Hard Work

by Roy Williams

  I know Frances was also upset by our family situation, but she didn’t seem to be as bothered by it as I was. She was older, more mature, and just handled it better. During the tough times, she was keeping an eye on me more than I knew she was, but I just wasn’t willing to talk about our mom and dad splitting up. I never really talked to anybody about it. I pretended it wasn’t there.

  During one of the times when my mother and dad got back together, we lived in a house on Warren Avenue. That was the first and only house we ever owned. My mother, Frances, and I left and came back, and left and came back, and then one day when we were staying with one of my aunts, my dad said, “Why don’t you guys come back and stay at the house, and I’ll leave and let you guys live there?”

  We’d only been back living in that house for two weeks when these two guys pulled up in the driveway. They were wearing dark sportcoats, white shirts, and ties. I was on the porch, but I ran in the house to tell my mom as they came walking up the steps. I remember latching the screen door, and I wouldn’t unlatch it to let them in. It turned out that during that seven-month time period that we’d been gone, my dad hadn’t paid the mortgage. So they came and foreclosed on the house. They told us we had three days to get out. I went and packed up my stuff, and we moved back to the motel. To this day I still have a negative feeling about people in dark sportcoats, white shirts, and ties.

  Every time my parents got back together, there was a lot of fighting. My dad never hit my mother with his fist, but he went as far as he could go without doing that. I tried to run away from home one time because I just wanted to get away. I didn’t get very far; I don’t know if I wanted to get very far. I just wanted to shock my dad into stopping. I was always feeling like I needed to escape.

  ONE OF OUR NEIGHBORS at that house on Warren Avenue had a basketball goal in the backyard. I never had a basketball, but they had one, and when I wanted to get away from what was going on at home, I would just go over there and shoot. The goal was a pole with a plywood backboard, and there was no net, just a bent rim. I’d go over there for hours. If it was raining or snowing, I’d get filthy on the dirt court, but I didn’t mind. It was something I could do by myself. All I needed was a basketball and a goal and some sweat and I could lose myself in the game. I was in heaven, like a kid left all night in a candy store. That court was my refuge, the one place where it felt like there were no problems in the world.

  When I was 11, we moved to a place on Reed Street. We were 100 yards from Biltmore Elementary School, where there were some asphalt courts. Every day after school, I’d go home, change clothes, and head straight to the courts to play basketball until 6 o’clock.

  When I was in the seventh grade, a few other boys and I started sneaking into the Biltmore gym to play. I always played with older guys. One of them had the idea of hiding someone in the bathroom, and then when the head of the physical education department would go home at 4 o’clock, our guy would come out of the bathroom and pop the gym door open and we’d play on the court inside.

  One time we were in there playing and one of the guys started clowning around with a fire extinguisher, and it sprayed all over the girls’ locker room. That just infuriated me, and that’s when I started sneaking in by myself, because I didn’t want to be responsible for anybody else. On one outside wall there were some uneven bricks I could climb to get to a second-floor window. I opened the window and dropped down to the balcony inside the gym. I never turned on the lights. There was just an exit sign lighting each end, and I would play in the half dark. I would just shoot and rebound and shoot again. It was peaceful, and at that point the peaceful part of it was more important than getting to be a better player.

  I got caught several times. It became a little bit of a challenge for this one policeman to catch me in there and run me off. He came in the gym a couple of times and would find me mopping the floor. He probably thought I was trying to keep it cleaned up, but I was just trying to cover my tracks. I didn’t want anybody to know I’d been in there.

  Finally, one night he said, “It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to stop you. How do you get in here?”

  I was scared to death. It was dark, and I took him outside and showed him how I climbed up the outside of the building. Then he said, “Okay, come on with me.”

