Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  But Coach Lane had another reason for steering me toward Tufts. He knew John White. John had grown up as the oldest of seven kids with a single mother in the projects of Somerville, a tough town wedged between Medford and Cambridge, the home of Harvard, across the river from Boston. He had graduated from Tufts, and for him, basketball had also been the only ticket out.

  It had not been love at first sight when John White first saw me play. He considered me a skinny little kid, wiry and gangly, who ran slightly pigeon-toed. He thought I had a runner or track competitor’s body, not the strength to make me a basketball star. I was going to have to be quicker and stronger, and something other than a jump shooter. But for three seasons, Coach White kept coming back to watch me from the stands. And what he saw was that when there was a big shot to be taken, a big play to be made, a defensive move at a crucial moment, or a loose ball that someone had to dive for, I was in the thick of it. I played better under pressure. I was always willing to take the risk. He later told me, “When night after night, you, Scott, become the physical protector of your mother, when you take those punches, competing on a basketball court is a lot less daunting.”

  Coach Lane wanted to hand me over to another man who could be a mentor to me on the court and off. He thought the best person for that job was John White.

  When the 1977 high school basketball season was over, Coach Lane wrote me a note that began, “Scott, You’ve become part of our family.” I pasted that in my scrapbook, next to my game articles.

  I still saw Brad and Judy Simpson too. Once, before a date with my high school girlfriend, Kathy Donehey, I drove my motorcycle over to their house and hinted that I needed a jacket to wear. Brad produced a tan leather jacket, cut like a blazer, with big round buttons and wide lapels. I was about his size by now, and to me, that jacket was the coolest thing I had ever seen. For two years, even when I was a college freshman, I would come by to borrow it, when it was cold and I wanted to look dressed up for the evening. Brad still has that jacket, its sleeves slightly stiff and cracked, tucked away in a plastic bag in his basement.

  By the end of my high school years, my father had ceased making all child support payments. His $25 a week checks, always intermittent, had stopped cold. I arrived on campus at Tufts with nothing, except what I had saved from summer work. I had started painting houses, because I liked being outside, I liked the methodical work of sanding, prepping, and painting—alone with the music on the radio—and it paid well. Or at least well enough so that I had some money for books and a few weeks of food.

  I had been heavily recruited for the team, but I was anxious about whether I would play. I had heard lots of stories about guys who came on as recruits and then sat on the bench for the year. I was a freshman; there were juniors and seniors who had been with the team and who were starters. Coach White had been named as head coach of the Tufts team just two years after he himself had graduated from the university. His first year, he was coaching many of his former teammates. Coach was a powerhouse player who was only five feet five and looked like Tony Orlando from the 1970s group Tony Orlando and Dawn. He brought his street-kid toughness with him to the court and made us play for our spots on the squad. His philosophy was that you are only as good as your next game. No one was allowed to rest on his laurels. No matter how hard he recruited anyone, no one was owed anything, and most of all, no one was owed a spot on his team. It had to be earned and won. Every practice was as competitive as a full-fledged game, sometimes more so. A few times, players had fistfights on the floor. That fall, I was one of them. I ended up taking away the position of a good friend of mine from a town near Wakefield, and he didn’t like it; we took some swings at each other right on the court. College was also an introduction to the world of adults. Our captain, Jimmy Campbell, was already married, with a young son.

  My mother must have dropped me off at Tufts, but I have no memory of her being there to help me move into my dorm. All of my stuff fit into one small carload. I had a stereo that I had saved hard for, my trophy from being named co-MVP in the Middlesex Basketball League, and some Wakefield banners that I hung on the wall. The room was brown brick, with two metal-and-wood desks and a set of bunk beds that after too many uncomfortable nights my roommate and I eventually took down and set up side-by-side as twins.

  My freshman year, I roomed with another player on the team, Benji Williams, a black player from Roxbury, Massachusetts, six feet seven inches tall, who had gone to Don Bosco, a Catholic school. We were polar opposites, but we got along well, even though our lifestyles were completely different. When I was going to sleep, Benji was leaving to go out; when I was getting up, he was rolling in. I had a steady girlfriend back home in Wakefield; he’d bring girls back to make out in our room while I’d be trying to sleep on the bunk below. I was regimented about sleep and studying and working in my work-study jobs at the gym for financial aid and doing late-night cleanup at one of the local pubs. I wanted to get good enough marks so that I could stay on the team and play basketball. Benji sometimes tried to get me to do his work for him, but I couldn’t do mine and his. I was practicing three to five hours a day, working, going to class, studying, and then in my free time trying to have a social life. For finals, I reluctantly went home to Larry’s dreaded house to study because I just couldn’t study enough in my room. But Benji was probably far more typical than me of some college athletes at the time.

  The diversity of our team made us unusual in our league, the New England Small College Athletic Conference. In Wakefield, I never had to think about race. The town was about 98 percent white, but our team at Tufts had a fair number of black players, and suddenly, I began to see things through their eyes. We played most of the top New England schools—Colby, Bates, Williams, and Amherst—as well as a host of smaller ones. Most of the teams weren’t integrated, and when they did have African-American players, those guys usually were prep school grads. Our players were like Coach White, from the inner city, and they had honed their skills on the street. When we traveled to other schools, particularly the more remote and insular ones, people in the stadiums sometimes spat on us or called out racial slurs. A lot of it was horrible, vile, vicious language, and each time, I would think, “Damn, I’m glad I didn’t go here.”

