I Beat the Odds (10 page)

But following through on those smart choice wasn’t always easy. When I hit the eighth grade, I started as a regular student at Manassas High School. That’s where I was playing. I say “playing” because that’s really all I was worried about with school. I would show up for school just enough to stay eligible for sports (I was on the varsity football team as an eighth-grader, since I was about five feet eleven by then and as big as the seniors), but otherwise I would just hang out during the day with my brothers and their friends.

Looking back on it, I realize what a bad decision that was at the time, but it was just so much easier. While there were some great teachers in the Memphis city schools, after Ida B. Wells, I just didn’t have any of them. Mine pretty much didn’t care if I was there or not. They just kept passing me so that they didn’t have to deal with me anymore, or answer questions as to why I was failing—and it wasn’t just me. That was true for so many kids. We would just be held in the classroom for the period and the teacher would go over the material, but nobody (including the teacher) seemed to care if it stuck or not. No one checked for homework or book reports or even gave many tests. When no one around you, at school or at home, seems to think learning is important, it’s pretty hard to think that it is important yourself—especially when you’re a teenager.

But there was one period a day that I never, ever missed: lunch. At any inner-city school, you’ll almost always see that the lunchroom is packed even if there aren’t that many kids showing up for class. Since we were all on the free lunch plan, we knew that we would always get a hot meal in the cafeteria, so even on the days when we just stayed out on the streets, we were always in school at lunchtime.

Once the school day ended, I would head out to the baseball fields. That was the other thing I never missed: baseball practice. If I had skipped school that day, I still made sure I got to the locker room in time to head out to the field. I was the pitcher for the Manassas Tigers, and thankfully I wasn’t quite so tall yet that finding a blue and gold jersey was impossible.

I know I’m not built like your typical baseball player, but I was pretty good as a pitcher. I mean, I could throw a football almost seventy yards—pack that same power into just about twenty yards and that’s some heat behind a baseball!

The bigger and stronger I got, the more I started thinking about what I would do when I was grown up. I could look around me and see that there didn’t seem to be any other kind of an escape. The teenage girls I knew were all starting to have babies, the teenage boys were becoming part of the gang scene, selling drugs, or both. It was as if everyone around me had given up on ever leaving the ghetto.

But I knew I was different because I had a secret—something I’d not told anyone. I’d figured out how I was going to leave the ghetto years back in 1993, when I was still in second grade.

M
artin Luther King, Jr., had a dream, and so does every kid in foster care. Our dreams might not be as big as his were, but they are just as important. Having some kind of a goal is absolutely essential for kids trapped in poverty and bad family situations, because if we can’t hope that things might be better someday, then we basically lose a reason to live. It’s a lot easier to fall down, or to stay where you are, than it is to fight gravity by trying to pull yourself up.

Having a dream can be the first and most important step in making it out of the system. It’s got to be something more specific than just, “I want a lot of money” or “I want to be famous.” You’ve got to know not just what you want, but why you want it. A goal of being rich isn’t enough to make you put in the work day after day; you have to know why you want money—to buy a house, to take care of your family, to be able to always put food on the table, to make sure your spouse and kids aren’t stuck in the projects—whatever it is that is your dream beyond just the surface of what sounds like an easy life.

You also have to have a sense of what you are naturally good at. For example, if you have trouble with numbers, you should work on that, but you probably shouldn’t look for a career as an accountant. If you are a terrible singer, that probably isn’t the best road to go down. If you’re very shy in front of people, you probably should look for a different career from being an actor, even if you like movies. But maybe you’re good in science class and like studying it—then becoming a science teacher might be just the right job for you. If you always get good grades on writing homework in school, then maybe you should make your dream to be an author or a journalist.

Of course it’s great to dream about doing all kinds of different things, even if no one else thinks you can. I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t dream big, but if you are fighting against odds that say you’re going to fail, you should make sure you know what your talents are, what makes you stand out, so that you can work on developing those things that make you different; because just by recognizing what it is that you’re already pretty good at can give you a head start on working to make your dream something real.

For me, that dream came to me when I was seven years old.

 

 

THE TIMING COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BETTER. Right around the same time that the social workers came for us and took the littlest kids away, I saw something on TV that would change my life. It would give me something to hold on to over the next few years as I bounced around to different foster care homes and hospitals. It would give me something to keep in front of me after I returned home to live with my mother and the old patterns and bad habits came into play again. It would change the way I thought about everything else I was facing, because it gave me a goal to work toward when I started feeling hopeless that my life would never get me anywhere away from the ’hood. I watched the NBA finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Phoenix Suns and I knew—I knew—that sports were going to be my way out.

Even at seven years old, I was a big kid. I was taller and broader than the other kids in my class. I was bigger than most of my foster brothers, even though I was usually the youngest. I was almost as tall as some of my brothers who were four or five years older than me. But I wasn’t an obese kid. I was carrying a little extra weight, but I was athletic and fast on my feet with my reflexes—and I was tough. I’m sure having five big brothers had something to do with my toughness. If you wanted to play with the older kids, you had to keep up and you couldn’t be a crier. I had never played any organized sports, but people always seemed to think I should, so I realized pretty early on that I had a unique combination of build and talents.

I remember watching the NBA playoffs at my cousin’s house. There were a bunch of us there—most of my brothers, some cousins—everyone was just packed around the TV as the Bulls tore through the Hawks, the Cavaliers, and the Knicks before making it to the finals against the Suns. I didn’t know where any of those cities were: Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, Phoenix. I didn’t even know where Chicago was, even though I was cheering for them like they were my hometown team. All I knew was that Michael Jordan was the most incredible athlete I had seen in my life, and the way he played ball just blew my mind.

