Misunderstood, p.8
Misunderstood, page 8
* * *
Sophomore year of basketball, coming off that 10-0 football season, we were so much more confident. And success came. Early on we beat Gloucester High School and I had 19 points in the third quarter. A few days later, we lost a close one to Kecoughtan. We were both unbeaten coming into the game. While we lost that game, me and Tony combined for 49 points. By the middle of the season, we were the top two scorers in the district. I was getting my shots more and more. I was hitting threes, driving to the rim, getting out on fast breaks. And this year, Coach Bailey was pretty clear that we had to get better on defense. It wasn’t just the Loyola Marymount, get-it-and-go system. Giving up 128 points to Hampton, as we did my freshman year, wasn’t going to cut it. As the season wore on we won some, we lost some.
Mid-January 1991 came and we had our first game against Hampton. Remember, we had finally beaten Hampton at the end of that football season. Their whole school was riled up and mad as hell about us taking the football crown. I was determined to make it happen on the basketball court. But we were small. People talked about me and Tony in the backcourt, perimeter guys. But could we hold up inside? I think that day might have been when I really started seeing it on the basketball court—again, that moment you know you belong. There was absolutely nothing I could not do. I scored 39 points in that game, in every way you can imagine, and we won 83–72. But here was the part that really had me fucking hyped—I had 13 rebounds. Even though we were small, we beat them on the glass that day.
Back at school, in the neighborhood, in the papers, that’s when people started getting excited about basketball. Like, Damn, this motherfucker is doing it on the court now?
That excitement built in the school and in the community, but more than anything, it built in myself. We blew out Phoebus, and I scored 37. We won a tight one against Lafayette, and I scored 18 of my 22 points in the fourth quarter. I felt a need to one-up myself. By the end of January, I was the leading scorer in the district, with nearly 25 a game. While Tony had led the team the year before, it had slowly shifted to me as the focal point and scoring leader. We were still a two-man show, mind you, but it was different.
The top team in the district that year was the Kecoughtan team that had beaten us earlier. They had this dude, Faisal Abraham, who just kicked our ass. The excitement had built to the point that for the first time ever, we sold out our gym. Fourteen hundred people piled into that little pressure cooker. The next year we moved over to a much bigger venue, that’s how crazy it got. But this was the first taste. I scored 35 and we almost had them. But Abraham was just a little too much at the end.
While we didn’t win the regular season title, we still had the district tournament.
That started well when we beat Menchville, and I remember that game because I scored 42 points—the most anyone had in the district all year.
But then in the district semis we played Hampton again. They had the better record, even though we beat them twice. And this time they had our number. Teams had been playing crazy defenses against us all year, blitzing me as I brought the ball up court, box and ones, diamond and twos—anything to slow me and Tony down, and this was no exception. It was another bitter loss to end the year. And another time where I felt like they put everything into stopping me, and once they accomplished that, they won.
It was like football all over again. We had achieved a lot. But it wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t stand to lose. I hated it. And I was determined not to let it happen again.
NINE THE SUMMER OF 1992
So I practiced and I played. I played and I practiced. The court in particular, for the next few months of 1992, was my sanctuary. And it was for the rest of my playing days—the drama and the chaos disappeared as I stepped onto the blacktop, eventually wood surfaces, in air-conditioned gyms, then arenas.
But that summer… Damn that summer. Sometimes the moment I stepped off the court, life smacked me in the face.
My life that summer was surrounded by death.
I lost a whole bunch of dudes. I lost count, and that’s the worst of it: I can’t even remember exactly which ones happened which year.
The worst was Tony Clark. The trickster. The swindler. The fighter. Dude who could leave his home in the morning with nothing and hustle his way to a new bike to ride home. I remember it like it was yesterday. His cousin came running up, and she was like, “He dead.”
My heart sank. “Who?”
“Tony, Tony dead.”