  I had been in the junior deputy sheriff’s program, and one day they were taking everybody to the jail and the courthouse just to show them what it was like, and I didn’t go that day because they said they were going to fingerprint everybody and that frightened me. So when the policeman put me in the back of the police car, I thought he was taking me to jail. He drove over to Mr. Norton’s house. Mr. Norton was the school principal. When we reached his house, the policeman got out of the car and said, “Stay here.”

  I was about to mess my pants, I was so dadgum scared. He knocked on the door, and when Mr. Norton opened it I could see them talking. After a little while, Mr. Norton went back in the house and then came out to the car. I sat there trying to figure out how I was going to tell my mom that she had to come bail me out of jail. Mr. Norton reached in the window and handed me a key. It was the key to the Biltmore gym.

  “I don’t want you to kill yourself climbing in the window anymore,” Mr. Norton said, “but you are responsible for anyone in there with you.”

  I never took anyone in there with me. The only time I ever used that key was when I could be by myself.

  ONCE MY SISTER got a job working weekends at Kress’s five-and-ten store, I was on my own. Really on my own. I was 11 years old. On Saturdays I would get up at 8:30 and my sister and my mother would already be gone to work, so I’d eat my Cheerios alone. It was Cheerios with canned milk and I would dilute that with water. That was my milk, because it was cheaper. Then I would go to Biltmore Elementary School and I would play there all day.

  Some Saturdays I would go to the YMCA, riding the bus because we had no car. I played basketball there, too, but also I learned to play Ping-Pong and pool and chess. I learned to swim enough to stay alive. I would stay there until two in the afternoon. Then I would leave and go to Pack Memorial Library. I would sit there for hours reading the different newspaper sports sections and then catch the last bus back home in the evening.

  Then, in the seventh grade, I joined a basketball league at the YMCA. In my very first game I remember I came down the court and I passed the ball to the guy on my right and he shot it and missed it. On our next possession, somebody gave me the ball and I passed it to the guy on my left, and he shot it and missed it. The third time I came down the court I shot it and it went in, and I’ve been shooting ever since.

  During that whole time period when I was very unhappy, my mother was so strong and she took such good care of me. When I started going to town by myself, she would always say, “You just do the right thing.”

  One time, I said, “Mom, how do I know what’s right?”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “You just make sure you do the right thing.”

  And so one Saturday I didn’t save a nickel for the bus ride home from the YMCA. I told the bus driver, Mr. Haynes, “I don’t have a nickel. Can I ride the bus home and I’ll give you back the nickel next week?”

  He said, “Come on in here, son.”

  I got on the bus and rode home. The next Saturday morning I wasn’t going to the YMCA until 9, but I knew the first bus would come to my stop at 7:30. I waited out at the bus stop and when it came, I walked up the stairs and gave Mr. Haynes a nickel. “I’ll see you in an hour or so,” I said. “I’m not riding this bus.”

  He said, “Why didn’t you just wait and bring it to me then?”

  “I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t going to pay you back.”

  I HEARD MY MOM cry herself to sleep sometimes. I know she worried about how she was going to pay the bills. There were a couple of times she had to ask our landlord’s secretary if she could pay the rent a few days late. Sometimes that lady was harsh to her. There were
times when my mom didn’t know how she was going to get through the next day, but she always found a way.

  She had worked for Chakales Hosiery for a long time and then she went to work for Ball’s, a place that made jars, and then she went to work for Gerber baby food, but she kept getting laid off. A couple of times my mother had to take unemployment and it embarrassed her. She would fill out 100 job applications to try not to take money she hadn’t earned. Eventually, she got a job at Vanderbilt Shirt Factory and she worked there for 25 years.

  In my seventh-grade year, my mom started taking in laundry to make extra money. She would do ironing for people, 10 cents for a shirt or a pair of pants. They’d come by to bring the clothes on Friday afternoon and I never wanted to go to the door. I didn’t think it was right that she should have to do those kinds of things. It made me feel like people thought my mom was inferior. It was one of those things that really bothered me. So I would just leave.

