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Losing His Smile
When I was seven years old, I knew one thing for certain: I loved baseball and stunk at basketball. My passion for baseball originated with my baby-sitter, Mary Mitchell, who was a rabid fan and lived near both Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. My mom also liked baseball and often listened to the play-by-play Brooklyn Dodger broadcasts by Red Barber. As a little kid in 1951, I watched Joe DiMaggio play his last season and Willie Mays play his first. I quickly learned to appreciate the hysteria that was New York baseball then.My love of the game grew at the same rate as my body, and when I was finally old enough, I joined Little League. The Inwood section of Manhattan, where I was raised, was just a few miles north of Harlem, and it was there that I played -- both first base and outfield. Occasionally I also pitched. I was starting to grow so tall, however, that basketball was a choice I could no longer completely ignore. Eventually, I ventured onto the court and tried a few shots. I failed miserably. My father then took me to the public park. "This is how you protect the ball," he said. He proceeded to elbow me in the face. After that one lesson, I abandoned basketball.
But two things brought me back to it: getting the snot beat out of me and seeing an amazing movie.
The physical beating took place in 1956, when I was nine. My parents had sent me to an all-black boarding school, Holy Providence in Cornwells Heights, near Philadelphia. The school had about 30 boys and 100 girls, but the benefits of such a lopsided gender ratio were completely lost on a shy nine-year-old. Besides, my problem was with the boys. Though I was already a towering five feet eight inches, I was mild mannered and cheerful. I also excelled in my classes. With my parents' encouragement, I was reading several grade levels above the other fourth-graders and earning straight A's. Naturally, I was hated.
This hatred was expressed by the school bullies, a couple of pugnacious seventh-graders who were constantly on my case. The nuns were powerless to protect me. Then, two weeks before school let out in the spring, I was jumped in a narrow hallway. The bullies pummeled me relentlessly until they finally got tired and ran away. When my parents came to pick me up, they noticed a distinct change in me. They said I didn't smile anymore.
It was true. I had changed. I'd learned not to joke around with the other students and not to volunteer answers in class. A happy face seemed to antagonize the bullies, so, yeah, I had stopped smiling. I'd had to find refuge on my own.
I found it on the court. Despite my lack of ability or interest, being on the team kept me away from the knuckle-dragging crew.
As a nine-year-old kid imprisoned in a grown man's body, I was all wobbly legs and gangly arms. I must have looked like a puppet being controlled by a drunk puppeteer. If my teammates passed the ball to me, I soon made them regret it. But no matter how badly I played the game, at least while I was on the court, no one was punching me in the face.
In one game, I was trapped by the other team and, having lost the dribble, was desperate to get rid of the ball. Unable to find an open teammate to rescue me, I glanced over my shoulder at the basket. Then I pivoted and tossed up a hook shot. It was an in-and-out miss. But that feeling -- that sense of power and control as I was being swarmed yet still able to rise above them to take the shot -- completely energized me.
By now I'd also seen the film Go, Man, Go! It told how Abe Saperstein, founder of the Harlem Globetrotters, saw a group of talented black kids playing basketball one day in 1926. He became obsessed with making them the greatest team ever. In the film, the Globetrotters played themselves. After watching them, I walked out of the darkened theater a changed boy.
I had seen what basketball, when played by the greats at the highest level, could be like. One scene really stood out. Marques Haynes, considered by many to be the best dribbler in the world in those days, maneuvered a basketball in a narrow hallway past another guy with such agility and flair that I knew I had to possess that skill.
Haynes was just six feet tall and 160 pounds; he made the bigger guys look foolish, like woolly mammoths. I started practicing my dribbling immediately. Over time, I focused on being the kind of big man who could move like Marques Haynes. Okay, I could never move like Haynes -- but that was my goal. Better to be the quick hummingbird than the extinct mammoth, I figured.
As a nine-year-old kid at boarding school swarmed daily by bullies, and with no option but to become invisible, I found something on the basketball court. My skills gave me back a little of what I had lost: pride, self-respect and visibility. My parents took me out of that school after a year, but I kept practicing my hook shot.
For the next 33 years, I was always on a basketball team. And not just because of the height I ultimately grew to -- seven-foot-two. The skyhook became my signature shot. I was never invisible again.
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