by Vin Baker
I also went to a camp that summer at the University of Connecticut. Recruiting was different in those days; not everyone played AAU ball, and certainly it didn’t dominate the recruiting landscape the way it does today. A lot of kids were recruited based on their high school performance, or by playing well at a particular camp. It didn’t occur to me that I could play at UConn, or any other program at the elite level of Division I. But the competition was fierce at this camp, and I liked it. I was skinny and slow, lumbered around a little, trying to figure out my new body, but I didn’t back down. Even when I was getting pushed around and guys were dunking in my face, I liked playing. I knew the competition would make me better, and I wanted as much of it as I could get. I didn’t have a game plan. I wasn’t a blue-chip recruit with a street agent and free sneakers. It’s not like I got cut in ninth grade and said, “One day I’ll be an Olympian.” I was just a wiry kid from Old Saybrook who liked playing basketball so much that he couldn’t imagine quitting. Eventually my body began to catch up with my enthusiasm, but at times it felt like a glacial process.
Complicating matters was the fact that I was a young black man in a predominantly (almost exclusively) white community, so I lived something of a double life. At home, at church, and on the playgrounds, I was surrounded by African Americans. At Old Saybrook High School, however, I was one of only a small number of black males. My parents were from the South and had come of age during the civil rights era. From them, and from other parishioners at our church, I heard stories of segregation and oppression, and while I experienced nothing quite that severe while growing up, I did see black and white very clearly. I experienced racism and bigotry on a more subtle level, but I did feel its sting, and I never forgot it. And I used it as a motivational tool.
There was a kid my age at Old Saybrook named Aaron Smith. He transferred in as a freshman (we had played against each other in eighth grade) and immediately became the star of the program. Aaron was a big, strong white kid, more physically advanced than I was, and certainly a lot tougher than I was. At that point in our lives, there is no question that Aaron was a better basketball player than me, and everyone knew it. He was elevated to the varsity as a freshman, while I couldn’t even make the JV. This had nothing to do with the color of our skin, but I had trouble looking at things objectively. I was angry with Aaron, and I was envious of him. I was so angry that I quit the freshman team—just walked off with two weeks left in the season. I would look at Aaron and see him living the life of a varsity player, while I couldn’t even make the JV, and I would seethe with anger and frustration.
So I quit. And then I decided that quitting wasn’t the answer; hard work was the answer.
Aaron and I both attended the UConn camp after tenth grade. It was a very competitive camp with a lot of college coaches in attendance. Suddenly I started to get some buzz. Part of this was a natural result of my physical maturation. There was talent and size to go along with the tension and anger, and college recruiters began to take notice. The first step in the recruiting process, after all, is to pass the eye test—to look like a player. I had no idea how to put it all together, but for the first time I discovered that channeling my emotion in the right way could be beneficial. Simply put: when I played angry, I played better. But in a very real sense, I felt like I was on my own. The coaching staff didn’t believe in me, my parents didn’t believe in me (or didn’t care, because basketball simply wasn’t all that important to them), my teammates didn’t believe in me. At least that’s the way I felt in my sixteen-year-old head. I had something to prove.
Aaron and I were expected to be the two best players on the team our junior year, and we got along okay for the most part, until something happened during the preseason workouts. Aaron had a pickup truck, and he was driving around gathering everyone for the workout one afternoon. At one point I volunteered to jump in the back because the truck’s cab was becoming uncomfortably crowded.
“Just give me a second,” I said as we pulled out of the driveway. “I’ll climb into the back.”
Before I had even settled into the bed of the truck, Aaron punched the accelerator—hard. I went flying off the back of the truck and broke my fall with my arm. I knew right away that something bad had happened. The pain was severe and instantaneous. Even worse, when I fell off the truck my pants caught on the edge of the truck bed, so I was literally dragged down the street for about five seconds, screaming at the top of my lungs, before anyone knew what had happened. When the truck came to a stop, the response was not exactly compassionate.
“My bad,” Aaron said as he jumped out of the truck. “Didn’t know you weren’t ready.”
This may have been true, but the fact that Aaron was laughing as he said it really bothered me. Not only that, but as the shock of the incident wore off, I realized that I had probably seriously injured my arm.
“Dude, look at this,” I said, holding up my wrist, which was bent at an odd angle. “I’ve never had a broken bone before, but I’m pretty sure this is messed up.”
The pain was bad enough, and my wrist twisted at such a weird angle, that we decided to cancel our workout. Instead, we went to another friend’s house and watched TV. By the time I got home that evening my arm was throbbing.
“I think I need to go to the emergency room,” I said. “It really hurts.”
My parents were not the coddling type, but as they watched me squirm while trying to flex my wrist, they became concerned. Dad drove me to the hospital, where X-rays confirmed my fears: I had a broken wrist. When the doctor told me that the fracture would require roughly two months to heal, I felt my heart sink. This was early October; the start of basketball season was only a few weeks away. Depending on how quickly the bone healed, I could miss several games. I was devastated, and one of the first things I did when I got home was call my buddies to commiserate. I called Aaron first, and his response took me aback.
