon. Sports practices were pushed into the evening. But what I remember most was that the old high school had to rebuild, and the town decided to turn that school into a junior high and then build a brand-new building away from downtown for the high school students—complete with a new gym and new basketball courts.

  I remember walking into the unfinished gym when the poles and nets were up, but the final smooth, shiny composite floor had yet to be laid, and walking to each hoop, standing there and visualizing the shots from every angle, mentally seeing myself execute with the ball. I walked to the game hoops, the practice hoops, every last one, ringing both sides of the gym, and imagined myself there. When I got into the heat of a game, I could will my mind to remember just where I should be, ball in my hand, basket in my sights.

  School in Wakefield was cliquey and divided, a little like the town itself, where the train lines marked off the East Side—with its blue-collar houses and Chevys and Dodges and Buicks parked alongside the curbs—from the more affluent West Side, where the doctors and lawyers and Boston bankers lived. There, the lawns were bigger and the owners hired lawn services to mow in the summertime, and it was not uncommon to see Cadillacs or Oldsmobiles in the driveways. Even within the two sides, there were divisions, the old-line New Englanders versus the newer immigrants. One section of the East Side was called “Guinea gulch,” derisively stamped as an Italian ghetto even though it was just another ring of cross streets dotted with modest postwar, middle-class Cape and A-frame homes. Wakefield wasn’t racially mixed, but it had its own ethnic or class tensions and put-downs, and they carried over from the homes to the hallways to the gymnasium to the playground. By ninth gr
ade in Wakefield High, kids separated into factions. There were the jocks or heroes and the freaks and the others, and they traveled in packs and marked their territory as thoroughly as dogs. I was a jock, but I was also a loner, one of the kids who wore the same clothes over and over, and I wasn’t afraid to take anybody on.

  During my freshman year of high school, I was shooting around with Jim Albanese and Billy Cole at Nasella Field on Water Street. It was on the East Side of the tracks, a place with a baseball sandlot, a soccer field, and basketball courts, surrounded by trees, where the punks hung out. It was a warm early evening, a men’s softball league was playing on the diamond at the far end of the field, and I was back near the roadside, a basketball in my hand. I turned just as one of the Fotino brothers and his crew sauntered in. There was a group of them, maybe eight to ten, the two brothers and their friends. They traveled in packs, cultivating the look of street guys, tight T-shirts with cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeve of one arm. One of the Fotino brothers kicked the basketball. I retrieved it and continued to shoot. And he grabbed for it again. I got it, and yet again, he lunged. He was older than me and bigger. We had fought once before, a knock-down, drag-out fight that I had ultimately won. He was back now, looking to even the score.

  He came at me with a mocking face, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, backed up by his friends. Anticipating that he would want to throw the first punch and thus gain the advantage, I pulled my fist back and let it fly, straight at his mouth, the cigarette collapsing between my knuckles and his teeth like an accordion. Then we hit the ground, the hard, hot blacktop. We rolled like animals, each clawing for the kill. My elbows were bloody from the hot black tar; my knees were on fire, dragged and shredded; but I wouldn’t let go. He knocked my arm and kneed me in the stomach, and then I reached around with my left arm, my shooting arm, and grabbed him in a headlock. My friends were already racing across the field to get some of the men from the softball team. Joey’s friends were kicking me, driving their feet into my back, aiming for my kidneys, or trying to kick the soft underbelly of my abdomen. And I was slamming his head against the ground. “Every time you kick me,” I spat out, “I’m slamming his head.” They kicked again, and I smashed his head, boom. Kick, boom. Kick, boom. I took whatever punishment they gave me and I gave it to him. There was no way for them to know that I had long ago learned how to take a beating. Then the men from the softball team ran up and separated us, and it was over. We were pulled apart: he was howling and spitting, and I was shaking with adrenaline and wiping the blood from my hands. It was done. When our paths crossed, there was now an established order of things. Unless he could find me alone and he was with all his friends, he knew to stay away from me. He would not get another chance with me, one-on-one, again.

  I wanted them to know that no one could mess with me. If they came looking for trouble, I would give it back to them. The problem was that trouble would come looking for me. Even after that summer, it kept coming.

  My high school coach was a legend, a man named Ellis “Sonny” Lane, who lived in Reading. He came to the school in 1970 from Stoneham, and he was in his own right an athlete of distinction—a Middlesex League all-star in basketball and baseball. At the start of his senior year, he tried out for the football team for the first time and was instantly made starting quarterback. He played semipro baseball and won a four-year baseball scholarship to college. But now his turf was basketball. Wakefield was one of the smallest schools in the Middlesex League, but that didn’t matter to Coach Lane. Winning did. He wanted us, he willed us, to win. This was an era when coaches wore jackets and ties to all the games, when there was a press box right off the court in the high school gymnasium, when high school games were chronicled with almost the same obsession as the Celtics. Sonny Lane showed up for our games with his assistant coaches in a large, plaid sport jacket with mile-wide lapels and a bold, oversize pattern that verged on blinding. But that was where the flash ended. He didn’t like any flash in his games.

