I Beat the Odds (11 page)

That was exactly the kind of friend I needed—someone who didn’t laugh at me when I said I was going to have a different kind of life. Being with Craig reminded me that I wasn’t wasting my time by studying sports, practicing my game, and trying to figure out what it would take to get me to junior college. He wasn’t into sports as seriously as I was, but he was definitely focused on making a good future and responsible life for himself. I needed that kind of solid friendship to help keep me in line and my mind in the right place as I steered through the challenges of middle school and becoming a teenager in the ghetto.

But even before meeting Craig, I was determined to make sports my “thing.” Somehow I knew sports would give me discipline and help me grow my talent so that I could use it as a tool for a career. I was actually the only one of my brothers who was really into playing sports. I don’t mean I was the only one who liked to play—in the neighborhood, everyone plays basketball. But I was the only one who was involved with sports teams at school. It just seemed like a good way to work on my life skills, and I think I kind of knew, in the back of my head, that it would help keep me out of trouble, too. My older brothers each had their own talent. Some were good at singing, or at video games we played at other people’s houses. Marcus was artistic and was great at drawing. Carlos was athletic but never got excited about playing for school teams the way I did. Athletics just became the area where I stood out—and it wasn’t just because of my size.

A couple of my brothers are tall, too: Andrew is six feet six and Deljuan was six feet seven. My sister Denise is pretty tall, too. Just like my mother, she’s about five feet ten, so I am grateful to our mother for passing that height on to us. But while my size may not have made me stand out in my family so much, it definitely did with my friends. Craig used to tease me about fitting in with the men of the neighborhood when we’d play football on those empty lots. But I wasn’t just a huge guy—I was also very fast and coordinated. The teams I joined in junior high and high school helped me develop these abilities.

I made plenty of poor choices when it came to school. I missed far too many days and relied on my teachers and coaches not noticing or caring. What I was really doing was putting my eligibility at risk, which would have upended my dreams. But fortunately, I ended up making more good choices than bad choices.

A
s I hit my teenage years, I totally threw myself into sports. I was pitching for the baseball team at school and playing pick-up ball. In Hurt Village, the Greet Lot was where everyone got together to shoot hoops. I played there and at Morris Park, near where my mother had moved us as I was starting high school. There were a lot of talented players, plenty of guys who could have played college hoops, but they had no one who took an interest in them by getting them to buckle down and go to school or to learn to play with discipline.

Whatever sport I was playing at the time would be my favorite—if it was football season, then that was what I liked; if it was baseball season, then that was my number one. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to play on any serious teams. The middle school teams weren’t much of anything, so I also played for a local church team. But things really took off for me when Big Tony Henderson showed up at my door one day.

I’d been playing ball in one of the local parks when some kids in the neighborhood talked to their coach, Big Tony, about me. There was a tall guy named Zack who played for Tony. He was older than me, but everyone thought he was my big brother because he and I were built so much alike. Some of the other kids on the team told Tony that I might be good to have playing with them as well.

Tony didn’t know who my mother was, so he made some calls and a friend of his, Earl, said he’d take Tony over to our house. So one evening, Tony and Earl showed up at our door and talked to my mother about letting me play on the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball league Tony had going in Hurt Village. As it turned out, Tony had known my uncle Gerald, who they all called “Hawkeye,” after a character on the old TV show
M*A*S*H
. (No one seems to remember why they called him that; they just did.)

Since everyone had told Tony that my size and speed were unusual for a kid my age, he was determined to get me as part of his team, and my mother agreed. So starting in eighth grade, I began playing basketball with the Hurt Village team, which was for middle-school-age boys, roughly fourteen and under, and took on other neighborhood teams around the city.

Tony moved me around to every position, but I preferred to play a bit out of the fray where I could just shoot baskets without having to be in the mix of players so much. I was good at hitting the basket from a distance. Refs loved to call fouls on me—every time I would get a rebound or even get close to another player while trying to guard them, it seemed that the whistle would blow. When you’re as big as I was and you’re playing in a league full of normal-size eleven- and twelve-year-olds, it’s almost impossible not to foul. This was a challenge I would have to deal with all the way up to varsity basketball in high school.

Tony understood what it was like to be a big kid. He’d never actually played basketball himself—he’d boxed when he was younger—but he was a pretty big guy (hence the name). I think he understood some of the challenges of trying to move a huge body effectively in a game where I was literally double the size of everyone else.

Our team did very well, winning a number of tournaments in both my eighth- and ninth-grade years. We traveled all over the city, playing other teams and nearly always beating them. I loved playing in AAU. I felt with each practice like I wasn’t just enjoying the game but that I was doing something that was going to make me better and help set me up for the career I wanted.

I am pretty laid-back about most things, but when it comes to something I feel is a responsibility, I get very worked up about it. If practice was at 5:00 p.m., I showed up at the gym at 4:30 p.m. I don’t think I ever missed a practice or was even late. I might have been willing to slack off on some things, but sports was my future and I was fanatical about my practice and discipline.

Tony had pulled some strings to get me transferred from Manassas to Westwood High School, which was where his son Steve was going. Steve was a year younger than me, but it was a seventh- to twelfth-grade school, so we were together. Westwood technically wasn’t in my district or in theirs, but an uncle let Tony use his mailing address so that Steve could go there to take advantage of the better sports programs, and Tony let me use that as my address, too. I was so happy when Tony managed to get me into Westwood for my freshman year of high school that I started going much more regularly.

I loved Coach Johnson, who was my football coach my freshman year. He made us lift weights, ran us, and focused on conditioning and training. I loved all of it, even though summer practices were especially awful. But I knew what I was good at and I knew what I had to do to get better. Coach Johnson pushed us in order to make us understand the importance of discipline. He also helped us to take pride in ourselves and our team.