I hustled down there, following his cousin. They had already moved the body, but there it was, the bloodstain on the driveway of a Stuart Gardens house. That one, it still hurts. It was crazy too. It wasn’t a drug war or any shit like that. His girlfriend stabbed him in the throat. She said he had been beating her and it was self-defense.
Another killing was this dude from the neighborhood. I’m not going to say his name. He was a bad motherfucker, and he was always drunk. He used to mess with this crackhead. He would just beat the shit out of this crackhead for no fucking reason. So one day I was coming back from playing basketball in the park just as it was getting dark, and I saw this dude stumbling. I’m thinking he’s drunk, as usual. Nah. He had evidently gone to mess with that crackhead, and the crackhead just shot him, one time in the heart. Sometimes I wonder how I got through shit like this, the stuff my kids never had to deal with, thank God. Well, it was like when I was a little kid peeking out of my bedroom door in our Pine Chapel spot, seeing that man’s head bleeding all over our floor. You couldn’t stop and dwell. If you did, you were done for.
Then there was another guy. He came from a good family. They had a funeral parlor, their own business. So this dude was different. He had money, and he was always walking around with chains on. He had beef with some dudes, and they came to arguing about some bullshit, and what I heard was they were just trying to mess with him. They shot him in the arm, but the bullet went through his arm and caught him in the chest. That day, I heard the commotion—this was in Glen Gardens—and I ran over and saw his body on the ground. At the funeral, his little boy, his son, was crying like a motherfucker on top of the casket.
I can’t recount them all. Like I said, can’t even remember them. But it got to be regular. And while I was done hustling, my dudes on the street weren’t. They were out there running around, and all kinds of shit was going on. People were hiding their guns in my house, and there were robberies, shoot-outs. It felt like anyone could go at any moment. Ra could go. Arnie could go. E, too. That’s just the way it was. What hurt so bad later when Ra did get killed was that we had gotten out. We were in the clear.
One thing about me, I knew that all that shit was dangerous, but in my mind I was just thinking, It ain’t gonna happen to me. I ain’t fucking doing nothing to nobody. I knew everybody who was anybody. I knew who the killers were and weren’t. I knew who wanted a problem and who didn’t. I knew who was robbing and who wasn’t. I knew who was selling drugs and who was not selling drugs. I knew who was using them. So I knew how to avoid trouble. And I had no interest in making any enemies on the street.
But I swear to God, it comes back to what my mom told me when I was eight years old, “This is what you gonna do! You want to play basketball? Football? If that’s what you wanna do, you can do it.” She was telling me I was worth more than all that street shit. And I fucking actually believed it. Like damn, Mommy said I can do it. So, I was out there putting the fucking work in to become that. I was out there doing it, doing it, doing it, even with all that shit going on around me. I would go out there and put the goddamn hours out there on that goddamn court until it got dark.
I was hungry as a motherfucker. I’m gonna play basketball. There ain’t no food in this goddamn house? I’m gonna take it out on somebody. My friends dying in the streets? Let’s play football, goddammit! I’m mad! I wanna hit somebody, I wanna do something.
* * *
That summer of 1992, I channeled that anger and took it out on the whole damn country.
Once high school basketball stopped, it was time for Summer League. This was the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) summer season. Back then it wasn’t like it is today. You didn’t just get to play. You had to be among the best, and you had to prove yourself to get on that AAU motherfucker.
So all those dudes I’d been playing against? Now we joined forces and became one team. So we had me and Tony Rutland, and remember Faisal Abraham from Kecoughtan? Damon Bacote from Hampton was on that team. Another dude that came from Maury High School in Norfolk was Joe Smith. The Joe Smith that would end up going to the University of Maryland, winning all kinds of accolades, and who was the first pick in the NBA Draft the year before me. It was the summer before his senior year of high school, and at the time he wasn’t heralded like that. He shocked the world when he went to Maryland and won all that shit.