  Coach Lane didn’t swear, but he would say, “What the hell was that?” On his court, there were no behind-the-back dribbles, no dipsy-do shots—the plays I had been working on for years. It was fundamental basketball, while I leaned toward the flamboyant. My heroes were John Havlicek, the great Celtics player who made his career running on the court as a fast-break star and a clutch stealer and outside shooter, and “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the scoring machine, whose repertoire was ball tricks, behind-the-back passes, head fakes, and long-range shots. I read their books and watched their films. I wanted to be just like them. But Coach Lane wasn’t interested in would-be Havliceks and Maraviches on his team. His philosophy was that we didn’t set up plays for individuals. Everything was about the team: it was pass first and shoot second. He was the type of coach to say, “Well, hopefully you’ll have a good game, but what about the other kids on the team? How are you going to help them? It’s not about you or any single player.” He wanted us to be a team.

  If I did well, he’d say, “Oh, good play,” but whenever I screwed up, he’d unload. “Hey, Brown, you know that move you just did? Take it to bed with you. I don’t want to see that ever again.” His favorite line was, “Brown, what the hell were you thinking? Brown, take that shot to bed.” He’d stop practice and mockingly say, “Oh my God, Brown, that move is going to get you in the Hall of Fame. You keep living on that. You keep living on that shot and you’ll be sitting on the bench right next to me for the rest of the game and for the rest of the year, Scott.”

  And back then, I worried that this was exactly what would happen. My sophomore year was frustrating. I had a great start to the season, but then I sprained my ankle in practice and I got a blister on the bottom of my foot, which developed a staph infection. It was absolute torture when I shoved my feet in my sneakers and ran. I had come in as a high scorer, but now the coach wanted me to play defense because the team already had a lot of scorers. He had me run defensive shuffles around the gym to work on my footwork. He had me dog the other team’s best players, and was constantly saying, “Scott, sacrifice your scoring for the team.” I did. I sacrificed everything. I got to the gym first for practice and stayed after everyone was gone. I learned to pass the ball, to assist, to shadow the other team’s players. But in the big games, I still scored: 17 points against our archrival, Lexington; 12 points against Belmont. The newspapers called me “Super Sophomore.” That summer, I got a shooting glove to train my hand to keep the ball in my fingertips. I became a perimeter shooter, before there was such a thing as the three-point line.

  When I came back to practice, Coach Lane was every bit as much of a hard-ass.

  We got scouting reports on all the teams we played and watched films of them before games, analyzed them, were tested on them, and then watched films of ourselves, until after seeing so many black-and-white images and dissecting all my imperfections, I was ready to quit or go home crying. And so were most of the other players on the team. It didn’t matter how good I was—Coach Lane was riding me all the time, until I believed that I sucked, that I was a fraud, that I was nothing running up and down the court, driving to the edge of the foul line. Finally, I confronted him. I said, “Coach, you’re yelling at me all the time. What’s up? I can’t be that bad.”

  He shocked me by saying, “Listen, you’re not. You’re great. You’re a great player. You’re a hard worker. You’re the hardest worker on the team, but if I don’t yell at you, then I can’t yell at the other kids. When they see me yelling at you, they say, ‘Oh my God, he’s all over Scott.’ So when I yell at you and then I yell at them a couple of times, they don’t take it as bad.” He went on to say that some of the other players can’t be yelled at because they’ll go home crying to their parents. “I can yell at you,” he said, “because I know you’ll just get angrier and angrier and work harder and harder.”

  And he was right. He was right too because I would never think to go to either of my parents and compla
in. By now I had much bigger problems at home. My dad had moved out to Western Massachusetts with his third wife, and my mother was remarried again, for a fourth time.

  “When I stop yelling, you start worrying, OK?” Coach Lane added.

  “OK, coach,” I said.

  Chapter Nine

  Larry

  Around 1999, a house came up for sale on June Circle in Wakefield. It was a brown house of deep red brick, with colored shutters and a red front door, and for a few seconds, I contemplated buying it and then burning it down.

  I helped build that house, at the end of the cul-de-sac, up the steep hill from the high school. It was the last lot on the street, backing up to a small woods. Larry McShane owned the lot. He was a friend of my mother’s from Wakefield High, and he was the baseball coach. He was the man who taught me how to throw a knuckleball and how to throw a fast pitch. I had a couple of good baseball seasons, as a lefty pitcher, throwing fast and mostly wild. He taught me how to drive too, although I didn’t mention that I didn’t really need lessons, but he did teach me how to coast up to a red light, to go light on the brake and let the car glide. “Anticipate the stop sign,” he would say; “keep it smooth.” And he taught me about horse racing and the racetrack.