For the first thirteen years of my life, I was one of the taller kids in my class. Then in eighth grade, I stopped growing. My peers surpassed me on the height axis until I was the shortest in class, but in my mind, I was still a giant among teenagers. I even thought that, just maybe, the NBA was in my future.
When freshman year of high school began, a notice went up at George Washington High School: There were going to be tryouts for the varsity basketball team on Wednesday at six in the morning. There was nothing I wanted more than to play varsity basketball and get my career started.
Though my mom had signed me up for practically every team in a thirty-mile radius, she didn’t actually care about sports. She just cared about keeping me off the streets and on her schedule. In those days, that schedule included taking the school bus, which didn’t pick me up early enough in the morning to get to tryouts.
“You’re not leaving the house at that hour to make any tryouts,” she informed me. “You’d have to catch public transportation. It’s not safe that early. You’re not doing it.”
I don’t think I’d ever been as mad at her as I was that day. I loved basketball too much to miss my one shot at making the varsity team. So I devised a plan.
I studied the bus schedule and determined that the best bus to take was at 4:07 a.m. Then, the night before tryouts, I crept around the house while my mom was sleeping and meticulously set every clock forward by two hours. If there was something that had a time on it, from the VCR to her watch, I set it forward.
At four in the morning, her alarm clock clicked over to 6:00 a.m. and started buzzing. I was already awake and ready to sprint to the bus stop.
“Okay, Mom, I’m going to school.” I stepped into my sneakers and stuffed my homework into my book bag. Then I got to that bus stop, made it to tryouts, and gave it my all.
By third period, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for pulling this off. I was joking with a friend in history class, waiting for the teacher to enter the room, when I noticed a familiar head on the other side of the glass panel in the classroom door.
It was her.
There is no fear like the terror I had of my mom in that moment.
As I sat there, with my heart clenched and my mouth suddenly dry, the door opened. The principal entered, with my mom right behind him.
“Kevin,” he said. “Your mom is here to pick you up.”
My classmates were instantly jealous. They thought I was getting to leave school early. As I weaved between desks, they all said goodbye and patted me on the back like I was the man. Meanwhile, I was trying not to shit my pants.
With every step I took toward that door, I saw my mom’s control over her rage slip. By the time I was two paces from the door, she had her belt off. My whole body trembled as I took the next step. Suddenly—thwack! Thwack! THWACK!—she started beating my ass in front of the whole class.
The kids who had been jealous just a moment before started laughing and making fun of me. I cried up a storm as she whupped me out the door and into the hallway. She was such a high level of pissed off, even the principal was trying to get her to stop.
He didn’t succeed. My mom beat me all the way out of the building and to the bus stop. Then she calmed down for a moment. But taking a break gave her an opportunity to think again about what I’d done, and a minute later, she had that belt whistling through the air again.
“Had me at work two damn hours early!” THWACK! THWACK! “Wasn’t a goddamn soul in sight!” THWACK! THWACK!
(Up to that point, the worst beating I’d gotten was a few years earlier, after my first and last time shoplifting. I’d taken a pack of Starbursts from a store, because all the kids were eating them and I wanted to know what they tasted like. She caught me trying to open one on the train and smacked the hell out of me. Then she made me go back to the store, return the Starbursts, and apologize, as she whacked me the whole time. The fucked-up thing about it is I never got to taste a Starburst.)
When the bus finally arrived, she had to pause for a second to pay the fare. Then she found a reason to get mad at me again. “Sit down!” Before my butt even landed on the seat, she hit me again and yelled, “I said sit!”
Any excuse there was to hit me, she found it that day. “Don’t you look at me like that!” Thwack! “Stop crying, boy!” THWACK! “I said STOP CRYING!”
My dad, despite all the violence I witnessed around him, only hit me one time. And even then, all he did was put his hand on the top of my head and smack his hand. With my mom, on this particular day, it got to the point where she was slapping the shit out of me over things that were out of my control. When we were close to our stop, we got up and walked to the doors. The bus braked and I stood on the steps, waiting for the doors to open. All of a sudden, behind me, she boomed, “Get off the bus!” THWACK! THWACK! The doors weren’t even open yet.
I was grounded for three months after that. Since I’d pretty much been grounded my whole life anyway, I couldn’t really complain. Especially since I made the team.
16
* * *
BECOMING ELITE
Never quit. That was the message that our varsity basketball coach, Calvin Jones, constantly drilled into our heads. He never got angry and yelled at us like other coaches did. Instead, he related to us and cared for us, and he became a mentor to me and many of the other guys.
My goal on the team was to be part of the starting lineup, but there were several players who were much better than me. Coach Jones would constantly tell me not to be comfortable sitting on the bench. But he also refused to let me start out of pity. Instead, he tried to instill in me the will to do better, the will to win, and the will to work hard for all of it.
It was effective, at least as far as basketball was concerned. When my mom brought me to work with her on the weekends, I’d go to the UPenn gym and play until she came to get me at five o’clock. All that basketball and swimming—playing in different leagues and gyms, meeting kids of all races and backgrounds, and traveling to so many different places in the state to compete—probably taught me how to communicate, understand, and get along with all different kinds of people.
However, the more I got into basketball, the less excited I got about swim team. Not only had my mom been making me do it for the last five years, but, in her tireless effort to keep me busy, when they offered a lifeguarding course, she signed me up for that too. I hated swimming, and I decided to stop trying.
It was a serious team, which was later the subject of a film, Pride, along with our coach, Jim Ellis. According to him, we were the first black swim team in our league to compete nationally. My teammates were very competitive and were not only winning medals, but getting As and Bs in school.