  Many times, though, the prejudice was far subtler. When we played the Bentley College Falcons in 1979, their game program had a little write-up on their evening match against Tufts. The featured photo was of our three African-American starters, with the caption “Roxbury Connection,” adding, “The three Roxbury residents are the key to Tufts’ inside game.” Roxbury, of course, was the “black section” of Boston. It had been the scene of riots and looting following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and by the late 1970s, its streets were a mass of vacant, trash-strewn lots and the burned-out shells of old industrial buildings, many gutted by arson. In a few years, it would become the epicenter of the city’s crack epidemic. To highlight our team’s “Roxbury Connection” was to offer multiple meanings. In our league, other teams did not have inner-city players. We were the exception to the rule. But the stream of comments also had another effect: they made us tighter as a team. We didn’t have cliques of people; all the guys hung out together. People who saw us play either loved us or hated us. There was no middle ground. We knew that—and nothing ever pushed us apart as a team. Ever.

  And we came to notice one other thing. When our team traveled to these other schools, in the stands, their few African-American students were often rooting for us.

  I held my own that first year as the team’s “Sixth Man,” the guy right behind the five starters. I was able to become one of the top four scorers on the team—when I scored 22 points in an overtime loss against Sacred Heart, the Eastern College Athletic Conference named me Rookie of the Week. The next week, we were slated to play MIT. I started, but after four minutes Coach White pulled me out. That was it. I didn’t play for the rest of the game. Coach d
idn’t tell me why; he didn’t say anything. After the game, I walked up the stairs to the locker room. I showered and changed, and when I walked out, Coach White was standing there, being interviewed postgame. I looked at him, dropped my uniform on the ground, and walked away. All those hours in the gym, working, studying, practicing, they all collapsed in that uniform on the ground. It was the first time I had ever walked away from anything. I walked through the gym, down to an alleyway off the indoor track underneath. And I began to cry. I stood in that alleyway, under the stairwell, bawling. The only thing I wanted to do was play; inside, I just felt hollow, as if everything had been drained from me. I was still crying when Coach White found me.

  I told him that I didn’t know why I didn’t play. I was ready to win, ready to contribute, I had been playing great. And then he didn’t play me. I played for four minutes. And he told me that he didn’t want me to get a big head, to get too full of myself. I looked at him, stunned. “What do you mean, ‘full of myself’?” I asked him. “I’m working my ass off trying to be the best possible player I can be.” I said, “Do you know what I go through? I go home. I take care of my family. I’m studying. I’m working. I’m never late to practice. I always stay long after practice is over to keep working on my game. And you’re afraid I’m going to get full of myself?”

  He handed me my uniform and said, “Well, why don’t you pick up your uniform and think about it?” I did think about it, and I didn’t quit. As with everything else, I showed up at practice the next day and worked even harder. I scored and contributed more. Years later, I saw the lesson, to accept adversity in whatever form with balance and grace. I never cried again over sports. I took the challenge to allow that game to make me better, and to make me a better master of myself. With even more hours of practice, I could make everything go right on the basketball court.

  Where I couldn’t make it go right was at home.

  Leeann was usually the one who called, at night, and she would find me at the gym, or in my room. She would be crouching in Larry’s front hall study, up on the second floor, in tears, whispering into the phone. Larry had started in on mom again. Sometimes, she would be locked in the bathroom. But sometimes, when Leeann was on the phone, Larry would have his hands around my mother’s throat. With me gone, there was no check on his rage, and no other outlet. He could pin her to the wall and do what he wanted. I would drop the phone and race for my motorcycle or a car, borrowing the keys from my coach or someone on the team. Leeann would be screaming to Larry, “Scott is coming!” That was usually enough. If I arrived when he was still there, he and I would go at it: he would come at me with his sawed-off fingers; I would throw him up against the wall in the hallway. But many nights he just took off, and I would race home to find him already gone. The only visible residue of his rage were the phones constantly ripped out of the wall sockets, their dangling cords and shredded wires streaming helplessly on the ground.

  I might go out looking for him, riding around Wakefield, searching in his familiar haunts, or I might sit in the living room and wait for him to return, for the usual round of apologies—his “I’m sorry,” followed by some excuse. He always had a smooth line afterward, something almost hypnotic that drew my mother, Leeann, and me back in. And truly, where did my mother have to go? She had no money, no profession, no child support from Leeann’s father. Larry controlled every bit of cash in the house; he paid the expenses for Leeann. A divorce lawyer would require a retainer of thousands of dollars, and my mother had nothing to her name. She had very little sense of any of her rights, and Massachusetts law back then gave her very few options for where to turn. Larry ruled their lives, to the point where both my mother and Leeann were sometimes too scared to tell me what was going on when I dropped by just to check on things. But I could read it in their faces, and I could read it in the smugness that radiated from Larry’s eyes.