  AFTER SCHOOL MY BUDDIES and I used to go home past Ed’s Service Station, which had a vending machine where you could get a Coke for 10 cents. One day my sister said she saw us at Ed’s and asked what we were doing there. I told her and my mom that we liked to stop at Ed’s after playing basketball and get Coca-Colas to drink while we’d sit there on the sidewalk and talk.

  Now my mom knew I loved nothing more than a cold Coca-Cola, but she also knew I didn’t have the money to buy one. “What do you do?” she asked me.

  I told her, “Oh, they have a nice water fountain. I just get some water.”

  The next morning I’d gotten myself ready to go to school as usual, because my mom always left earlier to go to work. I walked into the kitchen and sitting on the corner of the table was a dime. My mom didn’t have very much money, but she was too proud to allow her son not to have what other kids had. After that, when she cashed her paycheck at the grocery store, she’d get rolls of dimes so that she would be sure to have one there for me every morning.

  She did that every day for years.

  GROWING UP I ALWAYS knew my dad was wrong. I hated the drinking. I wanted my mom and dad to be together, but I didn’t want them to be together if it was going to be that way.

  The summer I turned 14, my parents had been apart for a couple of years. My dad hardly ever paid the child support. He’d pay one month and skip seven, then pay another month and skip nine. My mom talked to a lawyer and they served a warrant for my dad’s arrest and said he had to catch up on child support. My dad came by the house. He was drunk and angry. It was the worst time I can ever remember. He went after my mom. I pulled him off of her, pushed him down, and grabbed a bottle and put it under his chin. “Get out of here or I’ll bust this over your head,” I said. “I’ll kill you!”

  The whole scene was very nasty, but I didn’t care. When he got up to leave, I said, “I never want to see you again. I never want you to set foot in my house again for the rest of my life.”

  My dad never, ever came back to our house again. After that, I rarely saw him, only a couple of times when my sister made me go with her to visit him. Frances was more forgiving, but I was not. I was mad that he’d torn our family apart.

  CHAPTER 3

  Home Games

  I HAD NO DREAMS. No goals. Nothing whatsoever. My dad worked at a sawmill, my uncles worked at a sawmill, and my grandfather had his own little sawmill. I didn’t think about it much, but I guess I figured that would be me.

  I wanted to be good in school, though. Some of my older cousins and uncles had trouble reading, and I knew that I didn’t want to be like that.

  And then, when I was in the third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Cheek, put up a list of the top 10 students in the first grading period. There were only 25 kids in the class, but my name was not on the list. She put it up on this little chalkboard right beside the regular blackboard and I had to go in there every day for six weeks and stare at it, and that really ticked me off.

  After that, for the next five grading periods, my name was the first one on the list. To see my mother’s reaction when I brought those report cards home was so important to me. She was so proud that she told all of my relatives about my grades.

  Whenever anybody asks me how I came to be so competitive, I trace it directly back to that experience. That’s the first time I can ever remember any competition at all, except for fighting. And that was the first time that I ever even thought about competition. Now most of my friends think of me as the most competitive person they’ve ever met.

  So I kept trying to be a good student for those two reasons: because I wanted my name on that board and because I thought it would make my mom happy. Not because I saw it taking me anywhere.

  MY FAMILY NEVER had a television until I was six years old. I thought it was a new invention. We got two channels and sometimes a third. Not long after we got the television, one of my grandfathers visited and suggested we watch a baseball game. To this day, one of my favorite numbers is 7, because during the game that day they showed footage of Mickey Mantle hitting a home run left-handed and a home run right-handed. The announcers also talked about how Mantle was the fastest player in all of baseball. I was starstruck.

  So baseball was my first love. It was the first sport I played on a real team. In Little League I’d pitch one game and catch the next. Those were my favorite positions because they allowed me to stay the most involved in the game. I played second base and shortstop and pitched in Babe Ruth baseball when I was 15, and we won the district championship. I was one of the best players on my team.