“It’s broken, dude,” I said. “Can you believe it?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, a long pause before Aaron finally spoke.
“Awww, that’s too bad, man.”
And that was it. He didn’t apologize, didn’t express any real emotion. Looking back on this now as an adult, I understand that he might have felt awkward or embarrassed or otherwise responsible for what happened, and as a sixteen-year-old simply wasn’t capable of expressing contrition. But something about that conversation did not feel right. We were teammates, if not exactly friends; we were the two best players on the team, but my impending absence did not seem to bother him. Maybe he didn’t want to have to share the spotlight. Or perhaps, it could have been something deeper. This is a hard thing to convey without sounding alarmist, or being accused of playing the race card, but when you’re a black kid in a white world, sometimes you just feel things; you know in your gut that something isn’t quite right. Do I think that Aaron tried to hurt me because I was black and he was white? No, it’s not that simple or that blatant.
From that moment on, I vowed that Aaron would never be better than me on a basketball court. This was going to be personal from here on out. I would work within the team concept and treat him, as I did all teammates, with respect, but I would be competing against him as well as with him.
It’s me against you, buddy.
I kept this mostly to myself; it wasn’t like I had a bunch of black friends with whom I could share my suspicions or frustrations. I tried to talk with my parents about it, but they felt like I was overreacting, or reaching for something that wasn’t there. To their eyes, my broken wrist was merely the result of bad adolescent driving. It happened. Nothing personal. I saw things differently, and I had a hard time letting go of those feelings. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, for they fueled a rage that drove me to be successful, to prove people wrong, and to rise above my surroundings.
The basketball court became my sanctuary, a place where I could forget about my problems, a place where I wasn’t anxious all the time a
nd unsure of myself, as I often was in social situations or at school. Anxiety is a terrible affliction, and I had suffered from it as far back as I could remember. It made me extraordinarily nervous, to the point where I would sometimes feel the urge to be invisible, to just disappear, so that no one would expect anything of me. On the court, however, I was confident and strong. I believed in myself.
My wrist healed on schedule, and while I missed a few practices, I was back in time for the first game. As a junior, I averaged about 16 points per game, which was pretty good, but not enough to attract any serious interest from college coaches. If I had been playing today, the path would have been different. I would have played AAU ball in the spring and summer, and someone would have noticed that I was a late bloomer and shipped me off to prep school for an extra year of seasoning (i.e., physical maturation and intense academic support). The paradigm of college sports in America has shifted dramatically since I was a kid. Today it’s not unusual for parents to hold their child back a year and start kindergarten at age six. The promising athlete then picks up a redshirt year along the way, and now the twenty-year-old college freshman is fairly common.
By comparison, I was seventeen when I started my senior year. Thanks to respectable performances in a couple of preseason tournaments, combined with another growth spurt that left me at a legitimate six foot eleven, the phone began to ring. Not heavily, mind you, but there were offers. The University of Hartford, a fledgling D-1 program just an hour or so from home, was the first to reach out, and the most persistent in its pursuit. I was flattered by the attention and I liked the idea of being part of a new program. True, it wasn’t UConn or Duke or Syracuse, but schools at that level had expressed no interest in me, and that wasn’t going to change. In the parlance of the game, I was a “project,” a kid who had developed late and might, with a little luck and lots of hard work, continue to develop. The big schools didn’t have time to invest in projects. There was too much at stake.
That was fine with me. I liked the Hartford coach, Jack Phelan (although, like all coaches, he would prove to be much less cuddly in the gym than he was on the recruiting trail). I liked the guys on the team. I liked the campus. And I really liked my recruiting visit. See, it wasn’t so much what Hartford had to offer that turned my head. Eventually all the good stuff came: playing time, professional opportunities, small classes, and strong relationships with faculty and teammates, everything that had been pitched. But what really sold me on Hartford was the pretty girl who agreed to dance with me at my first college party. Simple, right? But completely true. I was a naive high school senior who, basketball camp aside, had never been away from home overnight on his own, and who had never been to a party. At the time, this was the best night of my life. By the end of the weekend, I was ready to sign with Hartford. It didn’t happen right away, though. For a while I flirted with the University of Rhode Island, but they never made a formal offer and eventually my mother shook some sense into me.
“You’d better take this scholarship before they give it to someone else,” she said. “You can’t afford to miss this opportunity.”