  After each episode, I left, knowing that I would be back in a few weeks or a month or two. The promise that things would be different was nothing more than a fragile truce that would hold only until the next time. There was no way to curb the violence. It was gathering out there like a storm, and every night I waited for the phone call, never knowing for sure when it might come.

  By my sophomore year, Larry was routinely physically and mentally abusing my mom and sometimes my sister. On occasion, he would lift my mom against the wall and lean forward into her face, slowly crushing her windpipe under his forearm or his palm, choking her. And he would hurl Leeann against that same wall. I remember racing home during one of these incidents and finding him in the hallway. This time I didn’t care. I was not afraid of him. I was big now, 185 pounds of solid muscle from lifting with the Nautilus machines. I pinned him against the wall, the bone of my forearm against his chest, my left fist pulled back and balled, ready to connect, and I told him, “You fucking touch my mother again, you fucking touch my sister again, and I will kill you. I will absolutely kill you.” And I was ready to. I didn’t care what happened. I knew that the next time, it would be my mom or Leeann. For a while, he got the message.

  I was lucky to be on the basketball team because that gave me free clothes. I got shorts, T-shirts, and sweats. And that was what I wore, to class, to parties. I had a jacket, a hat, and a sweater, which I had to make last a very long time. I would do almost anything for extra cash. In the dorms, the resident advisers or even Coach White, who lived with us with his family as a faculty resident, would call me and say, “Hey, Brownie, someone hurled on the stairs. Can you come clean it up for ten bucks?” And I’d be right there, with a shovel, a bag, some rags, and disinfectant. Two minutes of cleanup for some drunken vomit, and I’d have ten bucks. I could get through the week on ten bucks, and a lot of weeks, I had to. I would do anything to make money; no job was too disgusting or too small.

  My mother couldn’t help with much, and my grandparents were in New Hampshire, but Gram would chip in with what she called pin money, sending me an envelope with $10 to $20 every once in a while. I was working, practicing, and studying all the time. I was on full financial aid, but I had no extra money to live on or to go out with friends. According to the court papers, my dad was obligated to continue his child support payments through college, if I attended. But even when I was in high school, the $25 a week checks had been intermittent. Now, they were entirely gone. I don’t know where I got the idea to sue my dad to enforce the agreement, but I did. I went to the local courthouse and looked through the legal documents. On my own, I collected the right papers and I prepared to file them, not only asking for the $25 but petitioning for $50 a week because of “a change in circumstances.” That change was college. I called my father and told him, “Dad, I need some money. I have no money. I need money just to eat. I need you to continue the $25 a week, $100 a month, or even to up it to $50.” His answer was, “Are you kidding me?” He wanted to be done. It was like pulling teeth to get him to honor the agreement. Finally, he grudgingly relented, but the payments stopped again after about a year. The second time, I gave up. Even though he was back in Newburyport, opening a country store with needlepoint pillows, scented candles, and painted trays with Linda, his third wife, my father didn’t come to many of my basketball games. The relationship was too strained. Over $25 a week.

  Instead, Coach White and I went back to the financial aid office and begged for more money for me, so that I could cover books and a meal plan. But as bad as the coach knew things were, there was a lot more that I never told him.

  The worst night of my life came toward the end of my sophomore year. That night, once again, Larry had my mom up against the wall. He had his hands around her throat, but this night, he pushed harder, until her face was turning blue. Leeann saw her eyes begin to roll back in her head and she, age thirteen, rushed Larry from behind. She kicked him in the balls and began hitting and biting him. It was like me and Dan Sullivan all over again. Larry whirled around and threw Leeann up against the wall, with
a force so violent and strong that her head cracked against the Sheetrock and she almost lost consciousness. But to do that, he had to let go of my mom. My mom broke free and raced to the phone in Larry’s study, locked the door, and called the cops. She also called me. The cops came and escorted Larry out of the house, and I came back home, to stay for a while. Either by court order or by some other arrangement, Larry was forced to move out. But he was not totally gone.

  He was still allowed to come around to see his mother, who continued to live in the in-law apartment above the garage. He was also responsible for all the utilities and the maintenance. But that gave him another form of control. In the winter, he would periodically make sure that the oil was not delivered, so that the heat could not be turned on in the house. He would let the electricity bill lapse until the power was shut off. He did the same with the phone. When he lost the proximity to physically abuse my mom, he tried every type of mental torture on my mother and Leeann. One night I got another hysterical call from Leeann. Her dog, Taurus, was missing. Larry had taken him.

  I got into a car and began looking for Larry. Finally, I found him in downtown Wakefield, in the second floor of a building he owned, with a thin, tenement stair stretching up the back from the parking lot. He had the dog, an animal that he would periodically hit with his scarred palm when he had been at home. I went and got a friend of mine who was a cop, and I asked him to come with me to get the dog back, because I was afraid of what might happen if I had to confront Larry, just myself, one on one. We retrieved the dog. Leeann and my mother stayed in June Circle because my mother had nowhere else to go. When they finally did leave, going to an apartment, my mom was back where she had been nearly a decade before, a single mother on welfare, struggling to make ends meet.