Basketball was a challenge, too, because I was surrounded by a lot of kids who had been playing organized ball since they were six or seven years old. I didn’t have anywhere near as much experience, but it gave me something to work on. My goal was to be as disciplined as those other kids so that no one watching us all play would be able to tell who’d been playing in a league since they were very young and who hadn’t. It took a little while to get used to playing organized ball instead of just street rules, but I eventually learned.

But other than sports, I really didn’t have anything in my life that I was happy about.

Life at home was still challenging. My mother sometimes would fall back into her old habits of doing drugs and leaving us alone. At that point, it was just two new little brothers and me who were still at home with her. Carlos was there for a little while, but he was nearly eighteen and moved out on his own.

My mother would come to school to pick me up a lot of afternoons, which was nice. She also came to almost all of my home games for football and basketball, and would sometimes bring some of my brothers, too. But whenever the school called her to talk about my grades, my mother was nowhere to be found. It was as if she only wanted to be involved with the easy parts or fun parts of my life.

When I talk with people now who knew my family back then, I’ve had people say to me: “You know, it wasn’t like she was getting high and leaving you all alone every single weekend. She’d be clean for months at a time before slipping up.” I understand what they’re saying—that is, not to let the bad times at home crowd out the good times. But how many times is it okay for a mother to smoke crack and lock her kids out of the house for days at a time? I would think that one time was one time too many.

As a kid, I knew it wasn’t a good way to be living, but I didn’t have the perspective on the situation that I do now. Now, I wonder why people try to defend that kind of behavior. I love my mother with all my heart, and I always will. But that does not mean that I can just look past her actions and say it was all okay because it only happened every couple of months instead of every week.

I don’t want anyone to think I am talking in a disrespectful way about my mother. It’s important to honor our parents—that’s even in the Bible—but honoring them and approving of their lifestyle are totally different things. I will always love and honor my mother, but that doesn’t mean that I can just shrug off her addictions and pretend that they didn’t hurt me or my brothers and sisters. In some ways, I feel she robbed us kids of the chance of future success, as her actions told us that selfish, indulgent, irresponsible behavior was okay.

That is probably the reason why I liked Steve’s company so much; I just enjoyed being around him and his family. I liked that he worked hard, applied himself in school, didn’t cut class, got good grades—all of that. I admired it because I’d never seen anyone else my own age who was disciplined like that. And other than my good friend Craig, I didn’t have any other friends who were so determined to keep out of trouble.

I also liked that Steve had a father in his life. There were so few men in my neighborhood who stuck around and stayed with their families, I didn’t even know what I was missing until I saw what it was like to have a male authority figure in the house. Ms. Spivey had tried to bring a male authority figure in a few years earlier with Eric, but since he was part of DCS, I couldn’t see him as anything but one of “them”—the people who wanted to split up the family. But seeing a man come home every day and interact with his own family was a different story. That was when I knew I wanted that—needed that—in my own life.

Maybe it sounds strange to have had mentors who were kids, but I admired the dedication and character of Steve and Craig and I know that having them around helped keep me out of some of the more serious trouble I could have found.

One great example was when I wanted to go to the same summer basketball camp as Steve. There are all kinds of clinics all over the city for hoops skills, and the one that Steve was going to was for eighth grade and under, so I was too old for it. But I knew that when I stuck with Steve, things were good. So Tony made a phone call to someone he knew working the camp and they let me in.

It was really a good thing they did because the week I was attending that clinic, the group of neighborhood guys I sometimes hung out with got caught for stealing a Cadillac from an old couple near the hospital, and they had several thousand dollars of stolen cash in the car, too. When the police were questioning them, someone said that I had been with them. But when the cops did a little digging, they found out that I’d been at the basketball camp and couldn’t have been involved in the theft. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have taken part anyway, but it was valuable to have people who could confirm that I had been running drills in the gym when the car was stolen.

But it wasn’t just my company that I had to watch. My attitude needed some work, too. At one camp the next summer, right before my tenth-grade year, I got so fed up with the refs blowing the whistle on me when I was sure I hadn’t fouled anyone that I finally snapped and started cursing up a storm, then I stormed out of the gym and started walking home. Unfortunately, the camp was about eight or nine miles from where I was living, but I didn’t care. I was so steamed that I’d rather walk that far than spend any more time with those refs and coaches.

It was toward the end of the day and Big Tony had driven over to pick up Steve and me, but when he heard what happened, he got back in his car and drove down the route he figured I’d take to get home. Sure enough, he found me trudging down the sidewalk, still mad and still fed up with the world. “Get in the car, Mike,” he ordered as he pulled over. “We have to talk.”

The rest of the drive, he told me how I needed to get control over my language and my emotions if I was going to succeed in school and life. He told me that there would always be refs who would call fouls on me just because of my size, but I had to deal with that and just be a better player so that it would be harder for them to do that.

The more I thought about Tony’s lecture, the more I realized he was right. It occurred to me that I’d been reacting the way I had always seen people react—explosive, angry, obscene. But I had to learn how to do better if I wanted to
be
better. I had tried hard to make smart decisions on my own, but I needed reminders to keep me on track. I started looking around me and I realized that every time I had a bad attitude or lost my temper, I was just living up—or down—to the level of expectation that people had for me.

When you’re a poor kid from the inner city, most people already have their minds made up about who you are and what you can or can’t do. Every time you slip up, lash out, slack off, or sulk, you’re just playing into their hands by acting like the stereotype they’ve already decided you are. Too many people have already labeled you as a “bad kid” in their minds, and if you curse or pout or act up, you’re just letting them think that’s all there is to you—that you’re just one-dimensional, that what they see on the surface is all there is to see.