I called Coach Phelan and committed. I don’t even think I was his top recruit. We had seven freshmen on the team—that’s the way it works when you’re building a program from scratch. I didn’t care. I’d played only a single season of high school varsity basketball and already I’d earned a college scholarship. It didn’t bother me in the least that I was going to a small school with a brand-new Division I program. And in retrospect, I realize that if I had gone to a top-tier program, I may not have developed into the player I became. Some kids thrive in an intensely competitive environment, sink or swim. Others need more reassurance. I fell into the latter group, and as a result I am a strong proponent of being a big fish in a little pond. There’s value in that. For example, I believe that the best player in the world right now would not be the best player in the world if he hadn’t gone to Davidson. There, at a small college, playing for a mid-major program that had never known national success, Stephen Curry was able to explore different facets of his game; he was able to learn and to grow, and to play through his mistakes.
Steph was clearly Davidson’s best player. When you’re just one of ten—at Kentucky, for example, or any other big school—you’re constantly struggling for playing time and fighting for respect. You could be one of the top ten players in your class when you arrive on campus, and in October you’ll find yourself hosting a high school recruit who is ranked even higher in his class, and who will be after your job the following year. It’s enormously intense and competitive. Every practice, every drill, is like a test. You can’t just coast on talent the way you could in high school, because you are surrounded by players who are at least as talented, and perhaps more ambitious. If you relax for even one moment, you can get your ass kicked in a very public way. The potential for embarrassment is always present, every single day. Not everyone is built for that kind of pressure. I honestly believe that if you had dropped me on the University of Connecticut’s campus—which is basically a small city—when I was eighteen years old, I wouldn’t have survived. I could not have handled the pressure that came with being a UConn Husky in that era (a time when the program was a powerhouse member of a powerhouse conference—the Big East). Actually, I’m not even sure I could have found my way from my dorm to the gym, or to my classes.
It would have been a disaster.
But at cozy little Hartford? I’d be right at home. Or so I thought.
2
Big Fish, Little Pond
As it turned out, I couldn’t have been less prepared for the reality of being a college freshman. In the dorm and on the basketball court, I was a fish out of water. When I showed up for orientation in September, I didn’t even have any luggage. I was so clueless as to what this experience would be like that I didn’t even realize I’d be living there full time. My whole life had revolved around school and basketball and spending time with my parents. For better or worse, I was a momma’s boy. A few hours after I was dropped off, I had to call my parents and ask them to bring me some sheets for my bed and some clothes. The enormity of it all was overwhelming, so much so that I became one of those sad and homesick freshmen who hop on the bus and go home every weekend. The irony, of course, is that I couldn’t wait to go to college and to get away from the rules my parents had imposed. But I was so accustomed to being with them and living under their tight jurisdiction that freedom scared the living daylights out of me. People kept coming in and out of my dorm room—without even knocking! Inviting me to go out!
You mean I can leave and go across campus? On my own? No, thanks. Forget it. I’m good. I’ll just stay here. Matter of fact, I think I’m going home.
Basketball saved me, although it wasn’t easy. I struggled mightily my freshman year. I cried—literally cried, with tears streaming down my face—two or three times a week in practice, and out of practice. Coach Phelan was one of those legitimately tough guys who held nothing back. He was a Hartford native who had played college ball at Saint Francis (Pennsylvania) and was a sixth-round draft pick of the Golden State Warriors. Although he never played in the NBA, Jack was a very good player who was probably destined to become a coach. He was smart and demanding and worked his butt off. And he expected the same of everyone who played for him. No excuses were permitted, and volatility was normal.
He was a lot like my mom, actually: very tough and exacting, and so emotional that sometimes you couldn’t hear the message behind the rant. My father was big and intimidating, and once or twice he put a whipping on me when I was growing up, but generally speaking he was the calmer, cooler presence in our house. Mom was the screamer; so was Coach Phelan.
Interestingly, as much as I hated being the target of his outbursts, I can’t deny that Coach Phelan had a positive impact on my basketball career and my life. In fact, if I had to pinpoint one coach who flipped the switch for me and got me into the pro realm—who convinced me that I coul
d make a living as a basketball player—it was Jack Phelan. He challenged me. He got in my face. Now, admittedly, that doesn’t always work. My high school coach was relatively soft, so I’d never been exposed to anyone like Coach Phelan. Fortunately, I’d had my hair blown back by my mother on more than one occasion, so Jack just sort of took her place when I got to college. I’m not saying it was easy. As much as I loved basketball, there were days I hated going to practice because I knew I was going to get chewed out in front of everyone. Coach Phelan saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself, and he figured this was the way to pull it out. But it was such a painful, uphill battle. I’d leave practice some days shaking my head, eyes bloodshot from crying, wondering whether I was wasting my time.
“Baker!” Coach Phelan yelled one day, in the middle of what I’m sure he considered to be a particularly disappointing practice performance. “Get over here.”
I lowered my head and walked slowly to the edge of the court, where Jack stood waiting, arms folded across his chest, face contorted into a mask of disgust. I stopped a couple of feet short of him, but he quickly closed the gap. He leaned into me. I was a head taller than Jack, but felt somehow smaller in his presence. At that point in my life, he intimidated the hell out of me.