Anyway, this was Boo Williams’s team. Boo Williams had run the summer leagues in Virginia since the early 1980s. He’d been a baller himself, playing for Phoebus, in Philly for St. Joe’s (there goes that Philly connection again), and even internationally. He came back to Virginia and set up the summer leagues, building it from nothing into something you couldn’t even believe now. He’s got himself a multimillion-dollar complex with all this sports shit now. It wasn’t like that yet in 1992. But it was big, and how it worked was you played in the summer leagues, and if you were the best, you moved up and played with the travel squad (the Hoyas). You had to earn that shit. By the summer of 1992, I had earned it. They couldn’t keep me off it.
Bill Tose was the coach, and he was a tough guy. The big thing for him was the Hoyas had done it before—they had won the whole AAU national championship with a guy you might have heard of, Alonzo Mourning. So Coach Tose wasn’t taking shit from us. Any time we said anything, he was all about that national championship in ’88. But I didn’t want to hear that before-shit.
That AAU season started in April with the Boo Williams Invitational. It was the local AAU tournament and teams from all over came. It was our first taste of playing together that year.
The thing about basketball, you get a group of guys, they can be from the neighborhood, they can be from your school, or they could be a group of All-Stars from the area, like this was. However you get the guys, you start playing, and you see who can do what. The leaders become defined, the best players become defined. It’s just natural. It happens in practice, it happens in games. It just happens. You work so hard to make it to that next level, and that shit happens again. It’s how you realize how good you are—or ain’t.
In this first tournament, we were still feeling things out. But I had my moments. A couple dunks, a couple threes, a couple steals. We lost in the final to a team from Florida, in a real close game, 79–76. I came away with what was now a familiar feeling. Man, I couldn’t defer. I couldn’t allow them to stop me. I had to be the guy. Making that realization and putting it into action, that’s what I had to do.
That May, I started getting some more recognition. Nike invited me to their camp, one of 120 dudes across the nation, and one of only 25 rising high school juniors. I got that invitation, I was like, Damn, I’m the real shit. And people were surprised, because I hadn’t yet gotten that national recognition. Just me and Joe Smith got the invite from our squad.
Later that summer, we won the Boo Williams Summer League, and I collected 35 points in the final along with the MVP trophy.
From there the team traveled to a tournament in DC. We beat a DC team for the title, and this time there was no deferring. I led the team with 36 points and got me another MVP. What I remember, though, was Alonzo came and spoke to us. It was like a little pep talk. Man, seeing him there. He was doing everything I planned to do. He had just finished his Georgetown career. He had been drafted No. 2 by the Charlotte Hornets, right after Shaquille O’Neal. He would go on to finish second in rookie of the year to Shaq as well. As I traveled farther with the team, I got exposed to more shit like this. I was seeing my future. That day Alonzo told us what it meant to win the whole damn thing. Now, let me tell you, nobody, and I mean nobody, thought we were going to do all that. But I just said to myself, We going to win this motherfucker.
The AAU Nationals were held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the end of July 1992. Everybody was there. In the first game, I paced myself with 21 points and we pretty easily beat an Oklahoma team. The next game was crazy. We played these dudes from Cleveland, and they gave us a good one. When we were down two points right at the end of regulation, I passed the ball to Faisal, and he dunked it to get us to the first overtime. After we tied the first overtime, we had a three-point lead in the second when this dude hit nearly a half-court shot to send it to triple overtime. I just said to myself, I got to take over this game. In the third overtime, I scored all seven of our points (making it 33 for the game) for the W.
Next we blew out these dudes from Wisconsin. We then won two more against Arkansas and Memphis, games where I scored 37 and 26. As we moved along in the tournament, the competition kept getting better and better. I had to adjust, maybe to a defense laying off me by shooting more threes, if the dudes inside were bigger, sometimes passing more to my teammates. Whatever it was, I figured it out. I got more dominant, became more the team’s focus, as our competition improved.