It was late spring, which meant it was already hot in Memphis. I don’t know if the air-conditioning was broken or if it was just because there were so many people in such a small room watching the game, but I felt like I was sweating as much as if I’d been out there playing with the Bulls, a feeling that probably helped to make my new dream seem that much more real to me.

The series against Phoenix had been crazy. Chicago was looking to win its third championship in a row—something that hadn’t happened since the Celtics were on their streak in the 1960s—but Phoenix kept fighting back. In the first five games, Chicago scored 100 points or more, and in Game Three, Phoenix ended up winning after taking the game into triple overtime, with a final score of 129 to 121. It was nonstop action on the court and probably the most exciting thing I’d ever watched. The Bulls won the first two games, lost the third, won the fourth, and lost the fifth. I was completely hooked by how intense it was to watch these two unbelievable teams fight it out.

Then in Game Six, all of the drama came to a head. Chicago was determined not to let the series go to Game Seven, and they were leading by 11 points in the second quarter, 10 in the third, and 8 going into the fourth; but Phoenix turned up the heat and pulled ahead 98 to 94. In the last minute of the game, Michael Jordan got the rebound, drove it down the court, and scored to make it 96 to 98. There were 38.1 seconds left on the clock. Dan Majerle missed the shot for the Suns and the Bulls got the ball back at 14.1 seconds. In the best show of teamwork I had ever witnessed to this day, Jordan passed to Scottie Pippen, who passed to Horace Grant, who shot it over to John Paxson, who had hung back in the three-point zone. It was a perfect shot—nothing but net—and the buzzer sounded. The Bulls had just won the championship for the third year in a row, Michael Jordan was named the series MVP for the third time in a row, and I was now hooked on sports.

For the next few days, and then the next few weeks, I kept replaying those games (especially the final one) over and over in my head. There was Jordan, scoring at least 40 points in four consecutive games—even scoring 55 points in Game Four—and averaging 41 points per game for the series. It was unreal. No one seemed to be talking about anything else except what an amazing player Jordan was. It seemed like he was starring in every commercial and was on every piece of sports gear out there. Even in my neighborhood, where no one seemed to have money for good food or to pay bills, any kind of fancy brand-name stuff with his name or his face or that famous silhouette of him jumping was something you just had to have. His name was money.

The message was pretty clear to me: MJ was never going to go hungry. If sports could make you so famous that you could always pay rent, then that was what I was going to do. After all, I didn’t see many people in my neighborhood headed to regular jobs each morning, so athletics was kind of the first real career I recognized that interested me.

Of course, it turned out that every other little boy around me seemed to have the same dream—they were all going to be either professional athletes or rappers. Some wanted to be both. Rap was a popular option because rap stars were all over TV with the fancy cars and pretty girls. There seemed to be a lot of stories about kids from the projects making it big in the rap world and shaking things up with the establishment, but I knew that wasn’t really my personality. Sports was the road for me.

When I first came up with that idea, to become the next Michael Jordan, I just figured it would be something that would happen to me when I grew up. But as I got older—especially as I hit my teenage years—I started to see a difference between myself and the other kids who had my same dream. There were the kids who
wanted
to become something, and there were the kids who were
working
to become something. The ones who wanted it ended up getting involved in drugs and gangs—the easy way to some quick cash and the most common route to take. The kids who were working toward it were the ones who were showing up to school, trying to be responsible, and studying players instead of just watching sports. It was a much smaller group.

Even though it wasn’t the easier way, I decided that I wanted to be one of the kids who was actually working toward the goal, prepping myself for the kind of life I wanted. For me, it wasn’t about the money or the flashy lifestyle or the power. If I had wanted that, I could have easily joined the Vice Lords or Gangster Disciples, and with my size, I probably would have climbed up the ranks as a bodyguard and started bringing in the money quickly. But it was a whole different way of living that I was after, so I chose to take the other route.

I took that personality quirk I’ve always had of being an observer, and I focused it on sports. I didn’t just watch games to enjoy them; I paid attention to the way the athletes moved and what the different plays were. I really
studied
the way the game was played and the players themselves. I learned everything I could about how they got to the pros, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I knew that I would have to go to college if I ever wanted a shot at playing basketball or football. But by the time I got to the ninth grade, I knew that college was not going to be an option for me.

That was when I decided to learn about junior colleges, where a lot of these players went before going to a big-name school. If I could figure out how to make that happen, maybe I would have a chance. First, though, I had to figure out how to get through high school.

Yeah, it’s true that I slacked off sometimes, going to school just for the free lunch and sports practice. It is tough to show up every day with your homework done when the kids around you don’t do it and encourage you to just hang out with them. It’s also tough to do what you’re supposed to do when you feel like no grown-ups—not even most of the teachers—even care if you do it or not. In the end, I realized any success I might have would come down to two things: 1) finding good people to surround myself with; and 2) taking responsibility for myself.

Not long after I moved back home after foster care, I met a kid in my neighborhood who was just a year younger than me and who felt all the same things I did about getting out of Hurt Village. That kid was Craig Vail.

Craig’s dad had moved away from his family not long before my family moved into the neighborhood, but I think it helped that he’d had a male role model for at least the first ten years of his life. Craig was the middle child of five living with his mother (plus two more half-sisters), so we were similar in that we weren’t old enough to be counted with the big kids but we weren’t so young that we were still the family babies, either. We were both kind of quiet, and I think that’s why we first started hanging out; but as we got older, I could see that there was a reason Craig and I stuck together, and it was because we needed each other. Craig didn’t think the drug dealers or gang members were cool. He didn’t drink or swear or do any of the stuff that was just normal for everyone else around us. He wanted to have a steady job to support a nice family when he grew up, so he was determined to do whatever it took to make that happen.