  In high school I figured I would play basketball in the winter and then baseball in the spring. In my freshman year I played junior varsity basketball. I was only 5'3" and 104 pounds and I didn’t start on the JV team. But at the end of the season, they had a junior varsity tournament for the county schools. In the second game of that tournament, I played almost all of the fourth quarter and I made 10 out of 11 free throws, but we still lost on a last-second shot. I felt really positive about the way my freshman year had ended, but I was still thinking that as a sophomore I’d play on junior varsity again.

  That spring some of my friends got to talking to the varsity basketball coach, Buddy Baldwin, after his history class. They asked him what he thought the team’s prospects were for the next season. I ran into one of them, Ronnie Slider, later that day, who told me, “Boy, Coach Baldwin had some great things to say about you maybe making the varsity next year.”

  The next day at school I was walking down the hallway and Coach Baldwin stopped me. “You really finished the season strong,” he said. “If you work hard over the summer, you’ve got a chance to do some big things.”

  That was one of the best things anyone had ever said to me. It made me feel so good, and at that moment I made the decision that I was going to outwork everybody. I switched almost all of my attention from baseball to basketball. I still played baseball, but I stopped working as hard on it. That spring I’d take 10 swings in batting practice and then I wouldn’t take 10 swings again until practice three days later. In the meantime I’d shoot 1,000 jump shots. Over that summer, I played in Babe Ruth baseball games, but as soon as the game was over I’d go straight to the basketball court at Biltmore Elementary, change into some sneakers, and play pickup basketball with my baseball uniform still on. I was so excited about the basketball season starting.

  I remember one afternoon I had stayed around to do some extra drills after everybody else left the pickup game. I was absolutely worn out. I was just sitting on the sidewalk before I got up to walk home when I thought, “How good must Coach Baldwin feel to make me feel this good? And I’m not the only person he’s done this for. I want to be like Buddy Baldwin. I want to be a coach.”

  NOT LONG AFTER she graduated from Roberson High School, Frances got married. So once I was in high school, she was gone. Because my mother was always working, I had all these other people who took care of me and just looked after me in general. My friend Walt Stroup’s mother worked at Belk’s departmen
t store in the layaway section, and she told me to come and see her when it was time to get school clothes. She got 25 percent off on all the clothes because she worked there. Every year in high school, I’d get two pairs of blue jeans, two shirts, and a pair of shoes to replace the ones with holes worn in the bottom from the previous year, and we’d put it all on layaway. Before the start of my sophomore year, I bought two pairs of pants and three shirts. When it dawned on me how much money it was, I asked Mrs. Stroup if she could take one of those shirts back because I thought I’d spent too much of my mom’s money.

  During my senior year, one of the teachers at Roberson, Carl Conley, picked me up and took me to school every day. He was this preppy guy who had just gotten out of Mars Hill College. He gave me some clothes, so for the first time in my life I had sweaters that actually matched my pants. I had a particular outfit that I wore each day and then they all had to be washed on the weekends. I had exactly five outfits, and I hoped nobody noticed.

  When I joined the varsity basketball team as a sophomore, Coach Baldwin wanted his players to wear coats and ties to games. I had one sportcoat and I wore it to every game. I had one tie and I wore it to every game. I didn’t want anybody to know that, but if you look at all the pictures of me dressed up, it’s the same coat and tie every time. My junior year, I got a second tie.

  The first steak I ever ate was when I was a junior and they took the basketball team to Buck’s restaurant in Asheville. I thought, “Man, this is pretty good food.” They collected money from the parents to pay for that dinner. It was $10 per person and somebody came up to Mr. Crandall and I overheard him say, “This is for my son, David, and for Roy. Let me take care of it, and don’t say anything to his mom.”

  I pulled Mr. Crandall over to the side after the meal and thanked him and said that one day I would repay him. But he told me not to worry about it.