As a team, we found ourselves in the final. And I found myself the focal point. When you’re at a big tournament, when you’re playing like that, everyone starts looking at you. You walk down the hallways, and people start pointing. And remember, I didn’t come in with this big reputation. No one was thinking about Boo Williams winning the whole thing that year. Nah, man, the team that everyone started out talking about was this group from North Carolina. They had three real dudes. I’ll put it like that. Jeff McInnis, Jeff Capel, and, of course, Jerry Stackhouse. All eyes were on them the moment they walked in the place. In the final, that’s who we faced.
That final game was as intense as any AAU game I ever played. They got ahead early, but we came back, and right before halftime, I hit a long three to give us a one-point lead. In the second half they were hounding me, trying to keep the ball out of my hands. I had to work hard for my 25 points, and I led the team with 6 assists. On the defensive end, I had to guard McInnis. Dude was bigger than me. And he would back me down even though he was a guard. It was a way I would get attacked later in my NBA career. In this game I collected fouls, and sure enough, with a three-point lead and about two minutes left, I got me my fifth and fouled out. Now, you know how hard that must have been for me to watch the end from the bench. But after they tied it up at 78, Tarik Turner made this spin move to score. Now ahead by two, we made just enough free throws down the stretch to hold on.
As they missed their last shot, we jumped into a pile. We were hugging. We were dancing. When I say “we,” I mean Tose, I mean Boo Williams. All of us. We were just so happy.
And then they announced that I had won the MVP. There were fifty-six teams in that tournament, and most of those dudes were rising seniors. All of them were bigger than me. Many of them came in with more fanfare. But none of them walked out with it. When I say everything changed with that tournament, it’s no exaggeration. All of the sudden I was the No. 1 rising junior in the country. The best guard. All that.
TEN JUNIOR YEAR
I haven’t even gotten to the most important part. When I was still sixteen and a sophomore, I met Tawanna Turner. The first time we met, we just exchanged a few words. She was a student at Kecoughtan. She came from a real nice family. Then, a month later, I can’t remember where it was exactly but I was talking to some friends in a hallway, and I just started backing away. And evidently she was behind me, doing the same thing, backing up. We just backed right into each other. We turned around and that was it. You know, like it was meant to be.
From then on, we spent almost every day together. And the crazy shit about her is that she actually used to be at my house more than her house, and I told you about the living conditions in my house already, but it didn’t matter to her. She came from a family with a real nice house, like Mo’s, running water, working electricity, a phone you could call, and no damn smell. But she came on over to my house anyway.
She had a car, and I remember my mom used it like it was hers. She even had Tawanna’s extra set of keys. We would wake up and the car would be gone. Tawanna would just be with me all the goddamn time. We didn’t do too much like going places and shit like that. We would just hang out there. She would bring me food and be waiting for me after most practices. I don’t know, I guess we just liked being around each other.
She’s part of the reason I don’t want anyone to think, as tough as some things were, that I had it bad. Man, I had all kinds of fun. I had family. I had my girl. And I was a star.
From that point forward, Tawanna would come to all the games. The kids at her school would be talking trash about me. They didn’t like that she was with their rival’s star. But she’d defend me. She once got in trouble for defending me to a teacher after the bowling alley situation.
So that was just the beginning. We have had our ups and downs, as I said. More ups. But that’s where it all started.
* * *
When I got back from the AAU, it was a different atmosphere. The talk was all about me and basketball. Football was the biggest sport on the Peninsula. The football rivalry with Hampton was the biggest game. But all of the sudden it was like, Hold it, this dude has a basketball future.
And so rumors started up. He’s going to stop playing football, and it’s going to be basketball alone. I don’t know where that came from. For me, I had things left to do on the football field. So it was just a couple weeks after exploding onto the national scene with our AAU championship and me being awarded MVP that football practice was starting. And the attention was different. I remember I missed the first or second practice. I can’t remember why. This was an August practice in high school. And the press covered that shit. That was the first time (but not the last) that everyone started being interested in me and practice.
